Findwise is proud to announce that we now have released our first publicly available plugins to the Open Pipeline crawling and document processing framework. A list of all available plugins can be found on the Open Pipeline Plugins page and the ones Findwise have created can be downloaded on our Findwise Open Pipeline Plugins page.
Archive for the ‘Future development’ Category
Implement Findability in your customer service interactions
With the rapid rate of change in the global economy, the need for customer knowledge and predictive insight has never been more urgent. The competition is increasing as well as the demand for cost reduction, so whether you are a company fighting for business or a public entity serving the citizens, there is a great deal to gain by introducing Findability on your website.
Using the power of an enterprise search platform to serve your Internet site enables you to take your online service offering to the next level. Due to the “Google-effect”, users have become used to accessing information via a single search box as opposed to “surfing around” to find what they are looking for. A good search system enables your site users to start their journey through your site from the single search box. Accompanied by extreme relevance and navigational tools, users find the information they are looking for with a minimum number of clicks.
Online presence has become a must for companies with a large customer base. With consumers constantly developing a higher degree of online literacy, they expect a higher degree of online service from their vendors— including easy-to-find information and other services such as stock trading and banking facilities. You can easily offer your customers a unified view on your services and information—even if they originate from different source systems—due to the search system’s ability to act as a universal Findability layer.
An increased online service offering will also drive self-service behavior from the user side. By using Search Analytics on the query/search logs you will get a wealth of information about customer behavior. Take customer support as an example. By publishing the most requested support information on your public site, and enabling the users to easily find the information they are looking for, the need for call center support is lowered. This reduces the pressure on the basic customer service functions, allowing you to refocus resources to other value creating activities.
For many enterprises, self service is seen as the solution that can provide customers with the support they need while significantly reducing service costs.
Self-service is regarded as an opportunity to sharply lower customer support costs by deflecting calls. For example, respondents to a Fortune 1,000 survey expect to offload 23% of their call volume to Internet-based self-service (Mastering Online Customer Service, Bruce D. Temkin, Bob Chatham, Hillary Drohan, Katharine M. Gardiner, Forrester, July 2002). And there are proven cost justifications for implementing self-service: Web-based self-service interactions cost 75% less than a phone interaction.
While more traditional customer service interaction solutions tend to be based on a knowledge data base, that needs to be built and maintained, a Findability based solution is more dynamic in its nature and is based on a dynamical index created by the already existing data that resides in the corporate systems. The index can be partitioned into information buckets meeting different user needs and profiles.
So implement Findability in your customer service interactions!
No Comments Topics: Future development
Roadmap FAST Search: for SharePoint and Internet Business
In view of the fact that it has been a year since Microsoft acquired FAST, there has been a lot of hush-hush about the Enterprise search roadmap. However, at the yearly FAST forward conference, Microsoft’s press release Microsoft Unveils New Enterprise Search Road Map reached the public.
There are no big surprises, but a lot of interesting details to come.
Briefly speaking Microsoft is focusing on two areas: search to enhance business productivity and search to earn money online.
Here at Findwise we have been working with customers integrating SharePoint and FAST ESP for some time, and ESP certainly adds a lot of value by extending SharePoint’s main strengths: content management and collaboration. Office 14, which will probably see the light early next year, will hopefully add more flexibility to their infrastructure solutions out of the box.
More information about the licensing models are yet to come and even though FAST will continue to develop ESP as a standalone (to run on both Unix and Linux), the roadmap ties existing and potential Microsoft customers closer by presenting search as an integrated part of their business productivity offering.
As for FAST Search Internet Business Microsoft’s target group are companies looking for earning money online. During FAST forward 2007 there was a lot of talk about the future search driven portals and during the 2008 event about the ability to understanding user intent.
Today online consumers have higher expectations when it comes to search and the ability to show related information (such as Amazon’s “people that bought this product also bought”..) as well as showing contextual advertising (related to search terms, geographical location etc) and recommendations will create loyal customers. FAST has quite a few customers using search for strategic online business so one should keep an eye on the release of the new beta version during 2009.
If you read Swedish, Helge Legernes, one of the founders of Findwise is giving his comment in Computer Sweden.
Information Discovery: Search-in-page
Sometimes the users know exactly what they are looking for, sometimes they are just looking to discover new areas. When it comes to information discovery, a plain, one dimensional result list is not the most suitable tool. (more…)
Microsoft is opening its wallet for search
Three weeks after making a $1.2 billion bid for FAST search & Transfer Microsoft announces that they make a $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo. So far it‘s only an offer which Yahoo’s board and stockholders are considering but, to conclude, Microsoft is serious about going into strategic search markets.
Microsoft bids for Fast
In a recent press release Microsoft has announced an offer to acquire Fast Search and Transfer.
At Findwise we are of course excited about this, as it clearly shows how the world’s leading software vendor has understood the importance of search to the modern enterprise. We are also convinced that the result will be an excellent merger between technical as well as market knowledge of both parties. Since Findwise has a close partnership with Fast and Microsoft you can be sure that we will continue to deliver cutting edge solutions in the future.
Basic enterprise search is commodity – let’s go further! Trends for 2008
So looking ahead, what are the trends for enterprise search 2008?
Well, we have already been talking about Microsoft and IBM and there are a few other vendors (such as Google and Oracle) that have presented ways to develop their enterprise search solutions (looking at clustering, categorisation, taxonomies, entity extraction, visualisation etc.). To conclude: the simple search box is soon commodity – a search solution for enterprises has to go beyond this.
As a result, experts believe that 2008 will become a year with stronger cooperation and more strategic differentiation among the leading vendors. (more…)
How do you measure success on your intranet?
An intranet should, from my perspective, serve the people looking for general information as well as the ones who need specific information to solve an urgent task this very minute.
During the last few weeks I’ve been participating in many and interesting meetings which all have raised the question of how to measure success when it comes to finding content and people on your intranet. When working with enterprise search you often use the time you save as an important parameter. “If the users can find what they are looking for, then their everyday work will be more effective. Hereby we can save the user time and the company money”. This is an obvious truth, but I believe that there is more to consider. (more…)
Internet life in the future
I always think it’s nice when I hear people talking about the same things that are on my mind these days. It makes me reflect upon things in new ways and also makes me realize that I’m on to something. I attended a presentation by Björn Jeffery from Good Old (hosted by Västra Götalands Regionen). His talk on internet strategy was interesting and had many things in common with the keynote by Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo) that I recently heard at the HCI2007 conference. Two things interested me most; the future of mobility and the inevitable question of integrity. So here are my thoughts today, on internet strategy and the future of internet usage.
No Comments Topics: Enterprise 2.0 | Future development | Interaction Design | Intranet | Market trends | Trust | Usability | Web 2.0
New challenges and leaders in the segment of Enterprise Search 2007
The yearly magic quadrant for Information Access Technology from Gartner has become an important way to evaluate the vendors in Enterprise Search business. The result is presented in a matrix measuring the different players by ability to execute (product, overall viability, customer experience etc.) and the completeness of their vision (offering strategy, innovation etc.). The vendors are then positioned as niche players (a rather crowded spot), visionaries, challengers and leaders.
For the last couple of years the upper right corner, which includes the leaders, has been a yearly fight between FAST Search & Transfer, Autonomy, Verity (which was bought by Autonomy in 2005) and Endeca.
However, the magic quadrant for 2007 shows that there is a substantial change in the market and two new leaders as well as two new large vendors on the challenging spot are represented. (more…)
