Findability & Discovery In The Digital Workplace

With organizations storing ever-increasing amounts of digital content, including enterprise social content, they need powerful tools for discovering and retrieving the right information. And with users accustomed to searching the web with tools like Google and Bing, their expectations for findability and enterprise search are quite high.

In the digital workplace, a good enterprise search solution provides ease-of-use and the ability to discover content quickly in a manner that’s relevant for the individual conducting the search. We’ll work with you to build custom, on-premises search solutions or to fine-tune your existing search capabilities within Office 365and SharePoint. In either case, the objective is the same: helping your users to easily find what they need by serving up the most relevant content.

For the most useful search results, you need to store content in ways that make it easy to retrieve later — and that’s where taxonomy and metadata come in.

Why Metadata & Taxonomy Matter

Imagine a library that had no system for filing its books, no card catalogs and no computers for searching its inventory. It would be very time-consuming (if not impossible) to find a specific book or topic. Good taxonomy and metadata provide that organizing structure in the digital workplace.

A taxonomy is a systematic way of classifying and organizing information. Metadata (data about the data) could include information based on the document’s place in the taxonomy, as well as the document’s language, author and version.

People often have their own systems for organizing documents. But for an enterprise, information should be organized in a way that is logical to the users as a whole, and good taxonomy makes sure users are able to easily find the content they need.

Metadata & Enterprise Search

An enterprise search tool is able to scan through the full text of documents, but it’s not good at contextualizing that information in the way users expect from using Google’s search engine. Enterprise information management solutions use metadata (data about the data) to provide context and improve enterprise search results. A good metadata system allows for more effective searching than would be available through the taxonomy information and full-text searching alone.