Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

COMMENTARY Delivering on the Promise of Enterprise Search 10 ISSUES TO CONSIDER BY BRIAN DIRKING w hen an organization identifies the need for enterprise search, there are myriad questions it must answer. It is vital to identify the most important criteria for your organization, as they will guide your evaluation and eventual implementation of enterprise search. As a starting point, here are 10 issues every organization must consider to help ensure that its investment in a search solution delivers on its promise: 1. Security and Privacy Like it or not, most companies are lax about information security. Confidential content is often shared. The fact that more information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is known as “security through obscurity.” In other words, the information usually is not found because no one bothers to navigate through the directory structure and open each document. But once this information is indexed with a search tool, it is easily available through causal searches. Implementing enterprise search without first securing content can lead to unwanted exposure of an organization’s intellectual property or confidential employee information. Before you turn an indexing engine loose on your information, make sure you verify what information will be exposed, and establish the proper security around private content. (In many jurisdictions, legislation has made privacy breaches subject to sanction.) 2. Policy and Compliance An issue related to security is ensuring that access to content is consistent with your company’s policies. A well-designed enterprise search provides managers with the tools to separate public data—accessible to anyone inside the firewall—from private data that only named users can access. By implementing a regular sweep for sensitive content, enterprise search can tell quickly if critical content about sales or acquisitions is being made accessible in unsecured locations. Enterprise search can also ensure that enterprise resources are not being used to store inappropriate or unlicensed content. 3. Access Control Enterprise search offers powerful capabilities to authorized users, so you need to control user access and ensure that search users authenticate before using the full power of the system. Query-time authentication is one tool that can manage access control. This technique lets the search tool double-check a user’s access to each result before providing the search results. While this technique uses additional processing power, user authorization is dynamically updated. 4. Comprehensiveness For search to be effective, it must be comprehensive. Your organization may have a large intranet that needs to be indexed or a series of shared file servers. But the information individuals seek may also reside in content repositories, email systems, or business applications. Structured data systems and applications can also be vital information sets to enable you to get a full picture of your enterprise information. These systems have specific security and metadata configurations that must be represented in your index. An advanced understanding of the metadata for each application to be indexed will enable the search engine to determine the relevance of the searched content to the query, and it will enable the relevance of the results from that repository to be compared to the relevance from other repositories. This will ensure that the search results are not only comprehensive, but also that they are optimized for relevance. 5. Relevant Results The majority of the time, users know that what they are looking for exists, and they expect it to be one of the first 22 ENTERPRISE SEARCH SOURCEBOOK 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Publisher’s Note Findings and Figures Why Enterprise Search Will Never Be Google-y Searching for Search Usability Your Users Are Talking to You What’s Your Search Story? Search Is Dead—Now What? Delivering on the Promise of Enterprise Search Taming Multiple Search Engines in Your Organization Enterprise Search: Trends for 2008 Enterprise Search Seen From the Inside Open Source Search: Elixir or Poison? Avoiding the Big Mistakes in Search Semantic Search Takes Root in the Enterprise E-Discovery Essentials: The Rules You Need to Know SharePoint Search: An Enterprise Contender? Integrating Security Into Your Enterprise Search Infrastructure Engineering a Better Search Infrastructure Letting End Users Ask the Questions, Stat! The Power of Knowledge Legal Research Using Enterprise Search: A Developer’s View From Treading Water to Full Steam Ahead Pulling Out All the Stops With Midas A Natural Search Solution An Incremental Approach to Improving Enterprise Search The Enterprise Search Sourcebook Showcase Directory Index to Advertisers and Companies Mentioned

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