tapping the expert source with microsoft sharepoint...

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Tapping the Expert Source with Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010

Tim Smith, Vice President, Business Intelligence & Collaboration


Agenda

• Recent findings on collaboration

• Business implications of social computing

• Social computing/collaboration solutions

–SharePoint 2010 overview

–Leveraging social computing with Expert Source


Collaboration Findings

538 C-Level executives, business leaders

and IT decision-makers across 17 regions

of North America, Europe and Asia Pacific

Companies surveyed span

major categories:

conducted by Kelton Research


The Avanade name and logo are registered trademarks in the US and other countries.

Percent believe that enterprise-wide collaboration is more important than individual specialization for success

Collaboration

Matters Percent plan to increase the use of communications and collaboration technologies in the next year.

C-level executives and IT decision makers clearly see value from collaboration technologies

85

75


Essential communications and collaboration tools for business interactions


While benefits to the enterprise are evident, many respondents are still wary of new business culture issues created by greater collaboration in the workplace.

More than 1 in 3 1 in 4 Respondents agree that

people problem solve less on

their own today and instead

rely on collaboration

technologies to ask other

people.

Executives and IT decision-

makers say they dread

collaboration because of the

amount of time and energy it

wastes.

Collaboration Drawbacks


• Collaboration technologies are perceived as essential to business success.

• While benefits are overwhelming, collaboration also changes the way people think about how they go about their work. It’s not just about access to documents and voice communication.

• Companies need to consider the impact to both people and technologies when implementing an enterprise-wide collaboration strategy.


There are several consistent patterns involving how collaborative technologies impact the business.

1. People finding and communicating with others (corporate or team-based communication)

2. People locating and acting on relevant job-related data (decision making)

3. People executing tasks together (project collaboration)

4. People consuming, refining and qualifying information (innovation)

Impact of Collaboration


Business implications of social computing


Hierarchical structures with repetitive tasks Composite networks with multiple projects

10


Are you maximizing your business agility?

11

How can you ? Do you in real time? What makes an expert

a ?

Do you

in your organization?


• Documents created are not

accessible throughout the

enterprise and do not provide

basic information about

content or author.

• Communication via social

outlets, such as blogs or wikis,

is not leveraged within the

organization.

• Centralized management or

collection of updated

experience does not exist

within the organization.

• Identifying people with specific skills, knowledge and proven experience to engage for critical initiatives. Example - Pharmaceutical: “We need to get the right people in the room for tomorrow’s planning meeting—who should be invited?”

• Ensure the “expert” returned truly meets the requirements necessary to execute in a timely manner.

Example - Manufacturing: “Who has expertise using and building specific equipment to help us resolve a customer issue?”

• Knowing whether the “expert” identified is available and able to assist within the time constraints. Example - Healthcare/public sector: “We’re trying to respond about this outbreak—can our best experts address the problem now?”

• Once identified, communicating with the “expert” becomes a time-consuming e-mail and/or phone exchange that does not offer the best interactivity.

• Sharing content and working together, in real time, is hindered by global location and technical deficiencies.

• Expanding knowledge to wider groups increases in difficulty and becomes counter-productive.


Solution approach: Avanade Expert Source™ Business-focused application of social computing

• Solution enablers

– Ability to manage expertise in an organization

– Identify, connect and collaborate with SMEs

– Deliver social computing capabilities

– Aggregated, refined search results of employees

• Major requirements for an Expert Source solution

– Rich and easy-to-refresh user profile

– Search function that finds relevant people and expertise

– Functionality to synchronize profile information with other sources

– Ability for users to tag content and rate colleagues for expertise

• Bring the organization together in dispersed global workforces

– Build business networks around interests and expertise

• Reduce costs, increase service levels and mitigate risks

– Bring the best together to drive results

– Collaborate in real time with subject matter experts

– Staff experts on critical initiatives

Ratings, comments, tags

Enterprise taxonomy

MySites

Blogs, wikis

Social bookmarks

Status updates

Social distance

FAST for SharePoint

Avanade Expert Source

is built on the strong

collaboration features of

SharePoint 2010


Avanade expertise model

Avanade Confidential – Do Not Copy, Forward or Circulate


Expert Source logical architecture



Why SharePoint 2010 and FAST?

• Increased productivity – Integrated experience of SP 2010 and FS4SP

– Pervasive availability of SharePoint in the enterprise

• Respond to business needs – Social features are out-of-the-box in SP 2010

– BCS and FAST allow enough customization to enable enterprise class features

• Relevancy rankings – FAST’s relevancy rankings bring credibility to an expertise

location solution



Major architectural components

Primary Data Flow: 1. SP User Profile store is populated

from an LDAP source.

2. Experts are exported out of the Profile Store an into the ES database.

3. FS4SP crawls contributions stored in SharePoint (docs, blogs, etc…)

4. ETL job extracts expertise data from LoB systems (certifications, project experience, etc…) and uses it to calculate expertise scores.

17

SharePoint

Expert Source

User

Search Site

Query PageExpert Results

Page

7b) Query Passing

Active

Directory

5c) Insert

FAST Content SA

Index Partition

(Documents)

Blogs

Docs

LoB Systems

7c)

Exp

ert

Qu

ery

1) Sync

User Profile SA

Index Partition

(Experts)

3) Crawl Content

Expert Source

Custom DB

2b) Import

User Import

Job

2a)

Cra

wl

Metadata SA

Expertise

Analysis

Jobs

5a)

Cra

wl

5b) Query

FAST Query

SA

BCS

App

6a) Crawl Expertise6b) Convert Expertise

to Crawlable Format

7a) Query

4) ETL



Major architectural components (cont.)

Primary Data Flow: 5. Expert terms are pulled from the

SP Term Store. For each term, a query is issued against FS4SP to find the relevant contribution content for that term. The author of each contribution is used to create an expertise score for each author/expert term combination and stored in the ES DB. Contribution scores are then merged with

6. FS4SP crawls the ES database via the BCS connector.

7. User queries for expertise on the Expert Search page.

18

SharePoint

Expert Source

User

Search Site

Query PageExpert Results

Page

7b) Query Passing

Active

Directory

5c) Insert

FAST Content SA

Index Partition

(Documents)

Blogs

Docs

LoB Systems

7c)

Exp

ert

Qu

ery

1) Sync

User Profile SA

Index Partition

(Experts)

3) Crawl Content

Expert Source

Custom DB

2b) Import

User Import

Job

2a)

Cra

wl

Metadata SA

Expertise

Analysis

Jobs

5a)

Cra

wl

5b) Query

FAST Query

SA

BCS

App

6a) Crawl Expertise6b) Convert Expertise

to Crawlable Format

7a) Query

4) ETL



Logical infrastructure

19

Front-end

SharePoint 2010

front-end Web

Servers

Search Web Parts, Query Web Service

Application Servers

SharePoint 2010

Application

Servers

Back-end

Query SSA Content SSA

FAST Search for

SharePoint Farm

Content Distributor, Doc Processing, Indexer, etc...

SQL 2008

Database Servers


Three steps to pervasive collaboration

20


Implementation approach

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We work with customers worldwide. Avanade experience delivers real value.


Recognize the need for organizational collaboration

Identify the business issue or goal

Select a social computing solution that addresses your business needs

Implement a solution that fosters business agility

We bring the right knowledge, services and assets

to address your unique needs enterprise-wide collaboration.


Appendix


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– Insight

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– Expertise

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– Global expert network (about 6,000 professionals in GDN)

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– Avanade Connected Architectures (ACA)

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