One of the nice benefits of being part of the search game for 20 years is we’ve built up a solid base of longtime customers.  Many of them happen to be in the complementary fields of government, legal and law enforcement.  We routinely receive positive feedback from these groups, often unsolicited, so today we’d like to share with you a quick snippet that clearly illustrates the tangible value our customers get from their use of ISYS.

In a recent email exchange from our friends at the Michigan State Police, we learned about one of the ways they use ISYS for behind-the-firewall search.  The following is a quote from Sandy Chapman, who works in the Michigan Intelligence Operation Center:

“(ISYS) has come in handy many, many times. We will get calls from officers stating ‘I know you put this bulletin out maybe a month ago, but I can’t find it.’ In these instances we will get a few keywords from the officer as to the subject matter; enter into ISYS and 99% of the time we can find what they are looking for. ”

We obviously appreciate these comments, as they confirm we’re delivering on our mission – helping people find information fast.  Are our customers’ comments always so rosey?  Of course not.  But fortunately for us, the majority of feedback we receive is constructive in nature, and you’ll find that a good percentage of that input eventually works its way into our technology in the form of feature enhancements.  Our customers have made ISYS possible, and we appreciate the ongoing dialog we maintain with them.

If you’re in the Denver area July 25-26, we invite you to check out the NFPA Tech Institute event for paralegals, where ISYS will be exhibiting and demonstrating its recently released ISYS:desktop 9 application.  We’ve made several enhancements to better serve e-discovery needs, so be sure to download a trial version and check it out.

The NFPA event will be held at the Doubletree Hotel in Aurora, CO.  Conference hours are 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Friday, and 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday.

The results of the 2008 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey were released on Tuesday, and ISYS Search Software once again ranks among the top e-discovery software vendors in multiple categories.  We’re pleased to have placed in the Top 10 in the Preservation, Collection and Analysis categories for 2007 Electronic Discovery Software Providers.

The full rankings will appear in the August issue of Law Technology News .  They also will be posted on LTN’s EDD Update just after midnight on July 22 and, following that, on the Socha Consulting website.

ISYS recently released Version 9 of its industry-leading desktop search software, ISYS:desktop.  With ISYS:desktop 9, we added several enhancements to better address e-discovery requirements.  We invite you to learn more about ISYS:desktop 9 and download a trial version.  You can also read our paper on Enterprise Search for E-Discovery Compliance.

When we released ISYS:desktop 8 two years ago, it was the first enterprise-class desktop search solution to offer categorization and entity extraction. Today, we release ISYS:desktop 9 and raise the enterprise search bar even higher. Continuing our focus on delivering a broad set of capabilities that industry consultant Steve Arnold refers to as “beyond search,” ISYS:desktop 9 enhancements include:

• Timeline refinement bar, which highlights hit density in the form of a histogram and enables users to hone in on a specific date range using the click-and-drag sliders on either end of the timeline.
• Parametric refinement, which rounds out our category and entity clusters, giving users the ability to refine their results based on commonly recurring metadata fields and values, such as document author or the “From:” field in an email.
• Results Flagging, which supports discovery efforts by enabling users to flag results of interest and perform custom actions on just the flagged content.
• Centralized Management, for configuring and deploying ISYS:desktop across hundreds and even thousands of PCs, all from a single location.
• Tabbed searching, for analyzing multiple queries in parallel.

We invite you to learn more about the newest member to the ISYS suite of enterprise search and download an evaluation version. We look forward to your thoughts.

Part Three in our series of enterprise search white papers is a true classic. For four years running, it has been our most downloaded paper, likely because it’s a timeless topic that most businesses wrestle with at one point or another — selecting an intranet search engine.

Whether you’re building an intranet from scratch or are in the process of implementing SharePoint as your intranet, the search piece obviously plays a key role, particularly if we’re talking about a fairly substantial deployment. What’s great about the intranet search paper is it really helps you understand some of the fundamental requirements for search inside corporate firewalls. At the end of the paper is a checklist you can use to help you evaluate various vendor offerings.

Those who follow ISYS in the UK know that Solcara has been a longtime, valued partner of ours.  Solcara designs federated search technology designed to help organizations better control, manage and locate their digital information.  Recently, Solcara announced its new SolSearch solution, which pairs our indexing technology with Solcara’s federated search capabilities.

Solcara has had considerable success serving the information access and management needs of the legal industry, among other markets.  It helps professionals connect to their know how systems, as well as search and locate vital information that resides across a variety of sources, both internally and externally.  We’re pleased to play a role in these solutions and look forward to continued work with Solcara.

Take a moment to learn more about SolSearch and see what it can do for your organization.  You can also access third-party reporting and analysis from IT Week and over at the Beyond Search blog.

Part Two in our series of enterprise search white papers focuses on the notion of search as an iterative process.  If you’ve seen ISYS speak in recent months, you’ll know this has been our key topic in 2008. 

What we’re attempting to convey through this paper and our talks is that even when you approach enterprise search from a strategic level (i.e., we want to empower ALL employees with the ability to find their important content), your implementation has to start somewhere (i.e., the legal department is legally bound to respond immediately to a discovery request).

So what we encourage customers to ask themselves is, “Will the $300k one-size-fits-all platform I buy today give my engineering group the answer they needed yesterday?”  By instead taking an iterative approach to search, you address your immediate pain points through rapid rollout and gain valuable lessons about what’s good, what’s bad and what needs improvement, all of which feed into the next “iteration” of your deployment.

It’s true that one of enterprise search’s aims is to eliminate “siloed” information, but unless you deliver effective search to each individual business unit, your adoption rates will remain low and the industry will continue to hear reports from analysts stating that search is broken.  Read on to learn more about the iterative philosophy.