Improving SharePoint Search Experience – #SPSBE07

I think its my first time that I attended a search session for business users/decision makers - interesting times here at SharePoint Saturday in Belgium. Here follows a summary for “Improve SharePoint Search Experience” in my words.

Speaker was Elio Struyf (@eliostruyf) - he has some nice blog posts about search, go read them!

Elio on stage

Improve for everybody, don’t forget the novice users

There are different types of users in every enterprise, some of them are more mature with SharePoint, some do a search query with just one keyword - well, one of Elio’s key messages was that you should optimize the experience not only for the “educated” users.

Key tips

During his presentation Elio showed some nice tricks to improve the experience. Starting by enabling suggestions, optimize verticals, add and change refiners or improve the keyword search are really important parts of an optimized Search Center - default  means not optimized for your requirements, right?

neat keyword search solution

Expert users

For expert users there are plenty of options to drive adoption and create results that are important for the users - and help them tackle the information overload.

One good optimization is to enable search as you type (note: your IT admin will love you for that!) or to enrich the results with meaningful, additional metadata. For enriching you have multiple options, Elio explained Entity Extraction and Content Enrichment - both are very powerful concepts to provide better results.

Lastly Elio introduced Delve/Office Graph - the audience indicated that they know about it, but most of them don’t/can’t use them. As closing demo he showed that you can integrate Office Graph results into SharePoint results - good one, I need to keep that one in mind!

Summary

Solid session by Elio - good value for me. Its important to not forget the novice users, they can be important for your SharePoint adoption and are the “tomorrows” users of your platform. Thanks!