“We are struggling with the search feature in SharePoint. Too many results, end-users are getting frustrated”, if you’re a SharePoint customer then this probably sounds all too familiar to you. With the increase growth of user content being stored within SharePoint, finding information presents some challenges and an increase in cost for management.
The real power of SharePoint is not necessarily the features or functions, but the expertise and commitment of the SharePoint community. I am amazed at the loyalty, knowledge and skill of the SharePoint community. This is one of the driving factors why SharePoint has established itself as one of Microsoft’s best-selling products world-wide. Also compelling, is the fact that SharePoint has been adopted by over 17,000 companies worldwide.
With the increase of content within organisations. What are fundamentally the questions that SharePoint customers are asking themselves related to SharePoint search?
- How can I preserve my investment within SharePoint moving forward?
- Will the standard search features within SharePoint be enough for my business needs?
- How can I reduce down the cost for my company when users are recreating information they cannot find?
- Do I need to incur extra hardware costs to implement an alternative SharePoint search solution?
- What are the costs and time scale to implement a complementary search solution for SharePoint?
- How cost effective is my search solution when I have to manage a global rollout?
The key to any search solution would be to unlock the long tail in the diagram above (courtesy of Alex Dowbor, Director of Consulting at Imason inc), which would enable companies to reduce their on-going costs and implement a search solution that complements their existing SharePoint environment.
The REAL power and profitability of search can be clearly seen with in the innovation and progression of both Google and Bing. Maybe it’s time to bring those lessons learnt on search into your SharePoint infrastructure. Surely, maximising your SharePoint search efficiency should be high up on your company’s SharePoint agenda in today’s competitive marketplace.
Written by Ravi Sundaramurthy, Company Director at Channel2Market Ltd in collaboration with SurfRay (rsu@surfray.com)
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4 comments
3 pings
Gary
April 7, 2011 at 10:31 pm (UTC 1) Link to this comment
I think you’ve identified all of the factors that would contribute to improving any Sharpoint solution. How would one go about determining the ROI of searchin relation to the gains made in productivity, collaboration, efficiency and expanded search results?
Ravi Sundaramurthy
April 7, 2011 at 11:33 pm (UTC 1) Link to this comment
Thanks Gary for your comments.
The only way to determine ROI is to understand how the user community are interacting with the information. Factors such as the requests for information they cannot find or the time taken to recreate information from scratch will need to be recorded. All of these actions will incur a cost to the company. There have been some studies conducted by both IDC – The Hidden Cost of Information Work (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=217936)and AIIM – Fundability and the Market (http://www.aiim.org/Research/MarketIQ/Findability-7-16-08.aspx ) on this topic.
The conclusion from those studies based on the sample set of companies were that:
* Most searches were only successful about 40% of the time
* 71% of information workers blame poor search.
* On average, per week each employee spends:
9.5 hours searching for information
6 hours recreating documents that cannot be found
All of these factors tend to get overlooked as users simply get on with the task at hand. By unlocking how they are interacting with the information and providing them with better ways to profile result sets, social search, preview results, search & browse etc. This will in the long run save costs for your company. Typically, we see the product pay for itself within the first 2 – 6 months depending upon the size of the user community.
Hope this helps.
Ravi.
PS. If you are at the European SharePoint Best Practices conference next week, please feel free to pop over to our stand at SurfRay.
Veronique Palmer
April 8, 2011 at 4:27 pm (UTC 1) Link to this comment
Ravi, neither of the links you provided to IDC or AIIM are working, “not found”.
Ravi Sundaramurthy
April 9, 2011 at 12:04 pm (UTC 1) Link to this comment
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. You are correct both URLs no longer work, they must have moved the reports.
However, when I did a google search I did manage to find one of them:
IDC – The Hidden Cost of Information Work – http://www.scribd.com/doc/6138369/Whitepaper-IDC-Hidden-Costs-0405
It seems that the AIIM report has been de-commissioned.
Hope this helps.
Regards
Ravi
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April 23, 2011 at 7:56 am (UTC 1) Link to this comment
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April 27, 2011 at 10:31 am (UTC 1) Link to this comment
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April 27, 2011 at 10:33 am (UTC 1) Link to this comment
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