Enterprise Search News & Articles

Ektron has announced that it now uses FAST Search Server for more than a search engine. It's now Ektron's answer to automating the creation of personalized content for your website.

You may have noticed an artificial split between where search engines end and information management begins. With the launch of Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine 3.0 (AIE 3.0) disparate content and data is reorganized and unified so it can be found and used to reframe and rethink business challenges and processes.

Today was the second and final day of Lucid Imagination’s annual Lucene love fest, Apache Lucene EuroCon, in Barcelona, Spain. The information exchange, networking and new ideas continued to flow in sessions, halls and over the free wine at lunch.

Open source adoption is rising in the enterprise. However, lack of commercial support and enterprise capabilities like monitoring still holds back some IT organizations. Companies like Lucid Imagination offer a middle ground, and it seems to be working.

While most of North America was fast asleep, Lucid Imagination kicked-off the first sessions its annual European conference, Apache Lucence EuroCon. Hundreds of attendees have converged in Barcelona, Spain to learn from Solr experts, compare notes with peers and maybe find a little fun outside of the search conference hours.

For the last few months I have been working on a project for the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (an agency of the European Commission) to prepare a techno-economic assessment of the enterprise search industry and market in Europe. I’m not in a position to disclose the outcomes of the project, but in the course of the research I did examine how organizations went about selecting an enterprise search solution, and looked at the websites of around 60 vendors. At the same time I was working on an intranet strategy project for a European company with over 40,000 employees world-wide and no enterprise search capability! In this column I’ve summarized some of my conclusions from these two projects.

Yesterday was the final day of the SharePoint conference. I chose to attend a morning session lead by Jeff Fried, CTO & VP of Engineering at BA Insight and Guy Mounier, Co-Founder & CEO of BA Insight. This session is a vendor-sponsored session, which means that the vendors are free to discuss their specific products and tools. I have worked in the past with previous versions of BA Insight and I was curious to see what they had in mind for working with Office 365.

The only thing that is clear about the HP acquisition of Autonomy deal at the moment is that it was concluded, after the U$ 10.24 billion deal was finally given the green light by 87% of Autonomy’s shareholders.

Lucid Imagination has announced the latest version of its commercially supported Lucene/Solr distribution, LucidWorks Platform 2.0. The release is squarely focused on putting open-source search inside the enterprise, and despite what you may have heard, Lucid Imagination wants to make it clear it is not an enterprise search vendor.

Forrester has published its latest assessment of the enterprise search market. The study assesses twelve vendors, surprisingly none open-source, and finds the most popular players are getting more competition – especially in specialized capabilities.

Search is an integral component of any enterprise content management system. Whether you run content mainly for external clients, or as an internal knowledge base, finding the right information at the right time will usually spell the difference between success and difficulty in search -- hence the importance of an up-to-date enterprise search engine. The Apache Lucene Project Management Committee has announced the latest Lucene/Solr release, which will ensure searches are on the mark, with optimized indexing and search, as well as bug fixes.

The emergence of Google and other web search engines has made search pervasive. It has created a generation of users that expect to locate information at work as easily as they can at home online. But, often that is not the reality. Implement a tool to find stuff. How difficult could that possibly be? Ask anyone that has ever implemented anything but the simplest search solution, and they’ll likely agree -- pretty freaking hard.

Here are a few things to avoid to not make your enterprise search implementation even harder.

HP's third quarter earnings release confirms the offer to acquire information management software vendor Autonomy. As CMSWire readers know, Autonomy is also the proud owner of the assets once known as Interwoven. This makes for yet another exciting purchase in our sector, most recently following Oracle's acquisition of Fatwire Software.

Organizations are investing heavily in enterprise search and information accessibility, but a surprising number have no understanding of their users’ search behavior. We recently sat down with Otis Gospodnetić, founder of Sematext (news, site) and co-author of the book Lucene in Action. Otis shared some key lessons learned via the emerging discipline of Search Analtyics.

For companies that have been lured into a false sense of security by using enterprise search tools to comb through their growing repositories of online data, Clearwell says, not so fast. The e-Discovery vendor -- recently bought by Symantec -- has announced a few key enhancements to its identification and collection module designed to bring the next generation of targeted collection to e-Discovery.