An increasing interest in SharePoint 2007 seems to be driven by the twin assumptions that social software applications will have an immediate and significant positive impact on business performance and that SharePoint is the only social software application worth consideration. Both assumptions are wrong but understandable. As far as social software is concerned there has been very little independent analysis of the products that are available, which are both more numerous and complex in their functionality than is generally recognised ...more

Over the last year or so there have been a number of surveys that have indicated how difficult it is to find information inside the average enterprise but on their own they do not make a case for the value of information as an asset to the enterprise. In the June 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review (pp61-70) there is a paper by Gary Neilson, Karla Martin and Elizabeth Powers (all at Booz and Co.) entitled The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution. The core message of the paper is that there are four fundamental building blocks to ensure effective strategy execution, and the most powerful of these is effective information management ...more

This year's Enterprise Search Summit was the best so far, and that is not just because I had been invited to give the opening keynote. At a guess around 300 delegates attended the event. Overall the quality of the papers was very high, and even the presentations by the search engine vendors were not out-and-out sales pitches. The programme, developed this year by Michelle Manafy (Editor of EConent magazine) had tracks designed to appeal to experienced practitioners, delegates with a degree of enterprise search experience, and finally delegates who were coming to enterprise search for the first time ...more