Transforming Sharepoint Into a Unified Information Access Platform How the BA Insight Software Portfolio Extends Sharepoint 2013
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Transforming SharePoint into a Unified Information Access Platform How the BA Insight Software Portfolio Extends SharePoint 2013 BA Insight 2015 How BA Insight Turns SharePoint 2013 Into a Unified Information Access Platform Table of Contents The Need for Unified Information Access .............................................................................. 2 Search-Driven Applications and UIA ......................................................................................................... 2 Approaches to UIA Platforms .................................................................................................................... 3 Leveraging SharePoint .............................................................................................................................. 4 The BA Insight Software Portfolio .......................................................................................... 5 Going Beyond SharePoint 2013 OOB ....................................................................................................... 6 Connectivity Beyond OOB SharePoint ...................................................................................................... 6 MultiSearch: Beyond OOB SharePoint Federation ................................................................................... 7 Content Enrichment Beyond OOB SharePoint.......................................................................................... 8 User Experience Beyond OOB SharePoint ............................................................................................... 9 Incorporating Other SharePoint 2013 Capabilities .................................................................................. 11 Summary .................................................................................................................................12 References ..............................................................................................................................12 About BA Insight .....................................................................................................................13 © Copyright 2015 BA Insight. All Rights Reserved. Page | 1 How BA Insight Turns SharePoint 2013 Into a Unified Information Access Platform The Need for Unified Information Access The modern enterprise is struggling to make sense of the structured and unstructured information that is being generated and leveraged in exponentially growing volumes across an increasing variety of application silos. The fragmentation, diversity, and overall inaccessibility of this data can lead to a number of suboptimal outcomes, such as the lack of responsiveness to customer inquiries, widespread duplication of effort, general inability to locate and nurture expertise, and decreased employee productivity. As awareness grows of the challenges posed by the volume, variety, and velocity of content, today’s IT leaders are increasingly evaluating technologies that facilitate access to and consolidation of structured and unstructured content to gain timely insights into various business critical scenarios. One such technology is Unified Information Access (UIA), an advanced implementation of Enterprise Search technology that transcends simple keyword searching to allow for secure, ad hoc interrogation of multiple content sources in a highly targeted and contextually specific manner. This white paper discusses UIA platforms and applications, and in particular describes how the BA Insight Software Portfolio transforms SharePoint into a powerful UIA platform, providing capabilities beyond SharePoint 2013 out-of-the-box. Search-Driven Applications and UIA A search-driven application is a software application that uses a search engine as the primary information access backbone, the main purpose of which is to surface critical information at the right time within the right context. There are many examples, including: Customer Service – empowers customers to engage and resolve issues online, enables self-service, and reduces repetitive questions and answers. Professional Services – enables identification of experts who have addressed similar needs, delivers immediate and relevant knowledge to drive projects forward, and supports subscriptions to particular topics for automatic notification of updates. Helpdesk – provides actionable resolutions through instant access to critical information through one portal, and delivers a complete 360 degree view of customer information across multiple sources such as CRM and ERP systems. Research and Development – minimizes duplication of effort, increases the speed of innovation, finds product information quickly, and creates tailored R&D environments. e-Commerce – provides a responsive, contextual, and remarkable user experience to allow customers to interact with a brand, find relevant products, and follow up on orders. While Internet Search has evolved rapidly over the past two decades, Enterprise Search has, for the most part, remained the same. Internet Search has gone from being a largely horizontal keyword driven catchall for web content (Lycos, Alta Vista, Google) to being the driver of a number of targeted © Copyright 2015 BA Insight. All Rights Reserved. Page | 2 How BA Insight Turns SharePoint 2013 Into a Unified Information Access Platform applications that have fundamentally transformed the way information is accessed. Search now propels applications that help us to book travel, navigate from point A to point B, research general interest topics and purchase vital goods and services (Travelocity, MapQuest, and Wikipedia). These ‘Search-Driven Applications’ (SDAs) have a number of notable characteristics: 1. They are contextually specific: far from being one search box that yields “ten blue links”, SDAs are Hotel Room Finders, Flight Finders, and Product Finders, along with research apps for travel and general interest. 2. They leverage search to access and surface content from a number of sources of both structured and unstructured data in a unified view. 3. The user experience involves exploration and navigation rather than being simply query-driven, and it features the use of graphical refinement options like pick-lists, map parts, and sliders that obviate the need for more complex query formulation. SDAs are an intuitive, dynamic, and targeted means of rapidly accessing a diverse and fragmented data set. This approach “offers businesses a rapid, low risk way to eliminate some of the peskiest and most common information systems (IS) problems: siloed data, poor application usability, shifting user requirements, systemic rigidity, and limited scalability” (Grefenstette, 2011). The pattern of multiple tailored and targeted applications is familiar to us in the consumer world and, as our experience suggests, it can be a successful pattern in the enterprise as well. Unified Information Access platforms support search-driven applications particularly well. Typically, there is not one but many different sources of information needed in a search-driven application, and there may be structured as well as unstructured information. Deploying multiple applications on a UIA platform is far more cost-effective than fielding each application on a standalone basis. Approaches to UIA Platforms UIA platforms include a wide range of technology such as connectivity, text analytics, and data visualization. There are different approaches you can take to cover the range of capabilities involved in UIA (IDC, 2014): . Assemble the capabilities as ‘bits and pieces’, with components from different sources and vendors. Procure a standalone platform, with all of the capabilities included, and integrate it into your environment. Leverage the existing infrastructure (such as search core, workflow engine, and BI stack) and add a pre-integrated software or components to cover the range of UIA capabilities. The BA Insight Software Portfolio takes the third approach and leverages existing infrastructure, in particular SharePoint. © Copyright 2015 BA Insight. All Rights Reserved. Page | 3 How BA Insight Turns SharePoint 2013 Into a Unified Information Access Platform Leveraging SharePoint SharePoint is the most common content and collaboration platform found in enterprises today. It focuses on providing pre-integrated capabilities in a wide range of areas and is an extensible infrastructure for business applications. SharePoint 2013 in particular has strong capabilities in a number of areas relevant to UIA: Presentation Framework: SharePoint provides a Familiar UI that is integrated, extensive, and easy to brand and extend using standard tools. FAST Search Core: SharePoint includes a Powerful, Scalable, Extensible search core based on FAST technology. Integrated BI: Dashboards, Analytics, and Excel Services are all built into SharePoint. Integrated SharePoint Workloads: WCM, ECM, Workflow, and e-Discovery capabilities are all included with SharePoint and can be leveraged and extended. SharePoint has an extensive supporting ecosystem which includes numerous ISVs and System Integrators, as well as trained administrators within many organizations. SharePoint 2013 is also built with search-driven applications in mind, and is set up to support multiple search-driven applications running on the same infrastructure. (Tordgeman, 2013) SharePoint 2013 provides a great infrastructure to leverage for UIA, as the underlying search core has many strong capabilities. (BA Insight, 2013) Managed Metadata is pre-integrated via