Keeping active with IDOL

Autonomy has launched IDOL Enterprise Desktop Search with Active Folders, which brings together a wide variety of information ranging from office documents, e-mail, Web sites, news and multimedia content from multiple locations including corporate networks, the Web, the desktop and local data sources. Autonomy says its new offering is the first integrated tool that uses implicit query, working proactively with users on the corporate desktop to understand the information they require and bring it straight to them at the right time and in the right context.

The company says that by using contextual matching, Active Folders understand the themes within any set of data and then automatically populate the folder with related information, regardless of its storage location, as soon as it becomes available.

For example, explains Autonomy, lab workers in a large pharmaceutical company can use Active Folders in order to stay in touch with any information that could influence drug development--anything that is conceptually related to a particular drug development either within the corporate intranet such as lab reports, data from patient trials or from research communities or news sources that publish on the Web.