The Path to Universal Search

3. Do a pilot. Based on your evaluation across these criteria, either through an RFP or any other mechanism, you’ll hopefully finalize on a vendor. At this point, you’ll want to do a pilot—to make sure they can do everything they claim. In a pilot, the main thing you’re testing is how much of the solution can you get right out of the box. Give the vendor an extremely short timeframe—say one week. Can the vendor come in, configure their search tool, and start providing you relevant results across several repositories within a week? If the relevancy out of the box isn’t up to snuff, then chances are that you’ll be in for a long road with the vendor.

Once configured, conduct a survey with your test users. Do they like the interface? Are they able to find documents much faster with it? Ultimately, the speed of retrieval and increased usage will generate your ROI.

4. Roll out with core repositories.—Start your production system with the most important repositories that are meaningful across the enterprise. For instance, you might want your intranet, all file shares and key content management systems accessed by multiple departments. A typical place to have the universal search box is in the home page of your intranet. Your launch will provide a boost to intranet traffic and enable you to reposition your intranet as the one stop shop to access all company information, not just HR information or company news.

5. Scale to all systems. After a successful roll-out securing the big win with your users across the enterprise, increase the connectivity to all systems. Here, it is important to inventory your systems, prioritize them, and incrementally add them. A helpful framework is to view your systems at three levels—core, high ROI and niche systems. Your core systems will be the most used repositories across your enterprise, such as your intranet, file shares and certain content management systems. High ROI systems might be specific repositories, such as a contact center knowledgebase that would yield instant ROI by enabling search. Or it could be a business intelligence system, where search capabilities would enable better decisions by your managers and executives. Once you have these added, you then will want to tackle niche systems that might be pertinent only to a subset of users, such as financial databases. By that point, all your users will be accustomed to accessing everything from a simple search box.

At this point, you’ll truly enjoy the benefits of having universal search.

Google’s Universal Search for Business
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Google’s universal search provides the ability to search all your enterprise content through a single search box—including intranets, file shares, databases, content management systems and real-time business data. Additionally, through integration with Google Desktop and Google.com, your users gain a one-stop searching experience:

Within a few years after Google.com launched a decade ago, it claimed the mindshare of most Internet users bycombining three simple elements—comprehensiveness, high relevancy and extreme ease of use. The Google Search Appliance builds on these three principles and incorporates a fourth—security—to rapidly gain the mindshare of enterprise users. Enterprise users all over the world are able to stay connected within their organizations, make better decisions, innovate faster and provide better service to their customers.

From an IT viewpoint, the Google Search Appliance provides unparalleled ease of installation and maintenance. With high relevancy out of the box—yet allowing for a few key dials to fine-tune relevancy—the Google Search Appliance can be operational within days of purchase and provide high value to the enterprise. And by integrating with all content sources in the company, and scaling up to 30 million documents, your IT department would only maintain one search platform across the entire enterprise.