When search fails to deliver to expectations, the response is usually that the software does not work. That is rarely the case. Most of the products on the market are stable and well-developed. Whether the functionality is appropriate to the requirement is a different issue, but for now assume that it is. In the majority of cases the problems lie with a shortfall in human resources and not a shortfall in technology resources.

One test of the commitment of an organization to quality enterprise search is the extent to which a search team can be identified and funded at the stage when the requirements for the search application have yet to be fully developed. Excellence in support is so important that if a full-time search manager with the appropriate expertise cannot be allocated to the search project, then the sensible route is to delay the implementation.

The minimum core search team will likely include five members, though at the outset some of these roles may be on a part-time basis. Each member of the team plays one of the following roles:

• Search (Information Discovery) Manager
• Search Technology Manager
• Information Specialist
• Search Analytics Manager
• Search Support Manager

Search (Information Discovery) Manager

This is not an IT role. Instead, it requires a very good understanding of how information is used in the business, with a particular emphasis on unstructured information. The Search Manager might have a background in business intelligence applications, but the key success factor is that he or she understands the language of the business and appreciates from personal experience the value that effective search can have on business performance. Excellent project management skills are also essential, as this is going to be a complex installa­tion and, any failure to deliver will be very visible to the majority of the work force.

Search Technology Manager

This is an IT role. The person concerned will be responsible for assessing server and network per­formance, crawling schedules, load balancing, backup, and disaster recovery. In a multinational company, this may require treading on the operations of national IT managers.

Another important responsibility of the Search Technology Manager is to manage information security, user authentication, and user permissioning. It is usually not until an enterprise search application is fired up that all sorts of "confidential" information is found lurking ons hared drives. Finally, this role should take responsibility for API management and documentation. Effective enterprise search across multiple applications will require some complex APIs, which have to be kept under review as the individual applications are upgraded or restructured.

Information Specialist 

Good search needs good, consistent metadata, and yet metadata management is not given the priority it needs in many enterprise search implementations. Ideally, the Information Specialist needs to have a background in information science or in librarianship so that he or she has a fundamental training in metadata management and in the benefits and challenges of taxonomies. This person will also have an important role to play in developing best bets and working with the Search Analytics Manager to resolve problems over acronyms and synonyms.

Search Analytics Manager

One of the critical success factors for enterprise search is the quality interpretation of the search analytics.The volume of search reports is very extensive. In one global consulting business, about 500,000 searches were being carried out each month. One of the most important tasks for the Search Analytics Manager is to work through the searches that resulted in zero hits being found. If the assumption is made that only 0.1% of searches failed to find anything, then this still represents a total of 500 searches a month, or around two each working day. Finding out why a search has failed may require some detective work and will certainly require some feedback from the search user. The Search Analytics Manager can easily become a victim of his or her own success as the volume of searches increases. The propensity for zero searches will hopefully tail off, but probably not at the same rate as the increase in search volume and in the diversity of the collections being searched.

Search Support Manager

This person acts as the user-facing member of the team, undertaking training and usability testing and providing feedback from surveyson the performance of the application. Although search applications generally claim to require only minimal training, the reality is that this is not the case, especially where federated searching is being carried out. Users may not fully appreciate the provenance of the various information repositories being searched and will need good guidance notes and suitable Help documentation on the search application. It is also important to appreciate that each year perhaps 15% of the staff will be new employees at various levels in the organization, and they will prioritize search over browse to find out what they don’t know, but need to.

Creating A Global Center of Search Excellence

Many companies are considering setting up a global Center of Search Excellence (CSE), and in principle this can help bring together staff with specialist expertise that may not be available in all business centers. Staff members in the Information Specialist and Search Analytics roles may not need to be located in the countries that they are supporting, but this is certainly not the case with the Search Support Managers.

The decision is not an easy one and needs to take into account factors such as the following:

• Where staff with the appropriate specialized skills are located
• Which operations/countries are going to present the most complex search inquiries
• The reporting line for the Search Manager
• The ability to provide real-time access to support from as many of the core geographic areas as possible

In the end the decision is more likely to be political/orga­nizational than pragmatic, and the downsides of the resulting decision need to be considered in detail and addressed.

Teams Work

Most business applications are built around processes and workflow. Finance systems are an excellent example: Search is built around a dialogue between the user and the software as each user frames a question and looks for infor­mation that he or she can trust to be relevant. Ideally, all of the relevant information that the enterprise holds can be accessed. The work of the search team is to ensure that the dialogue is a productive one by making constant adjustments to get the best from the investment in technology.

When I outlined the staff support requirements in my keynote at the 2008 Enterprise Search Summit, I suspected that many in the audience were skeptical. It was not until later in the summit that some of the case studies from successful search implementations suggested that, if anything, my proposed staffing levels were on the low side. The moral of this analysis is that if you can’t find the funding for the search team at the outset, you mightas well tell employees that they will have to continue to guess where the information lies hidden in the enterprise. Without a search team supporting it, even the best search engine will never be the brightest bulb.

About the Author

MARTIN WHITE is managing director of Intranet Focus, Ltd., a consulting company based in Horsham, U.K.

Ex Libris Group, a provider of automation solutions for academic, national, and research libraries, announced the release of version 4.3 of its MetaLib gateway and metasearch solution. Enhancements have been made to the MetaLib back-office tools, including the addition of task-based wizards that enable librarians to activate MetaLib resources, to customize the user interface, and to create linking URLs to integrate the MetaLib functionality with other applications. MetaLib end users will benefit from a tighter integration between MetaLib and the SFX OpenURL-compliant link server, also from Ex Libris. From a list of search results, users will now be able to link directly to the full text of articles in peer-reviewed sources when they are available.

(www.exlibrisgroup.com)

Google has agreed to pay plaintiffs in the AdWords lawsuit $20 million, according to reports. Google also agreed to pay the plaintiff's lawyers more than $5 million. The class-action lawsuit was filed in 2005 by two small business advertisers, CLRB Hanson Industries, a printing company based in Minnesota, and New Jersey resident, Howard Stern.

Google also announced it is discontinuing its Video AdSense program. By the end of April, publishers will no longer be able to sign up for the revenue-sharing service, and those with AdSense videos embedded on their page will have their videos replaced. Publishers will still be able to embed YouTube videos onto their pages, but they would have to do it by going directly to the site and pulling embed code from individual videos. Under the current AdSense program, publishers sign up through a dashboard provided by Google where they can choose what videos to be included in their AdSense player. According to a Google blog, this did not work well enough.

(www.google.com)

Readex, a division of NewsBank, announced the launch of American Newspaper Archives, an expanding online collection that will offer access to major U.S. newspapers. A part of America’s Historical Newspapers, the Archives will provide users with fully searchable digital editions of historically significant and regionally diverse publications from the 19th century through the 1990s. American Newspaper Archives will initially feature nine papers and their relevant predecessors. American Newspaper Archives will provide regional perspectives and reporting on conflicts from the War of 1812 to the Gulf War; movements ranging from women’s suffrage to civil rights; scientific and medical advances; noteworthy people; natural disasters; and political campaigns. Each title is available individually, and all are cross-searchable via an integrated interface that allows users to view, magnify, print, and save digital page images.

(www.readex.com)

The state of Minnesota is working with an enterprise search provider to improve its Web sites and to develop a new Web hosting service for state agencies. The Minnesota Office of Enterprise Technology’s Web site will integrate Vivisimo’s Velocity Search Platform into a new content management system.

The project will meld the capabilities of both solutions with the goals of: indexing nearly a million pages of state content, providing federated search of external Web sites, and making the information available through a single search box for public facing sites and on intranet and extranets for state employees and the public.

A current project in the multipronged effort, called License Minnesota, will provide a single point of access for nearly 600 licenses issued by about 50 state agencies. With the help of Velocity’s search and discovery tools, the new site will offer a better user experience by replacing an older site that required residents to call or write for license applications.

"Our new License Minnesota Web site will take e-licensing up a level so that, as we roll this out, our citizens will be able to apply for or renew all licenses issued by all state agencies from one portal," says Eileen Quam, information architect for the state’s Office of Enterprise Technology.

Quam works with the state agencies on taxonomies to help categorize information on their Web sites. The goal is to offer departments options that range from having the Office of Enterprise Technology host the site to a more decentralized model, in which an agency manages its site more closely and customizes search parameters for its site, receiving technical expertise from the Office of Enterprise Technology. "Designing the look of the user interface and making choices about results rankings and relevancy—those are choices that belong under the agency and not in our office," Quam says.

In a recent press release, Vivisimo reports that Minnesota chose its solution because of its flexible user interface and easy configuration.

Coveo and Bell Mobility have partnered to develop a new search and access tool called Enterprise Search from Bell.

The new offering is powered by Coveo and provides business clients comprehensive search capability on their BlackBerry smartphones. Further, Enterprise Search from Bell provides business users with the ability to securely search and retrieve any information within their Microsoft Exchange server accounts, including e-mails, attachment content, calendars, tasks and contacts via their BlackBerry devices across Canada.

With this capability, users can access the precise information they need within seconds, when they need it, without having to know where the document was previously stored.

Xerox has announced the DocuShare Virtual Filing System, which has been designed to dramatically reduce the need for physical filing cabinets while providing users with immediate access to the information they require.

Xerox explains that the system includes a document storage assessment, scanning technology, software, set up and user training. Once paper archives are uploaded into the virtual filing system’s drawers, documents can be searched by name, category and type.

Xerox has also introduced DocuShare 6.5, an upgrade to its existing version. DocuShare 6.5 can store more than 50 million documents, perform search queries within seconds and supports intake of up to 1 million imaged documents per day. DocuShare 6.5 is also the software in the Virtual Filing System package, the company reports.

The DocuShare Virtual Filing System will be sold in North America through Xerox direct sales starting in June. Select, certified partners will begin to sell the package in July.

DocuShare 6.5 is currently available on Windows platforms through Xerox direct sales and resellers in North America. It will be available worldwide and on other platforms beginning in June. Customers on a maintenance contract will receive a free upgrade to DocuShare 6.5.

Google is now allowing advertisers to stream Tweets on its AdSense network, according to reports. Clicking on the tweet takes the visitor to the company’s Twitter feed. The first advertiser to sign up for the service is Intuit’s TurboTax. The feature is still in testing mode.

(www.google.com, www.twitter.com)

Bell Mobility and Coveo, a provider of information access and search solutions for the enterprise, announced a search and access tool called Enterprise Search from Bell. Powered by Coveo’s search and index technology, Enterprise Search from Bell offers business clients search capability on their BlackBerry smartphones, including full mobile access to information contained within their Microsoft Exchange server accounts and across their entire corporate IT systems. Enterprise Search from Bell provides business users with the ability to search and retrieve any information within their Microsoft Exchange server accounts, including emails, attachments content, calendars, tasks and contacts via their BlackBerry devices.

(www.bell.ca, www.coveo.com)

Google and Microsoft have added new health partners. Google has teamed with CVS pharmacy, allowing customers to transfer their prescription history to an online Google account. Microsoft has said it will integrate HealthVault platform with Amalga, an enterprise data aggregation platform that enables hospitals to unlock patient data stored in a wide range of systems.

(www.microsoft.com, www.google.com)

DocuLex and dtSearch have joined forces to provide an e-mail archiving extension to DocuLex’s Archive Studio product line. DocuLex’s WebSearch component with embedded dtSearch Engine can now pull inbound and outbound e-mail from a Microsoft Exchange Journal mailbox, further expanding the product suite’s broad document management and archival capabilities, says DocuLex.

The company adds Archive Studio provides a wide range of highly scalable capabilities, from file capture to collaboration, workflow, enterprisewide content management, document management compliance, failover continuity and life cycle policy management. Organizations can direct the flow of documents from capture through policy-based destruction.

DocuLex WebSearch for Archive Studio offers a variety of collaboration and organizational features. Active Directory integration enables heightened security and user permission access and tracking. WebSearch also serves as an offsite document archival/disaster recovery facilitator, with advanced public key infrastructure (PKI) encryption and digital signature security.

dtSearch says its products can index over a terabyte of data in a single index, as well as create and instantly search an unlimited number of indexes. The software offers more than two dozen search options, including Unicode support covering hundreds of international languages. Proprietary file format support provides for highlighting hits in all popular file types. A built-in spider supports searching of local and remote, public and secure, dynamic and static Web data, with WYSIWYG hit-highlighted display of Web-ready data. The dtSearch engine API supports .NET, Java, C++, SQL, etc., including native 64-bit Windows/Linux support.

Autonomy reports iManage WorkSite (previously known as Interwoven WorkSite) is now powered by Autonomy’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL). The move falls on the heels of the third integration of IDOL into both the Interwoven TeamSite and iManage Universal Search solutions. Autonomy announced the completion of its acquisition of Interwoven on March 17.

Autonomy reports that with IDOL as the core search technology for WorkSite, Autonomy iManage’s 1,400 law firm clients will benefit from the same enterprise search solution in use by more than 20,000 corporate customers. WorkSite customers can now also leverage IDOL’s conceptual search and automatic classification capabilities with support of more than 1,000 file types and over 100 languages, maximizing the utility of their content and improving search performance and relevancy, says Autonomy. The company further claims IDOL builds upon the strong foundation of iManage’s document, e-mail and records management. Law firms now have a common search platform across WorkSite and Autonomy’s enterprise archiving, legal hold, EDD processing, review and production solutions.

Autonomy iManage’s WorkSite 8.4 is available now. The product is available at no additional cost to current maintenance customers.

A series of new add-on Autonomy iManage modules leveraging the additional capabilities of IDOL, including audio, video and phone call search, legal hold and expert profiling, will be released over the coming months and available for an additional cost.

Gen-9, Inc. announced the release of StratoVista - Google Edition v1.0. StratoVista is an internet centric, personal information management (PIM) application. It provides users with the ability to use web-based services in lieu of the functions provided by an enterprise email client/server solution such as Microsoft Outlook/Exchange Server. StratoVista is designed to operate as an independent personal information manager, as an internet mail client, or in conjunction with Google Web Services. StratoVista runs on the user's computer and includes a database that permits the local storage of data. Features include: the email download controller and the topic creation feature.

(www.stratovista.com)

EContent magazine contributing editor Ron Miller has released a new ebook, Unlock the Power of Enterprise Search. The free ebook (no registration required) is a collection of Miller's articles on a variety of enterprise search related topics including the state of the market, mutlimedia search, semantic search, and much more. The ebook also features an introduction by well known search industry blogger Daniel Tunkelang, chief scientist and co-founder of Endeca. The book is available in both PDF and a digital magazine editions.
(http://byronmiller.typepad.com/byronmiller/unlock-the-power-of-enterprise-search-ebook.html)