Gaps in Microsoft SharePoint are challenging organisations, but there are ways to unlock valuable enterprise information

Experts estimate that organisations created 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily in 2012, much of it in unstructured formats such as research documents, internal briefings, journal articles, e-mails, proposals, blog posts and social media content. Storing this data and organising it for later recall is essential for organisational success, experts say. If readily accessible to staff, this data is extremely valuable and can be used to aid product development, customer relationship management, risk management, market intelligence, new business pitches and a host of other initiatives.
A recent survey conducted by MindMetre Research on behalf of Smartlogic shows that 53 percent of respondents have chosen SharePoint as their platform for organising data. SharePoint facilitates access to data by building a platform for sharing documents within an enterprise, enabling access to information and making it manageable.

The Information Performance Survey took in the responses of 532 information management professionals across the US and Europe and revealed that, while the high adoption levels highlighted in the survey are a telling indicator of SharePoint’s capabilities, there is also widespread disillusionment among professionals with the gap between their expectations of SharePoint’s search performance and its actual ability to deliver results.

The findings revealed three key reasons that companies are investing in SharePoint. The primary objective of 76 percent of respondents was to eliminate unnecessary duplication of work by making existing knowledge more accessible. This was followed by a desire to facilitate effective collaboration between different parts of the organisation (60 percent) and protection against failing regulatory standards due to inadequate information governance (42 percent).

A huge 80 percent of respondents stated that SharePoint is failing to meet their and their colleagues’ original expectations by some degree, with 46 percent of these believing it is falling a little short and 34 percent saying there is a considerable margin between what people in their organisation believe is satisfactory and what they are actually getting from SharePoint.

A key area of disappointment was the amount of data SharePoint actually makes findable: a quarter of SharePoint users believe its search facility allows them to access less than half of their organisation’s internal information. Overall, disappointment with the application’s ability to enable access to internal information was a concern for 78 percent of respondents – a worrying figure given the primary motive behind many companies’ implementation of the platform.

There is, however, a valid reason for this: SharePoint primarily is an enterprise development platform – used to manage, process, store and share documents generated by an organisation to facilitate workplace collaboration, internal communications and other content-related tasks. SharePoint is not a pure search facility and, given the range of implementations through which it is deployed, some gaps in functionality are inevitable. A number of leading technology analysts have identified areas where SharePoint requires enhancement by adding specialist bolt-on applications, and this presents a viable way for companies to boost SharePoint’s capabilities themselves.

A recent report by Gartner, for example, highlights six areas where organisations can enhance SharePoint’s capabilities by adding supplementary applications. Two of the six, records management and taxonomy/classification, directly impact an organisation’s ability to optimise the ‘findability’ of its unstructured information – so by adding extra applications that target efficiency in these areas, companies can boost SharePoint’s functionalities for themselves.

These applications can be implemented alongside SharePoint to infuse it with ‘content intelligence’, which imbues the platform with an enhanced capability to access, describe and control unstructured enterprise information. For most organisations, augmenting SharePoint with content intelligence can be vital to ensuring ‘findability’.

Content intelligence enhances a system such as SharePoint with auto-classification, text analytics and visualisation capabilities. Those enhancements enable the platform to deliver a user experience that addresses searchers’ intent so that extraneous documents can be filtered out during the ‘find’ process and relevant content that might normally fall outside the search parameters can be included. This semantic approach enables users to run searches that take in the contextual meaning of a term, not only filtering out irrelevant content as a result, but capturing information that can otherwise fall outside traditional search parameters.

A key step to improving ‘findability’ is to drive the search process with a comprehensive metadata classification system. Much of the reason for this underperformance can be attributed to reliance on manual tagging by different people, departments, divisions and offices that often using their own unique systems for labeling documents. Not only is physical tagging labor-intensive, the result is often poor quality metadata that is inconsistent – if it has been applied at all. As it stands, SharePoint relies on manual tagging of metadata to make documents accessible by internal or external search engines. What’s more, with conventional search, a term or combination of terms could have numerous different meanings, leaving the user with thousands, even millions, of results to wade through.

Content intelligence provides an automated metadata classification process through specialist applications. Such software can read documents, put them into context, and accurately tag each with the correct metadata. Information can also be cross-referenced and different information streams mapped together to ensure unstructured content integration. To ensure that this is an ongoing capability, the system’s functionality needs to include taxonomy and ontology management, automatic classification, text analysis, contextual navigation, information visualisation, semantic search enhancement and metadata management.

These applications can sit alongside a businesses’ information management systems like content management, enterprise search and business intelligence and allow companies to exploit their full capabilities. While SharePoint may not yet be delivering the results that information professionals expect, by adding a semantic model like this companies, can effectively upgrade SharePoint to a complete enterprise search solution that really makes the most of Big Data and improves return on investment on existing information architecture.