Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be discussing important concepts in using the Cloud and how you can achieve agility and effectiveness as you deploy Office 365 and other applications to the Cloud.

Today, I’ll give a quick refresher course, with help from some information published by Richard Harbridge, and will go over the benefits and tradeoffs of the Cloud and Office 365 and how you can use these solutions effectively. To kickoff this series, I’ll also discuss the most common pitfall when using Office 365: the fact that it creates information silos within your organization. When only a portion of an enterprise is running on Office 365 or only a portion of your content is in the Cloud, the need arises to bring those separate silos together. Search technology in general, and the Search capacities built into SharePoint in particular, can be used to bridge those silos and provide your users with a unified view of information, regardless of where it resides.

Microsoft recently introduced a new global initiative, Business-Critical SharePoint Program (BCSP), focused on helping companies use SharePoint to capture maximum value from their Line-of-Business data. The goal of BCSP is to evangelize and differentiate solutions that help organizations integrate their line-of-business (LOB) systems into SharePoint, in order to facilitate more effective collaboration and greater end-user productivity.  I am proud to announce that BA Insight was accepted into the program based upon our track record of helping customers maximize the value of their SharePoint deployments – our products enable the secure and unified access to data from across the enterprise, and empower knowledge workers to use SharePoint’s best-in-class collaboration tools to engage this content to achieve business goals.

Enterprise search technology is incredibly useful and powerful, but very few people understand how to apply it well. Perhaps because search looks so simple on the outside, or perhaps because of the universal familiarity with web search, enterprise search is generally poorly understood. There are many misconceptions and misunderstandings about enterprise search, and in many organizations the first comment you hear about an intranet is, “the search is useless.”

We can do search better. There is no silver bullet or secret sauce, but if you follow some basic ground rules and utilize some proven, practical techniques, you can make search something that people not only use but love.

“With great enterprise search, organizations can quickly respond to market changes, innovate and accelerate their time to market. Without good search, people drown in their own information,” writes Jeff Fried, CTO of BA Insight in his new article “The Search Journey”, “When search works well, people use it. Improving search quality will increase its utilization and make people more effective at their jobs.”

By Stephen E. Arnold, Republished from KM World:

Seven years ago, a child was swept from her home in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In December 2011, she was reunited with her parents. Serendipity, not a search technology, delivered this result. Unable to remember details of her past, the teenager was identified by birthmarks and a mole.

In most organizations, information tsunamis rage each day and locating information often bears striking similarities to the story of Meri Yulanda in Indonesia. Chance and elbow grease often deliver the needed information. Technology often gets in the way of making connections, of solving tough, real-life findability problems.