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.

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.

This particular topic generated quite a bit of interest when I presented at the New York, and Washington D.C. SharePoint Saturday events that recently occurred so I thought it made sense to summarize the webinar here.

Many people were surprised to learn that users often complain about enterprise search tools despite the high marks that they garner from Analysts such as Gartner. The analysis from Gartner below was conducted back in 2008 and pegged Microsoft as the leader in Enterprise Search. Microsoft has remained there ever since.