Archive for the ‘Intranet’ Category

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Caroline Abrahamsson

“If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive” (how to create a knowledge sharing intranet)

August 29 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

The quote is a statement from the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Lew Platt and summarizes this week’s conference “Sociala intranät” (Social intranets) in Stockholm.

For two days intranet managers, editors, web strategists and communication managers gathered in Stockholm to talk about the benefits (and pitfalls) of having an intranet where the end-users share and contribute with their own and their colleagues information.
A number of larger companies and organization, such as TeliaSonera, Thomas Cook, Manpower and Perstorp, have started their second generation of intranets: where blogs, collaborative areas, wikis, personalization, micro blogging (see the twitter flow from the conference)  and Facebook-inspired solutions finally seem to work in a larger scale.

The pioneers, such as Fredrik Heidenholm from Skånemejerier, has been doing it without a large budget – proving that social intranets are more about users than expensive technical solutions.

Read interviews of Fredrik Heidenholm, Gunilla Rehnberg (Röda Korset) Hans Gustafsson (Boverket)  and Lisa Thorngren (Thomas Cook Northern Europe – Ving).

And in general, the speakers as well as the attendees seem to be agreeing with one another: having the whole organization contributing with their knowledge is a prerequisite for keeping the intranet alive.

But letting everyone create information requires a good search solution, something some of Findwise customers, such as Ericsson and Landstinget i Jönköping, talked about:
“Search promotes the value of our social intranet” said Karin Hamberg, Enterprise Architect, at Ericsson. Search makes it possible to gather information from all kind of sources and make it accessible from one entrance. However, this also requires strategies for handling security restrictions (who should have access to what?), meta data models, user experience (expectations and behavior) and ranking (who determinates which results that should appear on the very top?).
Sven-Åke Svensson, from Landstinget i Jönköping, had the same experiences and ephasised the need for a good prestudy (workshop method) and tools for the editors such as a meta data service to help the contributors write good meta tags. Sven-Åke also made a demo of the new intranet (if you are Swedish, the blog post “Landsting på väg mot det social intranätet” gives a great overview of the solution)

The two days covered most angles of Lew Platt’s vision – and apart from a number of good speakers the informal talk at coffee breaks and lunch gave a good insight in the fact that Swedish companies are working hard to provide an intranet that serves consumers as well as contributors.

Did you visit the conference? Was there anything in particular you found interesting? Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts.

P.S. If you want to read more about social intranets, take a look at Oscar Berg’s blogpost “The business case for social intranets”. An inspiring summary of the topic.

Lina Westerling

>Structured and actionable results – there is more to results presentation than blue links

June 22 - 2010 | Lina Westerling

Search patterns are standardized patterns describing search functionality as well as human information seeking behavior. Earlier this year Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender released a book about search patterns.  Morville also gave a presentation based on the book at the IA Summit 2010 (slides, mp3), which my colleague Maria and I attended. Among the patterns Peter Morville mentions my favorite ones are structured and actionable search results.

Structured results
Let us start with structured results. You might have seen that for certain queries you submit on Google, you get a richer results presentation than for other results. For example, typing the query ‘weather stockholm’ gives a basic weather forecast for the upcoming four days, directly visible in the results list. Other examples include local movie showtimes and stock information. It is even possible to use google as a calculator or a currency converter by typing in certain kinds of searches. For the curious, here is a list of all google.com search features. Structured results is about offering a more informative presentation of search results than just a title, summary, and possibly some basic metadata. It is also about not presenting all information in the same way, because the information in itself differs. Richer results presentations speeds up the process of finding relevant information since the system has already done some pre-processing for user.

Google structured results

Examples of structured results from Google. Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/4274340130/sizes/l/in/set-72157623210542674/#cc_license.

Structured metadata is a prerequisite for structured results presentation. Web pages and documents normally come with standard metadata such as date and author, but in some cases they will have to be augmented with additional information in order to create a more useful presentation. Presenting results in a custom way requires some extra development effort, especially if the structure is not initially available. However, I believe it creates much value to the user. Also, this need not be done for all types of contents. My advice would be to identify the cases where a more elaborate results presentation would be most usable. Which information is frequently requested by many people and perhaps also difficult to find because it is embedded in pages with lots of text or other contents? Search logs and user feedback in combination with thorough knowledge about the contents provides a key basis for the selection.

Actionable results
Related to structured results are actionable results. Entries in the search results list can be more than just displays of information; they can also be means of performing tasks. Common examples found on the web include printing, saving or sharing the search result directly from the results list. Other examples include adding to shopping cart, commenting and rating. Within the enterprise or organization additional relevant actions could perhaps be checking in or out a document, add an event to the personal calendar, starting a chat with a co-worker, and so on. As with structured results, it is about identifying the cases where it would add most value. What are the most common tasks and possibly also what tasks are complicated to perform in the source system? Structured and actionable results share the advantage that users do not have to open the actual results web page or download the document to find or do what they need. Speeding up information seeking and other tasks in this way is not only valuable in web search, it can also be very useful within the enterprise or organization. Search results lists in enterprise search solutions still look quite homogeneous and there are lots of opportunities for improvement.

To conclude, there can and should be more to search results presentation than just a snippet. I believe we will benefit from putting focus on the results presentation, and not only on tools surrounding it (filtering for example). After all, the list of results is where the user’s attention is first drawn. What do you think? How can your organization benefit from working with structured and actionable search results? If you are curious about this approach, we would be happy to help you look into what can be done in your organization.

Caroline Abrahamsson

>Search in SharePoint 2010

May 15 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

This week there has been a lot of buzz about Microsoft’s launch of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Since SharePoint 2007 has been the quickest growing server product in the history of Microsoft, the expectations on SharePoint 2010 is tremendous.

Apart from a great deal of possibilities when it comes to content creation, collaboration and networking, easy business intelligence etc.  the launch also holds another promise: that of even better search capabilities (with the integration of FAST).

Since Microsoft acquired FAST in 2008, there have been a lot of speculations about what the future SharePoint versions may include in terms of search. And since Microsoft announced that they will drop their Linux and UNIX versions in order to focus on higher innovation speed, Microsoft customer are expecting something more than the regular. In an early phase it was also clear that Microsoft is eager to take market shares from the growing market in internet business.

So, simply put, the solutions that Microsoft now provide in terms of search is solutions for Business productivity (where the truly sophisticated search capabilities are available if you have Enterprise CAL-licenses, i.e. you pay for the number of users you have) and Internet Sites (where the pricing is based on the number of servers). These can then be used in a number of scenarios, all dependent on the business and end-user needs.
Microsoft has chosen to describe it like this:

  • “Foundation” is, briefly put, basic SharePoint search (Site Search).
  • “Standard” adds collaboration features to the “Foundation” edition and allows it to tie into repositories outside of SharePoint.
  • “Enterprise ” adds a number of capabilities, previously only available through FAST licenses, such as contextual search (recognition of departments, names, geographies etc), ability to tag meta data to unstructured content, more scalability etc.

I’m not going to go into detail, rather just conclude that the more Microsoft technology the company or organization already use, the more benefits it will gain from investing in SharePoint search capabilities.

And just to be clear:  non-SharePoint versions (stand-alone) of FAST are still available, even though they are not promoted as intense as the SharePoint ones.

Apart from Microsoft’s overview above, Microsoft Technet provides a more deepdrawing description of the features and functionality from both an end-user and administrator point of view.

We look forward describing the features and functions in more detail in our upcoming customer cases. If you have any questions to our SharePoint or FAST search specialist, don’t hesitate to post them here on the blog. We’ll make sure you get all the answers.

Caroline Abrahamsson

>Search and content quality – ways of improving your intranet

March 28 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

If you have 6 minutes to spare I would recommend you to watch this interview with Gabriel Olsson from Tetra Pak. During the last years Tetra Pak has been working strategically with turning their intranet into something true end user-centric.

By actually asking the employees what they expect to find and what sort of information that would make their everyday work (tasks) more efficient, Tetra Pak has managed to create a navigation structure based on facts reflecting these needs. The method used is Gerry McGovern’s Task based Customer Carewords.
..and the result?
The ones that scream the loudest are not the most important – the need of the employees is.

Gabriel is also talking about the importance of following up on search by key matches and synonyms.
This, together with content quality initiatives, helps create a solid foundation for search, the simple reasons being:

Use metadata to filter search results (note, not a Tetra Pak picture)

  • If the quality of the information is good (clear headings, good metadata, frequent keywords), the information found through search will be good as well. If you have a lot of old content and duplicates this will be just as visible, making it hard for the users to determinate what is qualitative and trustworthy.Good quality will also make it possible to group and categorize information.
  • Synonyms makes it easy to adjust the corporate language to the one used by the employees. Let people search for “report” when they want to find a “bulletin”. A simple synonym list, based on search statistics will make users find what they want, without thinking about how to phrase the query.The synonyms can used in the background (without the users knowledge) or as ‘did you mean-suggestions’:

    Synonyms used for 'Did you mean" functionality (note, not a Tetra Pak picture)

  • Key matches (also referred to as sponsored links, best bets or editor’s pick) are used to manually force the first hit in the search result list to refer to a specific page or document. By following up on search statistics and knowing what sort of information that is frequently most asked for, it is easy to adjust the search result list. However, this take  time and effort to follow up.

Tetra Pak is not alone when it comes to adjusting their intranets to true end-user needs. During the spring there will be a number of conferences where our customers will be sharing experiences from their initiatives. Among others Ability Partner, and the recently completed IntraTeam.

Apart from this, our own breakfast seminaries is a, as always, announced on our homepage and on twitter.
Looking forward to seeing you!

Björn Klockljung Johansson

>Search and accessability

March 19 - 2010 | Björn Klockljung Johansson

Västra Götalands regionen has introduced a new search solution that Findwise created together with Netrelations. We have also blogged about it earlier (see How to create better search – VGR leads the way). One important part of the creation of this solution was to create an interface that is accessible to everyone.

Today the web offers access to information and interaction for people around the world. But many sites today have barriers that make it difficult, and sometimes even impossible for people with different disabilities to navigate and interact with the site. It is important to design for accessibility  – so that no one is excluded because of their disabilities.

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact and contribute to the Web. But web accessibility is not only for people that use screen readers, as is often portrayed. It is also for people with just poor eyesight who need to increase the text size or for people with cognitive disabilities (or sometimes even for those without disabilities). Web accessibility can benefit people without disabilities, such as when using a slow Internet connection, using a mobile phone to access the web or when someone is having a broken arm. Even such a thing as using a web browser without javascript because of company policy can be a disability on the web and should be considered when designing websites.

So how do you build accessible websites?
One of the easiest things is to make sure that the xhtml validates. This means that the code is correct, adheres to the latest standard from W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and that the code is semantically correct i.e. that the different parts of the website use the correct html ”tags” and in the correct context. For example that the most important heading of a page is marked up with ”h1” and that the second most important is ”h2” (among other things important when making websites accessible for people using screen readers).

It is also important that a site can easily be navigated only by keyboard, so that people who cannot use a mouse still can access the site. Here it is important to test in which order the different elements of the web page is selected when using the keyboard to navigate through the page. One thing that is often overlooked is that a site often is inaccessible for people with cognitive disabilities because the site contains content that uses complex words, sentences or structure. By making content less complex and more structured it  will be readable for everyone.

Examples from VGR
In the search application at VGR elements in the interface that use java script will only be shown if the user has a browser with java script enabled. This will remove any situations where elements do not do anything because java script is turned off. The interface will still be usable, but you will not get all functionality. The VGR search solution also works well with only the keyboard, and there is a handy link that takes the user directly to the results. This way the user can skip unwanted information and navigation.

How is accessibility related to findability?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/4274260576/in/set-72157623208480316/


Accessibility is important for findability because it is about making search solutions accessible and usable for everyone. The need to find information is not less important if you are blind,  if you have a broken arm or if you have dyslexia. If you cannot use a search interface you cannot find the information you need. And “what you find changes who you become” -Peter Morville

In his book Search Patterns Peter Morville visualizes this in the ”user experience honeycomb”. As can been seen in the picture accessibility is as much a part of the user experience as usability or findability is and a search solution will be less usable without any of them.

Andreas Franzon

>Search Driven Portals – Personalizing Search

March 2 - 2010 | Andreas Franzon

To stay in the front edge within search technology, Findwise has a focus on research, both in the form of larger research projects and with different thesis projects. Mohammad Shadab and I just finished our thesis work at Findwise, where we have explored an idea of search user interfaces which we call search driven portals. User interfaces are mostly based on analysis of a smaller audience but the final interface is then put in production which targets a much wider range of users. The solution is in many cases static and cannot easily be changed or adapted. With Search driven portals, which is a portlet based UI, the users or administrators can adapt the interface specially designed to fulfill the need for different groups. Developers design and develop several searchlets (portlets powered by search technology), where every searchlet provides a specific functionality such as faceted search, results list, related information etc. Users can then choose to add the searchlets with functionality that suits them into their page on a preferred location. From architectural perspective, searchlets are standalone components independent from each other and are also easy to reuse.

Such functionality includes faceted search which serves as filters to narrow a search. These facets might need to be different based on what kind of role, department or background users have. Developers can create a set of facets and let the users choose the ones that satisfy their needs. Search driven portals is a great tool to make sure that sites don’t get flooded with information as new functionalities are developed. If a new need evolves, or if the provider comes with new ideas, the functionality is put into new searchlets which are deployed into the searchlet library. The administrator can broadcast new functionality to users by putting new searchlets on the master page, which affects every user’s own site. However, the users can still adjust new changes by removing the new functionality provided.

Search driven portals opens new ways of working, both in developer and usage perspective. It is one step away from the one size fits all concept, which many sites is supposed to fulfill. Providers such as Findwise can build a large component library which can be customized into packages for different customers. With help of the searchlet library, web administrators can set up designs for different groups, project managers can set up a project adjusted layout and employees can adjust their site after their own requirements. With search-driven portals, a wider range of users needs can more easily be covered.

Caroline Abrahamsson

>How to create better search – VGR leads the way

January 11 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

I realise we are a bit late. Fredrik Wackå, a senior IT-strategist, has already written an excellent article on his blog (in Swedish). He has, among other things, been interviewing Kristian Norling (at Twitter), who has been working with portal strategies and search for many years at Västra Götalands regionen.
Although, for all our non-Swedish speaking guests here is a short summary:

Findwise has during the last few months been working on a new search solution for Västra Götalands regionen.  The two main goals have been to deliver a search experience that seems both fast and accurate.
The result?
Today making a search at VGR takes about 0,1-0,2 seconds, faster than a Google search on the web.

Furthermore, there was a need for context. Large amount of information requires ways to filter and sort – otherwise the users will drown in the result list.
By giving the end-users the ability to sort the search result the users can look for general information within an area as well as quickly narrow down to a specific piece (for example by two clicks be able to see only the PDF-files created in 2009). The filters (and thereby metadata standard) includes:

• Information type
• Where the document resides
• Where it belongs in the organization
• What source it has
• When it was last changed
• Who has written it
• What format it resides in
• Keywords that has been created

VGR

VGR

The search solution also includes a metadata service. As so many others VGR has been struggling with getting the metadata in place.
Apart from the metadata supported by the system (where Dublin Core is being used) the metadata service is doing two things:
• Analyses the content in the text, compares it to taxonomy and gives the writer suggestions of keywords that he/she can use
• Gives the writer the ability to add additional keywords

Apart from this the end-users will be able to add etiquettes (tags). These will be compared with two lists. If the tags appears in the “white list” it will be published right away, if they are in the “blacklist” they will be deleted. Anything inbetween are controlled before they are published.

To conclude: a lot of effort has been put into creating a good search experience and VGR continues to deliver functionality and solutions that are light-years ahead of many others. The combination of supporting systems and using the “collected intelligence” of the writers and end-users will make it even better over time.
Search is about both supporting systems, content and people.

Read more in Fredrik Wackås blog

Caroline Abrahamsson

>Do you know something I don’t? The art of benchmarking

December 1 - 2009 | Caroline Abrahamsson

During the autumn we have been trying to keep our customers and others up to date with the search world by hosting breakfast seminars.
By sharing experiences and discussing with others the participants have taken giant leaps in understanding what search can deliver in true value.
The same goes for sharing experiences between companies, where you often find yourself struggling with the same problems, regardless of business or company size.

We have been discussing how Enterprise search can help intranets, extranets, external sites and support centers to capitalize on their knowledge.
Some of the things that have been discussed:

…Business Cases:
How can search help companies save 100 million SEK/year?
How do you count return on investment (ROI) for search?

…Search functionality:
How and why should you work with:
Key Matches to promote certain content (similar to Google’s sponsored links on the web)
Synonyms (to make sure that the end-users language corresponds to the corporate without having to change the information)
Query completion and suggestion to give the user an overview of what other people have been searching for when they start to type (similar to Apples web site search).

…End-user experience
How can different interfaces serve different information needs and user-groups?
How does your user interface serve your end-users?

…Information Quality
Do taxonomies and folksonomies help us find information faster?
Can search be used to improve the quality of your content?

During the spring we will continue to hold seminars, keeping you up-to date. If you’re not on our mailing list, please send us an e-mail and we’ll make sure you will get an invitation.

During Wednesday and Thursday this week we will be attending the Ability conference to discuss search. Hope to see you there!

Henrik Strindberg

>Findwise in cooperation with Borås University College receives research grant

November 2 - 2009 | Henrik Strindberg

In recent decades Swedish and Western industry have had to adapt to the new paradigm. Moving from classical production industry organizations towards knowledge companies in which sales of services and knowledge are often bundled with a product – resulting in a complete solution. This change is vital for the survival of the Western world’s economy which previously has been built upon organizations of heavy industrial giants optimizing production processes and factory outputs by reducing overheads and increasing quality.

The threat to the industry from low cost countries, which no longer only compete just on low cost, but also with high quality and competence, forces Western organizations to develop new strategies to sustain their growth and competitive advantage. Cutting margins in order to compete with low cost countries is a downward spiral. Instead changing the model, to be able to provide knowledge and holistic understanding of customers needs and the ability to rapidly deliver a complete solution is now becoming the key competitive advantage. This however requires investment in IT and knowledge exchange tools. By moving away from selling physical products and components to solutions higher margins are possible because more business value is exchanged in the transactions.

The organizations adapting to this change, are identifiable by the fact that they consider knowledge and information as corporate assets – treated and cared for as any other asset. One example is the Swedish company SKF Group whose new vision is the “Knowledge Engineering Company” where the company going through a change from component supplier to a holistic supplier of both products and services.

A key success factor in this transformation from products to solutions is that the supply of knowledge and information to the employees is effective, easy to use and complete. The organization succeeds in providing that extra value, thereby allowing higher margins. Historical key performing indicators (KPIs) such as factory output, reduction of defects and increasing of quality, are dealing with physical production efficiency to ensure as little cost per unit manufactured and as high quality as possible. Individuals are used to measuring these KPIs and provide a way to manage the operational production processes. The turnover and efficiency of information and knowledge exchange lacks these models and measurement tools, thereby not allowing them to be managed. What you can’t measure, you can’t manage, or improve..

One technical solution which has the capabilities to enable complete, rapid and reduced turnover time for knowledge and information exchange, is Enterprise Search. This has been recognized by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, which granted Findwise AB research funds to tackle this problem in cooperation with the College University of Borås in the Strategic Mobility program. The funded project will study the usefulness and value of a well functioning search engine for work-related information use. It will also identify performing indicators for information and knowledge exchange through search and to achieve results that systematically will illustrate the quantitative direct effects together with soft indirect effects.

The project will start early 2010 and run through the entire year. As part of the project, Dr. Katriina Byström will join Findwise and work together with Findwise employees in this joint research project. Findwise customers are invited to participate in the project and will have the availability to influence its direction. For more information contact Henrik Strindberg.

About Dr. Katriina Byström
Dr. Katriina Byström is an associate professor in the Swedish School of Library and Information Science at the University College of Borås & Goteborg University, Sweden. She is one of initiators and director of the IA bachelor’s programme at Swedish School of Library and Information Science, and she is a chair for the programme with teaching involvement broadly across the curricula. Furthermore , Katriina is associate editor and co-founder at the Journal of Information Architecture. Katriina’s degree is in information studies, and her research focus on task-based information seeking, information retrieval and information architecture.

Daniel Johansson

Smooth CMS migration through Enterprise Search>

Recently Findwise participated in a successful project for a worldwide customer in the furniture business.

The goal of the project was to migrate from an old Content Management System (CMS) to a new CMS to meet the new demands of the organisation, and at the same time making least possible impact for the end-user throughout the migration process.

With support from Findwise and using the connectivity possibilities of an Enterprise Search Platform , content from both CMS’s could be indexed and searchable concurrently as more and more content got migrated to the new CMS. Also the new navigation structure of the Intranet was introduced step by step and reflected in the Search solution.

The power of Enterprise Search technology have once again been proven to provide an abstraction layer to underlying information sources and support the business, even when the information architecture is changing dramatically.

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