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Discover the Definition of Search: ISYS 8 Speaks the User’s Language
Posted Sep 18, 2006 Print Version     Page 1of 1
  

In order to support the emerging needs of its clients and meet the expanding definition of search, ISYS Search Software has introduced the latest version of its flagship suite. ISYS, a global supplier of enterprise search solutions for business and government, has a vertical focus on a variety of industries, including government, legal, law enforcement and criminal intelligence, financial services, healthcare, and recruitment. The company's clientele includes the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Justice, California Attorney General, the United Nations, the Ford Motor Company, and Dow Chemical.

Adding 10 languages from the previous version, ISYS 8 now supports over 40 languages as well as more than 150 file and document types. The suite is designed to offer wide-ranging solutions, allowing its users to index, search, and view any files to which they have security access. "When users conduct a query," says Dave Haucke, ISYS VP of global marketing, "they do so in their own language and terms, which obviously leaves a lot up to chance. You have to provide users with more than a nicely ordered results list." In an effort to make results more meaningful, he says the company examined the speed and comfort with which the users analyze and navigate results. "In this version," he says, "those efforts manifested themselves in the form of various features that satisfy the overall goal." 

The software is comprised of three core applications: ISYS:desktop 8, designed to locate information on an individual PC as well as across large corporate networks; ISYS:sdk 8, the embedded advanced search technology for custom applications; and ISYS:web 8, a search solution for websites, intranets and portals, and more. 

New features incorporated in ISYS:web 8 are Enhanced Suggested Synonyms, designed to allow organizations to analyze search behaviors, users, and trends, and the ISYS Search Designer feature, which helps administrators glean live Search Trends data while navigating their sites, giving them the means to pinpoint problem areas and optimize accordingly. 

This time around, ISYS has included a "Best Bets" tag, a tool incorporated to guarantee that a specific document appears as the first result when given for a query. "Our goal is to blur the line between what is possible with the mid-market and the high end and to focus on delivering functionality that previously had been available only in high-end solutions," Haucke says. 

The latest version also features "Federator," which is designed to merge the high volume of disparate information contained across an enterprise with its various geographic locations, incorporating all the indexes in one. This feature enables customers to combine results from various ISYS web servers, thus reducing overhead, improving performance, and ensuring users access to the most up-to-date content. ISYS 8 supports Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server, which ensures security settings by enabling users to view only the authorized content. 

Also new with ISYS 8 is content caching, incorporated to provide another means for improved performance. In terms of scale, "customers can create an unlimited number of indexes, each with a maximum capacity of 64 million documents," Haucke says. "Customers can also chain up to 128 indexes together, providing users with the ability to search a maximum of 8.2 billion documents in a single query." 

According to Haucke, ISYS is "targeted primarily for the mid-markets: small- to mid-size organizations and departments of large enterprises. The mid-markets are our bread and butter, though we do compete with the big markets such as Google and Verity Ultraseek [now Autonomy]." 

As always, ISYS emphasizes navigation and discovery features like categorization, entity extraction, and search analytics reporting. The new version, Haucke says, "completes the transition for us from ISYS 7, which was released last year. We recognized that enterprise search would no longer be viable if it stuck with its rigid query-response model. There was a clear need to evolve the technology beyond this foundation to address a broader set of information access needs." According to Haucke, "It is no longer about search engines but about giving users more than what they expected and broadening their capabilities. The whole idea of search is to save time." 

(www.isys-search.com)   

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