This week on Shared Insights, founder of Boston-based KMW Technology, Kevin Watters, joins BA Insight CTO Sean Coleman for a discussion of the technical and organizational merits of these two powerful platforms — Elastic and SOLR — from their open source roots to integrations with other systems to core features of each. How likely is it that one of these solutions will meet all the needs of your organization? Join our experts to find out!

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Mark Kashman is a Senior Product Manager on the SharePoint team at Microsoft focused primarily on SharePoint Online — the mobile and intelligent intranet. Mark returns to the show today to talk about the mountains of content we create every day, and the deeply personalized and intelligent search tools companies like Microsoft are building to help users, IT, and developers better support their users. Plus, Mark brings news of the new Microsoft podcast he hosts, The Intrazone.

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Mark Christianson serves as Digital Experience Delivery Senior Lead, Global Services at Mars, Inc. Mark joins us on the show this week to talk about data — mountains of data — and the constant challenge to stay ahead of the needs of tens of thousands of business associates at the company to help them do their jobs better. From machine learning to natural language processing, Mark and his team are pushing their systems to unveil new insights, and he shares how his operational processes have had to evolve to support the work as well.

About Mars, Incorporated

Mars is a family-owned business with more than a century of history making diverse products and offering services for people and the pets people love. With almost $35 billion in sales, the company is a global business that produces some of the world’s best-loved brands: M&M’s®, SNICKERS®, TWIX®, MILKY WAY®, DOVE®, PEDIGREE®, ROYAL CANIN®, WHISKAS®, EXTRA®, ORBIT®, 5™, SKITTLES®, UNCLE BEN’S®, MARS DRINKS and COCOAVIA®. Mars also provides veterinary health services that include BANFIELD® Pet Hospitals, Blue Pearl®, VCA® and Pet Partners™. Headquartered in McLean, VA, Mars operates in more than 80 countries. The Mars Five Principles – Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency and Freedom – inspire its more than 100,000 Associates to create value for all its partners and deliver growth they are proud of every day.

For more information about Mars, please visit www.mars.com. Join us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.

Helen Lippell has run her own consultancy since 2007, working as a specialist in taxonomy, metadata, ontologies and enterprise search. She loves getting stuck into projects and working with clients to figure out how best to use the messy content and data they have. She has supported organizations such as the BBC, gov.uk, Financial Times, Pearson, and Electronic Arts.

Helen joins us today to help our audience better understand taxonomies and search and how solid metadata can support your organization through the scourge of digital entropy.

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Computers can do a lot, but they can't do it all. This week, Nationwide's Ted Williams shares platform stories, and the critical factor of human intervention in truly useful enterprise search. Ted serves as SharePoint Information Architect with Nationwide and is intimately familiar with what makes enterprise search tick, why it fails, and what he and his team are working on to make search smarter for their users.

Bob Bachand serves as search architect for a major Fortune 100 organization. As such, he's accustomed to dealing with the complexities of unifying the search experience for his users across platforms and applications. Today, he joins us to talk about his experience working on search systems that are evolving rapidly, and the BA Insight products that help him to create a more streamlined and intelligent search for this global company.

We've wrapped up a remarkably eventful year in search and this week on the show, BA Insight CTO Jeff Fried will share his top 10 predictions for 2018 across the search landscape. From machine learning to hyper-personalization to voice, AR, and more, Jeff shares his thoughts that might just influence where you place your attention in the coming year. Before we get started, we've got a recap of just how far we've come in the last year!

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This week, Jeff Fried lands after a whirlwind of speaking and learning to share his report on the state of AI in enterprise search as we wrap 2017. Developments in deep learning, ensemble and transfer learning are allowing savvy engineers to do things more efficiently and more clearly than ever before. There's still a disappointing lack of interoperability across platforms. Plus, the hype cycle is thriving, even as real, substantive development aims to catch up to it. Finally, are people giving up on SharePoint search? All that and more in this, our final show of the year. Happy holidays!

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• (00:00) - Welcome to Shared Insights

We're talking about information today, specifically, how we implement and utilize the tools and software at our disposal to improve the way we interact with our information when we need it. To help us, we are honored to have Robert Bogue as our guest. Robert is a sought-after speaker, author and consultant who shares his passion by helping organizations become more effective, efficient, and successful. He's written 25 books, speaks around the world, and is here today to share some of the key lessons he's learned on implementing information management. He has just launched his latest course for the Association for Information and Image Management, Implementing Information Management on SharePoint and Office 365.

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CollabTalk founder and CEO Christian Buckley is back this week, sitting down with CTO Jeff Fried at the European SharePoint Convention 2017 in Dublin, Ireland. This week, they cover the latest trends coming out of Dublin including the latest announcements in hybrid and the Azure stack, the maturing culture around cloud adoption, the continuing embrace of social through Teams and more!

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