Enterprise Search

Norconex offers a wide range of enterprise search related consulting services.

Requirements Gathering

The task of establishing proper requirements for a new search engine implementation can be daunting. The difficulties of this task often come from having requirements gathered by people who lack a thorough and up-to-date understanding of what enterprise search related technology can offer. Enterprise search requirements are often adapted to meet the perceived capabilities of search engines, based on a limited understanding of search technology.  At Norconex, we view things in a different light. We strongly feel that technology should adapt to meet your needs, not the other way around. Not knowing about certain enterprise search capabilities should not impact your requirements, and should not keep you from implementing a search system to meet your needs. We can help you understand what is possible in the enterprise search space, and help you meet your requirements without making uninformed sacrifices.

Norconex can take the lead in meeting with, and gathering requirements from, all project stakeholders. We can also guide you towards implementing a solution that will really work for your users, and help you understand enterprise search best practices. Drawing on our enterprise search knowledge and experience, we can help you get the most out of your search investment.

Enterprise Search Architecture and Implementation

At Norconex, we are proud to have some of the best enterprise search specialists on our team. Our specialists have solid and diverse expertise that covers the wide spectrum of enterprise search knowledge and technologies. We have successfully implemented numerous solutions using different enterprise search technologies, such as Autonomy, Exalead, Sharepoint, Solr, and more. Our clients vary in size from small businesses to Global Fortune 10 companies. We research, design and implement search architectures ranging in size from a few hundred users searching across a few thousand documents, to millions of users searching across terabytes of diverse digital data.

Our search experts have extensive experience working with all major operating systems (Windows, UNIX, Linux, etc), meaning we can implement a search solution that best suits your technical infrastructure. On top of our enterprise search knowledge, our search specialists are also well adversed in all popular programming languages and frameworks (eg. Java SE/EE, C#/.Net, PHP, Ruby/Rails, C/Objective-C, etc.).

The technical architecture and infrastructure of our clients can vary greatly. This means our team is constantly exposed to new technologies and used to surpassing the technical hurdles presented while making sure all content can be properly found, indexed, and made searchable. We are well experienced in making sure your information is available to search, through indexing any type of data repository (eg. web sites and applications, database servers, file systems, Exchange and other mail servers, Sharepoint and other content management systems, etc.). We can also build custom solutions for indexing proprietary content repositories.

When designing, developing and implementing enterprise search architectures, we cover several important areas that contribute towards a successful search implementation. Some of these area are:

  • Planning and outlining a detailed topology of enterprise search components
  • Making sure the designed solution will adapt well within your existing network topology (or propose the necessary changes required to make the solution fit in)
  • Performance optimization suggestions
  • Preliminary sizing to help with hardware procurement
  • Fail-over and load balancing planning and implementation to ensure optimal stability and up-time
  • Setting up proper indexing solutions for each data repository that needs to be made searchable
  • Several more

Understanding and implementing an enterprise search system can be a daunting task. There are numerous aspects and technologies to consider, all of which can involve a high level of complexity. We have experience implementing many of the different technologies involved with enterprise search, such as:

  • Search results relevancy tuning
  • Faceted search (guided navigation, parametric search/refinement, etc.)
  • Taxonomy planning, implementation and management
  • Search auto-completion (suggest as you type)
  • Automatic guided navigation
  • Field based searching (text, numeric, date, etc.)
  • Recommended results (suggested links, best bets, promoted results, etc.)
  • Search result security and entitlements
  • Capturing, monitoring and using statistics to improve your search
  • Several more

Search Application and User Interface Development

Norconex has a strong background at building enterprise search applications, from websites to mobile devices.  It is one thing to build a search interface, it is another one to build it so it nicely brings all the power of your search engine into your users hands. We have build all kinds of interfaces and applications for different purposes:

  • Intuitive search interface using best usability practices.
  • Cool UI features not supported natively by search engines.
  • Application integrating with existing website code.
  • Support for complex user query syntax.
  • Advanced JavaScript options to layout part of search screen dynamically.
  • Variety of programming languages (Java, C#, Perl, PHP, C, etc).
  • Abide to government look and feel standards.
  • Mobile search applications.
  • Code synchronization with multiple repositories (Subversion, CVS, SourceSafe, etc).
  • UI administrative tool to ease the enterprise search management.
  • Prototyping and wire-frames.
  • Proof-of-concepts.

Whether you have your own team of UI/application experts or not, Norconex can blend it with your existing practices and provide search user interface or applications that integrates transparently with your environment.

Search Project Planning and Management

To put in place a good enterprise search solution, you do not only need expert technical resources, you need expert enterprise search management and planning.    Search management can be very challenging without extensive search experience.   The nature of enterprise search means you not only have to manage a search team, but rather a multitude of teams in your organization.   You need the network team involved, the security team, the database team, the publishers, the business stakeholders, and the list goes on.   The inter-dependencies can build up very quickly and it is easy to get stalled and lose weeks if not months of productivity.   Planning the group activities very carefully, and having a deep understanding of the pressure points is necessary.

Norconex offers project management by experts in the field.   We can build a solid project plan that combines everyone’s efforts and closely manage all group activities.  As a result, dependencies and potential roadblocks are identified early on and project resources are always utilized to their best potential.   You topically end up with faster delivery and more robust development approaches.