Serchinform Software Information Technologies
Information technologies have long settled in the corporate sector. It"s a rare thing for the company not to have a well-organized local network and various specialized software that would provide a proper control of information flow, document storing and information structuring with convenient reports about the work process.
Information Diversity
Any company"s information can be roughly divided into three types depending on its "virtual"/ physical location and its use in the work process. Starting with files from the user disk (plus electronic mail and logs of various instant messaging programs, like ICQ or MSN Messenger) and on to the corporate information, the documents of different file types & electronic mail (MS Exchange, for instance), or a file information archive on the company server. And finally - the data in various information systems: DMS, PDM, CRM, etc. This may include everything from the system objects found in a file archive or in the database like MS SQL to "external" electronic messages and documents used in the work of the system.
Search?
Considering such a vast variety of information, the conclusion follows that the problem of information search has lately become that of high priority. Common problems with information search are physical data volume, lack of proper organization of data and a vast variety of file types containing the needed data. As a result the demand for perfect search and information processing tools keeps growing. However besides search management (whether it"s a file archive, corporate electronic mail or document management system), there is quite a number of other requirements that the corporate software has to comply with. This, obviously, includes working with local networks, which implies client-server software architecture; compliance with information security policies and user access management; as well as working not instead of some already installed system, but rather with it, without violating previously set business processes. Let us look more carefully at these requirements.
Critical requirements to the corporate software
Ability to work with the local network implies client-server software architecture, flexible network policy settings, different types of operating system support, etc. One of the latest trends is having a web-interface for the client part of the corporate software - it rids of the problems of additional workstations when extending the information structure. This version may be more expensive because when using web-interface the number of workstations is unlimited. Yet the choice between web-interface and an independent client program depends solely on the needs and problems to be solved by the software being purchased.
The next critical factor of search software"s work within the company is compliance with the information security policies and access management. Any information system should be a structure with clearly defined channels of information exchange both between the users and with the "outside world." Thus any corporate software must measure up to the strict requirements of information security: user access differentiation, multi-level access to different sorts of information, authorization system and a flexible structure of the security policies adjustment depending on the client"s query.
Another factor is the feature of corporate software that lets you work with company"s previously installed software products of various types. As it has already been mentioned, the information in any organization can be stored in files both on disc or in DBMS and in various information systems (whether it"s PDM, CRM or an accounting program). That is exactly why the third feature of any information system is the ability to function not instead of an already existing in the company software, but rather simultaneously with it. It"s even more crucial for the corporate search engine because organization of search from all company"s information resources is the main goal of the nominal search software application.
Search Functions
Besides the listed requirements, which put various search systems on the same level with the corporate software, there are also requirements to the functional capacities of this software. That is, directly to the main functions of the program, responsible for that very high speed and efficient search, the demand for which only grows.
Firstly, the old generation of "straight search" (simple blind search) and search strictly by document attributes is replaced by the full-text search with a prior indexing. It"s more than convenient as it"s faster even when the search process is a dozen times more complicated. Secondly, it"s the support of different file formats (both widely used and specialized ones) as well as flawless work with various types of DBMS, information systems etc. This list shouldn"t neglect irreplaceable means of electronic mail (TheBat! or MS Exchange, for instance) and instant messaging programs like ICQ or MSN Messenger. Another must-have attribute of a quality program is a set of search features: various types of search (by phrase or by separate words), search with due consideration to stemming and synonyms and so on and so forth. And, of course, specifically for the corporate sector with its gigantic volumes of information, high performance speed (both in data indexing and in the search itself) - are not just wants, but needs.
Progress looking for compromise
Now that we are clear on the requirements imposed on corporate search software, the only thing left is to actually find a program/system that would meet these requirements. Obviously, it"s impossible to satisfy all the needs without exception - there"ll always be black wholes, lack of functions, bugs, which will either have to be dealt with or covered with add-on programs. Thus we can forget about the ideal, nothing stands still...that which seemed perfect yesterday may very well be discarded before tonight is over.
In general, developments in the field of full-text search are in full bloom these days: Internet leading (Google being the evidence) while the corporate sector is catching up. All these developments are mainly conducted either by companies that have recently developed into popular online search engines or by search-based pages that started working on this technology 15-20 years ago. Verity, iSYS and dtSearch - companies, developing corporate search systems, make a good example.
Let us look at one of such utilities used for data search both on the user computer and in the local network. SearchInform, a program that has not so long ago entered the corporate market, has already managed to acquire a high reputation among the end-users, although its merits show more in the corporate use. The integration of this search engine into various types of information networks is evidence to that. SearchInform search modules already work in products of such companies as Hummingbird DM (document-management of Western grand developer Hummingbird), PDM Lotsia Plus from the Russian developer of project documentation management systems Lotsia Soft, and in HelpDesk system of IPI company. All this only proves the previously voiced thesis on the need for full-text search in various applications connected to information processing.
SearchInform
The modern search technologies are based on two root processes: indexing of available information and query processing followed by display of results. What concerns the former, any program creates its own area of search. That is, it processes documents and creates the index of those documents (an organized structure that contains information on the processed data). Later on this created index will be used by the program for quickly getting the list of documents relating to the query. As for this search software"s capacities, multiple tests have given a very high indexing speed (at times it even reached 30 Gigabytes an hour) and a small size of created index (around 30% of "clean" text information volume). The indicators are adequate and more: even such long-livers as dtSearch and iSYS gave, although not by much, but still worse results. As for the index size, there are certain laps...for home users. Regardless of the amount of information being indexed, SearchInform creates its own structure that is around 70 Mbytes in size. That is, even if you only need to index 10 Mbytes of text, the size of index will still be a bit over 70 Mbytes. Though, that flaw seems ridiculous in today"s hard drive volumes. Targeting corporate sector with its gigabytes and even terabytes of information makes us consider these 70 megabytes somewhat a plus rather than a minus since partially due to its index structure SearchInform shows such high speed results and such small end-index size (when talking about big volumes of data). If you ignore the program"s minor information laps with the index size (sometimes program"s data and OS data on the file size don"t match by a few percent) and a somewhat confusing "thermometer" of indexing process (there are two, actually - the current file and the whole number of files - inadequate in their performance from time to time), the conclusion is easy - when it comes to one of the main requirements of corporate search - indexing speed - SearchInform manages it more than well.
Yet the requirements don"t stop there. As we"ve already figured out, one of the critical requirements is a precise and smoothly-running work with the local network. In this case the corporate version of SearchInform can offer a client-server architecture, indexing files from all accessible (and if there"s administrator"s permission in all) folders on all the computers in the local network as well as indexing and subsequent search on all the connected network disks, and user access management system based on NTFS authentication. Though the server part of SearchInform has its own user access management module, it won"t be able to help an enterprise with dozens or hundreds of computers. It"s there and might be useful for small accounting companies with few workstations and absence of proper organization of the local network. Testing of both client and server part of the software showed that the main requirement of the information security and user access management was met. SearchInform was flawless. The user can only search in the network resources that he has permission to access. Of course it"s possible that when functioning in a big enterprise certain laps will occur from time to time, but from the technical point of view there are no complaints.
The third main requirement concerns working not only with the information on discs (electronic mail - SearchInform supports TheBat!, Outlook, Eudora), but also with other sources of data. Here too we find an obvious advantage of SearchInform - the standard package includes ability to index and search in MS Access databases. At that, the procedure of connecting this data source is just as simple as, for instance, work with the electronic letters or mail client: you only need to select the data source (in this case it would be MS Access database and show the program which fields should be indexed or simply leave that to the program and it"ll index all the fields automatically). The example with Access - is only a single case. The distributed SearchInform module with various information management systems has already been mentioned. It only proves the developers" claim that SearchInform supports practically any information structure as a data source for indexing. It"s more than enough for any enterprise to organize the search in all its information under the management of one program.
Now let"s look at the search capacities of SearchInform. This system was developed based on SoftInform Search Technology - a patented by the company technology of search for documents similar in their content. We"ll look at what that really is a bit later; now let"s take a quick look at the functions. First of all it"s the number of supported file formats: SearchInform has over 60 of them. It includes most widely used formats like TXT, DOC, RTF, PDF, HTML etc., as well as CHM, MHT, Open Office and so on and so forth. Besides that, SearchInform can conduct search in multimedia files (audio and video), various specialized "programmers"" formats, a dozen archive types and in logs of instant messaging programs (MSN Messenger, ICQ, Trillian). SearchInform standard phrase search includes a huge number of options (seems quite bulky at times). It"s search with due consideration to stemming and synonyms, fuzzy search (with mistakes) and phrase search or search by separate words that the phrase contains, search by attributes, etc. In reality the main features that should be used are, of course, stemming search and search in found. An average user won"t even need most of the features realized in SearchInform.
However there"s another function that shouldn"t be left without due attention. It"s hard to miss it actually: besides the standard phrase search, SearchInform also has search for documents similar in their content to the query text. Moreover this type of search is a lot more so to say "intellectual" than simple phrase search. In actual practice it helps solve a few vital problems, like that with duration of the search session - with continuously having to pick new keywords, looking over and over and comparing all the documents already existing in the company"s database to see whether there are duplications, etc. The practice shows that combining simple phrase search and "similar document" search allows you to successfully and with a greater benefit apply the full-text search software in information systems from DMS to ERP and PDM.
All in all, SearchInform is a product that has duly deserved the attention it is given with an interesting "mix" of a huge number of functions (similar search leading the chain), high speed and quality performance. On top of all that, it lives up to and satisfies at least the nominal demands of the corporate user. Considering the product"s break-neck development (no longer than one year on the market) and its transformation from an average desktop search engine into a presentable corporate system, SearchInform can become quite a demanded part of any enterprise"s information system. Although, large-scale tests to check how the program works in stress conditions are yet to be conducted.
Alena Siameshka
Alena A. Siameshka, SearchInform Technologies Inc. PR Manager
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/
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