Lee Romero

Archive for October 15th, 2008

In my last post, I wrote about what I termed the first generation and second generation solution to people search in enterprise. This time, I will describe what I call a “third generation” solution to the problem that will integration people search with your enterprise search solution.

This is the stage of people search in use within my current employer’s enterprise.

What is the third generation?

What I refer to as a third generation solution for people search is one where an employee’s profile (their directory entry, i.e., the set of information about a particular employee) becomes a viable and useful target within your enterprise search solution. That is, when a user performs a search using the pervasive “search box” (you do have one, right?), they should be able to expect to find their fellow workers in the results (obviously, depending on the particular terms used to do the search) along with any content that matches that.

You remove the need for a searcher to know they need to look in another place (another application, i.e., the company’s yellow pages) and, instead, reinforce the primacy of that single search experience that brings everything together that a worker needs to do their job.

You also offer the full power of your enterprise search engine:

• Full text search – no need to specifically search within a field, though most engines will offer a way to support that as well if you want to ffer that as an option;
• The power of the search engine to work on multi-word searches to boost relevancy – so a search on just a last name might include a worker’s profile in the search results but one that includes both a first and last name (or user ID or location or other keywords that might appear in the worker’s profile) likely ensures that the person shows in the first page of results amidst other content that match;
• The power of synonyms – so you can define synonyms for names in your engine and get matches for “Rob Smith” when a user searches on “Robert Smith” or “Bob Smith”;
• Spelling corrections – Your engine likely has this functionality, so it can automatically offer up corrections if someone misspells a name, even.

Below, you will find a discussion of the implementation process we used and the problems we encountered. It might be of use to you if you attempt this type of thing.

Before getting to that, though, I would like to discuss what I believe to be remaining issue with a third generation solution in order to set up my follow-up post on this topic, which will describe additional ideas to solving the “people finder” problem within an enterprise.

The primary issue with the current solution we have (or any similar solution based strictly on information from a corporate directory) is that the profile of a worker consists only of administrative information. That is, you can find someone based on their name, title, department, address, email, etc., etc., etc., but you can not do anything useful to find someone based on much more useful attributes – what they actually do, what their skills or competencies are or what their interests might be. More on this topic in my next post!

The implementation of our third generation solution (read on for the gory details)

Read on from here for some insights on the challenges we faced in our implementation of this solution. It gets pretty detailed from here on out, so you’ve been warned!

(more…)