These are my session notes from the SharePoint Conference 2009:
- Presenter: Jessica Alspaugh, Program Manager, Enterprise Search Group, Microsoft
- Business problems: Hard to find the right person; People working on redundant work; Enterprise search doesn't adapt.
- Social search is about connecting people to people, as well as, adapting dynamically based on usage patterns and available metadata.
- People search supports phonetic and common nickname match.
- With OCS, SharePoint supports contact card mouse-over.
- View recent content option opens AJAX window containing links to the most recent documents created by the person.
- Knowledge Mining provides keyword suggestions from Exchange 2010. Uses phrases that the person uses often in email. Person has complete control over what items are added to their profile page.
- In SharePoint 2010 colleagues are indexed for ranking purposes.
- Encourage photos. It makes a big difference in enabling interaction. People are less likely to engage with someone who doesn't have a profile photo.
- Microsoft makes it easy to add custom properties to the profile.
- Use the Managed Metadata Service to ensure consistency of terms. Manages metadata fields support dynamic type-ahead suggestions.
- Check out the "Go behind the Search Box" slide for a list of social search features.
- Vanity Search helps users build a profile and create search terms that other people find them in a search.
- Default search order was changed from relevancy to social distance, though you can override.
- If you add a new column and index it, SharePoint Search will automatically create dynamic pivots on the left navigator of the results page.
- If search quality is good, people have more confidence, which leads to increased usage, which further increases search quality.
- Pre-Query Suggestions are built from high click-through queries, and appear dynamically before the search button is pressed.
- Post Query Suggestions appear on the right side of the result set page, under Related Searches.
- Social definitions - "what people are saying about..."
- Check out Social Tag slide - Social tagging will improve search quality.