Microsoft Denmark searches for success with BehaviorTracking
A successful search engine will surely help my colleagues find the information they need in a more efficient manner, making their jobs easier and making them more efficient.
says Marie Kousgaard, Microsoft Denmark's Intranet Administrator.
Mondosoft, a leading provider of enterprise search and behavior analytics announced today that their search analytics solution, BehaviorTracking, has allowed Microsoft Denmark to identify lost opportunities and deliver better content with their SharePoint Portal Server driven Intranet.
Microsoft Denmark is one of the most successful regional offices of Microsoft. They deal in more than $71 Million of business a year and are the base for many of Microsoft's most successful business partners. Their company Intranet is based on the powerful SharePoint Portal Server.
The Problem
Microsoft employees using the Intranet were unatisfied because they couldn't find the documents and information they were looking for. Microsoft knew that their users and more and more becoming accustomed to searching as a main mode of navigation, opting to search before navigating. There was no way of knowing what was happening with the search, however, and users were complaining of poor access to information. They realized that the lack of knowledge of how their users were interacting with their Intranet was preventing them from making improvements to the site.
The Solution
The first step to solving the search problem was to identify why the solution was not returning what the users wanted. After installing the BehaviorTracking application, Microsoft could easily see that very few people were searching, and those that were, were not finding the content they wanted - even though it was on the site. People didn't trust the search engine and those that tried it often received no results.
"We found out immediately that our search engine wasn't indexing some of the key content areas", says Marie Kousgaard, Microsoft Denmark's Intranet Administrator. Marie realized that the SharePoint search engine, which was being administered off site by another department, had not been set up to index all the content. She quickly resolved this issue and made the search engine substantially more useful.
Beyond the site's search issues Marie also learned the drawbacks of having a remotely administered service. Although the service was originally implemented offsite to simplify administration during its early stages, she has now learned it's time to bring the technology in house. She lets BehaviorTracking remind her to monitor the stability and effectiveness of the remote solution until they can bring it inhouse.
Her second success was in identifying a large number of search terms that were synonyms or misspellings of terms on the site. Using the BehaviorTracking reports she is able to see these terms regularly and make keywords on the SharePoint documents that will return the documents in the search even when errors are made.
The Benefit
"We expect this knowledge to greatly influence the trust our users have in the search and the site and make us more confident in the material we are delivering", says Marie. "A successful search engine will surely help my colleagues find the information they need in a more efficient manner, making their jobs easier and making them more efficient." Another attractive result is that the users will become more trusting of the Intranet when they can find the information they need, making it a more valuable resource and a better investment for Microsoft.
We have one of the world's best portals with our SharePoint solution and it has a great, configurable search engine. The only problem is that we couldn't tell it wasn't working and even when we suspected there was something wrong we didn't know what. It was invaluable to know exactly what we needed to do and even more valuable to see how it works on a day to day basis
summarized Marie.