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.

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.”

Content Management and Enterprise Search are kissing cousins, but how can you make them really sing together? This session will provide a deep dive and best practices into how to best use search with ECM with SharePoint 2010. We will show how to optimize findability in different scenarios, including discovery and hold; how to combine search across active and archived content and across ECM as well as other sources; how to improve tagging and determine content migration priorities using search for visibility; and much more. If you are planning a complex ECM initiative (or in the midst of one), this session is for you.

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.