Deliver Your News to the World

IBM Upgrades Enterprise Search Software


WEBWIRE

OmniFind Product Enhancements Improve Information Access



ARMONK, NY - Mar 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced a new version of its OmniFind enterprise search software designed to help users quickly and easily find, manipulate and share information across their business or organization.

IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition 8.5 search software features enhancements that help customers rapidly gain insight and value from their business information, which is the aim of IBM’s cross-company Information on Demand strategy. The OmniFind advancements make it the industry’s first enterprise search engine to support the latest Lotus collaboration and social software allowing early adopters of Lotus tools such as Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections to further improve productivity, business networking and knowledge sharing.

The new version also includes an easy-to-use interface that refines and graphically displays relevant search results; full global language support for Japanese, Chinese and Korean; and support for the latest versions of Red Hat Linux, Windows Server, IBM FileNet Enterprise Content Management software and the IBM Lotus Collaboration Suite.

IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition extends IBM’s ability to provide customers a unified and secure search experience throughout their enterprise, enabling users to uncover and tap into information stored in multiple programs, repositories and file formats. It also helps organizations correlate massive amounts of information on the Internet with that of the enterprise, including text, audio, video and dynamic information, to create a real-time view of business scenarios.

In addition to delivering extensive enterprise search and information access capabilities, OmniFind Enterprise Edition also serves as a platform for versatile semantic search and content analytics solutions such as entity analytics, sentiment analysis, threat analysis and global name recognition, which are designed to help customers address industry-specific information management challenges. These solutions, combined with OmniFind Enterprise Edition, help organizations uncover new insights, patterns, and trends in text-based information that can be used to manage risk, reduce costs, and maximize customer service opportunities.

“With more than 20 years of experience in search technology and hundreds of fundamental patents, we view search as a core component of an end-to-end Information on Demand strategy, which is helping customers better compete and pursue new business opportunities,” said Lee Roberts, general manager, IBM Enterprise Content Management. “By offering enterprise search to organizations of all sizes and embedding search capabilities across IBM’s software portfolio, we are unleashing search as a catalyst to change and improve the way people work.”

OmniFind Search and Analysis Enhancements
Among the new features of OmniFind Enterprise Edition 8.5 is OmniFind Top Results Analysis, which provides a graphical means of analyzing top search results based on metadata. In addition to generating a standard list of search results, results can be displayed graphically, allowing users to drill down further and interactively refine their search to find what they need faster. For example, a query for “enterprise search” will return a list of relevant results as well as a navigation pane with dynamic bar charts where results are organized by category, for example, Web search, Desktop search, eDiscovery, author, language or source. Drop-down menus are provided for dynamically selecting other fields for analysis.

Clicking on a bar chart refines the search to show only the top results for the selected item. For example, clicking on the “eDiscovery” bar chart will only show documents that deal with enterprise search in an eDiscovery context. When combined with OmniFind Enterprise Edition’s text analytics framework, Top Results Analysis also provides a way to create interactive dashboards that deliver insight into search results and discovered content, going beyond search to help deliver the information-powered insight needed to drive better business decisions.

Prime Research International, a global media research institution, relies upon Top Results Analysis as part of their Online Media Analysis solution developed by IBM to help media companies analyze public perception and sentiment about corporations, products and services to determine customer response and improve communications.

“Using Top Results Analysis, we are able to quickly analyze and drill down into relevant media results that are the most meaningful to our clients,” said Dr. Rainer Mathes, head of research and managing director, Prime Research International. “This feature enables us to display results in a variety of ways such as a chart that compares media, or by displaying a company’s presence in the media over time. We can then further enhance our search queries based on this insight.”

IBM’s new enterprise search software unlocks information for users of the newest versions of Lotus Notes and Domino 8, as well as Lotus Quickr Services for WebSphere Portal. The new OmniFind Enterprise Edition plug-in for Lotus Notes 8 enables users to search among instant messages, documents, presentations and spreadsheets and other business applications -- such as help desk, discussion forums, blogs and more -- directly from the Lotus Notes client search bar. It also provides enhancements to existing crawlers for secure search across Lotus Quickr, Lotus Domino and Lotus Connections.

To provide greater precision and search relevancy for customers using Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters, the software also offers new improved support for Asiatic languages. It allows for full n-gram tokenization to enable search using special characters, such as characters that belong to the Unicode Symbol category, which can now be indexed and searched.

Support for the newest version of IBM FileNet P8 Enterprise Content Management as well as multiple relational database management systems helps improve productivity by using a single interface to search and retrieve information across the enterprise. In addition to enhancements in a number of areas, including search application customization, crawlers, service and performance, the enterprise search software now supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and Windows Server 2003 R2 environments. Search on the IBM z Series platform has been extended to support IBM Content Manager on z/OS as well.

In addition to OmniFind Enterprise Edition, IBM offers a full range of search and content discovery software, including OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, OmniFind Discovery Edition, OmniFind Enterprise Starter Edition, and OmniFind Analytics Edition.

The software is currently available from IBM and IBM Business Partners.



WebWireID60979





This news content was configured by WebWire editorial staff. Linking is permitted.

News Release Distribution and Press Release Distribution Services Provided by WebWire.