Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

SharePoint Search and Information Architecture Webinar Series

KMA's Sadie Van Buren is speaking at an upcoming webinar session from Earley & Associates entitled "Optimizing Your SharePoint Investment Through Search & Information Architecture."  She's presenting in session 2, June 11, from 12:30-2pm EDT.

If you have any burning questions about the webinar content or how to take advantage of SharePoint's built-in search, please feel free to contact me, or contact Sadie directly.

Serendipity and Weak Search -- For When The Stakes Are Low

I've been playing a lot lately with a music service called blip.fm (@mikegil), where one can "virtually DJ" songs stored by others to create a playlist.  When trying to find songs based on a keyword or theme, I'll often search based on that word (for example, "Saturday").

Blip.fm doesn't have anything like faceted search, and very little metadata associated with the songs, so the search results may return anything from songs with "Saturday" in the title to bands with the word "Saturday" in their name.  Pretty sloppy, right?  Lousy user experience, right?

As it turns out, no.

Perhaps it's the unique nature of music, but the imprecision of blip.fm's search actually makes my searches fun -- I often find some little pearls that I didn't expect and frankly wasn't looking for, but am happy to encounter.  I've discovered songs and artists I never would have found otherwise.

Commentators often lament the "niche culture" and "death of serendipity," those precious moments where you find the unexpectedly fascinating article on page 2 of the Metro section instead of the one article you googled and found on Boston.com, so this imprecise search has been a breath of fresh air.

However (and this underscores points we make all the time about the difference between enterprise data and consumer data), I'm not seeking serendipity when I'm searching for my firm's institutional knowledge.  I need one authoritative data point, not ten decent ones.  This requirement frequently means insertion of a human into the process to broker the flow of knowledge. 

Am I going about it wrong?  Is there a place for serendipity, for Amazon-esque "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." suggestion, or is precision the most important?  Is the distinction a work/fun one?  An enterprise/consumer one? 

There's some great reading on this point -- I especially recommend the work that Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo have done on behalf of AIIM in the area of findability.

Integrating Search with Office Applications -- New from Office Labs

I discovered a great tool recently thanks to a colleague at Microsoft:  an add-in from the Microsoft Office R&D group known as Office Labs called Search Commands.

It's a tool that uses search to simplify navigating the new user interface in Office 2007 by dropping a "Command Search" tab into the ribbon in the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications.   This will be another useful tool in helping users make the transition to the new version of Office by allowing them to easily search for and find commands that may be hidden or in an unfamiliar place.

Here's how it works: 

1. Download a small (< 3 MB) file from Microsoft Office Labs. [direct link to download]

2. Install the add-in.

3.  Fire up Word, Excel, or PowerPoint 2007.

4.  Click on the "Search Commands" tab in the toolbar.

5.  Enter in the search window the command or function you are looking for.

6.  Select the command you want from the results, shown in the ribbon.

7.  Extra bonus:  note the little flyover that provides details about where on the ribbon to find the command in the future.

Between this tool and another Office Labs tool called Community Clips that allows you to create, find, and share screen recording videos to create on-the-fly tutorials for colleagues or others, Office Labs is working hard to smooth the way for broader adoption of Office by enterprise customers.

Geek Reads 2008.2: Everything is Miscellaneous

If you manage, store, or search for data in your job, read this book.  Twice.

In probably my favorite work-related book of the past two years, David Weinberger has written a classic of the Information Age in "Everything is Miscellaneous."  Different from many other books of this type, it feels not at all like a Wired magazine or Harvard Business Review article stretched by another 100 pages to make the author some money -- this book is at once dense and broad, bursting with information and context for information workers.  I feel as if I need to read it again to do it any sort of justice in blogging about it. 

In chronicling how humans have sought to make sense of the physical world, and how this can be translated to the digital world, Weinberger travels far and wide from UPC codes to Wittgenstein to Dewey to Flickr to Aristotle to del.icio.us to Darwin to Wikipedia to Britannica to McCallum's railroad organization chart to Amazon to Linnaeus to the semantic web.

In very general terms, here are some of the themes he explores:

• the death of rigid information taxonomies in the digital world because data can be in more than one place at one time
• the fallacy of a neutral point of view because in practice this merely means the consensus of the community at a particular point in time
• information is evolving away from being represented like atoms in physical space (first "order of order", like a bookstore) or even metadata used for splitting and lumping items into categories (second "order of order," like a card catalog), and into piles, tagged with data by everyone, effortlessly resorted/re-organized to fit the user and the context (third "order of order," like Flickr or Del.icio.us)
• implicit relationships between ideas are far more important and less limited than explicit ones in describing complex, meaningful phenomena.

As search capabilities and collaboration technologies mature, and as "web 2.0" has provided users with a read/write experience on the web, this third order of order has taken root.  The ramifications of this are incredibly broad, from the specifics of users not storing e-mail in folders (store in a pile, sort by author or search to quickly find the relevant messages) to how organizations architect their enterprise collaboration environments (finding the best way to leverage traditional navigation + metadata + rich search to fit user needs).

This has already been a hugely influential book to me, and I expect to continue to explore the themes herein for many years to come.  I encourage you to read it yourself and learn, and think about these themes as you consider your own, or your organization's information architecture.

Search Killed the Taxonomy Star

In the past few weeks, I've informally polled colleagues and some customers about how they use e-mail.  Although the poll is an admittedly small sample size of admittedly techie users, I am finding a trend that is worth commenting on:  people are spending less and less time storing items in and navigating through intricately designed series of nested file folders. 

I used to create a folder for every customer, then would agonize when, for example, someone sent me a message about two separate customer issues.  I long ago ceased filing items from my Inbox into customer-specific or other folders in my Outlook -- when I want to find something, I search based on a few  keywords or re-sort by author, subject, or date (depending on what I can remember about what I want to find).  I have over 5,000 items in my Inbox, and using search, find things faster now than ever before (without having to declare "e-mail bankruptcy.").

I do the same thing on my desktop using Windows Desktop Search (soon to be upgraded to Vista), but I rarely store anything other than temporary files on my desktop.  Nearly all of my work data sits on my  Shared Documents" and "Personal Documents" repositories in our SharePoint site, both of which are very easily searched as well.

Of course, web search has been written about ad nauseum, but I can barely remember a time where a question such as "Where can I park if I'm having dinner at Carlo's in Allston tomorrow night?" couldn't  readily be answered with a few of the right keywords and mouseclicks.

Other than a few highly engineering-centric organizations I've encountered, and others who stubbornly just won't let go of their familiar way of storing and organizing data in folders, I'm seeing more and more demand for rich search capabilities and less for ornate data taxonomies. At the risk of sounding "ageist," in my experience there is a high correlation between this affinity for search and the age of the user -- users in their 20s don't know a world without search engines that are their (in a memorable turn of phrase from a Google exec), "Command line to the world."

Man, I've really got to read, "Everything is Miscellaneous"...

Some Searches Are More Equal Than Others

I was perusing my boss's blog the other day, and I came across a review he wrote of a presentation by Google, a company everyone has their eye on (especially if you work in the Microsoft "ecosystem" like we do).  Google is attempting to make inroads into Enterprise Applications (Search, Business Productivity, etc.), and David was learning about their strategy for doing so.

One point I found interesting in David's recounting of the presentation was that Google is selling their enterprise search tools by selling the knowledge that they have gained from internet search.  I found worth drilling down into a bit.  Just last week, I had a discussion with some reps from the search vendor Coveo about this at the Gilbane conference in Boston about how dramatically enterprise Search and internet Search differ. It seems that they sell their enterprise search tools in exactly the opposite way.

I did a little research, and (of course!) found a white paper [note: it's a link to a document] from Microsoft that helps underscore some major differences between enterprise search and internet search, namely:

• Link structure.  Content on the Internet is much more likely to be linked to other content than it is within the enterprise, where data resides in documents or line-of-business systems not typically linked to other documents or data sources.
• Site structure and hierarchy.  Content on a corporate portal is much more likely to be stored in a repository that is more narrow and hierarchical, whereas on the internet the hierarchy is much broader and flatter.
• Security.  Much content published to the internet is available to all.  This is virtually never the case within an enterprise.  Security in the enterprise is a top priority, in direct opposition to the "open" nature of the internet at large.  Nearly every engagement where KMA has worked with customers to deploy search as part of SharePoint (or separately), the customer has learned unpleasant things about their existing security infrastructure in the process -- the projects very quickly surfaced issues that required corrective action.
• Relevance.  More generic measures (e.g., high weighting to link structures) may be applicable for calculating relevance in large-scale, consumer-facing internet search, but enterprise search requires relevance that is highly configurable and can be tuned over time to match the patterns and quirks of people who search for information within an organization.
• People.  As often as not, an enterprise user seeking knowledge about a particular project, product or process seeks a subject matter expert for a dynamic exchange of ideas or Q&A about a particular topic, rather than a link to a static document, web page, etc.  Being able to find these subject matter experts is a critical requirement for effective enterprise search.

As a KM firm, we've built search engines, helped our customers assess and compare search solutions, and designed and deployed solutions incorporating search.  As Microsoft's search solutions mature, I look forward to learning more from our customers about unique use cases driving search needs. We've invested a lot of time and money in training people on search tools, but it's our listening to how users need to find enterprise data helping them do so that will make us most valuable to our customers.

Search Server 2008 Express (free)

The cost (entry point) of enterprise search just went down, as Microsoft announced yesterday the release of Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express.  This accouncement is interesting in light of recent announcements about Google investments in social networking platforms and mobility, countered by Microsoft's push deeper into enterprise search.

Two behemoths are battling for users' hearts and minds, and hopefully the net benefit to us as information workers is a flood of innovation, new business models, and decreasing price points.