Microsoft SharePoint has evolved a lot over the years, but one thing remains the same: CEOs and CIOs are still struggling to get their users to adopt it. The barriers to adoption are fairly common:

  • Users have difficulty finding their documents and truly collaborating
  • Users are still using old File Shares & DropBox to store their documents
  • The IT team is nervous about a complex migration coming up
  • The legal team is nervous about GDPR and sensitive PII content compliance

To mitigate these concerns, organizations need a way to make search so easy that SharePoint becomes the obvious place to store files. Companies also need their search optimization process to hold up when content is inevitably migrated and to function without compromising personal information. To solve these issues, we looked at what makes Google search work so well.

According to a study by The International Data Corporation (IDC), the average knowledge worker wastes 2.5 hours per day or about 30% of the workday searching for information.

Google search is great because it applies metadata to content. Metadata is information that describes various facets of an information asset to improve its usability throughout its lifecycle. In other words, it is actually metadata that turns information into a retrievable asset.

Think about the music that you have on your mobile device. Each song has a number of tags that determine the artist, album, genre, release date, playlist, etc. It’s this information that allows you to sort or search for it in a variety of different ways.

Now think about SharePoint. While it may be great for file storage, it was not designed to streamline the creation of metadata. SharePoint’s Managed Metadata Service and SharePoint Term Store all require some form of continuous involvement from the end-users or the IT team. Consequently, this can be very time-consuming, labor-intensive and prone to human error. Furthermore, these processes do not scale well, since maintaining a large store of metadata can be very problematic. All of these factors impact the accuracy and quality of your metadata. Having inaccurate metadata is as bad (if not worse) than having no metadata at all.

Is there a solution to this problem? Yes! Today, thanks to groundbreaking advances in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, we have solutions like CoreTag that fully automate the process of applying metadata to content stored in SharePoint. This means you can deliver a Google-like search experience in SharePoint with little to no effort, a surefire way to see the product adoption numbers you’ve been hoping for all along.