BA Insight and Recommind Form Strategic Partnership

BA Insight, a provider of connectivity, metadata classification, and user interaction software for SharePoint, and Recommind, a provider of enterprise search, e-discovery and contract analysis software, have formed a strategic alliance to integrate Decisiv Search natively into Microsoft SharePoint using the BA Insight software portfolio. According to the vendors, the combination of products will allow users to leverage the full capabilities of Decisiv Search for analytics, smart previews, and in applications such as expertise location and user-generated infosites.

In particular, from the SharePoint user's perspective, the new alliance adds an additional level of flexibility in terms of their back-end search index, said Sean Coleman, BA Insight’s chief customer officer.  Both companies, BA Insight and Recommind, have observed that SharePoint as a portal platform is highly used but for a search platform, people use a variety of solutions. The partnership offers users SharePoint users the flexibility to use SharePoint as a portal but use either the built-in index or the Recommind Decisiv index, which appears as a native search option.

Decisiv offers specialized features, some of which have to do with its use in key verticals such as legal, added Jeff Fried, BA Insight’s CTO. In addition, the technology of the Decisiv Search Engine is based on predictive algorithms, so that processes such as multilingual search and search on broad discovery topics, where users don’t know exactly what they are looking for, will be significantly better than with native SharePoint search, he said.

Organizations that use SharePoint can now integrate Decisiv Search as an alternative to the native SharePoint search, or use both in combination.

The integration is “truly seamless,” said Fried, noting that most systems integrate with SharePoint on a “shallow level.” With this new integrated search option, to SharePoint portals and applications, the Decisiv Search Engine appears “to be the native search,” allowing users to take advantage of any of the components with no restrictions, he said.

For more about BA Insight go to www.BAinsight.com and, for more about Recommind, go to www.recommind.com