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.”

Have you ever wondered how Google returns a search result in less than a second? It’s all made possible through the magic of indexing. On periodic basis, Google will go out across the Internet and crawl all of the content that it can access. During this process, the crawler pulls each and every document, webpage, or whatever, back to the indexer, were the document is broken down into the list of words it contains. Google creates a database which in the world of search is often called the index. When a user executes a query, the index is what is queried for relevant data resulting is sub-second response time. Think of an index as a data warehouse for unstructured information.

Now all of this sounds great, but there are times, when indexing information is not appropriate or even possible.

There’s an old adage in IT that ‘nothing ever goes away’. Retiring legacy systems is a painful, often expensive process, mostly because every system has some useful information in it, but it’s hard to distinguish jewels from junk within that information. There are times when migrating all your content and cutting over to a shiny new system is the right thing to do, and there are many strong content migration products on the market. Sometimes, however, a total migration is simply not necessary nor useful.

I’m a hopeless book hound, and in my life have spent more on books than on cars. I have thousands of books. The last time we moved, we had 60 boxes of books, and my wife made me a proposition: We would unpack the five boxes that contained the books we knew we wanted, and leave the rest in the basement for two years. Over the next two years, I opened a few more boxes and pulled out what I needed. At the end of the two years we donated the rest to the local library. Needless to say, our bookshelves were much more organized, and had a lot less junk.

Office365 and Azure provide great capabilities from the cloud – but how do they work with the information in your other systems? Enterprise Search technology can bridge information silos, including those you might create by putting some but not all of your content in the cloud. This session covers the scenarios that use search and SharePoint with O365, Azure, and Cloud services, including ways to provide information integration between multiple systems and Office 365. We’ll show what is available OOB for search with Office365, and cover how to enhance it. We provide demos of solutions running with Office365 and with Azure, and provide some ‘secret tips’ for how to use enterprise search in different scenarios. If you want to understand the current capabilities and limitations of search with Office 365 offerings, and how to make them work well with your on-premise systems, come to this session.