SurfRay

"Ontolica makes searching that huge SharePoint index a LOT faster and easier. In essence, it makes SharePoint search usable."

- Matt Zornes, IT Manager Silgan Plastics

Drive User Acceptance of SharePoint

By improving the ability to find people and documents in SharePoint, Silgan Plastics has drastically increased end user adoption of their SharePoint portal. Although SharePoint has been deployed on the Silgan Plastics intranet for over a year, poor search functionality has slowed the willingness of employees to transition to the SharePoint portal.

Silgan Plastics initially purchased Ontolica licensing for 200 users. The initial licensing purchase was based off SharePoint reports which showed the number of search users. In less than a month after implementing Ontolica, Silgan Plastics had purchased an additional 800 CALs to meet the unexpected increase in search users once the ability to navigate search results was improved. In the case of Silgan Plastics, improving the search experience with Ontolica resulted in a 400% increase in user adoption of SharePoint Search.

SurfRay:

Why have users started using search more since Ontolica was implemented?

Matt Zornes:

There’s a night-and-day difference between SharePoint’s built-in search tool and Ontolica. Don’t get me wrong, SharePoint’s search feature is great but the result set is usually huge and takes far too long to browse through all of the hits to find the document you really want. With Ontolica, we can quickly filter and refine the results based on what we know we’re looking for. Ontolica makes searching that huge SharePoint index a LOT faster and easier. In essence, it makes SharePoint search usable.

SurfRay:

How is better search driving user adoption of SharePoint?

Matt Zornes:

Our old intranet site included a very thorough search tool that could run wildcard searches, but the result output was fairly static and limited. SharePoint’s search tool introduces a new world of search flexibility, but Microsoft really fumbled when they didn’t include the ability to do wildcard searches. We actually had users asking to use the old intranet search tool rather than SharePoint because they simply couldn’t find what they were looking for with SharePoint search. Ontolica gives them wildcard searching back and turns SharePoint search into their new best friend. We’ve now got more and more users using SharePoint to find what they’re after and once they see how easy it is, they tell their co-workers and so-on.

SurfRay:

What features of Ontolica are most beneficial to your users and why?

Matt Zornes:

So far wildcard searching and result set refining have been the most helpful features. Wildcard searching is critical for us because we store a ton of reference documents in SharePoint. The users know part of the file name because it’s an ID number and the first portion of the number indicates a certain grouping of data, but who can remember hundreds if individual ID numbers? With Ontolica, they don’t have to. They enter the number prefix, and the result set is cut down tremendously. If that’s not enough, they can then use the "refine by" options to narrow down their results even further. The two features combined help them to quickly find the files their after.

SurfRay:

How much time a day is saved per employee because they are finding what they are looking for?

Matt Zornes:

This one’s hard to calculate as it depends on how long a person is willing to search and how often they’re searching. However, speaking from my own experience, I’ve found in less than 10 seconds what took me a minute to find previously. Generally, if it takes me much longer than a minute to find something, I give up and will try to find it "the hard way" by browsing to roughly where I knew it to be last. This could take up to another 5-10 minutes and I still may not find it. Then I’ll send an email or IM to a coworker that may know where it is and have to wait for their response which may take from a few moments to the better part of a day!

SurfRay:

How does Ontolica help your users’ perform their daily tasks?

Matt Zornes:

SharePoint is a magnificent and powerful tool. Slowly, our users are coming to understand just how much it can do in comparison to our old Intranet site. SharePoint’s capabilities, features, and content are really what help to drive user productivity. However, if they can’t find that content to use it, then the SharePoint investment is a waste. Ontolica helps bring that content to the users.

About Silgan Plastics and Matt Zornes

For over 20 years, Silgan Plastics has been one of the most successful rigid plastics packaging suppliers in the North America. This success is the result of providing innovative packaging solutions to customers and dedication to making the purchase experience reliable, easy, and efficient. Silgan supplies a broad range of products to numerous markets with the most abundant including personal care, food, health care, and household/automotive.

Matt Zornes has been with Silgan Plastics for over 10 years. He has been involved in a wide range of IT related projects including database administration, programming, web design, server administration, network administration, and desktop support.

About SurfRay

Founded in 2000, SurfRay is a global leader in search infrastructure software for enterprises that delivers highly packaged enterprise search solutions that are easy to try, buy and install. SurfRay has more than a 1000 customers in over 30 countries and is dual headquartered in Santa Clara, USA and Copenhagen, Denmark.