Atop the pinnacle of search

With its new portal infrastructure software, Verity offers a social network component that facilitates location of experts and documents. The company says the new feature in Verity K2 Enterprise (K2E) focuses on the relationships between the people in an organization and the documents they create, modify, access, search and organize.

K2E discovers experts within an enterprise and automatically links users to them while recommending documents based on the users' behavior or search criteria, allowing people to interact with one another to take full advantage of a corporation's information assets. Verity cites as an example an engineer searching for a product's technical specifications may also locate the product's developers and find relevant documents judged as important by others in the enterprise.

Verity describes K2E is a fault-tolerant, scalable offering that delivers a host of other advanced search capabilities, such as adaptive ranking and support for 26 languages. The company says the product also offers full gateway support to information repositories, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, ODBC and Documentum; it runs on Windows NT/2000 and Solaris.

K2E features include:

• automatic classification that can be augmented with human intellect using business rules;

• spidering that documents from all repositories, including e-mail, databases and software applications; and

• advanced security and unified access to information assets.