Comments on: Is your federated search a kitchen sink or an Easter Island?

By: Dan Wygant

Dan Wygant — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:31:26 +0000

SharePoint is an Easter Island when it comes to search. But we want to do Federated Search… spending time again researching how to enable this. I believe it’s easy once you know how to do it, but as in Easter Island, you gotta know where on the map to look in the deep blue sea of KB. Knowledge Base that is.

I’ll try to update this post once I’ve gathered my own KB on the subject. I see SharePoint as the next killer-app; learning and coding for SP now in prep for SharePoint 2010 is the thing to do.

By: Christine Carmichael

Christine Carmichael — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:50:00 +0000

I’m not sure where our deployment approach falls. If I had to categorize it, I would call it “selective federation”. That is, the most relevant resources by a defined subject area.

Yes, we decided to only federated those things for which we pay - a calculated approach to ensure we get the most bang for our subscription buck.

As professional evaluators of information, shouldn’t we be advocating using the best tools we can afford? The whole “satis-ficing” phenomenon smacks of the old “good enough for government work” mentality. I think our students/ customers deserve better.

By: Peter Noerr

Peter Noerr — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:38:36 +0000

As I am sure Abe will confirm, customer installations cover the whole range. If I had to guess for the installations of our partners, I would plump for the average being just a bit to the Kitchen side of Gatekeeper.

While most installations do have an administrator whose job is, among other things, to select appropriate Sources, most of them seem to err on the side of plenty. I suppose this is because of both “just in case” thinking and “somebody wanted it in the past so we’ll leave it there”.

Like many similar things we’ve seen the number of Sources grow at more or less random intervals, but suffer a cut back at what we presume is renewal time!

Surprise, surprise, tightly focussed Easter Island groups tend to be internal sources and expensive external subscriptions, and with a closed (usually employee) user group. Thus promoting the idea of dedicated tools for specific purposes.