COMMENT As enterprises amass more and more data, the task of searching through it has become increasingly unwieldy. Quocirca's Jon Collins examines the current options for easing info management headaches.
Seek and ye shall find, goes the adage - but this is clearly not a concept that has yet been taken on board by the mainstream of computing. While the principle of traipsing algorithmically through a file system or database is well-established, such mechanisms are often primitive, unwieldy and slow. Consider the 'find file' mechanism in Microsoft Windows, or the search facility in any email tool.
Equally established is the principle of generating and maintaining an index of information to enable searches to proceed more efficiently. However, such capabilities have in general remained too expensive for general use, remaining instead in the domain of specialist applications or top-end content management systems.
To be fair, Microsoft Office bundles the 'find fast' indexing tool but it is recognised to be resource-hungry and inefficient. IBM's Lotus Domino also has a fully indexed search tool, which is fine for Domino users but of little use for anyone else.
Ultimately it is the users who suffer, wasting time as they hunt for that necessary detail of past fact, that contact name, that phone number, that diagram or reference. As the volumes of information we all have to deal with continue to increase, these times extend to eat away at our efficiency, and add to the frustration of working with computers. In many cases, the alternative to finding a necessary piece of information is to go without.
The growing number of personal productivity tools provide a modicum of searchability. For email, there is the most excellent Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) from Caelo Software. This sifts through multiple Outlook email folders and allows them to be searched by content, by name, date and even by attachment type, providing 'views' (pre-defined search queries) to enable searches to be repeated as and when. NEO has its limitations - it does not offer searching within attachments, for example. Yet it does offer a welcome lifeline for anyone drowning in email.
The increasingly ubiquitous Google has ported its own search technology to offer a free desktop tool, offering an alternative (yet more basic) way to search both emails and email attachments, as well as other files stored locally.
For the best of both worlds the two mechanisms can be run in parallel, though the burden on CPU starts to become noticeable on a less than current machine. Microsoft also offers what it terms 'Windows Desktop Search' and has recently acquired an email search technology which it is no doubt currently integrating into Outlook.
The speed at which such tools can become indispensable is indicative of how difficult it can be to find information in the first place. For individuals they may be life-changing but from a corporate perspective they can never be considered as more than a good start. The scope of a search can always be widened, and provided it can happen efficiently, it will always be preferable to search across multiple file shares in addition to the local desktop.
Ultimately, it should be possible to search across the entirety of a corporation's electronic records, be they stored as emails, databases, web pages, Word files, PDFs or whatever esoteric format the company may be using. The fact that this is so clearly a pie in the sky ideal for many companies does not make it any less desirable.
To achieve such a vision is technologically possible today. Not least, Google offers an enterprise version of its search technologies which enables companies to search efficiently across multiple types of repository. There are a handful of other specialist search companies, for example the Norwegian firm FAST, whose technology comes highly recommended by a number of governments and other large organisations. Such enterprise-wide capabilities do not come cheaply however. Other software companies working on solving one part of the problem include Zantaz, whose strength is in digging useful information out of email archives. (continued on next page...)
