
As a regular reader, you know that I love helping solve complex issues that involve Search in SharePoint and/or Office 365. I like teaching and it gives me a wonderful sense of satisfaction when I can see my explanations hitting the mark, and the solutions to serious enterprise problems appear.
January 2020 kicked off with a webinar that I co-presented with Jim Sweeney from Synaptica. I regularly do webinars but this was special and I was super excited.
It was super exciting because it was the unveiling of “Discovery for SharePoint” (D4SP), our new product that was created as a result of the joint venture partnership between Search Explained and Synaptica.
We joined forces to overcome some of the inherent deficiencies of SharePoint and deliver a richer search and browse experience that leverages the rich semantics of knowledge organization systems.

The uniqueness of Discovery for Sharepoint is that it transcends all of the problems and limitations encountered with an Out-of-the-box SharePoint Term Store. Some of the key features are:
- Employ Enterprise Taxonomies across the Entire Enterprise – D4SP’s Enterprise Taxonomy Management System (ETMS) with it’s built-in SharePoint Connector provides a direct link to deliver an organization’s taxonomies and thesauri to not only multiple SharePoint environments but also to any Knowledge Delivery focused application.
- Circumvent Term Store Limitations – D4SP’s SharePoint plug-in allows users to view term synonyms, related terms, and descriptive metadata to provide more meaning and context for document tagging and search.
- Access Detailed Tagging Information – Tagging terms selected from Discovery imported taxonomies are displayed right alongside documents in search results as well as in browseable lists providing direct access to view related terms and term metadata to better identify targeted content.
- Refine and Filter Search Results – Discovery for SharePoint allows users to refine and filter search results to arrive at only the most relevant content.
- Run Related Searches – Discovery suggests alternative search options by displaying terms on related topics instantaneously with search results.
- Expanded Content Tagging – Relationships within the taxonomies allow users to locate and apply tagging terms through their synonyms and related terms.

Discovery for SharePoint brings together the expertise of Synaptica in taxonomy management, whilst we are experts in information architecture as well as search in Office 365 and SharePoint.
Leave a Reply