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General Information October 5, 2007 • Vol.29 Issue 40
Enterprise Search
Finding The Right Search Solution To Meet the Needs Of Your SME
Oh, no, another thing for you
beleaguered IT administrators to worry about: finding the right
enterprise search solution for your business. “Ah, jeez, I gotta buy
something else, and furthermore I’m going to have to manage something
else, and this is just awful. I can’t believe that I’m in this world,”
says Gartner Research Vice President Whit Andrews, echoing the cries
heard around data centers around the globe.
And
the search needs of the average SME are certainly not
one-size-fits-all. “If you talked five years ago about search, you
would have a company that would say, ‘Does your company need search?
You just buy search from us,’” explains David Thede, president of
enterprise search vendor dtSearch (www.dtsearch.com).
“Now that’s like saying, ‘Do you need things that use electricity?
Well, you can buy things that use electricity from us.’ Well, it
depends what you need because there are lots of things that use
electricity,” Thede says, chuckling.
Thede points out that
the basics of enterprise search technology have not changed much over
the years. dtSearch’s desktop and network products, which offer a
desktop-based GUI and enable users to build their nexus of shared
documents collections, have been around for quite some time. “Our first
product in that market was released in 1991,” says Thede. “Bells and
whistles [were] added along the way, but the basic idea [in which] you
type in some words, and you get a bunch of documents, and you figure
out what you want, it really hasn’t changed a whole lot.”
Given this contradictory information, how do you choose the enterprise search solution for your needs?
 Determine Your Company’s Commitment
According
to Andrews, IT administrators need to determine the degree of
commitment their companies will bring to the quality of search results,
as well as the breadth of a search application’s influence. “If the IT
manager thinks his or her company has little appetite for
sophistication or training or multiple application development on a
search platform, then he or she needs to buy something comparatively
inexpensive, easy to install, and limited in flexibility,” Andrews
says.
Andrews says the basic questions are the same no matter
what the approximate project is. At the same time, the answers will
obviously vary, depending on an organization’s needs. “If you sell
widgets and you employ 350 people selling 50 kinds of widgets with
extremely low customization and a robust paper catalog and reorder
business, you don’t need to spend a whole lot of money on your search
engine,” says Andrews. “But if you employ 10,000 people and you sell
1,000 to 100,000 products from multiple suppliers with heterogeneous
data sources for product descriptions, you need to be ready for the
fact that your search engine is a strategic part of your business.”
Get Your Staff Involved
Thede
recommends that IT administrators focus on the ways in which enterprise
search fits particular situations within their companies and then
choose products that meet the needs of these situations. “You will have
different requirements for your legal department searching their
collection of documents vs. people doing email archiving or technical
people who want to be able to research data vs. [people who] might want
to put something on a Web server to provide a way for customers to do
searches of your documentation or product information,” Thede points
out.
Rather than trying to impose a top-down solution, where
a small group of IT professionals decides what everyone in an
organization should use, the organization is much better served when IT
departments work with smaller groups and choose a solution that comes
from the group that will actually be using these particular products,
Thede says.
“Get lawyers involved in picking out legal
research products, get whoever manages email archiving in picking that
product, and so forth,” says Thede. “Otherwise, it’s easy to miss
things that are important, and you end up with a solution that doesn’t
really address much of what anybody needs.”
Thede goes on to
explain that for a department needing email archiving, users typically
need a system that automatically migrates documents out of the email
live server into a durable repository for legal and regulatory
purposes. And Andrews points out that a department of lawyers and legal
support staff that uses search to conduct e-discovery needs a search
engine that provides forensic metadata with some level of guarantee. “I
can promise [them] these are the emails that are germane to [their]
requests for data, and the metadata in these emails is as it was when
they were created,” Andrews says.
Lots Of Search Vendors, Plenty Of Options
Thede
says that different levels of need exist for those employing enterprise
search products. For those who need just casual searching of relatively
small document collections, there are several free products that can do
the job. Meanwhile, those who need more serious research of large
documents or need special capabilities, such as forensics or reporting,
can find a host of solutions out there that do cost money.
Andrews offers several suggestions for quality enterprise search solutions vendors.
For enterprises that need e-discovery-related search tools for the litigation process, Andrews recommends dtSearch, ZyLAB (www.zylab.com), X1 (www.x1.com), ISYS Search Software (www.isys-search.com), FAST (www.fastsearch.com), and Autonomy (www.autonomy.com).
For
enterprises seeking out a broad platform search engine that can handle
anything from e-discovery to electronic commerce to intranet search,
Andrews recommends looking into solutions from FAST, Autonomy, Endeca (endeca.com), Oracle (www.oracle.com), and IBM (www.ibm.com).
For
enterprises looking for something to handle Web site, intranet, and
workgroup search, Andrews recommends IBM, Microsoft SharePoint, and
Google (www.google.com),
which he praises for being one of the simplest products on the market
and gets some of the best results out-of-the-box.
For enterprises needing enterprise search to support customer support and interaction hubs, Andrews recommends InQuira (www.inquira.com), Consona (www.consona.com), Talisma (www.talisma.com),
and IBM, adding that IBM has a variety of products, including a free
offering that targets small and midsized enterprises.
Finally, for enterprises needing video or audio enterprise search, Andrews recommends solutions from Nexidia (www.nexidia.com) and Sonic Software (www.sonicsoftware.com), as well as solutions from Autonomy and FAST. 
by Robyn Weisman
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