Getting The Most out of Enterprise Search

January 2008

International Data Corporation (IDC) estimated in a 2006 white paper titled “The Hidden Costs of Information Work” that the average Information Worker spends 9.5 hours per week searching for information. Assuming an average employee salary of $60,000 per year, this equates to an annual cost of over $14,000 per employee. With numbers like that, it is easy to see how a company can reap the benefits of improving their enterprise search. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) provides several tools that allow companies to build better, faster search capabilities. But to truly harness the power of the new search engine, companies need to understand how it all works together.

The first building block of the MOSS enterprise search is the indexing utility in the Shared Service Provider, a component of SharePoint Central Administration. The Shared Service Provider is used by all sites and portals hosted on the same SharePoint farm. All documents and information hosted on a SharePoint site are gathered together in one centralized index. Additionally, companies can choose to index the contents of network file shares, Exchange servers, and the Business Data Catalog. The implication is that SharePoint becomes the tool to allow users to search for and find information from anywhere, providing a true enterprise search experience.

While being able to find documents from anywhere in the enterprise can be a major advantage, it can also quickly become a disadvantage when the volume of matching search results becomes overwhelming. Another IDC research study estimates that the average employee produces the equivalent of 25,000 typed double-spaced pages of documents per year. Typical user behavior is to try a new search if the correct item is not found within one or two pages of search results. Thus employees need ways to do more focused searching in ways that make sense. And focused searching starts with careful planning.

A recent Abel Solutions client has new customers and projects numbering in the thousands per year. They needed to not only manage customer and project information in SharePoint sites, but to also easily find these sites quickly and easily. The attached screen shot demonstrates how the out-of-the-box SharePoint search interface was modified in order to make it easy for employees to find both clients and projects based on location.

Just as we did for this customer, in planning the search experience, companies should do the following:

• Identify content sources – From where is information being indexed? SharePoint sites, Exchange Servers, Public Folders
• Analyze search behavior – Search usage reports in SharePoint Central Administration collects statistics about common search queries, where they are coming from, and more. Conduct focus groups with employees to determine what they commonly search for, and especially, what they have a hard time finding.
• Determine logical search scopes – search scopes are pre-defined subsets of information, such as Marketing, SharePoint sites, Knowledge Base, and others that allow users to quickly filter their results to one or more sources of information in ways that make sense to them.
• Plan content types – SharePoint allows for the storage of documents and other information by type of information, such as Press Release, Contact, Project Task, Case Study, Policy, etc. Planning and analyzing the content types used in SharePoint make it easier. The above example filters search results to include just the Client and Project content types.
• Identify common metadata – What columns of information are captured frequently in SharePoint sites? Depending on the organization, frequently-used enterprise-wide columns might be Office, Customer Name, Project Number, or Product ID.
• Define and group searchable fields – SharePoint Central Administration also allows for the definition of property mappings, which can combine one or more commonly used columns. In the example above, a custom Location property was mapped to Office, Address, City, State, Zip, and County columns. This would allow users to search for items by “any part of the address”, providing them with results that matched in any of the mapped columns.
• Create custom advanced search pages – SharePoint comes with several search-related web parts that can be configured to make a search interface that makes sense. The example provided has the following customizations:
• Result types of Client, Project, or both
• Filter options for Address, City, State, Zip, County, or “Any Part of the Address”
• Search results that display the fields that make sense given the context of the search

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Search is a tool designed to increase the productivity of Information Workers. Like all tools, getting the most out of them requires understanding of how they work. For almost all companies and organizations, searching for and finding information is a part of the typical employee’s day-to-day activities. With the hidden costs that companies accrue when employees are searching for information, it is likely worth some time and effort to make the search experience as intuitive, efficient and easy as possible for employees.