On Tuesday 12 October I will be giving an Enterprise Search Workshop at the Radisson Blu Hotel, Copenhagen. The event is being organised by IntraTeam. Over the last five years or so that I have been giving enteprise search workshops I have found that there is now a much greater awareness of how search works, and the focus of attention is shifting towards getting the best out of the investment that has been made in a search application.

At the IntraTeam event some of the areas I will be focusing on are the potential impact of the enhanced search functionality of SharePoint 2010, the rise of open source search, and in particular monitoring the effectiveness of search in the organisation. So often I find that organisations fail to appreciate how important it is to ensure that there are adequate staff resources supporting the search application, both in terms of the number of people and their skills. Over the last few months I have been developing a Search Performance Benchmark methodology that uses a heuristic approach (similiar to that adopted by James Robertson for the Intranet Review Toolkit) to help organisations assess the extent to which they are close to good practice in enterprise search management. At the Copenhagen workshop I will be presenting a draft version of this methodology, which currently has around 30 different metrics. The public launch will be at the Enterprise Search Summit in Washington in November.

The Copenhagen workshop already has attendees from the pharmaceutical, finance, engineering and retail sectors, but there is always room for more!

Martin White