Archive for the ‘SharePoint Search’ Category

01: 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!

02: 2010 – the year of Federated Enterprise Search?

How the landscape has changed…ten years ago we had many different file types, but not many places to store them. Today, we have fewer file types, but many more repositories – add the complexity of the different security models into the mix and clearly the focus of enterprise search is changing. It is good to see the issue of federated search finally being raised, witness recent articles in the likes of Information Week.

The question that enterprises need to ask is who is best placed to provide true federated search? My opinion is that it is not the owner of any one of the repositories —  it is those companies that have an independent view of data. We will be hearing more about this issue in 2010 as our customers demand better access to information, and don’t care what email system of document repository their data resides in.

03: ISYS Releases ISYS:web 9, Appoints New CEO

We’ve been deliberately quiet as of late, thanks to a number of fun projects happening behind the scenes here at ISYS.  This week was just a taste of what’s to come in 2009.  In addition to announcing the appointment of our new CEO, Scott Coles, we also launched Version 9 of our ISYS:web information access and discovery solution for intranet search and site search.  The folks at EContent and Arnold IT covered it here and here.

Additionally, we rolled out our new website.  Collectively, these milestone moments kick off a new phase in our formidable history.  The year ahead for ISYS will be characterized by aggressive growth on all fronts, most importantly on the product development side of things.  We invite media, analysts and customers to contact us to learn more about our direction and what the roadmap looks like.

04: SharePoint Search With ISYS

Steve Arnold has a good post on the topic of SharePoint search. Over the years, Microsoft has been routinely criticized for its poor search, and much of the current commentary is directed at the confusion over Microsoft’s multiple search offerings. To be sure, that confusion will eventually fade as SharePoint’s penetration increases and the FAST technology that Microsoft purchased finds a home in the Microsoft search ecosystem. But that clarity isn’t arriving tomorrow, or any time in the near future.

More pressing for our customers is the complexity of setting up medium- to large-scale SharePoint search deployments. As Arnold points out, scale is a real concern with SharePoint’s built-in search system. ISYS opted to introduce its SharePoint Web Part a year ago as a result of customer demand for third-party search that would bring an added layer of sophistication. What users of ISYS SharePoint search get are added content analytics tools, such as entity detection, categorization, Boolean and proximity search, tag clouds and more, all out of the box.

These capabilities are key, but most important are the fundamental aspects of our tried-and-true indexing methodology, which Arnold cites as key to overcoming SharePoint Search’s scale issues. Read on.