Enterprise search is the practice of making content from one or more enterprise-type sources, such as databases and intranets, searchable from within the organization. Enterprise search systems index data and documents from a variety of sources, such as content management systems, electronic file systems, and document management systems. Enterprise search systems can integrate structured and unstructured content in their collections, and display it with a taxonomy and other metadata to filter the search. Enterprise search systems typically use access controls to enforce security policies.
Implementing enterprise search requires expertise in content ingestion, which is gathering information from the target sources using various types of connectors. The connector typically polls the source at certain intervals to look for new, updated or deleted content. Content within the databases can be converted to plain text and normalized in various ways to improve recall or precision. These may include stemming, lemmatization, synonym expansion, entity extraction, or part of speech tagging.
Iknow helps organizations to realize the value of their content, with deep expertise in all aspects of enterprise search systems. These include initial requirements gathering, design of standards for metadata, creation of facets and taxonomies, clustering and summarizing, the addition of text analysis for entity extraction and the handling of unstructured data, system deployment and customization. Iknow has experience with all sizes of enterprise search projects, from designing portals for large companies to the understanding of small companies’ need for security and speed.
Enterprise search provides rapid access to information. Investments in enterprise search increase employee productivity, by reducing the time they spend looking for information, and increase the quality and speed of business decision making. Iknow understands how best to integrate the system with other enterprise software such as business intelligence programs, to gather and distribute data, and taxonomy and metadata management systems, to filter content. Well-built enterprise search systems improve the speed and accuracy for finding the right data and content.
Product Landscape
The enterprise search product landscape is complex and includes the following products. Iknow can help you evaluate and select the right software product to help you achieve your business objectives.