X1 Search: A Unified Single Pane of Glass
May 26, 2015
I read “X1’s Microsoft Enterprise Search Strategy: Better Than Microsoft’s?”
Here’s the passage I noted:
Providing one single pane of glass to a business worker’s most critical information assets is key. Requiring end-users to search Outlook for email in one interface, then log into another to search SharePoint, and then another to search for document and OneDrive is a non-starter. A single interface to search for information, no matter where it lives fits the workflow that business workers require.
The write up points out that X1 starts with an “end user’s email and files.” That’s fine, but there are other data types to which an end user requires access.
My reaction was these questions and the answers thereto:
- What about video?
- What about drafts of financial data or patent applications and other content centric documents in perpetual draft form?
- What about images?
- What about third party content downloaded by a user to a local or shared drive?
- What about Excel files used as text documents and Excel documents with data and generic column names?
- What about versions?
- What about time and data flags versus the time and date information within a content object?
- What about SMS messages?
- What information is related to other information; for example, an offer of employment to a former employee?
- What about employee health, salary, and performance information?
- What about intercepted data from watched insiders using NGIA tools?
- What about geo-plotted results based on inputs from the organization’s tracking devices on delivery vans and similar geo systems?
My point is that SharePoint represents a huge market to search and content processing vendors. The generalizations about what a third party system can do boggle my mind. Vendors as a rule do not focus on the content issues my questions probe. There are good reasons for the emphasis on email and experiences. Tackling substantive findability issues within an organization is just not what most SharePoint search alternatives do.
Not surprisingly, for certain types of use cases, SharePoint search remains a bit of a challenge regardless what system is deployed into a somewhat chaotic sea of code, functions, and components.
A unified single pane of glass is redundant. Solutions to the challenges of SharePoint may deserve this type of remediation because vendors have been tilting at the SharePoint windmill in a highly repetitive way for more than a decade. And to what end? For many, SharePoint information access remains opaque, cloudy, and dark.
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2015
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One Response to “X1 Search: A Unified Single Pane of Glass”
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Stephen:
As you know, I work for X1, so I will disclose that upfront. Those are all good questions and X1 addresses them in different ways. For example, X1 supports searching content on shared drives with the Rapid Discovery tool, which allows organizations to index enterprise repositories just once and then make those results available in the desktop search interface. Within the desktop search tool, users can take advantage of the metadata (e.g. date/time) that you mention and can filter through information based on it. X1 Rapid Discovery also has the functionality you specify in terms of finding similar documents and other enterprise search functions required of leading tools. X1 addresses the concept of business productivity search and as such adheres to the 90/10 rule. We support 90 % of all common data sources out of the box, but the remaining 10 % can be addressed through our SDK and customized connectors.
In fact, it is the user interface of X1 desktop search tool that really complements all of the points you make about SharePoint. We see customers making strategic investments in Exchange and SharePoint; investments so strategic that they care about the search experience around content in both. And, because they care about the search experience, they also invest in X1, as it makes users able to find information quickly without having to work about searching in Outlook or SharePoint. That’s really the power of X1 – its ability to complement strategic investments and make users happy.