London, UK (PRWEB UK) 4 November 2011

An independent study produced by Mindmetre Research indicates that while Microsoft SharePoint is emerging as the industry standard for content management the most effective SharePoint-based solutions tend to combine the platform?s powerful capabilities with specialist applications that can improve the end-user experience and fill gaps in functionality.

‘Getting the Point’, the title of the research study recently issued by leading consumer and business analysts MindMetre, examines awareness among managers and directors about Microsoft SharePoint and its use as a building block for information management and enterprise search.

Among more than 2,000 managers and directors surveyed across the US, UK, Germany and France, overall awareness of SharePoint is shown to be strong, with significant awareness of the platform and its uses established among managers and directors, even though few of those surveyed are IT professionals.

This research comes on the heels of another study from Smartlogic and MindMetre showing that enterprise search ? the process for quickly finding accurate information from within a company when it is needed ? is falling far short of expectations. That report, which also canvassed managers and directors in the US, UK, Germany and France, revealed that 52% of the respondents said they cannot find the information they need within what most define as an acceptable amount of time using their own organisation?s search facility. 65% defined a ?good search? as taking less than two minutes, but only 48% reported being able to achieve that result in their own organisation.

The more recent findings also reveal that industries with the highest awareness of SharePoint and its implementation include hi-tech and IT, media and publishing, telecoms and ISP, banking, and utilities. Sectors in which knowledge of the application and its implementation could be improved include aerospace, healthcare, education, government, and extraction industries such as mining and oil and gas.

Both reports suggest that the most forward-thinking organizations are realizing that the most effective SharePoint-based solutions tend to combine the platform?s powerful capabilities with specialist content intelligence applications – such as Smartlogic?s Semaphore – to deliver performance that is noticed and appreciated by general management, whose awareness and buy-in is essential to the further development of the SharePoint-oriented enterprise.

Smartlogic’s Semaphore is a content intelligence platform which complements an organisation?s investments in enterprise search, business intelligence and content management to provide effective, rapid and accurate control of, and access to, unstructured content with a speed, accuracy and intelligence not achievable today through existing systems that are strained from soaring information volumes. Semaphore endows these systems with capabilities such as taxonomy & ontology management, automatic classification and contextual navigation, so that organizations can better find, organize, process, monetize, control and govern unstructured content.

Jeremy Bentley, Chief Executive at Smartlogic, which specialises in improving information access and findability? within enterprises, comments: ?Microsoft SharePoint is proving to be an invaluable tool for enabling collaborative work in organisations whose work involves large amounts of information. It?s a great foundation but additional solutions are required to realise the platform?s full potential. For many enterprises, ensuring quick and accurate information retrieval is already essential and yet remains a challenge. Taking an ?intelligent? approach to content management and enterprise search to optimise SharePoint and other systems can be central to enabling content intelligence for organisations hoping to harness the full power of their information.”

Semaphore already provides a comprehensive integrated solution for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint 2010. Smartlogic’s Semaphore for SharePoint 2010 extends Term Store and social Tagging capabilities using robust and scalable web services and SharePoint farm level services. Any List, Page or Document library content is automatically classified against one or more taxonomies.

As Matthieu Jonglez, Smartlogic CTO, explains, “Semaphore navigation web parts improve the user experience for Fast for SharePoint or Native SharePoint search, including features such as the tag cloud, taxonomy browser, topic visualization, enhanced refinement panel and taxonomy breadcrumb. A search-result ‘tag-based navigation’ and an ontology-based ‘Suggest as you type’ which disambiguates search queries at source.”

He continues, “In addition, the ‘Content Type Updater’ works alongside content organiser rules to determine the Content Type based on automatic classification.Ultimately, Semaphore for Sharepoint 2010 adds common metadata across all your SharePoint content to help you manage and find information – without putting additional demands on the end-users.”

The report concludes that “SharePoint is not and never will be an application that companies can simply take out of the box and plug in for a complete solution. Organisations such as Smartlogic augment SharePoint by providing a link between its function as an enterprise-wide content storehouse and the portals and business applications people ? managers, employees, partners, consultants, clients and others ? use every day. To be truly effective, the platform requires a content intelligence application – such as Smartlogic?s Semaphore – which sits between SharePoint as repository for content and human access to that information.

A copy of the report in full can be downloaded here: http://www.smartlogic.com/home/knowledge-zone/white-papers/2476-getting-the-point-sharepoint-report

Smartlogic are currently presenting at the SharePoint Symposium which opened yesterday the Washington Marriott Wardman Park, Washington DC. The conference, sponsored by Smartlogic, continues until on November 3, 2011. More information about Smartlogic and Semaphore can be found here http://www.smartlogic.com

About Smartlogic ? http://www.smartlogic.com

Smartlogic is a software company that specialises in Content Intelligence.

Smartlogic’s Semaphore is a Content Intelligence Platform which complements an organisation?s investments in Enterprise Search, Business Intelligence and Content Management.

Semaphore provides effective, rapid and accurate control of, and access to, unstructured content with a speed, accuracy and intelligence not achievable today from existing systems that are strained by soaring information volumes.

Semaphore endows these systems with capabilities, such as taxonomy & ontology management, automatic classification and contextual navigation, so that organisations can better find, organise, process, monetise, control and govern unstructured content.

Many hundreds of companies like NASA, Bank of America, AutoDesk, Occidental Petroleum, Ford Foundation, Pitney Bowes, The National Health Service, UBS, ABN AMRO, The Office of Public Sector Information, Yell.com and others use Smartlogic today.