This intensive half-day workshop focuses on the nuts and bolts of how search technology works. After an overview of enterprise search fundamentals, it looks at the enterprise search marketplace and takes a nonbiased look at the current enterprise search solutions available. Looking at strengths and weaknesses, it explores how to tackle specific scenarios, which tools to use, and provides an overview of who's offering the most cutting-edge features such as social search and collaboration. Finally,it looks at the new administrative interfaces of several search solutions, exploring search management, analytics, and tuning.

Organizations are turning to structured content and content component management to reach out to more customers, faster, and with reduced costs. In this multichannel world, customers want to be able to surf the web, get content on their cell phones and PDAs and, yes, even traditional print. And while email is often suspect, it is effective for distribution of content to well-managed lists. Traditionally,
marketing content has been handcrafted for each channel, but today's campaigns require faster turnaround, lower cost, and guaranteed consistent message, no matter what the touchpoint. Organizations need the ability to craft a core message and rapidly disperse it through multiple channels, testing and measuring responses at every stage. Marketing communicators want clean, simple content interfaces and understandable methods for identifying reuse and previewing content. Simplicity is key to success. This workshop provides the methodologies and best practices for design of modular content types, design of content components that allows for both consistency of

structure and delivery while still allowing for flexibility and creativity where appropriate, content design for multichannel delivery, developing a realistic content reuse strategy, and the technological requirements to support multichannel marketing. This methodology focuses on the creation of XML-ready models and illustrates with real examples.

As we venture beyond Web 2.0 and the undisciplined, unbalanced quest for sexy Ajaxian interaction at the expense of usability, findability, and accessibility, how do we reconcile the timeless principles of design and organization with new transmedia models of interaction, co-creation, tagging, user participation, and social experience? In this advanced workshop, Morville draws upon stories, examples, patterns, case studies, and discussions to explore the future of information architecture and uses best-in-class examples drawn from corporate, ecommerce, startup, education, and government websites; search interfaces; and interactive applications. He explores the concepts, methods, patterns, and tools needed to practice modern information architecture successfully and helps you to learn how to make your website, intranet, or software application more useful, usable, accessible, desirable, credible, and findable.

Topics include:

• Integrating product development, information architecture, and interaction design to create great experiences and sustainable value (real Web 2.0 case studies that take the discussion beyond de.licio.us and Flickr platitudes).
  

• Extending our understanding of structural design beyond its semantic foundations to incorporate social elements such as identity, reputation, presence, groups, sharing, conversations, and relationships.
  

• Designing next-generation search interfaces and applications that combine best practices in tagging and taxonomies with search analytics, guided navigation, thesauri, clustering algorithms, linguistic toolsets, and rich result interfaces.
  

• Evaluating the multichannel challenges and real-world opportunities presented by ambient findability and the emerging internet of objects.
  

The foundation of successful information architecture is a well-built taxonomy.  This half-day workshop addresses the basics: identifying concepts and collecting and organizing terms to describe your domain. It reviews the differences between taxonomies, thesauri, and other knowledge organization systems and proceeds through the steps for constructing a taxonomy or full thesaurus to suit your organizational needs, starting with domain analysis, sources for terminology, and organizational strategies. A major focus looks at the relationships between terms, the logic of inheritance and more, with attention to established taxonomy construction standards. Several practical exercises reinforce the concepts presented and provide a solid introduction or skills refresher for other sessions.

This workshop discusses how virtual worlds can be practically used to interact with customers, employees, suppliers, and more. It provides a guided tour of Second Life (SL), and other virtual world centers so attendees can become more familiar with how these solutions can enable new collaboration and communication possibilities for their organization.  Best practices of leading organizations are shared, and a helpful training guide on tips and techniques for using SL is also included.

The real potential power of emerging technologies is to connect intelligences in, across, and beyond the organization to inform the business strategy. Innovative initiatives are realized at the grassroots and edge of networks and succeed when supported by the organization. Co-created strategy is the most powerful. This workshop explores how organizations must adapt to not just take advantage of Enterprise 2.0 but on an ongoing basis as new technologies emerge. It starts with understanding how value is created in organizations through interactions in open networks of relationships, which produce social capital and “network capital value.” Innovative organizations large and small are manifesting a variety of new organizational designs for co-generating knowledge in open networks. Discussions include seven steps to map a network, nine steps for creating value through open networks, new organizational models supported by tools to promote knowledge-sharing and innovation, and real-world examples of positive value creation (e.g., IBM, Qualcomm and Bordeaux Colloquim). Organizational design (open networks) in concert with collaborative technology has the potential to “mobilize minds.” Attend this workshop for tools and strategies to build an organization based on fluid knowledge-sharing. 

Poor search is one of the greatest sources of user frustration with websites and intranets. Worse yet, the inadequacies of search may be consigning these sites as a whole to failure. If users can’t find information when they need it, will they even come to the site? Organizations are now recognizing that search is a critical business tool on their intranet as well as on their websites. More than just a way to find documents or pages, search can directly support users completing their common tasks. Fundamentally, however, this is not a technology problem. Modern search engines have more than enough functionality to deliver a workable search solution. The current issues with search, however, stem from simply using the out-of-the-box installation. In practice, there is a key piece of design that must be done to create effective user interfaces, as well as to tune the search engine behind the scenes. At the most basic level, this may only involve 2–3 days of work, although beyond that there are many more advanced approaches that can be considered. This workshop explores in-depth how to improve the design and effectiveness of search, providing best (and worst) practice examples throughout. Key information architecture principles are explored, including how “information scent” can be used to guide the design of search results pages. 

Now you’ve got your taxonomies up and running, how can their success be measured? Given the cost of developing and implementing taxonomies, it is critical that a taxonomy manager be prepared to demonstrate goals are being met and value is being added to processes. If not, managers need to have a starting point for understanding modifications that might be made to improve performance. Assessment metrics are key to this process. This workshop provides a general framework for the development of metrics and discusses several case studies and useful metrics. Discussion includes: the business case for taxonomy success metrics, ROI perspectives on taxonomic success, impacts of poor taxonomy such as poor customer experience, resources spent tagging items when tags aren’t useful, evaluation processes, taxonomies in the context of the systems and tools they support, e.g., auto-categorization, content management, search and evaluation. The workshop focuses on building metrics to address evaluative strategies and generating metrics using case studies to illustrate how to do this. 

How do you manage taxonomy and metadata implementation across 20-plus business units, five geographies, and 20 projects? What are the factors that need to be considered when deploying standards that affect taxonomy application and operationalization? Learn how these and other challenges were addressed in a global governance deployment for a large, diverse publishing organization. Topics include developing a governance framework, governance dimensions and factors, roles and responsibilities, specific charters and templates, and developing an action plan with accountabilities. This is a detailed session covering both strategy and tactical deployment issues. 

SharePoint is being adopted everywhere as a key enabler of KM and collaboration solutions. This workshop shares tested lessons on how to introduce SharePoint as a tool for extended project teams, communities of practice, content management, ecommerce, external sites, intranets, and Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, etc). A number of global cases are presented with emphasis on governance, policies and rules, taxonomy, information architecture, and change management issues. Interactive discussions and knowledge-sharing among the participants make up a core part of the workshop.