It's a big week in Microsoft world; over in Vegas they are holding their big Sharepoint event, getting ready for the release of Sharepoint 2010, which will also see a whole load of new goodies, including Office 2010, and (project managers take note) the first real update to project for years.

For those of you who are not in a large company or the IT world let me explain.
Sharepoint is a tool for organisations to use to create internal websites, manage documents, collaborate and share knowledge. With Office and Sharepoint, workers can work on documents together, they can book a document out (which locks it) work on it and sign it back in. They can create workflows which mean a document needs certain people to do things to finish it.
It is one of Microsoft's jewels and is used my millions of people with about a million developers.
It rubs up with products from IBM and Oracle and is now being targeted by Google with Apps. But isn't Google search? Yes and search is an important aspect of any tool such as Sharepoint. Just like the web, you need to be able to find the information you need.
This is where a local comes in – Peter Wren Hilton of Pingar, based here in the Bay, is over in Lost Wages chatting with all the Microsoft people and their Clients. Telling them about the search engine his company has developed with the help of the University of Waikato and Waikato Link.
He will not be just chatting though, this is Pingar's Global launch, this is business and with the numbers involved in Sharepoint it should be very nice business.

A few years ago Microsoft bought the FAST search engine. Pingar was using this engine with enhancements to create a new way to provide the results. He got in touch with Microsoft and now Pingar is the only New Zealand company to be part of a select group in the Microsoft Start Up Accelerator Group. It is part of the Wave 14 Programme, which ties in all the new release software. Windows 7, out today, Sharepoint, Office 2010, Project, Exchange (mail) which will all be built to connect to the cloud (lots of servers in shipping crates in deserts). This will partly be done by Microsoft's cloud platform called Azure.
Pingar's secret is not so much in how it searches but in how it supplies the results. Imagine you need some research, instead of spending time following the links like normal, a Pingar search delves into the pages of the documents and extracts the relevant parts then creates a whole new document with all the parts in an order. I think of it as the Early Bird, which the White House puts together for the President each morning; all the right bits from the papers and analysts. Part of the aim of Pingar is to reduce the time wasted in search. To quote Peter,
"Currently, according to IDC, 50 per cent of searches don't find the answer the person is looking for. Pingar can help change that. Pingar can help you find data faster and spend your time analyzing it, as opposed to searching for it. This is of real value to large enterprises with vast amounts of information," he says.

There has been a lot of effort by the search companies over the last year to make search results more meaningful and user friendly. While I am not totally sure this method would be right on the www I do believe it will make a big difference in the enterprise. The time saving alone over the year would cover the cost. I would suggest it would be a great tool for lawyers, insurance, medical and governmental organisations. Indeed as Tauranga City Council is currently looking to digitise all its old paper documents, now might be a good time to think about Pingar and Sharepoint.

Peter will be back next week, I will be looking forward to a beer and hearing about all his adventures in Lost Wages.