Three weeks to go now before the first-ever conference in Europe totally devoted to enterprise search.  Enterprise Search Europe 2011 opens for registration at the Hilton Olympia Hotel on Monday 24 October.  By the close at 5pm on Tuesday we aim to have found an answer to all your enterprise search challenges.  The topic range is very wide, including mobile search, making effective use of search analytics, the future of multi-lingual search, the convergence of enterprise search and business intelligence, future directions for enterprise search in Europe, benchmarking enterprise search performance, best practice in search implementation and …… Just take a look at the programme. There will be a strong open-source element to the event, as open-source search is now really offering great performance and scalability.  All the session chairs are experienced in both search and making sure that speakers stick to their brief and to their time slot, so that there is time for them to respond to questions.

But papers on their own, no matter how good, do not make a conference. We have three panel sessions, with the final session being a chance to you to ask a group of search experts the questions that you still have about how to get the best return on your search investment.  Good networking opportunities are also an important element, and on Monday evening there will be a social event at which every effort will be made to link together people with similar interests. This will not be in the hotel so there will be a chance to get some fresh air and a change of scene. There will also be a “Can you help?” board at the back of the conference hall where you can post anything from a technical query on a particular search engine to finding good Lucene developers.

Since the programme was published a couple of months ago we have persuaded SmartLogic to talk about a couple of market surveys the company has undertaken, so that delegates go away with some user research data as well as good case studies. On the opening day of the conference the Strix Award for innovation in information retrieval will be presented to Professor Alan Smeaton, from the School of Computing, Dublin City University.

The organising committee is already planning the 2012 event, but why wait until then to join the community of enterprise search professionals that will undoubted be formed from the alumni of this inaugural event. Managing an enterprise search implementation can be a lonely and frustrating experience until you find out that others have been there before and will be delighted to offer advice and encouragement both at the conference itself and in the months to come.

Finally, if you are wondering why I am doing this sales pitch the answer is that I am the Chairman of the Conference and am totally confident that you will find the event stimulating, valuable and enjoyable. Those are the three things I look for from a conference, and with my colleagues on the planning committee I aim to deliver them to you in a few weeks time.

Martin White