by Elizabeth Thede, director of sales at dtSearch
As any current, recovering or aspiring workaholic knows, the hardest part of an assignment can be finding the data you need to get started. That’s where enterprise search comes in. It can automatically index all your enterprise data, letting you—and everyone else in your organization—simultaneously and instantly find anything in the full-text or metadata across terabytes of files, emails, etc.
Even workaholics can hear the word “indexing” and shudder at the thought that this might represent more work for them. But indexing is only an effort for enterprise search. Just point to the folders to index and enterprise search will take it from there. All software is different, but using dtSearch® as an example, here is a list of things that even the most diehard of workaholics can relax about.
Don’t worry if your organization has a mix of local and cloud-based files like Office 365, SharePoint attachments, Dropbox items, etc. So long as files, local or cloud-based, appear as part of the Windows folder system, the enterprise search indexer can work with them automatically.
Rest easy: you won’t need to identify individual file types.
The indexer can on its own determine the correct file type of each item through the binary format. Even files with mismatched file extensions like a PDF with a PowerPoint extension and an Access database with an Excel extension will not trip up the indexer.
Nested file formats are also not a matter of concern.
Emails can have ZIP or RAR attachments that themselves contain multiple formats, like a Word file with an Excel spreadsheet embedded recursively inside, and the indexer will cover all that.
Don’t fret that your organization has too much data for enterprise search indexing.
A single index can hold up to a terabyte of text, and there are no limits on the number of indexes that the software can create and end-users can instantly and simultaneously search.
Data updates are no problem.
Enterprise search can automatically update its indexes as often as you want to account for new, deleted and modified files. Such updates will not affect ongoing concurrent searching.
Don’t sweat that searching will slow down at peak times.
The indexes themselves can support multiple concurrent search threads across a network or in an online environment, where each search thread can operate independently with no impact on other search threads.
Be confident that you’ll have the right search options for each project.
Over 25 different search features cover everything from “I don’t want to think too hard about this search request” natural language searching to highly structured full-text and metadata phrase, Boolean (and/or/not), proximity, concept, date / date range, number / numeric range and other search refinements. The software offers multiple possibilities for relevancy-ranking. After a search, view full copies of retrieved items with highlighted hits for convenient browsing.
As a workaholic, you would never mistype anything.
But don’t lose sleep about other’s TYPOGRAPHICKGAL and OCR errors either. Fuzzy searching adjusts from 1 to 10 to sift through these.
Lastly, multilingual text is not an issue.
Unicode support automatically covers hundreds of languages, including European languages, right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, and double-byte character text like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. A single item can switch back and forth among multiple different languages, and Unicode and enterprise search will follow all of that.
Why Workaholics Day comes the day immediately after the fireworks and cookouts of July 4 U.S. Independence Day is anyone’s guess. But even if you wouldn’t be caught dead slacking off the morning after you stayed up too late with such festivities, consider lightening the load with enterprise search. You’ve earned it!
Elizabeth Thede is director of sales at dtSearch. An attorney by training, Elizabeth has spent many years in the software industry. At home, she grows a lot of plants, and has a poorly behaved but very cute rescue dog. Elizabeth also writes technical articles and is a regular contributor to The Price of Business Nationally Syndicated by USA Business Radio, with current articles on the USA Daily Times and The Daily Blaze.
