A fairly recent trend I’ve noticed in this space is an increasing interest in search connectors. A connector enables a search engine to crawl messaging and line of business systems. SharePoint Search and FAST, provide connectors for File Systems, Exchange Public Folders, Websites, and SharePoint out of the box, but Microsoft leaves it to partners to develop others. This makes sense. There are hundreds of business systems out there and Microsoft is careful about where they devote their resources. We’ve invested heavily in developing I.P. in this area. A list of the connectors that we offer can be found here: http://www.bainsight.com/sharepoint-fast-search-connectors/Pages/default.aspx

So why the sudden uptick in interest in connectors? In my view, it’s because the technology has finally reached maturity. Enterprise Search is about all Enterprise data, not just the data in a file system or SharePoint. For over a decade now, search vendors have been promising a “Unified View” of Enterprise Data; both structured data and unstructured content. It is only recently that we have been able to deliver on this promise. Why did it take so long?

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.

Q: We are embarking on a search initiative this year. What best practices can I follow to ensure an optimal search architecture and topology?

Step 1
Your first step is to identify what data you wish to surface through search. You should avoid the temptation to index it all, because with increasing volumes of data relevance will inevitably suffer. Unlike the Internet, the Enterprise has far fewer people willing to take the time to identify relevant content by linking to it which is the key to Google’s relevance ranking algorithm.