Comments on: FASTforward ’09 Wrap-up http://brookbuchanan.com/2009/02/17/ffc09/ Concepts beyond 140 characters Wed, 12 May 2010 22:02:04 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Alexandra http://brookbuchanan.com/2009/02/17/ffc09/#comment-2 Alexandra Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:28:50 +0000 http://brookbuchanan.com/?p=14#comment-2 It is interesting how different you can percieve a conference. I was actually a bit disappointed by this conference and I left there with less notes than in any other conference. To be fair I have been following the Enterprise 2.0 discussion for two-three years now and have fully bought the concept. So I don't need any convincing about the changing nature of organisations nor why enterprise search is relevant. It almost felt like this was when Microsoft "discovered" social media and decided to make the argument for it around search. I talked to a few others who also felt that while some of it was interesting we did not learn much. Especially about how to do it. We only got a lot of what and why during this conference. To be fair I missed the "Ask the experts"-meetings for some unclear reason. What I think is a bit strange is this focus on enterprise search alone. To me all of this will not make neither sense nor work until you put it in a wider enterprise IT-architecture where all information is integrated. Search is heavily affected how, what and where you store the information and Sharepoint is definately not the only answer here :) I can't help compare between this and the CMA (Documentum) tracks at EMC World with a similar amount of people. There you could chose both from overall visionary presentations down to more technical ones usually focusing on what is new in different products. Another big difference is of course that EMC feels as a very open company compared to MS who only talks about their own technologies. It is interesting how different you can percieve a conference. I was actually a bit disappointed by this conference and I left there with less notes than in any other conference. To be fair I have been following the Enterprise 2.0 discussion for two-three years now and have fully bought the concept. So I don’t need any convincing about the changing nature of organisations nor why enterprise search is relevant. It almost felt like this was when Microsoft “discovered” social media and decided to make the argument for it around search. I talked to a few others who also felt that while some of it was interesting we did not learn much. Especially about how to do it. We only got a lot of what and why during this conference. To be fair I missed the “Ask the experts”-meetings for some unclear reason.

What I think is a bit strange is this focus on enterprise search alone. To me all of this will not make neither sense nor work until you put it in a wider enterprise IT-architecture where all information is integrated. Search is heavily affected how, what and where you store the information and Sharepoint is definately not the only answer here :)

I can’t help compare between this and the CMA (Documentum) tracks at EMC World with a similar amount of people. There you could chose both from overall visionary presentations down to more technical ones usually focusing on what is new in different products. Another big difference is of course that EMC feels as a very open company compared to MS who only talks about their own technologies.

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