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RESOURCES FOR EVALUATING ENTERPRISE SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES
May 16, 2007

Table of Contents

Enterprise Search Summit Opens in New York
Summit Sponsors Put on a Good Show, In New York and Also Here . . .
Best Practices in Enterprise Search (Vol. III), Now Available Free from KMWorld
The Top 4 Articles from Enterprise Search Center This Year
Featured Content: Special Delivery--Mobile Enterprise Search Coming on Strong
Siderean Partners With Inxight Federal Systems for Relational Navigation
Web Analytics Breaks Into Mainstream, According to Report
Reuters to acquire ClearForest
Relational navigation for government
Going global with XML
Ex Libris Launches the Primo Discovery and Delivery Solution
Lingotek Grants Free Access to its Language Search Engine and Other Tools
MyiLibrary and NRC-CISTI Launch eBook Loans Service
Clarabridge Offers Trade-In Program for ClearForest Customers
Market intelligence, remarkably

Enterprise Search Summit Opens in New York

IDC analyst Sue Feldman (left) kicked off ITI's Enterprise Seach Summit yesterday with a definition of enterprise search that extended the field from search boxes to anything that helps users discover content of interest. Shown here with conference program chair Nancy Garman (right), Sue said in her keynote address, "The search box is a good starting point, but it's no longer good enough."

Search in 2007, she said, has many faces, because it's embedded in something much larger.  "Search is anything that creates access to information that is unstructured."

The two-day program for Enterprise Search Summit, itself, bore witness to the trend, with sessions on a wide range of search and search-related topics.

If you missed the event in New York this year, good news.  You won't have to wait another year to attend the next installment, which will be in San Jose November 6-7. 

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Summit Sponsors Put on a Good Show, In New York and Also Here . . .

Delegates to Enterprise Search Summit had the opportunity to talk directly with many solutions vendors, including Autonomy, BA-Insight, Convera, Coveo, ENDECA, Engenium, Exalead, Expert System, FAST Search & Transfer, Google, Groxis, IBM, Inxight, ISYS, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, New Idea Engineering, Northern Light, Open Text, Oracle, Recommind, Siderean, Teragram, Vivisimo, WebSideStory, and X1. Many of these companies are also offering demos in the Enterprise Search Center's demo space.  If you couldn't make it to New York, check out the demos here.

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Best Practices in Enterprise Search (Vol. III), Now Available Free from KMWorld

KMWorld has released its third annual collection of White Papers on best practices in Enterprise Search, available free.

Best Practices in
Enterprise Search, Vol III
[May 2007]

CLICK HERE to review the Table of Contents and download the Free PDF

 

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The Top 4 Articles from Enterprise Search Center This Year

The Enterprise Search Center has been online for a year now. So, Happy Birthday to us. We're in the process of reviewing the site's performance. Over the next several weeks, we'll be sharing with you some results.  When it comes to content, site visitors have voted with their clicks-throughs. Based on the click rates, here are the four top articles we published in the last 12 months. You might possibly have missed some of the original content we've presented. Here's your chance to catch up . . .


Principles of Effective Search by James Robertson

There are a number of fundamental principles that underpin the design and delivery of successful search. These relate to the way that staff use search, and the types of tasks they are trying to complete. They are also built on an understanding of staff motivations and behaviors. These principles are not new or radical, rather they are built upon the observation of many users when they search. They distil down common behaviors and approaches that can be analyzed to help design better and more effective search tools . . . Download the Free PDF version of this paper.

Social Work--Adding Social Network Analysis to Search by Bill Ives

The web today is about participation and participant-created content. The most effective web search tools take this participation into consideration in the process of delivering relevant results. A look at these techniques (and some of the problems with them) can lead to insights into exploring the relationship between social context and search results inside the firewall as well. Click through and get the free PDF of this Enterprise Search Center exclusive by Bill Ives.

Best of Both Worlds (Case Study on Enterprise Search in Practice) by Jean Graef

Enterprise Search Center Exclusive Article. Case Study: By 1999, the Montague Institute realized that both its authors and readers needed a better way to find articles on a specific topic, vendor, or concept. Using both internal organization and with help from Autonomy Ultraseek, Mongague is making its content more findable. Click through to download your free PDF.

Help Us Define the Topic  -- The Enterprise Search Center's Taxonomy

ESCenter was created by ITI as an across-the-enterprise collaborative effort. In developing the center further we want to collaborate with site users in making the site best match user needs. So far, the topic “enterprise search” has been defined based on a content analysis of materials published in ITI’s periodicals, including KMWorld and EContent Magazine. We’d like your help in refining our working taxonomy. Click on the blue headline (ABOVE) to learn more about what we've done and how you can help


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Featured Content: Special Delivery--Mobile Enterprise Search Coming on Strong

Download the Complete PDF Here

By Peggy Anne Salz

Understanding that consumers will vote with their feet if they can’t find what they’re looking for on-the-fly, an increasing number of mobile network operators are scrambling to offer mobile search capabilities.The flurry of recent activity, marked by a raft of milestone deals involving giants such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft as well as a growing number of major mobile operators including T-Mobile, Vodafone, Verizon Wireless, and NTT DoCoMo, confirms that mobile search is this year’s mega-trend.

And with good reason. Search—which is already the de facto entry point to content in the online space, with more than half of all users going straight for the search box when they want to find a website—has also become the primary means to access and monetize the legendary “long tail” of content. Moving forward, mobile search, like its stationary online counterpart, is destined to be the core capability required to get individuals to the content they seek.

Indeed, industry excitement around mobile search demonstrates that it is an indisputably potent way to generate value. Consumers find what they want, marketers gain traffic by providing relevant offers and advertising, and mobile operators and service providers capture increased revenue as a result of the increase in mobile content purchases by consumers.

It’s a virtuous cycle because mobile search is designed from the ground up to deliver content within an acceptable click-distance, and to overcome the key usability barriers that threaten to block access to mobile content and stump the growth of the mobile web in the process. Recent studies argue that optimal mobile search experience must deliver content within two or three clicks and refrain from forcing users to navigate through multiple menus and sift through catalogues to find content they want.

In the consumer space, mobile search is clearly the modus operandi that delivers the right content to the right users with the right results. Granted, the industry must now find ways to refine search results and increase their relevancy to match the personal profiles and preferences of each individual mobile user, but the pivotal position of mobile search at the center of any content access scheme is assured.

So what can we take away from the meteoric rise of mobile search in the consumer space that will better enable enterprise mobile search?

Time To Find a Solution

While information in the consumer space is want-to know, in the enterprise space it is mission-critical. The growth in the amount of content used by the mobile workforce has forced the introduction of mobile-specific search tools to help users navigate mobile services and applications. However, security concerns have so far prevented organizations from building mobile business portals, let alone delivering robust and relevant mobile search solutions. For the moment, vendors and customers alike are in a holding pattern waiting for someone to take the lead. But this year could see business take the first steps in this direction.

Driving this is the widespread adoption of mobile enterprise applications and the substantial progress made by mobile operators to create enterprise portals and better serve their “prosumer” customers. All evidence points to an untapped growth opportunity in the wireless business sector—and mobile operators are anxious to cash in. The proof is in the numbers: IDC estimates overall business revenue is expected to reach $52 billion in 2010. Much of the revenue growth can be attributed to strong growth in data revenue, which offsets slowing growth in the voice segment due to continued voice Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) erosion. Furthermore, IDC expects data services to make up a growing portion of wireless business revenue and account for just under 40% of total revenue by 2010, compared with less than 20% in 2005.

The growing availability of off-the-shelf data solutions, increased flexibility with data implementations, pricing declines in data transmission and voice calling bundles, the emergence of services designed to improve ease of wireless management, and the prevalence of 3G wireless broadband networks all pave the way for the mobile enterprise. They also create an opportunity for providers to blend enterprise content and applications behind the firewall with the range of other mobile content and applications offered on the portal, and mobile search is well-positioned to be the interface that brings these two worlds together.

Solutions Emerge

Mike Brady, senior director for product development at Fast Search & Transfer, a leading enterprise search provider that also offers customers a mobile search platform, points out that the drive to increase productivity will increase the value of technology and techniques that can make the mobile workforce more productive. “A mobile search system is one better than a turnkey solution or a one-off application because it provides workers with access to the intranet and a host of applications ranging from logistics to ERP,” Brady explained. “How do you deliver a user paradigm in the mobile enterprise that meets all those needs without mobile search?”

It’s early days, but enterprises are beginning to turn up the pressure on vendors to extend search beyond their applications and portals to other content throughout the enterprise.This is evident in the decision by SAP last May to release a beta version of new enterprise search capabilities the company code-named Argo. In a nutshell, Argo effectively extends enterprise search features for SAP end users to different sources with a single search query. With a single search query, users can use desktop widgets, browsers, email, and mobile devices to tap into company data from multiple sources.

A demo of the solution, at SAP’s last user conference, showcased a clear-cut use case for this capability: A user sends an email from her mobile device to a SAP email box to search for information in the enterprise database. The system replies to the query within seconds with the requested information. Granted, it may not be a fullfledged implementation of mobile search, but it nonetheless underlines its position as the primary interface to content in and around the enterprise. After all, workers don’t employ search because they want to search; they use it because it’s instrumental to some other activity in which they are engaged.

The question is therefore not when will mobile search arrive full-force in the enterprise, but rather how must it be modified to meet the needs of the workforce and satisfy productivity goals.

Information Trail

There are no easy answers, but one solution may be to complement mobile search tools with technology and techniques that can follow the clues a user leaves to offer information and assistance before workers know they need it or even ask for it. It’s a concept Brady refers to as “zero-term” or “zero-effort” search.Within this personalized and contextualized mobile search scenario, the device’s idle screen acts as a personalized entry point to the enterprise mobile portal, serving up relevant information and tailored to each worker’s individual needs.

Mobile operators already employ client software technology, widely referred to as “on-device portal” software, to dynamically and automatically present relevant information and content to consumers based on combined contextual data mobile devices. Thus, the networks on which they operate easily and continually collect information including the individual’s personal profile, current and past content preferences, click history, location, and time of day. Such an approach, if applied to the mobile enterprise, would not only present workers with relevant information before they request it, thereby boosting efficiency and productivity, it would also dovetail with more standard mobile search tools to deliver an immersive information and content experience that matches the right content with the right user with the right results.

Download the PDF

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PEGGY ANNE SALZ (peggy.salz@gmx.net), a freelance technology writer and author based in Europe, tracks the global mobile telecom industry and the business models and trends that will shape its future.



 

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Siderean Partners With Inxight Federal Systems for Relational Navigation

Siderean Software, a provider of relational navigation solutions, has entered into a reseller agreement with Inxight Federal Systems, a provider of government software solutions for information discovery. Siderean will be added to Inxight’s GSA-approved price list, enabling Inxight’s government customers to propel information discovery, access, and participation. By combining Inxight’s SmartDiscovery platform with Siderean’s patented relational navigation technology, users can navigate through large volumes of information to pinpoint content containing relevant information.

Inxight’s software structures unstructured data by “reading” text and extracting important entities, such as people, places and organizations. It also extracts facts and events involving these entities, such as travel events, purchase events, and organizational relationships. Siderean’s Seamark Navigator then builds on this newly structured data, providing a relational navigational interface designed to allow users to put multi-source content in context to drive improved discovery, access, and participation across the information flow.

(www.siderean.com; www.inxightfedsys.com)  

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Web Analytics Breaks Into Mainstream, According to Report

CMS Watch, an analyst firm that evaluates content technologies, has completed research into the web analytics marketplace that finds enterprises and vendors alike working to integrate web analytics into emarketing services--including email campaigns, keyword bid marketing, and customer segmentation--making web analytics a more mainstream enterprise concern.

CMS Watch released the Web Analytics Report, which evaluates 13 major web analytics suppliers based on vendor research, interviews with customers across a range of industry sectors, and "hands on" testing of solutions. The report also found: some web analytics vendors--including WebTrends and Coremetrics--are rolling out new data mining and customer segmentation solutions; some vendors--including Omniture and Fireclick--are partnering with other emarketing suppliers; and sophisticated data and process integration requirements are driving a renewed reliance on IT resources to support emarketing, following a period when web marketers predominantly procured and managed analytics tools on their own. The Report can be purchased at the CMS Watch website.

(www.cmswatch.com)  

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Reuters to acquire ClearForest

Reuters has entered into an agreement to acquire all the outstanding shares of ClearForest, a privately held provider of text analytics solutions whose tagging platform and analytical products allow clients to derive business information from huge volumes of unstructured text and enterprise data.

Reuters believes that search will be a pivotal element to the future of how financial information is sourced and consumed. As part of its drive into this space, it has created a new strategic group that will oversee the integration of ClearForest into Reuters' offerings.

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Relational navigation for government

Siderean has entered into a reseller agreement with Inxight Federal Systems. The deal enables combining Inxight’s SmartDiscovery platform with Siderean’s relational navigation technology, thus allowing users to intuitively find their way through large volumes of information to pinpoint content containing relevant information.

Inxight explains that its software provides structure to unstructured data by “reading” text and extracting important entities, such as people, places and organizations. It also extracts facts and events involving these entities, such as travel events, purchase events and organizational relationships. In the combined solution, the companies say, Siderean’s Seamark Navigator then builds on this newly structured data, providing an intuitive, easy-to-use relational navigational interface that allows users to put multisource content in context to drive improved discovery, access and participation across the information flow.

Seamark Navigator uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The companies add that RDF and OWL are standards being driven and heavily adopted by the Department of Defense and other government agencies. They enable a standards-based approach to providing a 360-degree view about any concept, regardless of the format of the underlying information sources.

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Going global with XML

XyEnterprise and Idiom Technologies, an independent supplier of SaaS and on-premise, server-based globalization management systems (GMS), announce that they have formed a technology partnership.

The deal calls for the companies to jointly develop a software extension that lets XyEnterprise customers easily integrate their Contenta XML content management solution with the Idiom WorldServer GMS solution. Customers will be able to combine the solutions into an end-to-end platform for content creation, management, translation and delivery. The software extension will support either SaaS or on-premise editions of Idiom WorldServer.

The companies report that by integrating the Contenta and WorldServer solutions, customers will have full editorial, workflow, translation and publishing capabilities based on reusable content components. It will allow authors, editors and publishers to identify precisely which content components have changed and the impact these changes have across products that share this content. By translating only changed content components, the time and cost associated with localizing content will be dramatically reduced, and the quality, integrity and accuracy of the data will be significantly enhanced, they claim.

The integrated solution will enable:

  • automatic tracking of all language variants for any content components or documents in the Contenta and WorldServer solutions,
  • real-time information and version control on work in process at every step in the workflow, and
  • storage and management of approved data in all languages for multichannel delivery.

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Ex Libris Launches the Primo Discovery and Delivery Solution

Ex Libris Group has announced that the Company's Primo unified solution for the discovery and delivery of library resources, regardless of format and location, is in general release.

The Primo discovery and delivery system is designed to enable libraries to provide users with the ability to access authoritative information from a single point. This information is an aggregation of locally held collections of various types--print, digital, and electronic--which may include the library catalog, digital repositories, course management systems, and remote resources such as abstracting and indexing databases and ejournal collections. Primo integrates with various library systems such as the Ex Libris ALEPH 500 and Voyager systems and the SirsiDynix Unicorn system. Primo provides various linguistic capabilities and, when relevant, suggests alternative search terms--helping users to focus on more appropriate results. Delivery options complete the discovery process. The Primo system displays an availability statement for each result along with a “get it” button that links the user to the most appropriate service for the specific context, such as a method for obtaining the actual material if it is available online or for obtaining information about the location of a physical item.

Incorporated in the Primo user experience are multiple elements adhering to Web 2.0 concepts, such as social computing features, including tags, ratings, and reviews that members of an institution’s user community can share with each other or with communities in other institutions.

(www.exlibrisgroup.com)  

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Lingotek Grants Free Access to its Language Search Engine and Other Tools

Lingotek has offered free access to its Language Search Engine and other Web 2.0-based translation-related software tools. Lingotek's existing customers were given the first chance to sign up for additional free licenses. The Language Search Engine works similarly to internet search engines. Rather than searching the web, however, it performs searches against large collections of Translation Memories to find previously translated content that most closely matches the meaning of the sentences or phrases that need to be translated. Free access to the Language Search Engine includes both open and closed Translation Memories, which combined memories can include an unlimited number of individual Translation Memories. All Lingotek users can access and contribute to the open Translation Memory, while closed Translation Memories are only accessible by those who created them or those who have been granted access by the creators. In addition, the Lingotek project management system can help project managers track translation projects in real-time with visibility into the actual translation as it is being performed. The system's alignment tool, glossary capabilities, version tracking, and other tools are all included and available at no charge to all Lingotek users. Language professionals who want to acquire a free Lingotek license can do so by logging on to the Lingotek web page.

(www.lingotek.com)  

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MyiLibrary and NRC-CISTI Launch eBook Loans Service

The National Research Council Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI) and MyiLibrary, an ebook aggregator, have partnered to launch a new service called eBook Loans, an electronic twist on the traditional library-interlending model. eBook Loans offer instant access to tens of thousands of electronic books from scholarly publishers, including Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Blackwell, and Springer. Each loan costs $25, payable online using a credit card. Users are given access to an eBook for 30 days through a URL received in an email immediately after payment has been received. There is no need to return a borrowed eBook because the link expires automatically. Librarians and others wishing to access this new service should visit the CISTI Catalogue.

(www.myilibrary.com; http://cat.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/search)   

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Clarabridge Offers Trade-In Program for ClearForest Customers

Clarabridge Inc., a text analysis software vendor, has announced a migration program for current ClearForest Ltd. customers potentially impacted by the uncertainties generated from the acquisition of ClearForest by Reuters. Throughout the second quarter, Clarabridge will offer customers a dollar for dollar credit for any previously purchased ClearForest licenses. This credit can be used for upgrading from any version of ClearForest's products to Clarabridge's Content Mining Platform (CMP) platform. Clarabridge's CMP is a platform built for the commercialized use of text analysis.

(www.clarabridge.com)  

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Market intelligence, remarkably

Northern Light has unveiled the first automated “meaning extraction” application designed specifically for market intelligence and market research. The company says MI Analyst combines free-text searching with text analytics, dramatically speeding and enhancing a researcher’s ability to analyze reports from internal and external sources, identifying the strategy issues and suggesting the business implications of the analyzed content.

Northern Light reports MI Analyst adds value by extracting meaning from search results and mining market research content for relevant competitive intelligence and market trends. Further, it can read all the market intelligence reports and articles a company creates or licenses from third-party sources. The application then can tell the researcher what is in the documents, suggest what business issues they address, and direct the researcher to the documents that are most interesting based on their meaning, rather than on their statistically derived search relevance.

The company says its new application can also assess the tone of content; additionally, it identifies business-critical facets of searched content, including companies, venture-funded companies, technologies, markets, job titles, business issues, government agencies, identified phrases and market research vendors.

MI Analyst is available as an option for its SinglePoint enterprise market research portal.

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