Enterprise Social Media: Boris Aleksandrovsky of Yammer

We’ve written elsewhere on any number of occasions about to virtuous cycle of Lucene/Solr open source search and social media. It should come as no surprise, given the enabling attributes of search in today’s landscape, where data created and exchanged is increasingly the measure of relationships, at work and not at work.

One company that’s proven particularly adroit at translating that into economic utility — in the context of work — is Yammer, the free private social network for companies, used at more than 100,000 businesses worldwide (they have an impressive list of information-economy clients). In an interview published today in DZone, Yammer’s lead search archictect, Boris Aleksandrovsky, talks about how they’ve used search:

Yammer is a knowledge base created by interactions between colleagues over time within a company. Yammer can help with the on-boarding process, faq’s, tips, computer setup, company procedures and processes, practices and culture. For this, search is an entry point and quite possibly the most important interaction element. We need to answer complicated queries and present results based on textual similarity, popularity, engagement and social distance.

You can read the full interview here. Boris will be speaking at Lucene Revolution, delivering a talk on what they built at Yammer and how it works:

the architecture, scalability concerns, performance bottlenecks, operational characteristics  and lessons learned while designing and implementing Yammer distributed real-time search system. Yammer is an enterprise social network SaaS offering with over 100,000 networks (including 85% of the Fortune 100) and nearly 2 million users. The search system we developed scales well up to 1B messages and serves a foundation of knowledge base analysis services Yammer is developing.

There’s a pretty full agenda of talks like this and more at Lucene Revolution, and registration is still open.