Making Content Manageable
Customer support and case management—Call center and government case management personnel face increased pressure to act as less of a "problem solver" and more of a "strategic advisor." But at the same time, they often lack the necessary information and decision support systems that will enable them to demonstrate subject and content mastery.
An enterprise search solution enables customer support representatives to improve their knowledge of complex and rapidly changing product or service features and functions without expensive and time-consuming training. It can provide a consolidated view of all customer interactions that go well beyond traditional support issues. Government organizations benefit through the ability to provide integrated case management and improved customer service to citizens.
How To Choose a Solution
Adopting the right approach to enterprise search is critical. Enterprises must address the issues of security, accessibility and cost. When choosing an enterprise search solution, both the overall architecture of the search technology and specific features should be considered.
Reuse of existing assets—As mentioned before, traditional enterprise search solutions create a static repository or index by crawling information sources. But choosing a solution that reuses existing assets is important to the solution’s success in the enterprise. The solution should reuse the native indexes of each source and built-in search feature of every application so that the retrieved information is always current and can reflect any changes that may have occurred if the same group of sources was searched at two different times using an identical query.
In addition, make sure the solution also reuses security mechanisms within repositories and applications through a single sign-on (SSO) API that integrates seamlessly into the enterprise security infrastructure. The access rights of each individual user should be used when remote information sources are searched. The solution should pass authentication information to appropriate sites as part of the query, avoiding repetitive login steps. Beware of search tools that claim to have SSO, but that accomplish this by passing cookies, as this method raises security threats.
Source and content adaptation—Comprehensive enterprise search solutions will include a large number of pre-packaged adapters for various content sources and the ability to easily customize existing adapters or simply build new ones—usually without changing or writing any code. It is also important that search solutions have the ability to adapt to content, context and structure changes because information sources often change the way they present their results pages. The solution should be able to identify and classify all changes without human intervention, and repair itself in order to perform the correct extraction of metadata.
Content enablement—A search solution is only as good as the results it provides. But just as important as the results is the way the results are presented and the ability to use them. A comprehensive solution will de-duplicate results, rank them by relevancy and cluster them automatically and dynamically by topic. Solutions should also have the ability to perform cross-lingual queries—in other words, queries are formulated using the preferred language and the search solution translates the query into other languages before performing the search. Complete, accurate search results should be presented in a convenient manner and should be able to be used with automated actions, such as posting to collaboration eRooms, integrating into workflows or sending notifications.
Why EMC for Enterprise Content Integration?
Today’s complex business environment requires enterprises to access and act on content that resides in many different sources, both inside and outside of traditional organizational boundaries. In this ever-changing IT environment, there will always be content whose access is critical to success, but that will remain outside the control of one single repository or index. In addition, each repository or index will have its own precise security and access-control requirements. To keep pace, companies need to provide their employees a simple way to find content across changing organizations and repositories, while preserving critical authentication and security mechanisms to manage its access.
EMC has created a new approach to enterprise search that enables integration of all content sources inside and outside of the enterprise and provides access to all of this content via a single user interface. EMC® Documentum® Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) Services makes enterprise content accessible with a single query no matter where it resides.
The ECI Services’ federated search architecture and interfaces make it extremely easy to deploy across many different IT environments. First and foremost, all enterprise content remains in its native repository—no content migration is required. Customer records can stay in their databases, documents can stay in their management systems, email can stay in its archives and Web content can stay in its intra/Internet location. No matter where data is, ECI Services will find it.
And unlike other search solutions, ECI Services creates no master index of its own, reusing the investments that have already been made in each repository’s search capabilities. Hence, there is no overhead for batch crawling of huge virtual repositories, nor storage requirements of massive master indices that are potentially out of date by the time they are built. True single sign-on capability provides worry-free security for users and IT administrators. And pre-packaged or custom-built adapters enable ECI Services to provide access to any information source.
Information on EMC’s products and services can be found at
http://software.emc.com.
1 Filing Information: April 2006, IDC #201334, Volume 1, "The Hidden Cost of Information Work"
2 Filing Information: April 2006, IDC #201334, Volume 1, "The Hidden Cost of Information Work"
3 Gartner Portals, Content, and Collaboration Summit, March 19-21, 2007, "Use Google and SharePoint to Handle All Your Information Management Needs"