Trying to summarise the outcomes of three simultaneous conferences taking place over three days is quite a challenge, if only because of the need to be in six conference rooms at the same time to take in all the papers. The task is not made any easier by the fact that a number of the presentations were not printed in the conference documentation. The focus of the exhibition was very much on search, with most of the main vendors present. A few years ago the exhibition would have been dominated by CMS vendors.

To me the most notable aspect of the three conferences was the convergence of search, intranets, collaboration and KM. As the volume of information  continues to increase so rapidly search has come very much centre stage in most organisations, and this is leading to some governance issues about just how the convergence of search with other platforms and initiatives is best managed. I was pleased to see that organisations were now taking user research very seriously. One of the best papers I heard was from the HSBC bank in Brazil, with the portal team taking a great deal of care to find out what users needed.

SharePoint implementations featured in many of the papers. Two of the best of these came from Michael Sampson on the extent to which SharePoint failed to support key requirements of collaborative environments and Daniel Webster on the various options for search in SharePoint. Both speakers produced a very balanced view on SharePoint which was sometimes lacking in other speakers. Listening to the presenters and talking to delegates it was clear that there had been very little attention to detail in many implementations. I also heard good reports of the presentations by Susan Hanley, author of one of the best books to date on SharePoint as a collaboration application and also by Janus Boye.  Many of the collaboration papers are noted down in Michael Sampson's blog.

Of the keynote speakers the best by a mile was Peter Morville (Semantic Studios) who presented his work on developing search patterns. Looking at the link is much easier and more illuminating than me trying to summarise a very elegant keynote. Others were less tied-in to the themes of the conference though as always Sue Feldman and Steve Arnold gave very good presentations in the Enterprise Search Summit.

The presentations from James Robertson were always well attended and James delivered very actionable advice on how to make a significant impact on business operations with an intranet. He made extensive use of the case studies from the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards, of which I was one of the judges.

I was pleased to see that in general the presentations from vendors were quite well balanced though it would have been interesting to learn why a particular vendor had been chosen by the company. An Autonomy presentation that labelled SharePoint as a huge success and that users had found it so useful that IT departments had been pressured into buying licenses raised a few eyebrows.

Overall the events were well worth the 10 hour flight and one hour drive down 101 South. As one of only a handful of delegates from Europe I had a certain curiosity value. However there were times when it seemed that the ESS and KM/Intranets events were competing with each other. Next year the event moves to early November, again in San Jose. Well worth putting a note in your 2009 diary and considering attending, though the main Enterprise Search Summit (a must attend for all search managers) will take place in New York in May 2009.

Martin White