Microsoft has unveiled its enterprise search strategy to
UK IT directors, bringing together desktop, intranet and web
searching.
The goal, according to Jon Beighle, general manager of the
online services group at Microsoft, is to tackle the
under-utilisation of information and prevent end-users from being
overloaded with too much data.
“Between 2001 and 2008 there will have been a twentyfold
increase in the amount of data,” he said.
Microsoft is attacking the problem from a number of angles. At
the point of creation of an MS Office document, IT directors will
be able to mandate that certain meta data information fields such
as “subject” are completed. This will be built into Office 2007,
said Beighle.
Sharepoint Server 2007 is due out in the fourth quarter of 2006
and will improve on the search capabilities of the 2003 release
using technology developed by Microsoft research.
Users will be able to customise how Sharepoint displays search
results using the ASP 2.0 interface and a version of FrontPage
called Sharepoint Designer.
A new component called Business Data Catalogue will allow IT
directors to enable SharePoint to connect into data stores like SAP
or Siebel.
There are also two components to capture knowledge in the
business. The first, an add-on to Outlook 2007, is designed to
build a social network based on who the user has contacted over
e-mail.
The second, called Knowledge Network, is monitoring software
that collects information based on the content within e-mails
and
MS Office documents to build a profile of the user’s area of
expertise, which can be used by the search engine to find
specialist skills or staff who have business dealings with some
external contact.
The final piece of the MS search strategy is Windows Live. Due
out as an enterprise product later this year, this search tool is
designed as a single user interface for web, intranet and desktop
searching. It can link to SharePoint and other search engines,
Beighle said.
Angela Ashenden, senior analyst at Ovum, said that a lot of the
technology was free or bundled with Sharepoint, meaning that users
do not have to pay extra to buy search functionality.