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Adding Enterprise Search Technology To Your Knowledge Management
By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-01-14
I want to share this post I did that first appeared in AppGap to make you aware of a free search tool for those in a Microsoft environment. Coveo offers enterprise search technology including their enterprise search modules and search-based applications for such functions as call centers and litigation & compliance. It has now launched a free, entry-level enterprise search solution, Coveo Expresso™ Beta. Coveo's new offering provides a basic, but robust, set of search functionality, at no cost, for up to 50 users, 1M desktop files and email items and 100,000 Intranet documents.
Coveo's new offering provides a basic, but robust, set of search functionality, at no cost, for up to 50 users, 1M desktop files and email items and 100,000 Intranet documents. I recently spoke with Louis Tetu, executive chairman, Laurent Simoneau, CEO, and Diane Berry, VP Marketing & Communication, about this new offering.
We first discussed the top two of their three levels of offerings to put Expresso in context. Louis describes their three tiers. At the top are enterprise search solutions that apply their search technology to specific business processes such as call centers, human resource management, knowledge management, e-commerce, and others. I am especially interested in their call center solutions, as I have tackled this issue from the knowledge base side. In these cases having good search often was a critical factor. I can certainly see the logic of making search the front end and leaving the content in place. We will discuss these solutions in more depth in a subsequent conversation.
Their enterprise search modules cover such areas as desktop search, email search, CRM search, intranet search and search through mobile devices. A subset of these modules forms the core for Expresso and they are the migration points for people who want to move beyond what the free product offers.
Next, Laurent took us on a tour of Expresso. We began with the email search. You can search your own email account to find both conversations and attachments. You can also filter by facets such as document type, person, date, etc. In addition, there is an Outlook Sidebar, a search plug-in, which provides related conversations, related people, and related attachments as a side bar item. You can search any indexed content without leaving Outlook. If these results are not sufficient you can launch advanced search with guided navigation through search facets. Here is a sample email search screen below. You can see the search results in the left column and facet related information in the right column. You can search other's email account if they give you permission.
I could see the value of this capability from the start and wanted a copy for myself but they have currently focused Expresso on the Microsoft world which makes a lot of business sense as that is over 85% of the market. It works with Exchange Server, Outlook, Active Directory, Sharepoint, and related products. You can get Coveo's capability for other platforms including the Mac environment, where I work, and Lotus Notes through their advanced search modules.
With the Outlook Sidebar shown below you can select a person and see all the conversations with this person, as well as attachments. They are sorted by date. As I mentioned, if you want to move from browsing these lists, you can still bring up the search box.
Next, we covered the desktop search that looks at all the content on your computer. Unlike some search engines this tool does not actually process its searches on your computer, taking up processing power. All of the content on your machine is pushed to a server and searched at the server level. You can exclude content from this process for privacy and/or security purposes. Security can be at the file level so you have granular control over what occurs. Below is a sample file search.
You can also search your company's intranet. These searches can be ordered by relevance or date. The relevance factor is available on most search types. The relevance of a document is determined by a mix of 75 factors. Your administrator can set weights on these factors such as credibility of author, popularity of file, etc. A sample set of intranet results is shown below. Again you see the results in the left column and facet related information in the right column such as document type and author. The type of facets offered varies by what type of search you are conducting.
We also looked at a people focused search. You can pull information from Outlook, Exchange Server, and Active Directory. If you are using Salesforce.com you can also pull this content into the search process. You can even narrow the search to a subset of your Salesforce.com data such as a particular pipeline, though not in the free version, currently.
There is an administrator dashboard that shows you how much of the free capacity you have utilized (e.g., users, files, etc.) and it conveys how to get more capacity if needed. I think this free offering is an excellent sales tactic. Since you access this product in a self-service mode, the cost of sales is virtually zero.
There is only upside to getting it in the hands of people who will likely want the additional features and capabilities available at the next tier. At the same time there is enough functionality at the basic level for users to see the value. These users are also not taking a risk as there is no time limit to the free offer so they can continue to make use of the tool and their investment in understanding it even if they do not move to the next level. I am impressed with what they are doing. Others seem to feel the same way as they recently received $8.2 million in Series B funding led by BDC Venture Capital.
Coveo is based in Quebec City, one of my favorite places in this world. I have been there many times as it is driving distance of Boston. Louis very kindly gave me an excellent collection of great local restaurants to add to my list. I will start trying them the next time I can get up there.
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About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.
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