I shudder at the thought of how much time I have wasted searching for information during my professional career. I would bet that the number of keywords and keyword combinations I have used to search network file shares, local drives, email, and enterprise content management (ECM) systems numbers in the hundreds. And as I think about how many of my searches resulted in me finding the information I was looking for in the first place, I would guess around a 70% success rate. For the other 30%, I would end up either re-creating content that already existed, emailing colleagues asking them if they knew where “high value content item A” could be found, or many times I would just simply give up and move on to my next work task that did not require ancillary information to complete.
My enterprise search experiences probably aren’t much unlike yours, and even if they are, I think we can all agree that time any time wasted searching for information in our organizations leads to increased costs, reduced knowledge sharing, and frustrated employees. And frankly, employees like me are frustrated because we aren’t always sure what system has the information we need. Industry statistics suggest that most large organizations have at least two content repositories and Gartner has even suggested 66% of enterprise have more than six. So it is really no wonder that up to 25% of a knowledge workers time is spent searching for information because they don’t know where to find it or the system they think has it doesn’t. Content management users that cannot find the information they need from those systems will quickly abandon them and instead choose to store and retrieve content from file shares or local drives. This only perpetuates the growth of repositories within organizations further increasing costs, decreasing knowledge sharing and frustrating employees even more.
Eliminating most of the above issues can be achieved by providing ECM users with search capabilities that provide the ability to search multiple repositories and return highly relevant, categorized results. The Google Search Appliance (GSA) offers out-of-the-box capabilities to search files systems and websites and return results through the familiar Google interface. Fishbowl Solutions has leveraged the capabilities of the GSA and extended them to WebCenter Content users through their GSA Connector for WebCenter. With Version 2.0 of this connector, WebCenter users are provided with a search template that can be configured to enable searches for not only WebCenter Content, but also content in SharePoint sites, file shares, as well as blog and wiki articles – All directly from WebCenter Content. This effectively provides WebCenter Content users with an enterprise search system within the context of their WebCenter user interface. For more information on Fishbowl’s GSA Connector Version 2.0 for Oracle WebCenter Content, please click on the following links:
- Press Release: Fishbowl Solutions Releases Version 2.0 of their Google Search Appliance Connector for Oracle WebCenter Content
- Demo Viewlet (9 minutes)
- Product Brochure
- Case Study: Fairview Health Services
