As a conference developer there is nothing more welcome than registrations as soon as the programme has been launched, and that was the case last week with Enterprise Search Europe 2015. The conference takes place in the Olympia Conference Centre on 20-21 October and the programme has more case studies than all the other papers put together. This year the programme committee spent some time getting a balance between case studies, papers on strategy and planning, and roundtable sessions where delegates can exchange views and business cards. We also made sure that we have a balance between open source and commercial search case studies. There is a lot of interest in open source search and that is why the keynote this year is being given by Charlie Hull, the founder of Flax. However in terms of installed base in enterprise applications the balance is still towards commercial applications, in particular SharePoint 2013.

One of the innovations this year has been scheduling round table sessions within the conference programme. The sessions cover open source search, SharePoint 2013 search implementation and the use of search logs to prioritise search development work. The timing is such that delegates with a specific interest in these topics are unlikely to be as interested in the parallel conference papers.

We are especially pleased to have Miles Kehoe (Avalon) on the programme this year. Miles is probably the most experienced search implementation consultant around, having started in the days before the launch of the Verity enterprise search application. More recently Miles was a senior member of the Lucid Words team so brings practical knowledge of both commercial and open source solutions to the programme. As well as a presentation on critical success factors for search success Miles will also be closing the conference with his view of how enterprise search will develop in 2016.

The timing of the conference has been shifted this year from April to October specifically to provide delegates with a perspective on options, opportunities and challenges in 2016 as input into business planning for year ahead. However in addition to the conference papers we will be making every effort to bring people together with common interests, not only in the workshops but throughout the conference and the social evening on 20 October.

Martin White