The latest news from O’Reilly Media is that sales of my book Enterprise Search are now approaching the 500 mark. The team supporting my book at O’Reilly are superb, so it’s time for some thanks to Simon St.Laurent and Meghan Blanchette on editorial duty, Adam Flaherty and Gretchen Giles on publicity, Debbie Schisler looking after royalty payments and Meghan Connolly for solving various little problems before they became big problems. I’m starting to plan the second edition which will be released later this year in time for Enterprise Search Summit Fall in November. I should also mention Yaz Greco who is organising a webinar for me on 4 June. More about that nearer the time. I’ve also started to contribute to the Answers section on the O’Reilly web site. O’Reilly make me feel part of the family and it has been a pleasure working with them.
Next week I am in Copenhagen and Oslo for two Search Days organised by J.Boye. Both have a good attendance but there is still time to book a place. For the Search Days I will be talking about how to get the best from a current search application and then about future developments in search. There will also be two case studies at each event and a lot of interesting discussion. However I have had to postpone my Enterprise Search master class which was scheduled for 21 March. In early April I am keynoting a virtual internal enterprise search summit for a major IT company but the ink is not yet dry on the contract so I can’t confirm the name of the company. I’ll be participating in the keynote whilst in the iSchool, University of Sheffield. I’m very honoured to have been a Visiting Professor since 2002 and each year spend a week on the campus lecturing on CMS, search and information management. Later in April I’ve been invited to keynote a meeting being organised by Comperio in London on 18 April when the subject will be search solutions for big data and collaboration. Registrations are already coming in for Enterprise Search Europe 2013 in London on 14-16 May and for the Enterprise Search Summit the following week in New York. Finally in May comes the Findwise Findability Day in Stockholm on 30 May followed by the O’Reilly webinar the following week.
In between there is still consulting work to do! I’ve recently completed a project on the feasibility of using FAST Search for SharePoint for a collection of research documents and am in the middle of writing a search strategy for a UK public sector organisation. An important element of this strategy will be the role of mobile search. The next two projects in the pipeline are more intranet strategy than search strategy but sorting out issues with poor search performance will be a component of both.
Martin White