On Wednesday, February 4th, my colleague Andrew McKay and I had the privilege of speaking at the first Enterprise Search Forum Toyko at the International House of Japan in Roppongi. Attivio was co-sponsor of the event, which was hosted by our partner Basis Technology.

One of the cornerstones of the Attivio AIE platform is that it affords engineers the opportunity to construct a proof of concept very quickly. This capability means that potential customers can see a live implementation of their content integrated into AIE in mere days, not weeks or months.

Relevancy isn't really about the mathematics of TF, IDF, and other ranking algorithms. Relevancy is about presenting results to the end user in an order that is useful to them. If you're selling paint or hardware, then popularity of your products doesn't change very quickly. But if you are selling CDs, or other products that have very high popularity swings, it's more difficult to judge which products are the most popular today. What are you doing to update your search capabilities so products that are popular today are ranked higher than the products that were popular yesterday?

If you are an online retailer, you have a gold mine in your sales transaction database. You know what products are selling better today than yesterday, and which solid sellers are slowly tailing off. Why not use this transactional information to dynamically adjust relevance?

According to Forrester Research companies use Microsoft Word out of habit, not necessity . The crux of the matter is that "Word has become so entrenched in the enterprise in the last 25 years, organizations cannot easily move off of it".

It goes on to explain how new and emerging web-based tools "make sharing documents and online collaboration more intuitive and easier for users" and are more cost effective.

This is a surprise?