25.07.2018 | News These five points are important for an enterprise search solution

The amount of information available in companies in the form of data, documents and any text is constantly increasing. An enterprise search solution - a special software for company-wide search - can lead employees through this growing data jungle quickly and purposefully to the relevant information. In IntraFind's opinion, however, it must meet a number of key requirements:

1. Modern Technology Stack

The solution should have a comprehensive repertoire of modern technologies. These include basic methods such as an arbitrarily scalable full-text search, but also high-end artificial intelligence methods such as machine learning, advanced text comprehension methods or graph databases. Then the software is able to understand natural language search queries, recognize proper names, extract relations between these entities, link content intelligently and show connections through knowledge graphs. It can guide users through their research processes with automatically generated correlating terms and act proactively - for example by informing a user about new information on his defined areas of interest or by deriving recommendations from requests already made by other users from the same department or department.

2. Wide connector set

If the enterprise search solution offers a large selection of standard connectors, the required data sources can be easily connected and indexed. These connectors should cover cloud-based file sharing services, file, database, e-mail, content management and ERP systems as well as wikis, collaboration platforms and company portals, but also external content such as standard, technical literature or patent databases. It makes no difference whether these sources are on your own servers, in the cloud or on DeepWeb and whether they are structured or unstructured data.

3. Efficient rights management

Not every user may and should see all information that is available in the company and that matches his or her search query. The rights-tested search must be considered a central paradigm. Therefore, an enterprise search solution should be able to demonstrate powerful rights and role management. If the rights from indexing and search to display in the interface are taken into account throughout, it is ensured that all users are only shown the data in their hit lists for which they also have authorization.

4. Comprehensive integration possibilities

The solution should also have special functions and interfaces that allow the search or components thereof to be integrated quickly and easily into existing applications - be it collaboration platforms, e-mail systems, wikis or the intranet. Ready-to-use plug-ins for SharePoint, Confluence or Outlook, for example, give users the freedom to decide for themselves from which applications they want to access the entire knowledge pool.

5. Customizable hit lists

Companies should be able to set up targeted searches for the individual requirements of individual employees or employee groups. This can be realized with the help of search profiles. The searches can then be restricted per profile by any filter queries to the data sources and document types actually required from the outset, and the relevance and sequence of hits can be set according to criteria such as click frequency. But also age, language, origin or format of a document can be used as relevance parameters.

"When selecting a suitable enterprise search solution, not only the system itself but also its provider must be closely scrutinized", says Franz Kögl, CEO of IntraFind in Munich. "Of course, the US-American global players with their well-known brands make an impression for the time being. However, companies should ask themselves whether they are perhaps better off with a medium-sized German provider. A one-stop shop for development and support in your native language, flexible and quick to meet your individual needs, and ensuring compliance with European data protection regulations".