enterprise search europe – Flax

Enterprise Search Europe 2015 review – day 2

Charlie Hull — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 15:44:11 +0000

Not such an early start for me for Day 2 (I’d been up pretty late running the Meetup the night before) but I did manage to catch the very end of Findwise‘s presentation on their annual Enterprise Search and Findability Survey. This is a unique and valuable benchmark of the state of enterprise search – I urge you to read it, if for no other reason than to be optimistic about the fact that in 2015 nearly 50% of the organisations surveyed have a strategy for search and findability – compared to only 20% in 2012.

Sadly I missed COWI‘s talk on migrating from Autonomy to Sharepoint 2013 (as you might expect I would have asked why move from one closed source solution to another when open source options exist). I did however catch Kurt Kragh Sørenson of Intrateam talking about lessons learned from their Enterprise Search Community of Practice in Denmark and Sweden – one particular phrase that stood out for me was “If your colleagues have given up on your search function it will take a long time to re-establish trust in your search function again”. Next was Anita Wilcox of University College Cork with a talk on their implementation of an open source system, reSearcher, which I hadn’t heard of before. She also talked about a federated search built using exploreIT from Deep Web Technologies and added that one should focus on developing a minimal viable product rather than lots of ‘nice to have’ features. Note that the library is named after George Boole, father of the Boolean logic used in most search engines to construct complex queries!

Next was the presentation of the Tony Kent Strix Award to Professor Peter Ingwersen, which started with an amusing tale of how it may be difficult to take a statue of an owl through airport security. After lunch, I had to step out for a meeting so missed a talk about the Port of Antwerp, but was glad to return to hear from Paul Cleverley of Robert Gordon University who has done some fascinating work on the ‘why’ of enterprise search and how to measure the impact of search. I’ll be using his research to inform my forthcoming presentation at Search Solutions next month.

The day finished with a ‘search clinic’ panel chaired by Valentin Richter of Raytion. I was very glad to hear Steve Woodward of AstraZeneca confirm that he can see a role for real-time analytics driven by search – confirming what I had said in my keynote the day before.

This year’s event was in my mind the best in terms of the content of the presentations – including some inspirational case studies from very large companies on how enterprise search can deliver better ways of working. I was also particularly pleased to see so many mentions of open source search software – back in 2011, at the first Enterprise Search Europe conference, this was still a relatively unknown option. Thanks as ever to the conference chair, Martin White, and Information Today for running the event.

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Why we won’t pay to play at conferences

Charlie Hull — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:59:28 +0000

One unedifying result of having been asked to speak on open source search at various events and conferences over the last few years is the discovery that not all events are equal – some genuinely wish to create a programme of interesting talks of value to the audience, and some simply wish to sell as much sponsorship as possible to those who would like to present. Some of the larger analyst firms are guilty of this behaviour – their Summits and Forums are often packed with talks by big-budget solution providers (and their industry sector reports similarly reflect the fact that if you pay, you play). At Flax we don’t have much budget for sponsorship so we’re often excluded, even though the talks we give are seldom if ever pushing any particular solution – a benefit of the open source model is that even if you hear about it from us you can still go and download and use the software yourself without paying us or anyone else a penny.

Luckily there are events that don’t work like this – the excellent Search Solutions day run in late Autumn by the British Computer Society and of course Enterprise Search Europe (disclaimer: I’m on the programme committee for the latter). My view is this means we get a higher quality set of talks, presenters who know and can discuss their subject rather than just reading out the company-approved Powerpoint deck, and attendees can see a wider range of views and options.

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Enterprise Search Europe & a SuperSized Search Meetup

Charlie Hull — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:57:46 +0000

We’ve been helping to organise a new conference to be held in London this October, Enterprise Search Europe. This two-day event promises to give a ‘European perspective on the technology, selection, implementation and optimisation of enterprise-scale search’ and features speakers from 3i plc, Logica, The Guardian and a number of search providers such as Findwise, Funnelback and ourselves (I’ll be talking on ‘Building a Strong Business Foundation with Open Source Search’ on the second day).

It’s going to be a busy time as I’m also chairing a panel on the first day and helping run the evening reception, which is co-hosted by the London and Cambridge Search Meetups – this is likely to be one of the largest Search Meetups ever and is sure to be a fascinating evening, featuring speakers from the conference in an informal setting (i.e., a pub!).

Hope to see some of you there.

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