ITI's Enterprise Search Center is pleased to announce that we have launched our electronic newsletter, Enterprise Search Xtra. If you are already signed up to receive it, a copy has been sent to the e-mail address you provided. Please encourage your colleagues to sign up for the newsletter, too, by forwarding a copy on to them or referring them to the Web site (http://www.enterprisesearchcenter.com), where they can sign up for an individual subscription. The newsletter, like the center, is free.

Vivisimo and exalead have joined the ESCenter's demo space. Take the opportunity to test drive the search solution of your choice. Our other featured demos include Coveo, ISYS, MondoSoft, NorthernLight, Synomia, and Thunderstone. Follow the Demo Center links on the ESCenter home page to see the demos.

Research Reports

Announcement from CMS Watch

The Enterprise Search Report by CMS Watch

Now Available on the Enterprise Search Center! 

To purchase a copy from this site, click on the Research Reports tab.

Find out how enterprise search tools *really* work

The Enterprise Search Report will help your enterprise make informed search technology strategies and buying decisions.

Published by the same trusted team that has been providing vendor-neutral technology evaluations for the past 5 years, the report provides a comprehensive overview of search solution providers and best practices. The bulk of the report entails comparative evaluations--each 10 to 20 pages long--one for each of 28 enterprise search offerings.

The Enterprise Search Report can help your team

* Save time in the selection process

* Create an effective vendor shortlist

* Avoid selecting the wrong product

* Budget more accurately

* Avoid painful setbacks

What's inside

Now available in its 3rd edition, the 500-page report addresses several essential issues for an enterprise investigating search solutions, including:

* Practical product selection roadmaps for large and small enterprises;

* Sample ROI analyses including a detailed examination of total costs of ownership and sample search project budgets;

* Answers to the 50 most commonly asked enterprise search questions;

* Comprehensive review of major players' approaches, including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Google, Autonomy/Verity, IBM, FAST, Endeca, and 20 others.

Like other CMS Watch offerings, the Enterprise Search Report does not rank "best" vendors, but instead details the strengths and weaknesses of the various players, identifies their suitability for different use cases, and isolates vendor tendencies that may influence long-term product roadmaps.

The report is ideal for those who are looking to develop a business-driven enterprise search strategy, or who are considering selecting a search product and need unbiased technical assessments, or who simply need a comprehensive guide to this confusing, fast-changing landscape.

List of vendors evaluated: IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Autonomy, Convera, FAST Search & Transfer, Hummingbird, OpenText, Google, Thunderstone, Coveo (formerly Copernic), dtSearch, GoDaddy (formerly Innerprise), Mondosoft, ISYS USA (formerly Odyssey ISYS), FunnelBack (formerly Panoptic), TeraText, YourAmigo, Blossom Software, WebSideStory (formerly Atomz), Endeca, Entopia, InQuira, Recommind, Siderean, and Vivisimo

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The 3rd edition of The Enterprise Search Report from CMS Watch is now available on ITI's Enterprise Search Center. 

Click on the Research Reports button to get your copy.

Featured Item of the Month

Best Practices in Enterprise Search

A Collection of White Papers

KMWorld, Supplement to the April 2006 Issue

CLICK ON ANY LINK TO DOWNLOAD ALL THE ARTICLES IN THE COLLECTION (PDF)

In Search of Search, by Andy Moore

I usually make it a rule for these interviews: No inside baseball. I'm normally much more interested in the so-called 50,000-foot view…how customers perceive their business needs and how these various KMWorld-y technologies can address them…Or how buyers organize themselves. . . 

User Driven Information Discovery, by Bjørn Olstad and Silvija Seres

The information chain is a pyramid. In past decades, information-intensive businesses profited from dropping storage costs. Computer systems offered simple. . .

The Faceted Navigation and Search Revolution, by Steve Papa, Endeca

You've likely heard the buzz by now: faceted navigation truly changes the ground rules for search and KM, and for the many related applications. . .

Accelerating Business Success with Intent-driven Search Interactions, by Mark Woollen, InQuira

In today's hyper-competitive business environment, companies work hard to differentiate themselves and provide greater value to their customers. . . .

Business Semantics Management: Empowered Enterprise Search Drives Competitive Advantage, by Jeff Dirks, SchemaLogic

For Global 5000 enterprises, the ability to optimize information management for competitive advantage will drive growth in market share. . .

Next-generation Deployment for Enterprise Search Tools, by Johannes C. Scholtes, ZyLAB

Consider the following: Throughout the course of the Enron investigation, the FBI has confiscated 12 million pages of paper documents plus terabytes of e-mail. . .

Making the Business Case for Search, by Chris Weitz, BearingPoint

The performance of any organization depends heavily on how well its people use information to make decisions and do their jobs. First, though. . .

Stalking the Smoking Gun: Top Law Firm Installs Concept Search Engine An Engenium Success Story

In the legal community, search technology has become as critical to the preparation of major lawsuits as securing witnesses and researching case law. . .

Analytics: Measuring the Impact of Search, by Ian Davies, ISYS Search Software

Quicker than you can say Sarbanes-Oxley, the enterprise search market has gone from serving a relatively quiet existence as a nice-to-have technology. . .

Adaptive Search and Resolution for Service and Support, by Mark Angel, Knova Software

If lowering costs, closing more issues at first contact, or increasing customer satisfaction are on your contact center's to-do list. . .

The "Other" Search, by Steve Kusmer, WebSideStory

When online marketers and Internet technologists talk about "search," the image of millions of shoppers, researchers and office workers typing queries. . .

Why Does Geography Matter in Enterprise Search? by Bill Fisher, MetaCarta

While browsing through various historical maps featured in the "American Treasures" collection at the Library of Congress the other day, one thing became very evident. . .

Distributed Search Technology, by Ken Bubeck, Open Text

The need for fast, accurate search and retrieval continues to be a significant factor in driving software sales for Fortune 1,000 companies and their employees. . .

Beyond Search Results—Get the Whole Picture and Reap the Rewards, by Bob Tennant, Recommind

Search engines today are built with an innately document-centric view of the world. This is hardly surprising, given how the technology has evolved, but it is often not the paradigm best utilized for providing an answer to a user's search request. . .

Managing Content for Added Value, by Laurent Simoneau, Coveo

There are many drivers that require companies to manage knowledge more effectively— the incredible rate at which electronic data is reproduced and stored. . .

To get your free PDF of all these White Papers, click on the White Papers tab on the top navigation bar.

CallinSearch (CiS), a joint venture of BlueNow, a Netherlands-based software development provider and PhoneRanger, a US market development firm that offers hardware and software solutions for the convergence of ecommerce, VoIP and rich media, has released the public beta version of its Firefox plug-in for general distribution. With the release, users of the Firefox browser can use the search tools from CiS that have been available only on Internet Explorer browsers. The plugin can be downloaded at the download page. Plugins for Internet Explorer and Flock are also available at that location. The Firefox plugin is also in the mozilla.org extensions directory.

CiS is a small plug-in that allows searchers using Google, MSN, or Yahoo search engines to view content directly within search results. CiS users can see links to VoIP click to call, click to chat, RSS feeds including podcasts and blogs, streaming media, and photo streams. CiS allows web publishers and advertisers to deliver their content to searchers during search. With a single click a searcher can call an ecommerce website with Skype or Helpcaster, check out a podcast or blog, view a product demo video or listen to a streaming radio station--right from within search results. Any RSS feed will display with one click from search results directly to a Feedburner landing page or the CiS Flash blog reader/podcast player. By registering their website with CiS, website owners can display targeted messages using RSS and rich media tools directly in search results. Website owners can register with CiS at the register page.

(www.callinsearch.com)

Teragram, a provider of multilingual natural language processing technologies, has announced the launch of Direct Answers for the Enterprise, a technology that searches documents within corporations to break down users' queries and find answers to their questions. Direct Answers for the Enterprise scans structured databases like Excel spreadsheets and sales lead databases, as well as semi- and unstructured documents like text-based reports and web pages, to provide answers derived from multiple sources of information.

Teragram's Direct Answers integrates with existing search software and does not require hardware installation. Features of Direct Answers, includes: Intelligent multi-lingual query processing, which parses user questions into search terms; Federation, which aggregates search results from multiple sources controlled by the enterprise (including other search engines) for comprehensive answers; Scalability, which can accommodate unlimited amounts of information, dependent on server capacity; and Speed, which scans up to 50 queries per second.

(www.teragram.com)

Inxight Software, a provider of enterprise software solutions for information discovery, has announced the general availability of Inxight Categorizer 5.0, a hybrid categorization engine. Inxight Categorizer provides automated techniques and editorial controls for accuracy. A Workbench allows developers to create and test taxonomies. Inxight Categorizer can also leverage third-party and industry-standard taxonomies. Available as a component within the Inxight SmartDiscovery Extraction Server (SDX) platform, Categorizer works in concert with Inxight's ThingFinder extraction and Summarizer modules to "read" and structure unstructured text in more than 30 languages.

Using the new, intuitive Categorizer workbench, categories can be defined manually (rules only), with learn-by-example only, or using both techniques together. The Workbench provides a set of testing tools for taxonomy editors to define, maintain, and test their taxonomies before deployment on a SmartDiscovery server. It also includes other new features, including an interface to assign training documents, a rule-writing helper, and a testing environment for the creation of truth sets and accuracy reporting. Inxight Categorizer is generally available.

(www.inxight.com)  

X1 Technologies has announced expanded platform support for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint through new content connectors, which allow companies to leverage their Microsoft systems through secure, unified search. With the X1 Enterprise Platform, users can search, preview and take action on critical Exchange, SharePoint and Office documents, through a single, secure enterprise desktop search interface. Users do not need to know where the data is stored in order to preview, print or take other action on the search results.

X1 has also introduced a free, secure desktop search solution for the enterprise. The X1 Enterprise Client gives business users comprehensive desktop search capabilities without putting enterprise assets at risk. Free of charge to their organizations, business users can increase productivity by searching desktop e-mail, calendars and documents quickly and easily, while IT managers can feel comfortable that network assets are secure.

The company says the free X1 Enterprise Client is the first desktop search product designed specifically for enterprise use. It adds that by disabling features that can put corporate data at risk and adversely affect exchange and network performance, it has delivered the first desktop search product that is safe for deployment on corporate networks.

X1 has also announced an industry resource center to help IT professionals evaluate and deploy enterprise desktop search solutions. The center offers a wide range of information and tools including white papers, articles, industry research and competitive offerings. The company will also offer a free enterprise desktop search evaluation kit with comprehensive tools for IT pilots and deployments. The evaluation kit will include deployment guides and best practices frameworks along with full support for free enterprisewide deployment.

The Enterprise Desktop Resource Center is available at her. The Enterprise Desktop Search Evaluation Kit is available here.

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) has released InStream for Data Classification, which the company describes as an OEM-specific solution that enables storage system, information management and data protection vendors to develop solutions that classify and make searchable 100 percent of available content, both structured and unstructured.

FAST says its new offering is designed for rapid, low-risk and high-capability integration and limitless scaling, giving OEMs the ability to offer their customers a contextual understanding of all active and archived data by indexing and analyzing metadata, text, terms and concepts and tying this information together with enterprise business processes. FAST also believes effective embedded data classification can turn storage systems from cost centers into a means of enabling productive processes such as compliance or litigation support.

Symphony Technology Group has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Hummingbird in an all-cash transaction valued at $26.75 per share, or approximately $465 million.

In other Hummingbird news, its subsidiary RedDot has introduced Content Management Server (CMS) 7.0 and LiveServer 2.5. RedDot reports CMS and LiveServer allow business users to manage, edit, share, reuse and control the delivery of content to targeted audiences through corporate Web sites, intranets and extranets. The new version of RedDot CMS was developed on the .Net framework and provides customers with greater site management functionality. RedDot CMS 7.0 now features:

• an advanced archiving function--site managers can purge content from their Web sites, portals, extranets and intranets while complying with laws and guidelines on data storage; and
• analysis tools--enable users to instantly generate reports demonstrating how individual assets are being used throughout the Web site.

RedDot says CMS 7.0 with LiveServer 2.5's content delivery platform is the first personalization and integration platform offered specifically for the midmarket.