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New York, NY June 03, 2005

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The Benefits of Enterprise Search

contributed by Roberto Ortega

Your business runs on the talent and know-how of your people. That is why answers to most of your business’s pressing questions can be found hidden in the wealth of intellectual capital spread across your enterprise. They are locked away in your documents, content management systems, email system, web servers, and in application databases such as inventory and customer relationship management.

Benefits of Enterprise Search

The ability to conveniently search and bring together complete answers creates business opportunities that would be otherwise missed. Existing business cycles are accelerated by reusing past experience. Premier understands the benefits of enterprise search. With our experience with search systems, document management systems, email systems, and other enterprise systems, Premier is well prepared for the planning, design and implementation of these knowledge management solutions for your firm.

MindServer

Premier has partnered with Recommind, a leading provider of enterprise search, to provide its clients with the best solution available. Recommind recognizes the value of intellectual capital and has developed industry leading technology that captures meaning from text information to present users with documents and information that is truly more relevant. The MindServer platform automatically identifies the concepts that describe a document, regardless of the language or subject.

No training of agents or manual intervention is necessary for MindServer.

Because MindServer extracts concepts from text on its own, no training or manual intervention is needed to make it useful, resulting in lower deployment and maintenance effort and expense. MindServer can incorporate both implicit and explicit user information to identify communities of users based on interest patterns. As a result, Recommind's core technology can provide automated personalized information retrieval, recommendation of information, and identification of experts.

If additional information structures exist, Recommind's technology can incorporate and leverage the existing work done within an enterprise. Existing information structures such as taxonomies, metadata, controlled vocabularies, and lexicons can be used to provide additional information for Recommind's core technology platform.

MindServer is ideally suited to tackle the information search and retrieval challenges presented in these industries:

  • Law Firms
  • Federal Government
  • Media/Publishing
  • Life Sciences

MindServer has several core advantages

Faster Searches – Access information from multiple sources using a single standalone search page – or integrate search interface into an existing portal or intranet.

More Relevant Results – View the best matches from all sources ranked by relevance and grouped by category such as author, office, or practice area.

Comprehensive Access – Access information stored across practices, in any office around the world, and in any source including document management systems, intranets, websites, and databases.

Concept-based Searching – MindServer automatically indexes text from multiple sources, then generates concept models that identify relationships between words and concepts, enabling relevant search results based on ideas, not specific words. As documents change or are added, MindServer incrementally indexes and identifies new concepts, providing real-time access to dynamic information.

Design Considerations

When designing an installation of MindServer, several considerations come into play. The main issues in non-functional requirements are interoperability, security, and scalability. Premier is skilled at deploying all of the connectors available for MindServer. Clients may choose to connect to their iManage, PCDOCS, Exchange, web, Lotus Domino, KVault, databases and file stores. Web sources may be internal and external web sites. The MindServer connectors also extract security information to enforce the same security model in the search engine as exists in the source system and restrict users to only the information to which they have access. With respect to scalability, Premier’s experience deploying large multi-national application systems provides the edge in ensuring the successful implementation and future growth of your enterprise search system. MindServer itself is scalable to 100 million documents and millions of users.

Functional requirements usually revolve around taxonomies and classification. Context and classification gives information greater value. Premier can configure automatic classification using data from your document management systems, from databases, or from information gathered from the documents themselves. This classification aids the end-users when browsing through the results of a query, allowing them to intuitively narrow their search to a particular type of information. It also aids in giving the user a big-picture of the categories associated with their topic. Premier will also work with a client on the proper presentation of these taxonomies to give users both flexibility and simplicity when using the system.

Case Study

An illustration of one of our more interesting projects involves eight data sources of four different types. As an application for a major law firm, we installed a nation-wide system that indexes five iManage document stores, the firm’s Microsoft Exchange Public Folders, an internal deals transaction database, and even the SEC web site.

The iManage stores provide useful navigational meta-data in the form of client and matter information for documents as well as highly reliable author information. In this way, searches performed for a topic such as workers compensation would include results that have items with relevancy scores that are increased due to an association with workers compensation matters and even due to association with attorneys that work with workers compensation. This means that users are more likely to find the type of information that is intuitively useful in their vast sea of information, because relationships among people and topics cause some documents to appear nearer to the top than they otherwise would. Also the fact that all the data is tied into one system means that user’s may easily browse knowledge previously confined to the branch level.

The Microsoft Exchange Public Folders within the company tend to be arranged in a particular client/matter hierarchy. We are able to leverage this hierarchy to extract client and matter information of nearly the quality of the iManage store. Combined with another Premier Technology solution installed at this client that automatically creates new client and matter folders within the Public Folder structure and an Outlook add-in that simplifies the use of these, knowledge captured in mail has been leveraged in an unobtrusive way.

The SEC web that is included in the index is testimony to the fact that this site happens to be a compact and valuable information store for this client’s attorneys. Internally, there is certainly knowledge of the applicable law, but by including the external source of law in the internal search we provide a compelling tool for the attorneys. As an aside, it is interesting to note that a simple search for “SEC” produces as the most relevant result the “About the SEC” page of the SEC’s web site. This illustrates the latent intelligence in the statistical analyses that take place behind the scenes. The reason the “about” page is the most relevant is not because it mentions the word “SEC” many times, but because in that page is mentioned many of the topics that the MindServer engine has extracted from the entire web site as associated to the word SEC. A simple text searching tool would not have such intuition.

Finally, all of these data stores are indexed with security in mind. Users do not see results on information they are not privileged to see. All of this is accomplished without any additional sign-on or backend security administration.

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