Archive for the ‘Desktop Search’ Category

01: Open Source Search – Ready For Prime Time?

Well… it really depends on who you are and where you are. In the US, vendors like Lucid Imagination are making a business out of the support of Lucene/Solr. There are even commercial search vendors developing products off a Lucene base. Open source search outside the US is not as prevalent. We see it to some degree in Europe, but not in Asia Pacific. When IT budgets are tight, doing some prototype development with open source to prove the merits of a business case certainly has value. Just make sure you are clear on the end goal of that prototype. Turning a prototype into a final commercial product only works if the technology was selected correctly in the first place. A lot of prototyping technology is designed specifically to generate a prototype, and do it quickly. Moving to a final product requires something different again.

But back to the original question…it really comes down to a question of your company’s appetite for risk. At a recent conference, the CIO of a large financial institution was talking about her attitude to open source in general. In her words – when something goes wrong you can’t hold the open source developer community accountable; sometimes you just need a commercial entity in there with you that you can put some pressure on, the “one throat to choke” so to speak.

Now you may be in a company that does embrace open source and is willing to tolerate the General Public License (GPL) aspects. If this is the case and you have enough expertise in house to deal with anything that goes wrong, then perhaps it is for you. If you do go down the Open Source Search route, be sure to come talk to us about the ISYS File Readers. The availability of document filters is clearly a key area of open source search that’s not ready for prime time.

02: Security for federated search

Thank you to all those who commented on the recent post, and as a number of you pointed out, yes, security is a challenge in an environment with multiple data repositories. Stay tuned for our upcoming whitepaper that will tell you everything you need to know about security in a federated search environment. We’ll do our best to have it out by the end of January!

03: ISYS:desktop 9 Now Available!

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.