Comments on: Lynda Moulton on enterprise search

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:17:13 +0000

Dan, you might want to check out this white paper on Best Practices in Enterprise Knowledge Management: http://www.astutesolutions.com/downloads/KMWhitePaper1107astute.pdf

Something to keep in mind is that, vendor claims notwithstanding, you can’t just drop a search solution in and expect useful results. It’s a lot like desktop search–if your files are in complete chaos, then indexing them only gets you so far. And what is true for a desktop is far more true for an enterprise.

There’s no free lunch: managing knowledge requires that people do some of the work. But the software needs to make that easy and natural. The “Acmepedia” case study in the white paper linked above gives you an idea of what we’re doing at Endeca (using our own software). Drop me a line (my initials @ endeca.com) if you’d like to discuss it more.

Daniel

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:14:27 +0000

Fixed, Tim. Thanks!

By: Tim Gray

Tim Gray — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:22:49 +0000

“the many differences between enterprise and web search” Link seems connected to something about Hungarian dogs

By: Daniel Weinreb

Daniel Weinreb — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:42:03 +0000

The points about enterprise search versus web search ring very true
to me. We have similar issues at the software development company
I work at. We write a whole lot of design documents and such, and
then it all gets lost in the Wiki. We have a Google Search
Appliance for the Wiki, and it helps a lot but not as much as you’d
like. Manual tagging would be great, but the person we hired as a
corporate librarian doesn’t like the Wiki, and set up a
Documentation Management System, which most people find a bit too
inconvenient to use. It’s really hard getting this right. If I
had it to do all over again, I’m not sure what I’d do.