This year’s Enterprise Search Europe was held near Victoria train station in London and unfortunately coincided with a two day strike on the London Underground – worrying for the organisers, but apart from a few notable absences it didn’t seem to affect the attendance too much. We started with a keynote from Dale Roberts, whose book on Decision Sourcing inspired a talk about a ‘rational decision making model’. When examining traditional relational database applications Dale said ‘if you peer at it long enough you can see the rows and columns’ and his point was that modern consumer social networking applications don’t exhibit this old pattern – so this is where search application designers should look for inspiration. His co-presenter Rooven Pakkiri said that Enterprise Search should attempt to ‘release the information from inside our heads’, which of course social networking might help with, connecting you with colleagues. I’m not sure that one can easily take lessons learnt from consumer applications and apply them to business use, and some later speakers agreed with me, but this was a high-energy and thought-provoking start.
Next I chaired the Open Source track, where we started with Cedric Ulmer of France Labs, who talked about a search application they built for a consultancy business with around 40 employees. Using Apache Solr, Apache ManifoldCF and their own Datafari open source framework they turned this project around very quickly – interestingly, the end clients needed no training to use the new system, which implies a very well designed UI. Our second talk from Ronald Hobbs of Reed Business International described a project on a much larger scale: 100 million documents, 72 business units and up to 190 queries per second – this was originally served by the FAST ESP engine but they moved to an Apache Solr system, replacing the FAST processing pipeline with Search Technologies Aspire project. His five steps for an effective migration (Prepare, Get the right tools, Get the right team, Migrate in chunks, Clean up) I can only agree with from our own experience of such projects, including one from FAST ESP to Solr. I was amused by his description of the Apache Zookeeper project as ‘a bipolar manic depressive’, although it seemed this was eventually overcome with a successful deployment on Amazon EC2. Next was Galina Hinova of Intrafind on a aftersales search application for MAN Truck and Bus – again at serious scale (MAN have around 1 billion vehicles in existence with 100-150 documents related to each). Interestingly the Euro6 regulations for emissions and standardized EU terms for automobile parts were direct drivers of the project, with Apache Lucene as the base technology. No longer is open source search just for small-scale projects it seems!
After a short break during which I chatted to John Newton, founder of Documentum Alfresco, and his team we returned to hear Dan Jackson give a description of how UCL had improved their website search – with a chaotic mix of low quality content and an ‘awful’ content management system, the challenges were myriad but with the help of experts such as our associate Tony Russell-Rose they have made significant improvements. Next was what was to prove a very popular talk from Nick Brown of AstraZeneca on a huge, well funded project to build applications to support research and development – again, this was at large scale with 75 million documents (including ‘all the patents and all the research papers’). The key here was their creation of many well-targeted ‘apps’ to enable particular uses of the Sinequa search engine they chose for the back end, including mobile apps to help find others in the company (or external to it) who are also working on a particular drug or disease. This presentation showed just what can be achieved if companies really understand the potential of search technology – knowledge sharing and discovery of previously unknown information.
After a short drinks reception we retired to a nearby pub for the combined Cambridge and London Search Meetup – I’d prepared a short quiz (feel free to have a go!) which was won by Tony Russell-Rose’s team. Networking and chatting continued long into the evening, with some people from the wider UK search community also attending.
To be continued! You can see most of the slides here.
