Posts Tagged ‘Federated Search’

01: ISYS Upgrades Enterprise Search Software to v9.6

Today we bring you fantastic news that Version 9.6 of the ISYS Enterprise Search Software suite is now available.  Noted below are just a handful of the key enhancements, including automatic language detection, early binding security and significant increases in indexing performance.  Maintenance customers wishing to upgrade or parties interested in learning more can visit our ISYS 9.6 overview page and request additional information.

For this cycle, we focused on capabilities that would meet next-generation federated search requirements.  Given our exclusive focus on enterprise search infrastructure and embedded search solutions, we identified the following three areas as key to our customers’ success:

Language Support
To ease the findability of critical corporate intelligence, we introduced Automatic Language Detection, which instantly recognizes documents in 36 different languages. The benefit to end users is the ability to refine results based on a given language, or include a pre-query filter to restrict searches to a specific language. Also new in 9.6 is the ability to extend stemming to French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Russian.

Security
To cater for broad security requirements, ISYS has introduced “early binding” document-level security for file systems, which ensures:

• High-performance secure search (no penalty for filtering unauthorized documents)
• Result counts are 100% accurate on the first result page
• Refinement facets only available for authorized documents

Performance
In lab tests using a typical mix of corporate content, ISYS 9.6 achieved indexing speeds of 100 gigabytes per hour. Our enhancements at the text extraction level have enabled us to see an average indexing speed increase of 3x.

Learn more about ISYS 9.6 and request additional information.

02: Security and Enterprise Search

Historically, enterprise search vendors have done a poor job addressing the subject of security.  In some cases, vendors didn’t have a good enough answer (and some are still struggling), hence the reason for the radio silence on the topic.  But in the main, I think we merely took the topic for granted and made assumptions that security would just be “taken care of” in the natural course of IT management.

With the continued rise in bigger and broader federated search deployments, security is only becoming more important, and as a result we’re doing more in terms of educating enterprises on the topic.  Our latest effort is a technical white paper titled, “The Principles of Security Management in the Context of Secure Search.”  While this paper won’t serve as a “how-to” manual on the subject of secure search, it does provide a suitable framework for better understanding the topic and ensuring your security managers are comfortable with the requirements.

03: Forget “Search” — It Is All About The “Virtual Aggregation” Of Data

I mentioned in a post late last year that 2010 would be the year of federated search, but now I think we need to go even further …

The number of record and content management systems that are coming onto the market (and the investment that is being made by vendors and customers alike) is simply staggering.  In isolation, a large number of these systems are good applications; some are even great … with some tremendous functionality.  But having spent time at the HP TRIM User Forum (TUF23) in Sydney last week, I can say they all have one thing in common – they require end users to know where content is in order to find it.

Think about this for a minute … if you know your content is in HP TRIM, then the search in TRIM will allow you to find what you are looking for, same if you know your content is in SharePoint.  However, no matter what role you have in an organisation, chances are you will interact with more than one of these data repositories.  From an enterprise perspective we cannot continue to expect our users to know where information lives.

The issue today is that data needs to live in different places.  These different repositories are purpose-built for the type of information that they contain.  The term “federated search” does not really do the concept justice … more accurately, what we are doing with federated search is providing users with the ability to find information by “virtually aggregating data” or allowing users to ask for some information that is likely scattered across multiple repositories.  

We can even take this one step further, following on from the commentary about “physical” data aggregation projects that are being embarked upon in Europe and the US after some high-profile information failures.  If you have a physical data aggregation project going on in your organisation, stop right now and see if there is a better way to accomplish the end result you are looking for. 

We can wrestle with terminology all we want (CMSWatch’s Theresa Regli recently presented some great thoughts on the related topic of “enterprise search” vs “federated search”), as long as we all agree that the true benefit of this technology is to locate and leverage information where it resides.

04: 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!

05: 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.

06: Solcara and ISYS Partner on SolSearch

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.