Jennifer and Matthew from Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP talked about SharePoint search in a legal environment. I missed the first part of the talk because I was talking to Steve from iDatix on the exhibition floor.

From what I heard, they worked out a process of crawling all of their content every night, and for any new or updated content (in SharePoint document libraries, intranet, business data catalog), they had a way of applying metadata. Some things would be flagged for human review (to add more metadata), using a tagging tool they created.

Once they had the content, they created a SharePoint Managed Property for each item in the metadata standard. Were able to mapped crawled properties from each content source to the managed properties.

Created “Best Bets” from user suggestions, consultation with KM lawyers, common task lists, stats on usage.

Did some work to enhance the search interface and results display. They also changed the Advanced Search screen in SharePoint, customizing it to add their metadata properties. Searching was tested with content owners.

The team working on this project had a good sponsor, specifically the Director of KM. Helped with securing the budget, promoting the project to management, and engaging the content owners.