Jan
A couple of months ago I gave a brief presentation at the Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose (actually, officially I was speaking at the KMWorld & Intranets show) making the claim that Federated Search is the technology that can unify disparate content within a company.
The talk was titled “Federated Search: True Enterprise Search.” Here is the abstract from that talk:
Enterprise Search Software as it is known today, whether from Autonomy, Endeca, FAST or others, cannot provide access to all the information of value at any reasonably sized organization with a single search. Organizational information-content exists in numerous silos accessible through a myriad of individual, incompatible indices-engines. Technical, cost and bureaucratic reasons prevent unifying all these various enterprise silos under one index.
State-of-the-art Federated Search software provides actual enterprise (-wide) single point of search-access to most, if not all, of the information repositories of value to an enterprise, including those beyond the firewall.
A copy of my presentation is available on the KMWorld website.
Just last night, which is what inspired me to write this post now, New Idea Engineering published an article in their newsletter which I asked John Lehman to write. John Lehman was one of the co-founders of Verity. I have known John for 20 years now. He was responsible for bringing me to Verity back in 1987 and I have worked with John on a number of projects since then.
In the next few months I will be writing more about Federated Search as a technology that can help realize the goals of comprehensive Enterprise-wide search. In the mean-time I’m very interested in hearing from those of you out there who have or are considering implementing a corporate federated search solution, especially one focused on providing single-stop access to internal content, perhaps which also includes providing access to subscription-based and external content.
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Also, check out our writing contest with awesome prizes!Tags: Abe Lederman, federated search, KMWorld, Verity
