More and more information is available every day, both out on the internet as well as internal to companies. Combined with the trend for organizations to increasingly enable self-service for their customers, it’s important to make all this information easily accessible. One of the easiest ways for customers to access information they need is by allowing them to search through the information.

The challenge is how to offer a nice and clean way for customers to search through these vast amounts of information. There are various enterprise search technologies out there. A few days ago, I talked to a friend of mine who had implemented the Google Search Appliance and other than that, you can obviously think about vendors such as Endeca or FAST. A (relatively) new kid on the block is Solr, an open source enterprise search solution.

At JTeam, we’ve always helped clients expose information in various ways. We’ve done this for clients such as Ilse Media (by implementing the frontend for the well-known Dutch search engine ilse.nl), and more recently i-local (online search engine for companies). We’ve used a wide variety of technologies to do all of this and we believe we have built up a good amount of knowledge in this area.

There are some interesting challenges to think about when settling on a strategy to make your information base searchable. Imagine things like multi-lingual information, customization of what to search for (documents, custom databases, SaaS platforms in use by clients such as Salesforce and the obvious package selection factors such as pricing, support, training and maintenance).

To get a better overview of what challenges you are facing while making your information available and searchable and to give you some insight into what we believe are the trends and technologies in this area, we’re organizing a Search Symposium coming June 3rd.

This event does not have open admission. We explicitly welcome decision makers of (semi)government or commercial organizations who are considering or currently involved with an enterprise search program–organizations that possess a substantial amount of information and are in need of an affordable & innovative solution that fulfills their needs. People that have a (strong) background in or affinity to search solutions and/or technologies are also encouraged to welcome to come and join.

This small and targeted event will take place on Wednesday 3rd of June, from 14:00 to 17:00 followed by some drinks at JTeam’s headquqarters in Amsterdam. There is limited space so make sure to apply soon at signup@jteam.nl with a short description of your motivation for participating.