MuseGlobal announced a partnership with Specialty Systems, Inc., a company focusing on innovative information systems solutions to Federal, State and Local Government customers. Specialty Systems, Inc. is partnering with MuseGlobal to provide the systems integration expertise to engineer law enforcement and homeland security applications built on MuseGlobal’s MuseConnect, which provides federated search and harvesting technologies, with a library of more than 6,000 pre-built source connectors. The applications resulting from this partnership will incorporate unified information access allowing structured data from database sources; semi-structured data from spreadsheets, forms and XML sources; unstructured data from web sites, documents, email; and rich media such as images, video and audio information to be accessed simultaneously from internal databases and external sources. This information is gathered on the fly, and unified for immediate presentation to the requestor. http://www.specialtysystems.com, http://www.museglobal.com
Category: Enterprise search & search technology (Page 26 of 60)
Research, analysis, and news about enterprise search and search markets, technologies, practices, and strategies, such as semantic search, intranet collaboration and workplace, ecommerce and other applications.
Before we consolidated our blogs, industry veteran Lynda Moulton authored our popular enterprise search blog. This category includes all her posts and other enterprise search news and analysis. Lynda’s loyal readers can find all of Lynda’s posts collected here.
For older, long form reports, papers, and research on these topics see our Resources page.
SDL Tridion announced that it has partnered with Q-go to provide an integrated Natural Language Search engine within SDL Tridion’s web content management platform. The solution provides the online search environment within websites only targeted and relevant search results. Q-go’s Natural Language Search is now accessible from within the SDL Tridion web content management environment. Content editors are able to create model questions in the Q-go component of the SDL Tridion platform. This means that the most common questions pertaining to products and the website itself can be targeted and answered by web content editors, creating streamlined content and vastly increased relevance of searches. The integration also means that only one interface is needed to update the entire website, which can be done anywhere, anytime. You can find more information on the integration at the eXtensions Community of http://www.sdltridionworld.com
When thinking about some enterprise search use cases that require planning and implementation, presentation of search results is not often high on the list of design considerations. Learning about a new layer of software called Documill from CEO and founder, Mika Könnölä, caused me to reflect on possible applications in which his software would be a benefit.
There is one aspect of search output (results) that always makes an impression when I search. Sometimes the display is clear and obvious and other times the first thing that pops into my mind is “what the heck am I looking at” or “why did this stuff appear?” In most cases, no matter how relevant the content may end up being to my query, I usually have to plow through a lot (could be dozens) of content pieces to confirm the validity or usefulness of what is retrieved.
Admittedly, much of my searching is research or helping with a client’s intranet implementation, not just looking for a quick answer, a fact or specific document. When I am in the mode for what I call “quick and dirty” search, I can almost always frame the search statement to get the exact result I want very quickly. But when I am trying to learn about a topic new to me, broaden my understanding or collect an exhaustive corpus of material for research, sifting and validating dozens of documents by opening each and then searching within the text for the piece of the content that satisfied the query is both tedious and annoyingly slow.
That is where Documill could enrich my experience considerably for it can be layered on any number of enterprise search engines to present results in the form of precise thumbnails that show where in a document the query criterion/criteria is located. In their own words, “it enhances traditional search engine result list with graphically accurate presentation of the content.”
Here are some ideas for its application:
- In an application developed to find specific documents from among thousands that are very similar (e.g. invoices, engineering specifications), wouldn’t it be great to see only a dozen, already opened, pages to the correct location where the data matches the query?
- In an application of 10s of thousands of legacy documents, OCRed for metadata extraction displayable as PDFs, wouldn’t it be great to have the exact pages of the document that match the search displayed as visual images opened to read in the results page? This is especially important in technical documents of 60-100 pages where the target content might be on page 30 or 50.
- In federated search output, when results may contain many similar documents, the immediate display of just the right pages as images ready for review will be a time-saving blessing.
- In a situation where a large corpus of content contains photographs or graphics, such as newspaper archives, scientific and engineering drawings, an instantaneous visual of the content will sharpen access to just the right documents.
I highly recommend that you ask your search engine solution provider about incorporating Documill into your enterprise search architecture. And, if you have, please share your experiences with me through comments to this post or by reaching out for a conversation.
Deep Web Technologies introduced Search Builder, an automatic deep web search-engine creation tool. This tool enables Deep Web Technologies’ clients to personalize the federated search experience for particular individuals, departments, classrooms or other groups that require different default collections and/or a modified user experience when conducting deep web searches. In short, Search Builder makes it possible to deliver any number of individualized federated search portals within an organization. Search Builder allows administrators or authorized users to create as many federated search portals as needed, which represent privately branded search pages containing different default collections and search fields used for the search, as well as customized user experience. Future plans include integrating Search Builder into Deep Web Technologies’ free media sites, Mednar (http://www.mednar.com/), Biznar (http://www.biznar.com/), and ScienceResearch.com (http://www.scienceresearch.com/). http://www.deepwebtech.com/
Earlier comments in this blog referred to Autonomy ads in Information Week. They have continued throughout early 2009 with just the latest proclaiming “Autonomy Dominates Enterprise Search” in bold red and black, two of my favorite, eye-catching colors. Having read the publication for over ten years, I notice things that are different. Seeing a search company repeatedly showing up keeps me noticing because they are the first to spend on major advertising like this in an IT publication.
This week the predictable happened, it was an article by Information Week‘s Sr. VP focusing on Autonomy’s terrific business run in a tough economy. Fair enough – it happens all the time for big spenders.
I just want to remind readers that if you are a small unit in a large organization or a small or medium business, there are dozens of enterprise search solutions that will serve you extremely well, with much lower cost of ownership and startup effort than Autonomy. You do not need the biggest or fastest growing company’s products to get good or even excellent solutions. Furthermore, the chances of getting superior customer support and services from a more modest company, which is focused exclusively on search excellence, are much better.
Be sure to check out the offerings at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco next week. A lot more guidance and good case studies will give you an earful of what else to consider. The search headliners at the conference with Hadley Reynolds moderating are:
E8. Search Survival Guide: Delivering Great Results
Speakers: Randy Woods, Co-founder & Executive VP, non-linear creations, Best Practices for Tuning Enterprise Search and Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering
E9/I5. The Next Big Thing: Tomorrow’s Search Revealed
Speakers: Stephen Arnold, ArnoldIT, What You Need to Know About Google Dataspaces and Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
E10/I6. Bringing it All Together: Perils and Pitfalls of Search Federation
Speakers: Helen Mitchell Curtis, Senior Program Director of Enterprise Solutions, MacFadden, Federated Search in a Disparate Environment, Larry Donahue, Chief Operating Officer & Corporate Counsel, Deep Web Technologies, Federated Search: True Enterprise Search and Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
E11/I7. The Special Case of Categories – and Where To Find Them
Speakers: Joseph Busch, Founder, Taxonomy Strategies, Taxonomy Validation, and Arje Cahn, CTO, Hippo, Find What You Need in Unstructured Content with the Help of Others (and your CMS): Demo of Wikipedia with Faceted Search
E12/I8. It’s Easier with Structure: Leveraging Markup for Better Search
Speakers: Dianne Burley, Industry Specialist, Nstein Technologies, Semantic Search and J. Brooke Aker, CEO, Expert System, A 3-Step Walk Through ECM Using Semantics
E13/I9. Improving SharePoint Search & Navigation with a Taxonomy and Metadata
Looking forward to seeing many of you next week at Gilbane San Francisco. Whether you will be there or not, you can suggest questions to ask our analyst panel. Each of the panelists have specific areas of expertise covering web content management, web governance, enterprise social software and social media, collaboration, and enterprise search. The panel is a keynote session after the two keynote presentations from Microsoft and Adobe, so we’ll also be covering reactions to those. You can submit your questions directly to me via a comment, email, or twitter (DM or post using the hashtag #gilbanesf).
Registration for the conference is still open and will be available on-site. If you register in advance you can still get a $200. discount using GILBANE as the discount code. There is no charge for the keynotes or the technology demonstrations or product labs.
K2. Keynote Analyst Panel
We invite industry analysts from many different firms to speak at all our events to make sure our conference attendees hear differing opinions from a wide variety of expert sources. A second, third, fourth or fifth opinion will ensure you don’t make ill-informed decisions about critical content and information technologies or strategies. This session will be a lively, interactive debate guaranteed to be both informative and fun.
Moderator: Frank Gilbane
Panelists:
Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Social Computing, Forrester
Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC
Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration and Enterprise Social Software, Gilbane Group
Lisa Welchman, Founding Partner, WelchmanPierpoint
Here is a monthly summary of some interesting and important announcements for April, but first a couple of comments on the Infonortics Search Engines conference in Boston the last week of April. Ever searching for ways to embrace and make social tools more useful, I decided to tweet the entire Infonortics meeting. Except for a lapse late on Monday because I left a little early and some wireless issues Tuesday PM, I was able to pass on quite a few interesting or relevant comments by speakers. See what you get out of some very terse tweets by searching in Twitter infonorticssearchengine (that takes up entirely too much space I learned). The talks were excellent and many of the speakers emphasized how hard it is to do search well; it was also clear that there are many, many ways to try to do it well, none of them for the faint of heart. If you want to get under the search hood, this is the conference for technologists and those who want to hear what the development community is pondering.
Here is the April news:
Marketwire. Bell Mobility and Coveo Partner to create Enterprise Search from Bell, an Exclusive Enterprise-Grade Mobile Search Solution, March 31, 2009.
My diminished manual dexterity and old eyes have discouraged me from embracing smart mobile devices but this announcement demonstrates that Coveo does understand the future of search. Coveo is releasing many enhanced functions and new options but the emphasis on search on a handheld is compelling for all road warriors. From what I understand, setup is pretty quick and productivity is immediate. This is a smart move to support Coveo’s current customer base and a draw for new ones.
Velten, Carlo. Official Qitera Blog: Qitera Enterprise – Search as a Service, April 2, 2009
There is a 15-day free trial being offered for this new software as a service for aggregating and sharing Internet search results with colleagues within the enterprise. As a consultant in knowledge management, helping people with collaboration and sharing technologies for KM processes, I find this an intriguing option. If any readers have checked it out, please let us know your impressions. http://www.qitera.com/corp/products/overview
Knovel Enhances Engineering Reference Offering, Adding Works from Five New Publishers, 04/06/2009
As a former technical librarian in a Fortune 500 chemical company, I contributed to a massive manually built index to technical information to support our research scientists. We ensured that all property data for any materials we developed, or developed by our competitors was indexed for rapid retrieval (e.g. what is the thermal conductivity of ABC grade of graphite). The overhead for scanning journals, government documents, patents and conference papers to harvest and categorize that information was enormous. Since I learned about Knovel in 2002, I have been a huge fan of the value of the content they codify and make accessible through their proprietary retrieval tools. This content is re-purposed through licenses with publishers who understand the increased value of being able to manipulate tables, charts and graphs as well has being able to compare data from various sources of reference books. Engineers and scientists need to be able to find data expressed in the most relevant form for their purpose. Knovel provides an aggregating and retrieval engine, and researchers can then normalize search results dynamically themselves through simple re-sorting operations. If you want to be kept abreast of the wealth of content that continues to come on-line from Knovel, be sure to visit their site and sign up for announcements. I recommend a subscription to their services to every scientific and engineering library in my client organizations.
Endeca Technologies, Inc. … today announced a formalized partnership to deliver Endeca’s Digital Asset Navigator solution on Open Text Digital Media Group’s Enterprise Media Management Solution.
April 16, 2009. Endeca’s Digital Asset Navigator offers an unprecedented access and discovery experience, combining Endeca’s market leading search, Guided Navigation and Content Spotlighting capabilities. It integrates related data from Open Text’s enterprise Digital Asset Management solution, as well as databases, file servers, enterprise applications and other source systems… The joint solution also takes advantage of Endeca’s advanced security capabilities to ensure that users only have access to data they are approved to see and use…
This is an interesting alliance, to be sure. Digital asset management is an arena ripe for growth and it has not gotten the wide-spread traction I believe it deserves. For publishers and R & D operations the productivity gains can be huge and this combined offering may intensify focus on an under-leveraged technology by ensuing high security and excellent retrieval. Looking at the headline, I would just advise that they pare down the labeling to something pithy and memorable.
X1 is gaining some serious traction and I know it appeals to engineers who like to maintain good order with their piles of data, particularly the flow of large quantities that show up in email and feeds. I spent a few hours four years ago with an engineer, an X1 devotee, who had tagged his email in text files scrupulously and then used X1 to index them every night. He swore by its value and reliability. This looks like they recognize the service they provide to customers who live in email and need to master their desktop domain. Theirs is a niche with a large audience to capture.
ISYS Search Software Announces Release of ISYS:sdk 9. April 28, 2009. Newest Version of Company’s Integration Kit Offers Dramatic Performance and Scalability Enhancements, Intelligent Content Analysis and Parametric Search.
ISYS made some significant management changes over the past few months and they are clearly moving along with their marketing efforts as they recognize the value of expanding the re-seller partnership options. Customer comments that come my way continue to be favorable and they have a good story to tell.
Data Search Technology Used by FBI Makes its Way to Enterprises. eWeek New York, NY, April 29, 2009
Add Chiliad to the list of platform search engines, now that they are being highlighted for their value at the FBI. With deep (20+ years) roots in government programs (including early DARPA research and later the SBIR) and a burst of interest and investment by the government after 9/11, Chiliad is taking its venture into more commercial opportunities. We will see how they stack up against the big players in the marketplace. They must have learned something as they worked to “connect the dots” for the FBI.
There have been a lot more stories this past month, but these notices are the ones that kept me engaged in contemplating the enterprise search marketplace that just keeps putting up more options.
Coveo announced the general availability of Coveo Enterprise Search (CES) 6.0. The new Coveo CES 6.0 platform provides a combination of enterprise-grade scalability, deep connectivity and security to data repositories and performance improvements. Some of Coveo Enterprise Search 6.0’s key features include: Improved scalability with up to 50 million documents per server, faster query performance and contextual faceted search; Coveo’s unified view‚ Out-of-the-box ability to create unlimited unified interfaces, providing users with a tabbed search interface for optimized access to information; Deep connectivity, which enables companies to leverage existing and legacy IT assets; New and improved connectors and interfaces‚ Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes, Salesforce.com, Open Text LiveLink, Confluence, Quest Archive Manager, SiteCore, Symantec Enterprise Vault, etc.; A customizable super-user mode that can be integrated in the search interface for enterprise-wide content discovery across all employee data, and; Extended capabilities for mobile phones‚ Contextual faceted search & filtering, added support for intranet (SharePoint, etc) and CRM (Salesforce.com), document quick view (for a device friendly, low-bandwidth access to documents), conversation tracking and people search. http://www.coveo.com
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