Organization:  SerenaSoftware, Inc., www.serena.com

Vendor or Solution Provider of Choice:  InQuira, www.inquira.com

Supporting Those Who Provide Support

Redwood City, Calif.-based Serena Software is an enterprise software company with a core business focused on application life cycle management for distributed and mainframe systems. The company helps its customers—the IT departments of client companies—automate application development processes. Those enterprise IT customers comprised the majority of Serena’s customer base of more than 15,000 (96 of which are Fortune 100 companies).

Serving a New Set of Customers and Their Needs

With a new product launch, Serena’s customer base was about to change. The company was entering a new area of business called mashups, which are web applications that combine data from multiple sources into one integrated tool. With the new product—Serena Mashup Composer—targeted to a less technology-savvy customer segment of individual business users, the company knew that its approach to customer service would also have to change to handle an influx of customer inquiries related to a new product offering.

It was imperative that Serena find a solution that would provide the customer service that these new customers would need without compromising the support the company’s current customers already received. "We changed and enhanced our customer base, so we were getting calls from just about anybody and anywhere in the business," says Peter Sianchuk, vice president of worldwide customer support for Serena. "The big challenge I had was to serve the new customers without bringing my existing customer support organization to its knees. For a team that is built to serve a certain level of support for huge corporations, this [potential] increased volume of calls really could have a [negative] impact on the system."

The goal was to create a self-service option that would enable Serena customers to quickly find answers to their questions on their own, while enabling call center professionals to reduce the number of calls they would receive, allowing them to use their time to answer more complex customer questions.

At the same time, Serena needed to ensure it had a robust knowledgebase that would house the answers to the most prevalent problems customers had and that the company had processes in place for effective knowledge sharing. Customers (as well as the call center representatives) had to be able to efficiently locate their desired information.

Searching for Answers—Literally

Sianchuk says that when he sought a new solution, he knew it had to be a technical one that would revise the outdated knowledge management solution Serena was using at the time. "The key thing we needed from it was it had to allow customers to get the answers themselves without having to come to us; and if they did come to us, we needed them to be asking the harder questions" so that information would eventually be entered into the knowledge management system, says Sianchuk.

Sianchuk says that the solution also had to be easy to use from an internal standpoint. His staff needed to be able to populate the knowledgebase quickly and easily so they could just as seamlessly share that content with customers.

Customer feedback also played a large role in the solution Serena selected. Customers actually play a large role in the solution, since their questions and feedback populate the knowledgebase from which other customers,as well as Serena support personnel, can search for answers. "We involved ourcustomers in the process," says Sianchuk. "We asked them what they wanted from us, what they would like to see, and what changes they would like us to do. That made a big difference in how we rolled this out and the type of testingthat we’ve done and the places where we’ve put the focus."

That input was considered when Serena chose to work with InQuira, a San Bruno, Calif.-based company that provides integrated semantic search and knowledge management functionality for companies seeking to improve their websites and call center processes. Serena implemented the InQuira Customer Experience Platform to run its knowledge management and search capabilities.

The platform consists of InQuira’s Information Manager, which helps Serena build its knowledgebase and powers the company’s online self-service functions. Information Manager contains content authoring, editing, review, and publishing capabilities that enable Serena to add and change content in the knowledgebase to ensure that it meets its customer’s service-related needs.

InQuira’s platform also includes InQuira’s IntelligentSearch product, which improves the searchability of Serena’s knowledgebase for customers as well as Serena’s customer support professionals. It combines advanced semantic search capabilities and contextual understanding to get clearer insight into a user’s inquiry—and present relevant results to natural language searches. "Our definition of natural lan­guage is language that is natural to the user," says Nav Chakravarti, vice president of product marketing for InQuira.

Another component is the analytics, which provides insight into how the system is being used. "You can track how useful the knowledge is,"says Chakravarti. "You can make sure it’s searchable. You can look at the analytics and see how people clicked and when they searched, and what happened in the session. The analytics helps you figure out if people are creating content or not.

Serena and InQuira kicked off the project in January, and it was up and running in less than 4 months. "From a technology perspective, we’re combining search, the ability to capture knowledge, collaborate on it, publish it quickly and also the analytics that help capture these interactions," saysChakravarti. "That all integrates with the transaction system people might beusing, like a call center."

While the previous knowledge management solution was old, Sianchuk says the data was clean and ready to be imported and exported into a new system. That made the transfer rather seamless, notes Sianchuk. Among the content imported into the system were PDFs of product manuals.

Creating a Helpful Collaborative Community

With the old system, Serena call center employees couldn’t find documents they created even a half-hour earlier, notes Sianchuk. During beta testing for the Intelligent Search solution, hit rates were in the high 80% and low 90% range. "Now we’re getting mid-95% first hit on queries customers raise," says Sianchuk. "The average response time is three seconds—95% of the time, it takes three seconds to get a whole list of the documents."

Since implementing its new combined knowledge management and search solution, Serena has been able to achieve its goal of improving customer service. According to Sianchuk, the number of customer calls received by the company have continued to drop since the InQuira solution went live in the spring. In April, just before the initiative was operational, Serena tallied about 4,600 calls. The company averaged about 4,300 to 4,700 calls per month before that. In May, call volume dropped to 3,800 and then to 3,400 in June. Sianchuk expected the numbers for July to be about 3,100.

"That’s giving my staff more time to deal with the harder questions," says Sianchuk. "We have more time to focus on those harder questions. But also, when the new business users contact us with more basic questions, I have the capacity to handle that. I already have 10 to 20 percent more [call center] people available because they’re receiving fewer calls."

Serena’s customer self-service is also getting a boost: A tracking system identifies if information related to incoming calls is not already included in the knowledge system; that information is then added to the ever-growing knowl­edgebase. "As new questions come in from those new users—maybe they’re asking questions we haven’t considered—this is the opportunity to update the knowledge system," says Sianchuk. "Every time we give an answer to a question to a customer, a knowledge management document is created. The ongoing side is that when we get answers to questions or when we have solutions we know are unique, there is a bit of a process to make sure the spelling is correct." The knowledgebase continues to grow and become a more valuable information source for both internal and external users.

Sianchuk says that the next step for Serena and the InQuira solutions could be using Information Manager as the backbone of the creation of user communities consisting of customers and company staff. "There are ways we can start to build this community support," says Sianchuk. "Serena support would be part of a community, and the customer base would be part of that community— helping each other, us helping them, maybe them helping us with ideas about product direction. I really don’t think it’s possible to give higher levels of customer service if you don’t have that customer interaction. You can never assume that you know best."

About the Author

MARJI MCCLURE (marjimcclure@sbcglobal.net) is a freelance writer based in Connecticut.

Serial Solutions, a provider of E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS), announced the release of The Summon unified discovery service. With The Summon service’s library-branded search box, users will be able to enter a search term and the service will return a list of the physical and digital materials that are appropriate for them. From this relevancy-ranked list, they will be able to click through to full-text articles, and also find the books, specialty research, and bibliographic tools. The Summon service is hosted and built with an open API so that it can be integrated with existing library web sites or campus systems.
 
(www.serialssolutions.com)

SirsiDynix, a provider of library automation technology, released Enterprise 2.0, a search solution. The most recent enhancements to SirsiDynix Enterprise allow libraries to: include search capabilities for any size library or consortium, display selected website search results within the catalog, let patrons save searches as an RSS web feed, integrate directly with SirsiDynix OPACs, and offer patrons dynamic search suggestions as they type.
 
(www.sirsidynix.com)

Sherpa Software, an e-discovery and archiving software company, announced a new email management solution for Lotus Notes users. Sherpa Software Compliance Attender archives and filters inbound and outbound email as well as internal messages in real time. Messages are then automatically mapped against administrator-defined policies and restrictions to prevent the transfer of sensitive data before it occurs. At the core of Compliance Attender is Sherpa’s proprietary Real Time Engine technology, which catches messages at the operating system level before they get to the Domino router. Compliance Attender Journaling archives all email into a series of managed repositories, while Compliance Attender Filtering provides administrators with message-management options such as restricting email based on content, group membership, recipient count or total message size. Compliance Attender archives and screens the messages as they occur for increased speed and control over which emails are caught and how they are managed, such as: archive/journal messages, prevent delivery, add classification headers, add disclaimers.

(www.sherpasoftware.com)

Autonomy reports it has entered into a definitive agreement under which it will acquire Interwoven. The acquisition agreement proposes that Interwoven stockholders receive $16.20 in cash for each outstanding Interwoven share, representing approximately $775 million.

Emerging highlights of the acquisition include:

• All directors and selected executive officers of Interwoven and Autonomy have agreed to vote in favor of the acquisition.
• The acquisition is expected to complete in the second quarter of 2009 and is subject to Autonomy and Interwoven shareholder and regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
• A combined customer base of in excess of 20,000 will provide additional scale and significant cross-selling opportunities.
• Opportunities to provide broader and more comprehensive offerings to customers will emerge.
• Autonomy and Interwoven believe combining the two companies will accelerate the delivery of the next generation unstructured information management software.
• The acquisition will strengthen Autonomy's access to the worldwide legal and compliance industry through Interwoven's significant sales force with industry expertise.

 OCLC, a nonprofit library service and research organization, has launched a pilot program to make collections from libraries visible through mobile devices. The WorldCat Mobile pilot allows users to search for and find books and other materials available in libraries near them through a web application they can access from a PDA or smartphone. Users can even get a Google Maps view of the library location along with detailed driving instructions if the mobile device supports the application. The pilot is based on WorldCat.org, an online resource for finding information in libraries. OCLC worked with mobile-technology provider Boopsie to develop this pilot.

OCLC has also released the new NetLibrary Media Center, a full-featured desktop application that allows library patrons to search, manage, transfer, and listen to downloadable eAudiobooks. The Media Center combines user functions available from NetLibrary’s web-based platform to browse, search, and check out materials, and adds enhanced features and functionality—such as a full-feature audio player; download to a portable listening device; a new interface; and desktop access to a library’s entire eAudiobook collection.

(www.boopsie.com, www.worldcat.org, www.oclc.org)

X1 Technologies, Inc., a provider of enterprise search solutions and information worker productivity tools for the desktop, announced expanded support for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino with the release of the X1 Content Connector V1.3 for Symantec Enterprise Vault. The new Content Connector for Symantec Enterprise Vault allows users to search, preview, and act upon archived Lotus Notes and Domino email, contacts, and email attachments. Key features of the new Lotus Notes and Domino support in the Content Connector for Symantec Enterprise Vault include the ability to perform keyword, phrase, and range searches along with Boolean searches on archived emails, contacts, and email attachments. Full fidelity preview allows users to preview the search results without recalling the email or accessing the native application of the attachment. Post search actions allow users to perform common actions such as "Reply, Reply to All, Forward, Open, Send, Print, Copy to Folder, and Zip" from the same interface they performed the search.

(www.x1.com)

Kalypso, a professional services firm, and Endeca Technologies, Inc., a search and information access software company, entered into a strategic partnership to deliver information visibility to manufacturers. The companies will work together to bolster engineering, product design, and product lifecycle management (PLM)-related initiatives for clients. The partnership represents the latest in a series of organizational investments at Endeca to expand its presence in manufacturing.
 
(www.kalypso.com/aia, www.endeca.com)

My audiobook ended while I was driving into the office. With 30 more minutes of back roads to navigate, I opted to listen to the radio. I have a few different stations programmed into my radio, as my epic commute takes me in and out of the range of several. Clicking until I hit a live station, I was immediately intrigued by an accented voice discussing the history of the Nobel Prize. I glanced up to where, on another day, my satellite radio receiver would sit, to find out who was speaking. Alas, it was analog. So I had to wait until the end of the Democracy Now! program to learn that it was Peter Zander, curator of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

Woe is analog. I want my metadata! I have grown spoiled by having the ability to answer (at least 10 times on the way to preschool) the question hailing from the backseat: "Mommy, what’s this song called?" When I want to know the name of a band, there’s no need to wait until I have access to a search engine; there it is neatly scrolling by. Tune into an interview midway? It’s easy to see who is talking to whom, so I can tell at a glance if I might care.

With digital cable, myriad information about TV programming is a click or two away. With video on demand, content is neatly segmented by channel, movie type, theme, and other categories. With this very article, which I started and then returned to a few days later, I looked at the document’s properties to see when I began so I could efficiently search (narrowed by date) for the spelling of Zander’s name.

Metadata informs so much of what we take for granted in information access. Yet, lacking any dot-oh hyperbole, it suffers from its lack of chic. Metadata has been around almost as long as I have, emerging as MARC from a Library of Congress-led initiative. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative originated in 1995, and the W3C published a specification for RDF’s data model and XML syntax as a recommendation in 1999. I know you just dozed off. This stuff is so not hot.

Luckily, a lot of it gets created without us having to think much about it because, despite its usefulness, metadata isn’t something most people want to think about. It is also lucky that there are some very smart people out there who do want to think about it, such as those at the Metadata Research Center (MRC) at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and at the HyperMedia and DataBases Research Group of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Both study automatic metadata generation: The MRC primarily focuses on harvesting data for library categorization. The Leuven project is broader and certainly not the most current research on the topic. However, those involved clearly express the issues in play: "We cannot (solely) rely on humans for metadata creation: Humans don’t scale and humans are not perfect. More importantly, producing metadata is not exactly fun!"

I couldn’t agree more. The only thing less fun than making metadata may well be reading about it. That said, the most recent related research seems to revolve around the semantic web, which has a much higher hipness factor (as these things go). An extension of this concept that is also getting some press is semantic publishing.

The first of the two different approaches to semantic publishing involves producing information using semantic web languages such as RDF and OWL. The second approach requires that publishers use markup languages such as RDFa and microformats to embed formal metadata in documents. Oh no, not metadata.

I like the microformats concept in that its approach repurposes XHTML and HTML tags to convey metadata. Though content can already be "automatically processed," it hasn’t been particularly applicable because traditional markup tags don’t describe what information means. Microformats bridge the gap by attaching semantics to allow for the extraction of things such as events, contact information, relationships, etc.

According to Microformats.org, "Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards." The approach is limited, but importantly, it doesn’t require everyone to change their behavior. Microformats represent an effort to make data easier to publish in a standardized way so that data is optimized for indexing and searching or to allow users to do things such as download a contact’s information or add an event to a calendar from a website. Thus, content that already exists in HTML formats can be enriched to take on semantic characteristics without a radical retrofit.

Users increasingly expect to reap all the benefits of metadata and the sorts of informed and interactive experiences it enables. However, having tried to go back through 4 years of digital pictures and tag them, I know that the labor-intensive approach is only likely undertaken by rare metadata devotees or those having the most to gain—entertainment providers and STM publishers being two prime examples. For the rest of us, automatic metadata or at least metadata-made-easy may be the best route to provide some of the benefits we all want to enjoy.

Open Text has announced what it calls a major expansion of its e-discovery capabilities with an early case assessment solution designed to help organizations reduce the costs associated with e-discovery activities. Called Open Text eDiscovery Early Case Assessment powered by Recommind, the offering is designed to allow organizations to quickly assess the legal merits of a case and defensibly manage legal holds and collection for discovery, regulatory and compliance requests.

Open Text claims that with this solution in place, organizations can significantly minimize the need for third-party processing and control the high costs of legal reviews by culling irrelevant information before it goes for review by outside counsel.

Open Text formed a strategic relationship with Recommind to combine its Insite Legal Hold application with the Open Text ECM Suite. The combination not only addresses the critical need for eDiscovery in an age of growing regulatory and legal challenges, it also lets customers tightly integrate eDiscovery within their broader ECM initiatives, the companies say. Open Text eDiscovery Early Case Assessment allows enterprises to explore information where it resides quickly and accurately before it is collected and placed on hold in response to an investigation or lawsuit. This Explore in Place technology is a paradigm shift in legal hold methodology, Open Text says, because competitive solutions simply index and aggregate large amounts of data without any ability to determine relevance prior to collection, resulting in the collection, preservation, storage, processing, review and analysis of far more information than required.

With Open Text eDiscovery Early Case Assessment, organizations can:

• centrally search, explore in place and preserve electronically stored information (ESI) from disparate sources;
• reduce the volume of content to be reviewed; and
• significantly lower the cost of third-party processing.

Springer Science+Business Media, a publisher in the science, technology, and medicine (STM) sectors, announced the launch of the website www.AuthorMapper.com, a free analytical online tool for discerning trends, patterns, and subject experts within scientific research. AuthorMapper.com searches over three million journal articles to deliver a variety of useful analyses including an interactive Google map of the results, keyword tag clouds, and "Top 5" bar charts for various important metrics. AuthorMapper.com advanced search also provides the ability to run complex queries using such criteria as keyword, discipline, institution, journal, and author. The results can then be refined to identify scientific trends through timeline graphs and bar charts of top statistics.

Springer Science+Business Media also announced it has published its 30,000th eBook. Originally launched in 1996, SpringerLink provides students and researchers with electronic access to a collection of eBooks, to more than 1,500 peer-reviewed Springer journals, as well as to 18,000 protocols for laboratories. The eBook collection also comprises more than 140 reference works and over one thousand book series. Springer introduced its eBooks in July 2006 with 10,000 titles.

(www.springer.com)

Questel announced the addition of The Patent People to its group of companies. The Patent People will enable Questel to offer customers search services in technology areas such as electrical, chemical, petroleum, mechanical, and biotech, including: patentability and novelty searches, collection searches, infringement searches, validity searches, and state-of-the-art searches. For Questel DigiPat’s IP document delivery business, The Patent People will provide expanded file-history services and inventory, patent copies, assignment and title searches, copyright searches, legalizations and authentications and certifications.
 
(www.questel.com)