A Site Map for All of Your Corporate Content

HEADLINES

• Browsing capabilities enhance the search experience - witness the popularity of search navigators
• Aspire Enterprise site maps take this concept to the next level, providing a fully integrated search/browse environment covering all corporate data

KEY FEATURES & BENEFITS

• Greatly improved search efficiency and user productivity
• Lightning-fast browsing of corporate content through a consistent user interface
• The ability to mix search and browse strategies at any time, in any combination, encouraging users to explore the available data and promoting the re-use of content

DETAILS
The site map is a familiar concept to anyone who regularly uses the Web. A good site map provides visitors with an easily digested overview of the information available on a Web site.

Search Technologies builds site maps for enterprise content, based on our Aspire technology.

THE VALUE OF BROWSE
Search is a great tool if you know exactly what you are looking for. However, one-dimensional search results pages are of limited value when the informational need is less well defined.

To address this, leading search systems provide browsing options alongside search results. Search navigators (a.k.a. faceted search, dynamic navigation, guided navigation) enable the user to interactively refine the result set, starting from a broad search clue and becoming gradually more specific.

Search navigators help to address the question of "how to search, when you don't know exactly what you're looking for?". From Amazon, Autotrader and Ebay to numerous corporate intranets, search navigators are popular with users.

Behind the firewall, there is a further step that can be taken - to the "enterprise site map". This addresses the question of "what data assets do we have?"

KNOWING WHAT WE HAVE
User surveys continue to show frustration with enterprise search systems.

At Search Technologies, we contend that part of the problem is a lack of understanding among users of "what data do we have?"

Aspire Enterprise Site Maps address this directly, providing a clear and secure (users can only see what they are entitled to see) overview of all content that can be accessed via search. The information retrieval process can begin with a search, or it can begin by browsing to a specific area of the data set before deploying a search over a sub-set of the data. Search and browse strategies can be freely mixed. Used together with a leading search engine, this provides the ideal information exploration environment.

LEVERAGING EXISTING FILE PLANS
Whether data is kept on file shares or in a content management system, it is usually arranged in a hierarchy. Even the most lawless of corporate file shares has some semblance of hierarchy. Managed environments often have important information encoded into their file plans.

Search Technologies captures this valueable information so that it can be fully exploited during the search process. Enterprise site maps are built by ingesting and normalizing metadata from all corporate repositories, using Search Technologies' Aspire content processing framework and Aspire Data Connectors.

Search Technologies creates enterprise site maps as a cost-effective service, based on leading search engines such as Microsoft SharePoint/FAST, the Google Search Appliance, Solr Lucene, Elasticsearch and Amazon CloudSearch.

Contact us for further information or an informal discussion.