IBM Brings Collaboration and Search Together to Enhance Enterprise Information Access

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced enhanced enterprise search software designed to allow users to quickly and securely search intranet portals, databases, public Web sites and file systems to obtain results highly-relevant to their individual needs.

The new version of IBM’s OmniFind Enterprise Edition search software provides a single interface for enterprise search, discovery and analysis for IBM Lotus Domino environments. The new software also delivers an unprecedented view into the rich content that can be exposed when the Lotus software platform is mined from a seamless enterprise search interface. Also announced today are new security and search capabilities for WebSphere clients.

By providing full-text indexing and search of Domino databases, users can find and access information stored in IBM Lotus Document Manager, IBM Lotus Quickr and in IBM Lotus QuickPlace documents, as well as other enterprise information from applications, repositories and shared files from across an organization. New Web 2.0 features in the OmniFind Enterprise Edition administrative console make it easy to customize the search application and preview changes immediately.

With extensive server-side support for Lotus Domino, the new software enhances search and sharing of business-critical information like collaborative documents, presentations, specifications and other files, improving productivity and knowledge sharing. OmniFind Enterprise Edition also provides an ideal foundation for enterprise search and text analytics strategies for organizations that need to easily access all their information.

CB&I, a global engineering, procurement and construction company specializing in large-scale, turnkey projects, relies on IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition to manage the challenge of sharing knowledge and expertise of the company’s 13,000 employees spread across 60 locations. With information stored in more than 50 project-specific databases along with myriad other sources -- customer account and contact applications, document distribution and project control systems, Lotus Domino files and even local file servers in each office -- employees can now use a single search interface to access project-related information, knowledge and specialized expertise spread across the enterprise.

“With OmniFind software, we can now provide our staff with fast access to documents that they might not have even known existed,” said John Shaull, senior technical analyst, CB&I. “Employees have told us that this is making their jobs easier, which, in turn, is increasing staff productivity and efficiency. The OmniFind implementation beat our expectations and was in place well ahead of schedule. Additionally, the administration and maintenance of the software is much easier than we had anticipated.”

IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition delivers rich indexing of all Lotus Domino fields including attachments, as well as fielded search. It also understands the structure of Lotus Notes databases and comes with pre-built support for Lotus Quickr, Lotus QuickPlace and Domino.Doc databases, Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Exchange as well as the ability to crawl IBM Workplace Web Content Management.

Additionally, the software provides scalable and secure enterprise search directly from within IBM WebSphere Portal. This provides WebSphere Portal clients the ability to scale to millions of documents and provides secure search of non-Web enterprise content sources. It also allows WebSphere Portal clients to conduct searches through the familiar WebSphere Search Center portlet or the OmniFind portlet directly through WebSphere Portal using native security.

OmniFind Enterprise Edition has the ability to bring conceptual understanding to keyword search through semantic interpretation and can also serve as a platform for text analytics applications. Using the advanced information extraction capabilities through the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), an open source framework for building advanced search and text analytics applications, OmniFind Enterprise Edition enables users to search for facts and concepts within the underlying content. It also includes a sample text analytics configuration to detect phone numbers, URLs and e-mail addresses included together with a matching synonym dictionary.

The new version of IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition optimized for Lotus Domino and WebSphere Portal supports Lotus Domino on Linux, Windows, and System i platforms. It comes with pre-built crawlers for WebSphere Portal Document Manager, WebSphere Portal Web pages and Workplace Web Content Management. The software is currently available from IBM and IBM Business Partners.