Last week TNR Global attended the Enterprise Search Summit organized by KMWorld in Washington, DC. VP of Search Technologies Michael McIntosh and Director of Business Development Karen E. Lynn attended the three day conference and Enterprise Solutions Showcase at the Marriott Wardman Park. Several companies were in attendance, and some common themes emerged. Among these were designing for users, dealing with unstrcutured content, the need for better search and content analytics to facilitate better search results, as well as tagging content as part of a best practice in workflow. Also discussed was the need for search vendors to demonstrate to search customers was “right looks like” in a search solution. A proof of concept and rapid integration are essential for search customers–they cannot visualize what a search solution will look like without some help from the search professional.
An unexpected surprise came when the speaker on open source search was unable to attend at the last moment, our own Michael McIntosh was asked to step in and present on the subject. Fortunately, he was fresh from his presentation at Apache Lucene EuroCon and already had his presentation loaded on his machine. Michael discussed Solr and made general points on migrating from a commercial search engine like FAST ESP to a open source platform like Lucene Solr.
Overall it was a great conference with lots of informative talks and friendly search professionals. We’re looking forward to the next Enterprise Search Summit in Spring, 2012.