Two major public sector organisation in New Zealand, the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) and Ministry of Transport (MoT), have issued a joint tender for enterprise search across SharePoint and other information repositories.
The aim is to deliver transparency and discoverability for millions of items in shared drives, SharePoint applications, intranet and web sites, as well as a Correspondence Tracking System, DB-Textworks Library Catalogue, CRM platform and Contracts Database

Both agencies have highlighted that “Finding information within both organisations is time-consuming and difficult because of a large number of content repositories and, in the case of the NZTA, because of the merging of organisations inconsistencies in how information was managed.
“The inbuilt search facility of some key content management systems, are of low quality leading to poor retrieval of information held in those systems.

“Costly and labour-intensive migration will need to be carried out in the future to ensure findability of information currently contained in shared drives and legacy systems.”
Currently there is no ability to search non-text based information beyond the metadata associated with an individual item.

The joint MoT/ NZTA project aims to deliver “a common search engine is a building block to eventually enable transport agencies to share information with each other and to provide a single view of transport information to the public.”
“There are linkages between Enterprise Search and Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Wherever possible (and appropriate) links will be made between this enterprise search project and any cross government ECM initiatives.”