Enterprise Search Europe 2015 Highlights #ESEU

This is the week of Enterprise Search Europe 2015, the premier conference of Search and Findability in Europe. All the vendors (Raytion, RAVN, BA Insight, Mindbreeze, Sinequa, Findwise, etc.), consultants and enterprises get together to discuss the latest challenges, solutions, case studies and talk about the future possibilities, options and opportunities. The event brings together all the relevant technologies, including SharePoint, Elastic Search, Lucene, Solr, etc.

The motto this year is: “It doesn’t matter how valuable your company’s content is – if you can’t find it, it’s worthless.”

I cannot be in London this year, but created a collection of sessions I find to be the most interesting/exciting ones. Choosing these was not easy, the lineup is VERY impressive this year. Here is my list:

• Keynote by Charlie Hull (Managing Director, Flax): I know Charlie for several years. He’s the king of all open search technologies, very smart and energetic person. His keynote is a must attend. He speaks about Big Data, IoT, real-time search and the relationship of these. Drawing on cutting edge research, Charlie describes how search technology combined with high volume streaming analytics might offer a solution.
• Choosing from the case studies is almost impossible, I wish I could include each here. Some of the enterprises who will demonstrate their solutions: AstraZeneca, PwC, COWI, NHS Wales, Port of Antwerp, … Each of these are really interesting cases – definitely a lot to learn if one attends these sessions.
• The conference also hosts several strategy sessions. The first day, Martin White (Managing Director, Intranet Focus) hosts a Strategy panel about “Selling Search to Senior Stakeholders“, followed by Miles Kehoe (Search Practice Director, Avalon Consulting) who discusses “Critical Success Factors for Enterprise Search Implementations“. The second day, Kurt Kragh Sørenson (Owner and Intranet Consultant, IntraTeam) summaries IntraTeam’s experiences about running an Enterprise Search Community of Practice in Denmark and Sweden.
• If you like roundtable discussions, this conference offers some of these too. Topics are Open Search Search Implementation (moderated by Charlie Hull, Flax), SharePoint Implementation (moderated by Sebastian Klatt and Jana Mitkovksa, Raytion), and Using Search Logs to Improve Search Performance (moderated by Helen Lippell).
• Are you into social events? ESEU offers very interesting discussions over lunch and tea/coffee, as well as a Drinks Reception and the traditional Enterprise Search MeetUp on Tuesday evening.
• Last but not least, as a very valuable addition to the program, Findwise presents their annual Enterprise Search and Findability Survey Wednesday morning. The survey was opened in April, and its goal is to investigate how search is managed and used globally.

As you can see, these two days will be really intense. If you’re attending, please share your experiences on Twitter, using the #ESEU hashtag. If you cannot be there this year, follow @EntSearchEurope and the #ESEU hashtag.