I’m delighted that Matthew McDermott and Kevin Watters have joined BA Insight’s Advisory Board. Both are top-notch search gurus, new colleagues, and old friends. I know them from different worlds- Matthew from SharePoint search and Kevin from open source search.
Matthew McDermott (@MatthewMcD) is well-known in the SharePoint world as an educator, consultant, community builder and evangelist. He’s an eleven-time Microsoft SharePoint Server MVP, and if you attend any of his classes, you’ll immediately know why. Matthew is incredibly deep technically and also has a rare ability to meet people where they are. His blog is a must-read, and I highly recommend any of his conference sessions, classes, and online courses. Here’s a couple of examples:
- Matthew’s SharePoint 2013 Search back to front online course on Pluralsight is a classic – full of great information that is still relevant for SharePoint 2016 (and will be valid for SharePoint 2019 too, I wager).
- Last fall he published a great five-part series on how to use Content Types and SharePoint Search to build search solutions.
- He recently posted a video showing how to create a Search-Based Employee Directory on YouTube.
- He’s gearing up to teach an Enterprise Search Power Class at the European Collaboration summit, with our mutual friend, Agnes Molnar of Search Explained.
Matthew runs AbleBlue and is also a director of Aptillon, providing SharePoint solutions and consulting. He has a YouTube channel and is always excited about new subscribers.
Kevin Watters (@kwatters76) is one of the top open source search consultants. I worked with Kevin back at FAST Search and Transfer, where he was renowned for his quick problem solving. In half of the time that most people would take just to understand an issue, Kevin would figure out the problem and come back with a fully implemented solution. He is concise in his speech- ask him what he does and he says simply, “I build search engines and robots.” I guess you don’t need to use a lot of words if you generate great code! Take a look at some of his work:
- Kevin’s work on graphs in Lucene and Solr
- Integration of VGG16 object recognition in the open source robotics project MyRobotLab and a video showing real-time object recognition
- Another video showing additional work in combining chatbot technologies with search engines, speech recognition, and speech synthesis.
Kevin runs KMW technology, a boutique firm providing Search and Big Data Professional Services.
I’ve known both Matthew and Kevin for years, and they’ve each done some work with BA Insight in the past. Having them join our new Advisory Board is a fabulous way to deepen our relationships, and as a result they’ll undoubtedly make some big contributions to the company as well as to the search community at large. I’m particularly excited about what we’ll be able to accomplish together on the Advisory Board as we bridge between SharePoint search and open source search – two very different communities that nevertheless have a lot in common. We’ll have a lot of fun together, too!
If you have any suggestions or questions for Matthew, Kevin, or me, drop us a line.