ISYS:web 9 Now Available
November 11, 2008
A happy quack to the reader in Colorado who alerted me to the new release of ISYS Search Software Version 9.0. I had a pre release version, and I found that its speed and date features were particularly useful. According to ISYS Search Software:
ISYS:web 9 offers customers several major enhancements, all designed to deliver the speed, efficiency and accuracy required to find information fast. More importantly, ISYS has expanded its content mining capabilities using predictive and reliable methods that help customers better understand their content. Through its Intelligent Content Analysis, ISYS notes key characteristics about a content collection, such as metadata patterns and entities, and leverages these facets in the interface to provide a more fluid search and discovery process.
Among the new features are:
- Intelligent Query Expansion. Designed to give users greater context and avenues to pursue, Intelligent Query Expansion offers suggestions based on your query and the document. For example, a search for “SharePoint” might suggest “SharePoint search web part.”
- ContextCogs are snippets of relevant and contextual information pulled from third-party sources and displayed alongside standard ISYS results. When a search is executed, the query is also passed to each registered Cog, which could include enterprise-level applications, Internet search engines or Active Directory Contacts.
- Intelligence Clouds enable rapid navigation of key information. The tag cloud appears as a collection of search terms and phrases, with the various terms shown in larger or smaller fonts depending on their density within the index.
- Improved Performance and Scalability. ISYS:web handles most search requests concurrently with a higher throughput. Additionally, we’ve increased index capacity from 24 gigabytes to 384 gigabytes per index. With indexed data representing, on average, 10 to 20 percent of the total data size, ISYS can now index two to four terabytes of information per index.
- Search Form Customization. ISYS now offers both automatic and custom designed search forms. For automatic search forms, users point the wizard at their indexes and ISYS creates a search form automatically by analyzing the content and structure of the information. ISYS also offers a point-and-click method for creating forms for searching structured information.
- Index Biasing. ISYS told me that the company wanted to enhance ISYS:web’s tuning capabilities. “Tuning” in this context means giving administrators with the ability to adjust the weighting on entire collections of documents. This option enables an organization to further tune relevance to suit specific situations; for example, boost specific content across result sets.
- De-Duplication. ISYS automatically identifies identical documents and either removes them from the results or visually marks them. This capability is of particular importance to legal professionals conducting discovery work, or any user attempting to conduct analysis of a given content collection
- ISYS:web Federator allows customers to federate their searches across both ISYS and non-ISYS content sources. ISYS:web displays results from each source separately, allowing users to navigate between the sets of results without compromising relevance.
- Exchange Indexing. Particularly important for responding in a timely manner to discovery requests, ISYS:web enables administrators to centrally create and manage individual indexes for each user’s email account. Administrators can also opt to make these indexes available to end users, relying on Active Directory permissions to ensure users can only search the email indexes for which they are authorized.
I ran several queries on the new system. You can read about my tests and examine a sample screen shot here. In my April 2008 study for the Gilbane Group, I identified ISYS Search Software as a “company to watch.” In fact, I highlighted the company in lecture about enterprise search in 2009 here. For more information about the company, navigate to the ISYS Search Software Web site here. You can download a trial version of the software here. If you want to get a flavor for the company’s commitment to search, you may find the interview I conducted with Ian Davies, founder of ISYS Search Software a way to understand the firm’s approach to information access. I conducted the interview in March 20008, but it is quite relevant today (November 11, 2008).
Stephen Arnold, November 11, 2008
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[…] We’ve been deliberately quiet as of late, thanks to a number of fun projects happening behind the scenes here at ISYS. This week was just a taste of what’s to come in 2009. In addition to announcing the appointment of our new CEO, Scott Coles, we also launched Version 9 of our ISYS:web information access and discovery solution for intranet search and site search. The folks at EContent and Arnold IT covered it here and here. […]