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RESOURCES FOR EVALUATING ENTERPRISE SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES
October 28, 2009

Table of Contents

Submit Your Proposal for Enterprise Search Summit East (May 2010)
Helping them Redisover Web Assets with iCyte
Clarabridge Launches SMA
Vamosa C&F Hits Market
Attensity Cloud powered by Radian
Xerox Releases New Document Classification Software
Vivisimo Launches Velocity 7.5
Partnering for IP power
Analyzing social media
Justifying E-Discovery Systems
Sherpa Software Targets E-Discovery with Discovery Attender 3.5
Exalead’s CloudView Receives Documentum Certification

Submit Your Proposal for Enterprise Search Summit East (May 2010)

We are now accepting proposals to speak at Enterprise Search Summit2010, which will be held May 11-12 in New York. (Pre-conferencesessions May 10).  Submit a proposal. The deadline for submitting proposals is November 30, 2009.

Topics

  • Integrating search into enterprise systems and workflow
  • Customizing your search solution/ Task-specific search
  • Compliance, records management, and eDiscovery with effective search
  • Migrating your search engine
  • Social search and social tagging strategies & solutions
  • Search-enabled decision making
  • Business intelligence, data mining
  • Search as the gateway to enterprise information
  • Optimizing the interface and user experience
  • Navigational tools—context, facets, entity extraction, clustering, and visualization
  • Emerging trends, the future of search
  • Overcoming information overload
  • Categorization techniques
  • Semantic Search
  • Query Federation & Federated Search
  • Enhancing an existing solution
Visit the conference web site for full details:  http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/2010/CallForSpeakers.shtml

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Helping them Redisover Web Assets with iCyte

John Lennon knew that some places he recalled were gone while others remained.

So it is with webpages. They might vanish between the time you discover them and your next visit. The desire to access otherwise evaporated pages spurred the creation of iCyte. And I say good riddance to that evil Web Page Not Found error message.

While it's nice to have your own personal Wayback Machine, iCyte offers more. Think of it as "bookmarks meet TIVO." Instead of recording television programs for later viewing, you save webpages for later scrutiny. Add annotations in the form of tags and notes, as well as the ability to share your findings with others, and you've got an effective research tool. Forget all that copying and pasting. Say goodbye to slogging through acres of possibly pertinent bookmarks. Add power to your research by collaborating with others.

Yet, inevitably, the cheeky question must be asked: Why bother with iCyte when you already have bookmarks?

Bookmarks have served us well and have a place in the cosmos. You don't need iCyte, for example, just to go to the homepage of Politico, eBay, or some other browsing oasis. However, if you want to save a page on one of those sites for retrieval later, and if you want a nicely organized bundle of pages, iCyte is your ally. Being able to access a page that might otherwise be lost in the ozone is good. Quickly and easily fetching a page or collection of pages is even better.

Starting Up
Set up is simple. Go to the iCyte homepage and click on Create Account. The next window that appears is the download page.

The only browsers iCyte works with-at the time of this writing-are Internet Explorer and Firefox. (iCyte prefers Firefox.) Safari? No dice! Google Chrome? Forget it for now. According to an iCyte spokesman, "The HTML5 database API isn't supported in Google Chrome. The Google Chrome team plans to support the HTML5 database API, as well as the other APIs that WebKit supports, including offline and workers, in a future release." Just for the record, I miss my Google Chrome.

So assuming you are using an approved browser, you just download and install iCyte. Next, set up a new account by supplying your name, email address, and password. (Later on, the email address and password will be the sign-in open sesames.) Two iCyte icons, placed between the homepage icon and the address bar, will appear on your toolbar.

Instructions, Please
The program is almost intuitive, yet it is the "almost" that got me into trouble.

After installing iCyte on the desktop, I innocently tried to install it on my laptop. I found myself staring into the abyss of limp documentation. Those of us who are too literal-minded or too trusting (or both) have been stung before.

When you arrive at the iCyte homepage for the first time (or for the first time on a particular computer), you are greeted with Download Now and Start a New Account. And if you click on download now, it takes you to start a new account.

"But I already have an account," I sobbed.

I navigated all around the iCyte site, searching for the door that sidestepped the start-a-new-account invite. Exhausted by the cyber loop-the-loop ride, I finally just said, "What the hell. I'll just start a new account." It was only then that I was proffered a little "Already have an iCyte account?" Phew! Neither Help nor FAQ pages offered guidance for additional downloads.

Sometimes iCyte's instructions were too general when they should be specific, and sometimes they seemed specific but weren't. Generally, the documentation was helpful, but there were moments that caused me to tremble. The good news is that support via email was helpful and courteous. And, to be fair, iCyte continually refines its documentation.

Well-Organized
iCyte performs three valuable tasks well: It stores, retrieves, and shares desired webpages. In so doing, it organizes and advances research as you go along.

The iCyte tidy little nomenclature is simple-project (private and public), tags, notes, and cytes. A project is the general category under which things get filed. For example, I am gathering material about the shift from printed media to digital media. I call that project iPodization. A cyte is the page you save. Notes are the stuff of Post-its. Notes I have written include a brief description of the page, what intrigued me, and an action to take. Tags are keywords. Tags you've entered for previous cytes in the project are visible, so you can click on any that you wish to include in your new cyte.

When you find a page that has promise, click on the left iCyte icon in your toolbar. A pop-up window appears, and you can make entries there. Associate the page with a project, which can be public or private. Only you and those you designate can access a private project. A public project is open to the world, or at least the iCyte, web-surfing, latte-drinking portion of the world. There is a field for tags and a space for notes. You also can highlight a portion of the page.

The pop-up window is about the size of a "save as" window and cannot be enlarged. I am myopic and typing-challenged, and I would have preferred to see both what I was typing and the tag list. There is an auto-tag feature. If you enter a letter and you already have a tag that begins with that letter, the program suggests that tag.

Your projects, cytes, tags, and notes are saved on the iCyte server. Thanks to the right-hand icon, which opens an iCyte sidebar in your browser window, they're only a click away.
While intended for research, iCyte is great for doing a one-click save and store of those confirmation windows that show up after a web transaction.

Project Management
You can manage your projects and review your entries at the iCyte website. The Manage page has two tabs: "Manage Projects" and "Profile and Settings." The latter allows you to enter your name, title, location, industry, time zone, website, brief bio, and interests. Profile and Settings harbors a social networking perk. For example, if you do a search among public projects for the word "metal," it's good to know if the citation you found comes from a metallurgist, an air-guitar virtuoso, or, for that matter, someone who is both.

Appropriately, the Manage Projects section is all about the projects. You can change (add, delete, modify) project names, edit cytes, and delete or add participants. Only the project creator is allowed to manage the project.

Inviting people to jump in is a snap. Under the phrase Invite Someone to Your Project is a space for the inductee's email address. Press a go arrow and whoosh. Recipients get a greeting that invites them to view and join the project.

Though organized by projects, the cyte-centric My View page lets you view your cytes and modify the metadata. A project list is shown on the left of the screen. Select one project and see its cytes, or select All Projects and view all cytes. (The cytes appear in the middle of the screen.)

Below each cyte is a details link. If you click on this, you will see data about the cyte, your notes, and two other links: iCyte View (the cached page you saved) and Live View (the actual page you've cited, if it is still available).

As you run your cursor across a cyte, a gear icon appears. Click on it and cyte-management choices appear: change, move, email, and delete. The email option lets you share the cyte with someone. I got all intuitive and short-cutty and assumed I could use this to invite the recipient to join the project. Wrong! That led to a somewhat irritated email exchange between my would-be collaborator and me. I would like to see users like me protected from our own flawed intuition. Or I would like to see users like me allowed to invite people to join in the project from more than one page. And while I'm in a what-needs-to-be-improved mode, iCyte should reconsider the navigation; links for the FAQ and Press Pack resources should appear on all pages.

When a project has two or more cytes to its name, a widget appears on top that lets you export the cytes to Excel or to Word as an RTF file. It creates a neat list of citations that will wow the fact-checkers.
The ability to join public projects brings a nice dimension to one's research. Enter a term in the My View page search box and you'll get a list of appropriate cytes from public projects. It's fun to harness the search prowess and quirks of others and join with others in appealing research forays. (iCyte is working on a multilanguage interface to reward its users with greater search and research opportunities.)

At the time of this writing, few iCyte users seem to have public projects. The word "health" yielded 158 citations; "digital" returned 70 citations; and "moon" garnered 30. "Michael Jackson," though he may always be the King of Pop, got a paltry five citations. I suspect that in this wild and woolly wiki world, these numbers will grow. In fact, the developer says social networking is not iCyte's "primary focus but more of a byproduct of what we do."

Writers have always adored clipping and storing items for use in future, unimagined articles. Storing dead (or live) webpages is much easier than storing dead trees, and it's actually kind of fun.

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Clarabridge Launches SMA

Clarabridge, a developer of text mining software, has announced the release of Clarabridge Social Media Analysis (SMA). Clarabridge SMA has the potential to mine social media content as a source for consumer intelligence. Clarabridge SMA can be deployed as a stand-alone solution, accessing only social media content, or as an add-on to existing Clarabridge text mining software implementations.

Clarabridge SMA features a new user interface powered by Techrigy to help marketing and PR teams immediately monitor and participate in social media conversations.

(www.clarabridge.com)

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Vamosa C&F Hits Market

Enterprise content governance company Vamosa has announced the availability of Vamosa Check and Fix (C&F). C&F is an online records management service that offers multi-domain, multi-author website monitoring and reporting, and the ability to initiate fixes when standards are found to be compromised.

C&F allows enterprises to take a snapshot of important web pages that require legal control every time content changes, allowing users to review outdated material for audits.

(www.vamosa.com)

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Attensity Cloud powered by Radian

Attensity Group has announced Attensity Cloud, a new product addition to Attensity’s semantic analysis application suite. The company says the offering has been designed to allow organizations to monitor, analyze and respond to social media together with internal customer conversations in e-mail, surveys and CRM systems. Powered by Radian6, a social media monitoring platform for marketing, communications and customer professionals, Attensity Cloud allows real-time active monitoring of social media to identify trends, influencers and sentiment.

Attensity Cloud enables people to determine which conversations are relevant and active, engage in dialogue with the community, and understand which sites and people are the most influential for their organization. The results can provide a foundation for crafting strategic decisions, and to measure and analyze the impact of various social media initiatives.

The offering is said to provide an easy-to-deploy listening and engagement application for monitoring and analyzing a wide variety of social media. It allows marketing and support personnel to keep tabs on real-time conversations regarding their products, services and brands in blogs, Web forums, wikis, microblogging services including Twitter and Facebook, consumer forums and more. In addition to enabling enterprises to listen to customer feedback, Attensity Cloud also helps government agencies hear the voice of the citizen, says Attensity.

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Xerox Releases New Document Classification Software

Xerox Corporation has released CategoriX, a new technology that uses input from the legal team to automatically classify documents, reducing the amount of material requiring manual review.
CategoriX allows attorneys to fine tune classification requirements as they uncover new case information, increasing the accuracy of the document review process.

(www.xerox.com)

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Vivisimo Launches Velocity 7.5

Vivisimo has launched version 7.5 of its Velocity Enterprise Search Platform. Velocity 7.5 is available as a standalone search solution or as an embedded OEM version for partner applications.

Velocity 7.5 will feature a new set of SOAP/REST APIs for embedding the search engine and creating new applications. It will also feature data compression that reduces the overall index to 5 to 10 percent of the original data size without loss of functionality.

(www.vivisimo.com)

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Partnering for IP power

Coronado Group, a systems integration and professional services firm, and Content Analyst, which develops search and document analytics technology, have formed a partnership whereby Coronado Group has integrated Content Analyst’s CAAT technology into its new intellectual property product, Cognition IP.

Cognition IP is a suite of conceptual search and advanced analysis tools designed for the demands of intellectual property research and IP portfolio management. Cognition IP allows users to search across the entire spectrum of patents to find and rank them based on their ideas and concepts rather than just the words they contain.

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Analyzing social media

Clarabridge has introduced its latest tool, Clarabridge Social Media Analysis (SMA), which, it claims, is the first advanced text analytics software that allows companies to integrate social media content into their existing internal enterprise feedback to create more useful customer analysis.

Clarabridge SMA accesses social media content from Alterian’s Techrigy SM2 growing warehouse of social media content, which currently houses nearly 3 billion pieces of data from blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace and other social media sites. SMA then automatically removes unwanted content, sorts actionable from non-actionable topics, and applies enhanced meaning and context to conversations using natural language processing, classification and sentiment scoring engines.

Clarabridge reports SMA users can create custom Web-scraping routines to access product review sites, discussion forums and subscription sites, as well as integrate with internal data sources, such as e-mails, call center notes and surveys, whereby giving them a 360-degree view of customer experiences, opinions, as well as issues both online and offline.

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Justifying E-Discovery Systems

It is a long, drawn-out process to justify, evaluate, select, implement, and maintain an enterprise search system. A decade ago, an enterprise search project I managed took nearly 2 years, from initial project concept through actually implementing the solution (including the unexpected need to champion the solution to the business community). Quite honestly, by the time management eventually gave me the green light to proceed beyond step one, it was anticlimactic, and I'd shifted my attention to other projects.

I doubt things are any easier today especially as the legal landscape grows more challenging. We all recognize the twin trends of exponentially growing electronic content and more litigiousness. The landmark 2006 Federal Rules of Civil Procedures Rule 26 and its updates make all electronic stored information (ESI) subject to legal discovery, and ESI continues its unbridled growth. Yet cost controls are tighter these days than they were a decade ago, so we increasingly react to problems rather than nip them in the bud. If you already have an enterprise search system (or, more likely, several targeted search systems), do you really need anything else to respond to a civil suit requesting information stored anywhere in the enterprise? Wouldn't an e-discovery solution just drain resources from electronic records management and enterprise search programs already in place?

A recent study of e-discovery practices found that "Few technology and strategy decision-makers report having a holistic approach to eDiscovery. In fact, only 23% claimed to have an end-to-end approach to gather and filter information. And a full two-thirds consider their eDiscovery strategy reactive rather than proactive." (Source: Forrester Research, Inc.) How do you make the case that another search system will be any better than the ones you already have? I challenged two vendors to explain the case for e-discovery systems: StoredIQ and EMC. StoredIQ of Austin, Texas, provides patent-pending ESI governance solutions. EMC's SourceOne information governance solutions build on StoredIQ products.

Ursula Talley, VP of marketing at StoredIQ, concedes that enterprise search is indispensable for knowledge workers, but that e-discovery solves a different problem. "E-discovery search is designed to support a workflow that can be legally defended in court" and results in a set of data files that are preserved in a new, target location without any changes to the metadata. Unlike typical enterprise search systems that emphasize recall-giving you everything you might ever want to find-e-discovery systems deliver precisely specified results. Moreover, says Talley, the quarantining process may require copying thousands of gigabytes, without disrupting user productivity.

Lori McKellar, EMC's senior product marketing manager, also emphasizes the special nature of e-discovery as "the need to take action on the content in very specific ways-collect, process, analyze, review, etc.-while ensuring chain of custody and auditing all action taken." She also points out that when e-discovery lawsuits occur, they can cost more than $1.5 million to defend. Although those costs can be high, there is still the tendency to hope they'll be somebody else's problem. Another tack might be to see if you can get ahead of the curve, perhaps by leveraging some technology you already support, such as taxonomies or managed search system thesauri. McKellar agrees and says that "at its root, e-discovery is fundamentally an information management problem. Information management and the e-discovery process are intertwined."

Your work today to organize and classify information will make a future e-discovery process easier, and establishing good electronic records management programs will complement e-discovery. The continuous struggle to implement an electronic records management program, encouraging everyone to keep only what's needed and delete the rest, is critical. The ERM program will pay not only green benefits (reducing storage and backup costs) but will also lower e-discovery costs because there will be fewer incriminating documents to search through. However, tools alone, even e-discovery tools, build on information management best practices. Anyone can Bing or Google, so they expect they can simply transfer those skills to in-house search systems to satisfy an e-discovery request. These acquired search skills are unlikely to suffice under deadlines to find everything needed. Firms will need to leverage their in-house librarian or taxonomy resources even with the best of e-discovery tools.

I once heard a records management instructor say, "Lawsuits are your friend." By that he meant that it sometimes takes a lawsuit to get management backing for a records management program. However, if you are unprepared for it, an e-discovery request may not be the kind of friend you need.

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Sherpa Software Targets E-Discovery with Discovery Attender 3.5

Archiving and e-discovery company Sherpa Software's Discovery Attender 3.5 is a recently released tool that automates investigative tasks in PST files, Exchange mailboxes, public folders, and common storage areas. New features, such as the ability to search data archived by Sherpa's Archive Attender and a combined exception log, will help users organize exceptions encountered during the search process. Details about exceptions will now be stored in one location, allowing users to collect, group, review, and export items for further processing. The Advanced Results Filter and Deduplication screens have also been simplified with a wizard-based setup, making customization easier while simultaneously reducing errors.

(www.sherpasoftware.com)

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Exalead’s CloudView Receives Documentum Certification

Business search application developer Exalead announced that its CloudView information access platform has received the "Designed for EMC Documentum" accreditation, signifying that CloudView meets EMC's standards for architectural compliance with Documentum and will provide reliable integration. CloudView provides indexing and search services for Documentum databases and extends the Documentum enterprise content management platform by automatically collecting, structuring, contextualizing, and delivering data in real-time from any source.

(www.exalead.com; www.documentum.com)

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