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Meaning is a very large concept in every aspect of search technology and dozens of search product sites include either the words "semantic" or "meaning" as a key element of the offered technology. This is not as far fetched as search product claims to "know" what the searcher wants to find, as if "knowing" can be attributable to non-human operations. However, how well a search engine indexes and retrieves content to meet a searcher's intent, is truly in the eyes of the beholder. I can usually understand why, technically speaking, a piece of content turns up in a search result, but that does not mean that it was a valid scrap for my intent. My intent for a search cannot possibly be discernible by a search engine if, as is most often the case, I don't explicitly and eloquently express what, why, and other contextual facts when entering a query.

The session we have set aside at Gilbane San Francisco for a discussion on current activity related to semantic technologies will undoubtedly reveal more meaning about technologies and art of leveraging tools to elicit semantically relevant content. I suspect that someone will also stipulate that what works requires a defined need and clear intent during the implementation process - but what about all those fuzzy situations? I hope to find out.

This is the last posting before the conference this week so I hope you will add this enterprise search session (EST-6: Semantic Technology - Breakdown or Breakthrough) being moderated by Colin Britton to your agenda on June 19th. He will be joined by speakers: Steve Carton, VP Content Technologies, Retrieval Systems Corp., Folksonomies: Just Good Enough for all Kinds of Thing, Prakesh Govindarajulu, President, RealTech Inc, Building Enterprise Taxonomies from the Ground Up, and Jack Jia, Founder & CEO, Baynote.

See you in San Francisco in person or virtually thereafter.

Executives from four companies with unique products for solving search challenges within organizations will share their thoughts on what is most interesting, promising and problematic in the current market at Gilbane San Francisco, session EST-4 on June 19th. Because it is important to consider markets, this type of session gives the panel and audience a chance to recognize the perspectives of each other, sellers and buyers. I'll be asking the executives to comment on their product strengths, with emphasis on specific value propositions for buyers. There will be an opportunity for the audience to ask questions because what is on the minds of buyers is often the most interesting for everyone to hear. When one listens to questions asked of vendors and hears responses, it reveals two important things about markets:

• Alignment that exists (or not) between what buyers want and what sellers have to offer


• Challenges both face to create value

Think about it. When individuals are tasked with selecting any technology on behalf of an organization or organizational unit, their ultimate success depends on selecting a product and company that truly supports a value proposition for that enterprise business need. While the buyer has responsibility for implementing or selecting the right implementation team, s/he rightly depends on good guidance and a healthy relationship with the purveyor of product. When a technology company puts its product in the hands of a buyer it must do so with the confidence that its product comes with a total value package. By that I mean not just the technology but also the design, toolkit, and support team to guide its successful implementation.

No one, particularly vendors, likes to talk about negatives. However, given all the things that can go wrong for a buyer trying to manage an implementation team or for sellers who don't anticipate expectations about their products not explored during the selection process, it is important to consider factors that lead to failure or less than satisfactory outcomes. One question I will have for vendors is to share honestly some of the challenges or disappointments about the market that are a particular point of pain for them. Bad-mouthing customers is not the answer but conveying how hard most vendors honestly try to create value and how their best intentions can be derailed through miscommunication may help buyers and sellers smooth the communication flow.

After all, don't we all want to provide value for our internal and external customers? I think you will find the panel a receptive group: a 25+-year veteran of the information access market, a marketing executive with an international search and text analytics firm, a founder of a rapidly growing plug-and-play search solution, and a marketing VP working to position a company with a large scale solution against the "big-three" search solutions. You'll hear straight talk and interesting value propositions.

Speakers: Margie Hlava, President, Accession Innovation, David Haucke, VP Global, Marketing, ISYS, Laurent Simoneau, President & CEO, and Rebecca Thompson, VP Marketing, Vivisimo

Since I weighed in last week on the Microsoft acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer, I have probably read 50+ blog entries and articles on the event. I have also talked to other analysts, received emails from numerous search vendors summarizing their thoughts and expectations about the enterprise search market and had a fair number of phone calls asking questions about what it means. The questions range from “Did Microsoft pay too much?, to “Please define enterprise search,” to “What are the next acquisitions in this market going to be going to be?” My short and flippant answers would be “No,” “Do you have a few hours?” and “Everyone and no one.”

I have seen some excellent analysis contributing relevant commentary to this discussion, some misinterpretation of what the distinction’s are between enterprise search and Web search, and some conclusions that I would seriously debate. You’ll forgive me if I don’t include links to the pieces that influenced the following comments. But one by Curt Monash in his piece on January 14 summarized the state of this industry and its already long history. It is noteworthy that while the popular technology press has only recently begun to write about enterprise search, it has been around for decades in different forms and in a short piece he manages to capture the highlights and current state.

Other commentary seems to imply that Microsoft is not really positioning itself to compete with Google because Google is really about Web (Internet) searching and Microsoft is not. This implies that FAST has no understanding of Web searching. Several points must be made:
1. FAST Search & Transfer has been involved in many aspects of search technologies for a decade. Soon after landing on our shores it was the search engine of choice for the U.S. government’s unifying search engine to support Internet-based searching of agency Web sites by the public. Since then it has helped countless enterprises (e.g. governments, manufacturers, e-commerce companies) expose their content, products and services via the Web. FAST knows a lot about how to make Web search better for all kinds of applications and they will bring that expertise to Microsoft.
2. Google is exploiting the Web to deliver free business software tools that directly challenge Microsoft stronghold ( e.g. email, word processing). This will not go unanswered by the largest supplier of office automation software.
3. Google has several thousand Google Enterprise Search Appliances installed in all types of enterprises around the world, so it is already as widely deployed in enterprises in terms of numbers as FAST, albeit at much lower prices and for simpler application. That doesn’t mean that they are not satisfying a very practical need for a lot of organizations where it is “good enough.”
For more on the competition between the two check this article out.

Enterprise search has been implied to mean only search across all content for an entire enterprise. This raises another fundamental problem of perception. Basically, there are few to no instances of a single enterprise search engine being the only search solution for any major enterprise. Even when an organization “standardizes” on one product for its enterprise search, there will be dozens of other instances of search deployed for groups, divisions, and embedded within applications. Just two examples are the use of Vivisimo now used for USA.gov to give the public access to government agency public content, even as each agency uses different search engines for internal use. Also, there is IBM, which offers the OmniFind suite of enterprise search products, but uses Endeca internally for its Global Services Business enterprise.

Finally, on the issue of expectations, most of the vendors I have heard from are excited that the Microsoft announcement confirms the existence of an enterprise search market. They know that revenues for enterprise search, compared to Web search, have been miniscule. But now that Microsoft is investing heavily in it, they hope that top management across all industries will see it as a software solution to procure. Many analysts are expecting other major acquisitions, perhaps soon. Frequently mentioned buyers are Oracle and IBM but both have already made major acquisitions of search and content products, and both already offer enterprise search solutions. It is going to be quite some time before Microsoft sorts out all the pieces of FAST IP and decides how to package them. Other market acquisitions will surely come. The question is whether the next to be acquired will be large search companies with complex and expensive offerings bought by major software corporations. Or will search products targeting specific enterprise search markets be a better buy to make an immediate impact for companies seeking broader presence in enterprise search as a complementary offering to other tools. There are a lot of enterprise search problems to be solved and a lot of players to divvy up the evolving business for a while to come.

I closed 2007 with some final takeaways from the Gilbane Conference and notes about semantic search. Already we are planning for Gilbane San Francisco and you are invited to participate. There is no question that enterprise search, in all its dimensions, will be a central theme of several sessions at the conference, June 17th through 19th. I will lead with a discussion in which a whole range of search topics, technologies and industry themes will be explored in a session featuring guest Steve Arnold, author of Google Version 2.0, The Calculating Predator. To complement the sessions, numerous search technology vendors will be present in the exhibit hall.

A most important conference component will be a highlight for conference goers, shared-experiences about selecting, implementing and engaging with search tools in the enterprise. Everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing, learning and what they know about enterprise search. You may want to present your experiences or those of your organization. If you are interested, considering presenting, know of a good case study, usability or “lessons learned” from implementing search technology, please raise your hand. You can do this by reaching out through this link to submit a proposal and make reference to the “enterprise search blog call for papers.” You can be sure I’ll follow-up soon to explore the options for you or a colleague to participate. This is a great opportunity to be part of a community of practitioners like you and attend a conference that always has substantive value for participants.

Leave it to Microsoft to end the year with a big announcement and open the next one with an even bigger one. We knew that the world of enterprise search was going to contract in terms of the number of established vendors, even though it is expanding in new and innovative offerings. Microsoft had to make a bold play in an industry where Google has been the biggest player on the WWW stage while reaching deeper into the enterprise, tickling at Microsoft’s decades-old hold on content creation and capture. So, with the acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer, whose technology may not be the best in the enterprise search market but is certainly the most widely deployed at the high-end, Microsoft opens with a direct challenge to its largest competitor.

Boy! Have the emails been flying this morning. At least I know there will be plenty of material to ponder in the next few weeks and months. P.S. Don’t miss the action in San Francisco!

In a week when the KMWorld and Enterprise Search Summit were running concurrently in San Jose, Microsoft made an enterprise search product announcement that was actually a well-kept secret for Microsoft. There was plenty of other new product news floating about the marketplace, too. Mark Logic, MuseGlobal, Cognos, SchemaLogic, and Brainware all had their own announcements.

Between November 6 and November 13, these five companies had interesting news to share. The announcements all related to leveraging enterprise content in tandem with search engines. This underscores a strong trend in software product deployment, specifically, that much of it is being rolled out in partnerships in highly heterogeneous environments. While Microsoft’s announcement about free Search Server 2008 Express establishes them as the last major software company to adopt search as a platform, the other technology announcements remind us that integration activity is a core operational consideration and even a necessity for gaining value from search.

In order to tie all the bits and pieces of content across the enterprise into a tidy bundle for simple retrieval, or in order for content to really bring value to solving business problems, it needs packaging. It needs to be packaged at the front end so that search engines can grab useful context and metadata for smarter indexing. It also needs to be well packaged at the output end to present results meaningfully for a particular audience or purpose.

Here is a quick look at what these five complementary technologies do for search plus a link to each of their latest announcements:

> Brainware – combines data capture with a content extraction and distillation learning engine for enhancing categorization relevancy in preparation for natural language queries. It will be embedded in search for a leading enterprise library system, Sirsi/Dynix.
> Cognos – a leading Business Intelligence (BI) software company is being acquired by IBM, whose search products are often paired with Cognos.
> Mark Logic – is a company with an XML content server platform for managing or converting content in XML formats. They just announced MarkMail, a community-focused searchable message archive service, which stores emails as XML documents. Expect more from them on this front.
> MuseGlobal – offers solutions that integrate content from multiple search engines. They just announced availability for presenting results in a fully unified and consistent format from multiple search engines in a SharePoint portal interface.
> SchemaLogic – specializes in content and document type modeling, metadata and vocabulary management using SchemaServer. In the past two weeks they have announced integration with SharePoint to manage metadata. A webinar this week described the interplay with Documentum for document production and retrieval using the FAST search engine.

And what do the other enterprise search vendors have to say about the “surprise” Microsoft announcement? Comments ranged from “we knew it was just a matter of time before they announced” to “good for business, enterprise search is officially now a market.” To the first comment I say, “Not so fast.” For several years rumors have been floated about the imminent acquisition of any number of search companies by MS but nothing materialized. Yes, Microsoft was doing something about enterprise search but until last week “what” was still the question. To the latter I say, “We’ve had an enterprise search market for several years, Microsoft just wanted to be sure it was well established before joining the club.” That was smart of them; let others lay the foundation for a growth industry. It also looks like this is a leveling of the field with Google already playing in Microsoft’s backyard in the free office tools area.

Now the positioning really begins.

I am in a mode of indecision about prioritizing a lot of news in the enterprise search space; it all seems important because we have an agenda focused on search at the upcoming conference on November 27 – 29 in Boston. The following, in no particular order, is not an exhaustive list but representative of happenings in the past month that will surely be the subject of much commentary and discussion by our speakers and panelists:

> Don Dodge of Microsoft, one of our panelists in the search keynote session, is taking on Google’s customer support positioning as an enterprise solutions provider in his blog.
> MondoSoft went from being shut down by its investors to being acquired by possibly two companies (one acquiring MondoSearch and the other acquiring Ontolica) and now both are being acquired by one company. Meanwhile, IntelliSearch is making an offer to MondoSearch clients to “switch and save.”
> Steve Arnold is continuing his drumbeat on Google search patents and their significance.
> Oracle is getting very serious about search as you will hear in this Webinar download and is positioning itself for a holistic approach to managing content in the enterprise.
> Fast and Autonomy are making acquisitions, too, and have begun to act like they are not the only search options for the enterprise by re-focusing their marketing.
> Companies like Connotate, ISYS, Exalead, Recommind, SchemaLogic and Coveo are acquiring good clients and showing their strengths in important niche markets with new enhancements
> Vivisimo’s social search is getting a lot of positive press, inviting a lot of blogging and has set the bar high for competitors to match their offerings.
> Endeca continues to expand its staff, client-base and well-engineered product line; they are also building important alliances with technology and business partners when it makes good sense to do so
> IBM is talking up the potential of semantic search in the enterprise.

Whew!

Most of the above mentioned will be making an appearance or two at GilbaneBoston, as speakers or exhibitors, or both. I am trying to figure out how to make sure the seven sessions on search and semantic Web technologies touch most of the bases but with so much afoot in the search arena, we will be working overtime. If you are going to be an attendee in any capacity, I hope you’ll blog or make comments when I do. We want to hear what you think and learn about from the experts and users alike. There are sure to be surprises. Your take on the programs will be of interest to many. If you do make the conference, be sure to find me and introduce yourself so we can have a chat.

Drew Robb has written an excellent article that reflects new thinking about the convergence of older and emerging technologies. In Search Converging with Business Intelligence for CRM Daily.com on August 28, 2007 I see similarities to my own way of viewing what is possible with newer search tools. Be sure to read it.

In addition to enterprise search, I actively follow enterprise knowledge management. It has been much debated because of confusion about its links to inappropriate technologies and well-intentioned but costly and failed initiatives in many organizations. But, in spite of rumors about its death, KM will remain a boundless frontier of opportunity. At its best, it leverages collaborative and sharing practices to maximize the value of organizations’ discoveries, developments and learning using innovative and often simple practices that work because they suit a particular culture’s way of operating.

Popular writings about business and technology innovation, plus tools and techniques for collaboration and sharing abound. 2007 is surely the year when search has come to dominate the technology landscape as vendors in BI, text mining and text analytics, data management, and countless semantic and Web 2.0 entrants vie to add refinements, and conversely search integrates features from those technologies.

In August I commented on search offerings that have made a point of highlighting their “Sharepoint” connectivity. Similarly, many products are adding claims for exploiting emails. I have long assumed that email should be part of the search engine crawling and indexing mix for any intranet. Given email structure, it seems to have more useful and usable metadata than a lot of other content. Social network analysis tools have been terrific at revealing fascinating relationships and internal communications within organizations, especially in the discovery area as emails have been a source for exploring questionable business practices in legal proceedings.

More sophisticated analytic and semantic techniques for exploiting concepts in content give hints about how technologies can integrate content by mapping experts to the expertise they contribute, even when it is scattered throughout their work, including emails where so many nuggets may reside. An area for development would correlate nuggets of knowledge in emails to reveal hidden and latent expertise, pointing to other content an individual has produced using search with BI and analytics algorithms.

Maybe I’m overreaching but I suspect that a lot of experts may not be sufficiently motivated, disciplined or expected to aggregate their small but useful contributions into more valuable knowledge. Regardless of the reasons for that failure, much could be revealed with the right blending of search, indexing, analytics and business intelligence technologies. The components already exist but implementation to get desired results are not necessarily easy to deploy. A truly innovative expertise exploitation engine would be a knowledge engine of note, able to synthesize new knowledge in unique and interesting ways. Historically, much has been made about the role of serendipity in the “search for truth” and “quest for knowledge.” With the aid of enhanced search technologies to blend any or many expert nuggets, a lot more serendipity might happen.

As we gear up for Gilbane Boston 2007, the number of possible topics to include in the tracks related to search seems boundless. The search business is in a transitional state but in spite of disarray is still pivotal in its impact on business and current culture. The sessions will reflect the diversity in the market.

One trend is quite clear; the amount of money and effort being expended for Web search or site search on commercial Web sites is a winner in the “search technology” revenues war with annual revenues measuring well into the $billions. On the other hand, a recent Gartner study described the 2006 revenues for enterprise search as below $400M. This figure comes from reading an excellent article, Enterprise Search: Seek and Maybe You’ll Find, by Ben DuPont in Intelligent Enterprise. Check it out.

The distinctions between search on the Web and search within the enterprise are numerous but here are two. First, Internet Web search revenue is all about marketing. Yes, we use it to discover, learn, find facts, and become more informed. But when companies supplying search technology to expose you to their content on the Internet they do so to facilitate commerce. If it falls into the hands of organizations that have other intent, libraries or government agencies, so be it.

As we all know, when we are at work, seeking to discover, learn or find facts to do our jobs better, we need a different kind of search. Thus, we seek a clear search winner built just for our enterprise with all of its idiosyncrasies. The problem is that what is inside does not look like the rest of the world’s content as it is aggregated for commercial views. Enterprises are unique and operate sometimes chaotically, or, at best, with nuanced views of what information is most important.

The second distinction relates to taxonomies, and the increase in their development and use. I’ve seen a dramatic increase in job postings for “taxonomists” and have managed several projects for enterprises over the years to build these controlled lists of terms for categorizing content. What is noteworthy about recent job opportunities is that most seem to be for customer facing Web sites. Historically, organizations with substantial internal content (e.g. research reports, patents, laboratory findings, business documents) hired professionals to categorize materials for a narrowly defined audience of specialists. The terminology was often highly unique, could number in the hundreds or thousands of terms, even for a relatively small enterprise. This is no longer a common practice.

Slow financial growth in enterprise search markets is no surprise. Like many tools designed and marketed for departments not directly tied to revenue generation, search goes begging for solid vertical markets. Search’s companion technologies are also struggling to find a lucrative toehold for use within the organization. Content management systems integrated with rich and efficient taxonomy building and maintenance functions are hard to find.

I am confident that tools in CMS products for building and maintaining complex taxonomies will not improve until enterprises find a solid business reason to put professional human resources into doing content management, taxonomy development, search, and text analytics on their most important knowledge assets. This is a tough business proposition compared to the revenues being driven on the Internet. What businesses need to keep in mind is that without the ability to leverage their internal knowledge content assets better, smarter and faster, there won’t be innovative products in the pipeline to generate commerce. Losing track of your valuable intellectual resources is not a good long term strategy. Once you begin committing to solid content resource management strategies, enterprise technology products will improve to meet your needs.

A week late I am wrapping up my first six months blogging for The Gilbane Group on enterprise search. I am attempting a retrospective of discoveries, thoughts and issues that surfaced in second quarter. June was especially busy and now that I have had time to sort the sortable here are a few noteworthy highlights and reflections on them. In short, the search market is complex and becoming more so on a monthly basis.

Google the company and Google the product suite are so dominant that any article about search in the mainstream or technical presses evokes the “G-word.” This happens even if Google is not the main topic. Consider for example Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal in this article June 28, “Ask.com Takes Lead in Designing Display of Search Results.” The first paragraph never mentioned Ask.com but began “Google and other search companies …” On the same page was an article “Start-ups Make Inroads with Google’s Work Force.” Earlier that week the New York Times ran a story “The Human Touch that May Loosen Google’s Grip,” MassHighTech referred to Google throughout an article “Why the Best Search Marketers are Right-Brained,” and Intelligent Enterprise did as well in “Enterprise Search: Seek and Maybe You’ll Find.” [More about the latter further on.] A search on www.Clusty.com for “Google” under News>Top News today gets 89 hits and “Toyota” 49.

Korea presents us with a take on Internet search that I think is highly relevant to the enterprise search market as described in the New York Times, July 5 in “South Koreans Connect Through Search Engine.” It turns out that the amount of content in Korean on the WWW is so scanty that Google is irrelevant. Instead a five year-old company, Naver.com is giving Koreans what they really need, answers to questions native Koreans are seeking, built up collaboratively through their cultural “helpfulness.” Naver.com services 77% of all Internet “searches originating in South Korea.” Just as Google can’t deliver to a Korean population what it wants to know, Google can’t really “understand” all of the information needs nuances in culturally diverse enterprises. Naver maintains “questions and answers in proprietary databases not shared with other portals or search engines” as well an enterprise might want to do.

At the Red Herring conference in Boston on June 28, a panel of industry leaders, in a session entitled “The New Frontier in Search” was asked by the moderator whether there will “be any major breakthroughs in semantic search in the next ten years.” The answer from all four including Jeff Cutler of Answers.com and Doug Leeds of Ask.com was an unequivocal , “NO!” I have a list of over 30 companies working on or publicly “sniffing around” the semantic search marketplace. Others are sure to be engaged in stealth work so “not in ten years” is hard to digest but who really knows?

Also at Red Herring, in an interview with EMC’s Mark Lewis, he emphasized a compelling issue for enterprise search, “security,” namely authentication for permission to view search results. In another panel session moderated by Judy Hurwitz on SOA, the security issue was even more dominant as speakers discussed the complexities of integrating heterogeneous applications in a SOA environment while maintaining security integrity. As the number of variables in the architecture rises, so too the technical difficulties of making secure content really secure in search.

The Enterprise Search landscape is pretty crowded with companies that are more focused on helping us find what is in the organization than what is on an enterprise’s Web site. Summarizing the challenges these vendors face is the aforementioned article, “Enterprise Search: Seek and Maybe You’ll Find.” Their market is my beat but grappling with the realities of serving such diverse audiences is a serious necessity.

OK, this blog entry is already too long but you get the idea. The fact that the New York Times has recently had at least one article a week relating to search technologies is really a business marker. While search was introduced to professional searchers 35 years ago, it has been a real sleeper for most of the decades since. Web technology is truly the enabler of so much that makes search work for the masses in so many environments. It’s pretty clear that although search is ubiquitous in the workplace, its commodity status and the normalizing of enterprise search protocols are still a few years off. It is going to be interesting to see who stumbles and who prevails of the current bumper crop of offerings. Or will another disruption take us into more innovative forms of search?

Stay tuned for the next six months – I’m predicting more shakeout in the industry and more adoption of different flavors of search in more organizations. Trying to keep up will be the primary challenge.

I participated in one search vendor’s user conference this week, and a webinar sponsored by another. Both impressed me because they expressed values that I respect in the content software industry and they provided solid evidence that they have the technology and business delivery infrastructure to back up the rhetoric.

You have probably noted that my blog is slim on comments about specific products and this trend will continue to be the norm. However, in addition to the general feeling of good will from Endeca customers that I experienced at Endeca Discover 2007, I heard clear messages from sessions I attended that reinforced the company’s focus on helping clients solve complex content retrieval problems. Complexity is inherent in enterprises because of diversity among employees, methods of operating, technologies deployed and varied approaches to meeting business demands at every level.

In presentations by Paul Sonderegger and Jason Purcell care was given to explain Endeca’s approach to building their search technology solutions and why. At the core is a fundamental truth about how organizations and people function; you never know how a huge amount of unpredictably interconnected stuff will be approached. Endeca wants its users to be able to use information as levers to discover, through personalized methods, relationships among content pieces that will pry open new possibilities for understanding the content.

Years ago I was actively involved with a database model called an associative structural model. It was developed explicitly to store and manipulate huge amount of database text and embodied features of hierarchical, networked and relational data structures. It worked well for complex, integrated databases because it allowed users to manipulate and mingle data groups in unlimited ways. Unfortunately, it required a user to be able to visualize the possibilities for combining and expressing data from hundreds of fields in numerous tables by using keys. This structural complexity could not easily be taught or learned, and tools for simple visualization were not available in the early 1980s. As I listened to Jason Purcell describe Endeca’s optimized record store, and concept of “intra-query” to provide solutions for the problems posed by double uncertainty I thought, “They get it.” They have acknowledged the challenge of making it simple to update, use and exploit vast knowledge stores; they are working hard to meet the challenge. Good for them! We all want flexibility to work the way we want but if it is not easy we will not adopt.

In a KMWorld webinar, Vivisimo’s Jerome Pesente and customer Arnold Verstraten of NV Organon co-presented with Matt Brown of Forrester Research. The theme was search security models. Besides the reasons for up-front consideration for security when accessing and retrieving from enterprise repositories, three basic control models were described. All three were based on access control lists (ACLs), how and why they are used by Vivisimo.

Having worked with defense agencies, defense contractors and corporations with very serious security requirements on who can access what, I am very familiar with the types of data structures and indexing methods that can be used. I was pleased to hear the speakers address trade-offs that include performance and deployment issues. It served to remind me that organizations do need to be thinking about this early in the selection process; inability to handle the most sensitive content appropriately should eliminate any enterprise search vendor that tries to equivocate on security. Also, as Organon did, there is nothing that demonstrates the quality of the solution like a “bake-off” against a sufficient corpus of content that will demonstrate whether all documents and their metadata that must not be viewed by some audiences in fact are always excluded from search results for all in those restricted audiences. Test it. Really test it!