A Conversation with ...
Derek Murphy, CTO, Perceptive Search
An Enterprise Philosophy; A Logical Approach

"We have the notion of an administrator pointing at a content source (with many of the necessary connectors included out of the box, natch) and pretty much be up and running with that application quickly. Minimize the provisional services, such as getting the content indexed. Then you should incrementally grow to more deployments and content sources as they make sense within the organization. But first: Get search pointing at the most important sources. Then later we can think about other things," advises Derek.

"Also, users shouldn't be constrained by IT or an administrator to get the work done," Derek continued. "For example, SharePoint sites pop up all over the place. We empower users to look at whatever source they like. So, as an end user, you get to point search at the repositories that make sense to you. We try to decentralize search, and empower the users to do the searches that are important to them."

Now, obviously, you don't want people running around with their hair on fire desperately searching for anything that can help. That's SharePoint in a bucket, I think, and I told him so. "That's exactly right. There's a lot of proliferation of content that is not under any control. You don't want users trolling all over and indexing their own stuff in multiple ways. You need to curb that behavior, and we have controls for that. But at the same time we don't want the technology to get in the way. There's a trade-off between empowering users, and letting them go off and do silly things."

I do not think Derek's Perception Search group will tolerate many silly things.