Martin White News & Articles

It's time for enterprise search vendors to give up the numbers. 

The world is a mobile place, we all know it. So, is there a way for enterprises to search effectively when using a combination of mobile devices? 

Do you think of your employee's experience when creating your enterprise search strategy?

My heart sinks when I see an email arrive that starts “We are about to start a search project and we need some assistance. Can you help?” At least with an email I have an opportunity to prepare a creative reply. When the telephone rings with the same question, then the challenge of delivering sad news in a kindly and constructive way is significantly greater. The sad news is that all enterprise search projects fail. Here are just a few of the reasons why.

Do you suffer from IDF on a regular basis? IDF (Information Discovery Failure) usually occurs when the website or intranet information architecture fails to find the information required and you then have no option but to use the search application. You know before you start out that this is not going to be a good user experience.

One of CMSWire's earliest contributors, Martin White is recognized as an expert on all things intranets and is passionate about enterprise search. He took some time out to answer a few questions so we could get to know him better.

Looking back, 2012 has been quite a year for search.  

The Olympic Games and US Presidential Elections come around every four years but SharePoint upgrades come on a three year cycle. There are still organizations using SharePoint 2007 and in the process of migrating to SharePoint 2010 and now we have SharePoint 2013 in all its glory.  

What better way to start the day than by asking some of the best known SharePoint experts about SharePoint? This morning SharePoint Symposium started with a Pundit Debate in which Tony Byrne, Mary-Foley and Martin White shared their thoughts on SharePoint today and its impact on the technology sector. Here's what we learned.

In September I was taking part in a European Commission conference on search computing at which a senior executive of a major search technology vendor proclaimed that enterprise search is dead, and that the focus should be on data analytics. Without doubt there are some significant benefits in enabling managers to look for trends and outliers in the mass of data that is now being collected by many companies, but that does not mean to say that "enterprise search is dead."

With SharePoint, it really can be 2007, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2014 all at the same time.

Over the years I’ve been faced with some very challenging intranet projects but none of them come close to the challenges of upgrading software on the office computer. 

I’ve decided I live and work in a parallel universe. Through a time warp site collection I am able to read columns, books, reports and prognostications on the impact of social business on organizations and on the way in which intranets and digital workplaces are going to change to support evolving social business initiatives in the Social Business Universe.

The business benefits of mobile are easy to make, especially when it comes to employee productivity and the facility of being able to contact members of staff on a close to 24/7 basis. Yet, I am sure we have all been in situations where we have been interrupted by a business call on our mobile phone at an inconvenient time.

The theme of this month’s issue is digital asset management, a technology that I know very little about. What I do know is that they help web managers manage photographs, videos and other graphic media assets, so let me offer some reflections on these.

Good intranet managers are able to slice and dice their customers in many ways. Thanks to all the work they have done with personas, they may even have pictures of them up on the wall of their office, or more likely, desk divider. Each day they will be worrying about the user experience of these customers, and it’s difficult to tell them that their customers are actually not that concerned by the user experience.