Information Management Is Key to Intelligent Search
December 31, 2012
Searching for information within an enterprise is often not simple, or even fruitful. A recent survey from MindMetre gives us the disturbing truth that over half of knowledge workers admitted they cannot find the information they are looking for using their company’s enterprise search system. The facts are detailed in a white paper from KMWorld titled “Best Practices in Intelligent Search,” which argues that under-management of information, not information overload, is to blame.
An overture to this white paper, “What Are You Looking For? An Overture to ‘Intelligent Search,’” is featured on Enterprise Search Center. The overture states:
“We set out to discuss “enterprise search” and “intelligent search” in this White Paper. And that we shall. But let’s get something straight: Enterprise search is not what you think it is. It is not a single unified piece of software that can magically scour through the dozens of business applications that contain that piece of information our hypothetical guy was looking for. And, much less, it is not a single tool that can seek, discover and deliver an important piece of information from the hundreds and thousands of repositories from which it may emerge.”
This article and corresponding white paper offer a lot of wisdom on enterprise search facilities and Intrafind can be a great resource as organizations seek to make the best of their investments. High-quality research surrounding the capabilities and necessary features of search applications is a focal point of the information retrieval specialists.
Andrea Hayden, December 31, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Big Data Drives Business Decisions with Enterprise Search
December 12, 2012
Big data is making the transition from a catchy trend to a serious power in the business world. A flurry of acquisitions involving big data and enterprise search systems are proving that value is being added to big data. According to recent article “Structuring the Unstructured: Why Big Data is Suddenly Interested in Enterprise Search” on CMSWire, this can be attributed to the inclusion of unstructured data (hard-to-predict human content,) into big data analyses, and companies are becoming more and more interested in creating actionable insights from this data set.
The article continues to explain the need to obtain value from unstructured data:
“It is the hands-on application of processes, pragmatism and checksums that produce the most value from unstructured data. A focus on transparency of process creates confidence in data provenance and enables actionable intelligence from unstructured data. That combination of technology and process is what is driving recent acquisitions and what can drive your business to make better, more accurate decisions based on your unstructured big data.”
The whole point of making structured and unstructured data available is so that the right information can drive business decisions. Intrafind makes finding the right data at the right time a bit easier in the age of big data. The company’s software and enterprise search solutions can help you target necessary information from the big data madness and also provide the consultancy services to help you decide what to do with that information.
Andrea Hayden, December 12, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Business Intelligence Software Essential to Current Business Decisions
December 3, 2012
Business intelligence (BI) technologies are essential to today’s knowledge workers in the enterprise, providing helpful and necessary decision support software. A recent academic research article addresses the changes and growth in this industry in the past twenty years. The article, “An Overview of Business Intelligence Technology,” published in the August 2011 issue of Communications of the ACM, was written by a team of researchers from Microsoft Research and Hewlett-Packard Lab. According to the article, this rapid growth has been fueled by the declining cost of data storage.
The article states:
“Enterprises today collect data at a finer granularity, which is therefore of much larger volume. Businesses are leveraging their data asset aggressively by deploying and experimenting with more sophisticated data analysis techniques to drive business decisions and deliver new functionality such as personalized offers and services to customers. Today, it is difficult to find a successful enterprise that has not leveraged BI technology for its business.”
This obvious growth accompanies a need to shorten the lag time between acquiring data and decision-making in daily business. Innovations in BI technologies require sophisticated functionality and services. Enterprise search solution Intrafind has a history as a university developed solution that understands the challenges in this industry and the company has created research-based services that solve the problem of making data findable within enterprise environments.
Andrea Hayden, December 3, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
OwnCloud Expands with Focus on on Deployment
November 29, 2012
An impressive showing in second seed round funding–$2.5 million to be exact–was reported by open source file sync and share software company OwnCloud Inc. According to the TechCrunch article titled, “On-Premise Cloud Storage/Sharing Startup, OwnCloud, Closes $2.5M Second Seed Round, Led By General Catalyst Partners,” the round was led by investor General Catalyst Partners as well as new investors.
The Boston-based startup plans to use the money for continued expansion in its enterprise and education customer base as well as support service providers. The article shares:
“‘We’ve been excited about ownCloud since its infancy, and after watching everything they’ve accomplished in a very short time, it validated our belief that they’d developed an exceptional team with an exceptional product,’ said [General Catalyst Managing Director] Bohn in a statement. ‘There’s no one in this increasingly crowded market that can do the things ownCloud does – integrate closely with existing IT, innovate at lightning speed and offer choice of storage locations. With those capabilities already in place differentiating it from the competition, we’re confident that ownCloud will succeed.’”
Serving specific industries and sectors is a great niche for companies concentrating on transformation from storage to deployment. Trusting a solution such as Intrafind, based upon well-formed technology to deploy enterprise solutions that fit the organization, may be a wiser choice in some sectors such as finance and pharmaceuticals.
Andrea Hayden, November 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Enterprise Search Needs More than Plug and Play
November 26, 2012
Today’s businesses are consistently looking for ways to improve enterprise management and overall operations, so it comes as no surprise that software marketing is targeting those needs. The unfortunate side effect of a good marketing plan can often be a product that does not live up to user expectations. FCW’s article “Does Your Enterprise Search Engine Stink? Here’s Why” reiterates how often times if new software seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Content processing, productivity tools and sorting options are just a few elements of enterprise software that should be evaluated before considering a change:
“Given the predisposition to think of search as pre-formatted to meet our needs, many IT managers and executives believe they can simply purchase, install and operate enterprise search software right out of the box. To a large extent, the leading search software vendors promote this plug-and-play mentality because it is a message customers want to hear. If you are familiar only with Web search as a personal tool, it makes sense to assume that a search engine for your business would operate the same way.”
When relevant results and increased efficiency are the primary concerns a friendly user interface is just an added bonus. Despite marketing hype, quality search requires more than plug and play attention. Full service solutions, expert tagging and feature rich search, such as that provided by Intrafind are a great start for enterprise search solutions.
Jennifer Shockley, November 26 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Search Appliance Updates for the Enterprise
November 2, 2012
The shiny new 7.0 version of Google Search Appliance has been updated for the enterprise, now allowing administrators to add information to the cloud, various social media outlets, and other online storage sites. According to the article “Enterprise Tools Added to Google Search Appliance” on PC Advisor, the upgrade includes a new Entity Recognition feature with auto suggestions for searches as well as a document preview feature.
The article tells us why the need for such an update is necessary for the enterprise:
“IDC analyst David Schubmehl said users would like enterprise searches to be as easy as Web searches, noting that slow searches can hurt productivity. A 2009 IDC study found that the time spent searching for data averaged 8.8 hours per week per employee, at a cost of $14,209 per worker per year.”
We believe Google Enterprise offers some great features, including the option for employees to add their own search results to existing results. However, if secure search and access is an enterprise priority for your corporation, then we would recommend a careful examination before opting for Google Enterprise. A company such as Intrafind offers a secure option for searching structured and unstructured enterprise data.
Andrea Hayden, November 2, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Enterprise Search Requires Speed and Security
October 29, 2012
Enterprise search platforms are constantly developing and changing to fit the needs of the enterprise, and a new release from DtSearch is attempting to fill some of those needs. We learn about the update in “DtSearch 7.70 Adds Document Filters, Increased Multi-Level Search” on CMSWire, which states the newest version includes enhanced document filters and APIs for OEMs to assist in data management.
The article tells us more about the benefits of the product:
“The search products’ spider can search local/remote content and static/dynamic web content, and it can reach across public/private sites, including support for log-ins and forms-based authentication. More than a terabyte of text can be covered in a single index, including directories, databases, online data and emails, and an unlimited number of indexes can be created and searched. According to dtSearch, that indexed search time is under a second, even across terabytes.”
While the new version does a great job responding to current issues in the enterprise, we believe security in search should be a priority when updating platforms. For a choice that provides high-performance full text search across various content sources while still focusing on access rights and secure search, we recommend Intrafind’s iFinder for enterprise search solutions.
Andrea Hayden, October 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Interesting Reads
July 26, 2012
There is a very enlightening source of reading references to be found in Jeff Huang’s “Best Paper Awards in Computer Science.” He conveniently provided a list of informative papers neatly categorized by area of expertise, like artificial intelligence or human computer interaction.
While scrolling down the list, two interesting papers seemed to jump right out.
The first of which, “Unsupervised Part-of-Speech Tagging with Bilingual Graph-Based Projections,” describes a new approach, as:
“A novel approach for inducing unsupervised part-of-speech taggers for languages that have no labeled training data, but have translated text in a resource-rich language. Our method does not assume any knowledge about the target language (in particular no tagging dictionary is assumed), making it applicable to a wide array of resource-poor languages. We use graph-based label propagation.”
The second paper, “How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?” Describes some research on search and their conclusions, with:
“When having difficulty in finding information, users start to formulate more diverse queries, they use advanced operators more, and they spend a longer time on the search result page as compared to the successful tasks. The results complement the existing body of research focusing on successful search strategies.”
Researchers are consistently developing models to predict and understand changes in text entry. Sadly, most of the models fail to account for varying system parameters and the ever changing human factor, nor their evolving relationship.
The latter explains the dumbing of search…but they were interesting reads.
Jennifer Shockley, July 26, 2012
Real Life Alerts Show There is More to Search than Key Words
July 12, 2012
AtHoc joined forces with Intel and received a $5.6 million investment to improve their technology. Since they are the leader in enterprise-class, network-based mass notification systems for the security, life safety and defense sectors of the United States, one would have to agree that was a wise investment.
Contrary to some beliefs, there is more to search than key words. The recent press releases on AtHoc’s page “Intel Invests in AtHoc; Chairman of RSA Security Joins AtHoc’s Board,” are a reminder that increasing device technology demands improvements with critical situational awareness data. Organizations must be able to swiftly analyze and address anomalies because lives may depend on it.
AtHoc does just that with real life, real time alerts as stated:
“AtHoc helps organizations become fully prepared to provide emergency mass communication to all of its constituents. It allows users to provide additional data and responders to remediate the issues at hand, based on the information they receive. AtHoc improves the safety and security of our citizens, first responders, and armed forces personnel around the world.”
Just imagine attempting to get a real time response on the average search engine during an emergency. The repercussions of scanning pages of possible aid would almost assuredly be life threatening. When considering the outcome from that perspective, real life, real time alerts show there is more to search than key words.
Jennifer Shockley, July 12, 2012
Document Previews: Necessary but Tricky in Some SharePoint Installations
June 22, 2012
Users find laundry lists of results a necessary but sometimes hard to use way to pinpoint needed information. Users looking for a PowerPoint presentation want a way to spot presentations without browsing, opening, scanning, and repeating the process. One feature of SharePoint is its document thumbnail and preview function. Instead of a list of text results, SharePoint can display search results with a thumbnail image of the document. Users can quickly identify a document type, which allows a research task to be accomplished more quickly.
There is, however, one challenge in some SharePoint installations. According to the document Office Web App & FAST Search Document Thumbnail and Preview scenarios, many users found document previews and thumbnails to not show up in FAST search results for SharePoint 2010. Microsoft acknowledges:
“Document Previews do not work with Claims Based Authentication and is a known limitation with the Product.”
Microsoft’s knowledge base article provides a number of ways to resolve the problem. But what does a SharePoint administrator do when a third party application is part of the mix? The SharePoint licensee needs immediate access to deep expertise with both SharePoint and Fast search are required to ensure that system performance and functionality are maintained at a high level.
Comperio, one of the world’s leading firms in Fast search engineering and consulting, can resolve preview issues quickly. Comperio’s engineers have in-depth experience with both SharePoint and Fast search. If you want to tap document previews using Microsoft’s native functions or employ third party software from firms such as BA Insight (www.bainsight.com), Comperio delivers. Comperio combines experience and technical expertise for leveraging Fast search within SharePoint. For more information about Comperio, visit the firm’s Web site at www.comperiosearch.com.
Jennifer Shockley, June 22, 2012
Sponsored by Comperio
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