Corporate Search

    Today, there is hardly a company that does not use IT technology in the process of its activities. The explosive growth of corporate information stored on servers, in a sense, determined the development of the data storage systems market and at the same time created new niches. One such niche is corporate search. Increasingly, companies come to understand that within their infrastructure, an intuitive and familiar search string is needed.

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    Corporate search is a tool for business, for employees of the enterprise - end users who are not related to IT. First of all, it is a search for information on file servers, where in essence there is no structuring, as well as a search on platforms such as Exchange and SharePoint. Thus, the search tool, on the one hand, should be easy to use and tailored to corporate specifics, and on the other hand, it should integrate with existing systems and regulations without damage, be able to index many modern data formats and satisfy many other technical requirements.


    So, let's take an employee of the legal department who needs to find a template for a contract made by himself or his colleague. No matter how adequate the search, the output will still result in a huge selection of similar documents for different contractors, many versions of the same document, copies of it in different places, including the most unexpected ones. There is the notorious corporate identity. Ideally, an advanced search will come into effect - some filters by the contents and metadata of the file.

    According to the contents of the file, you can:

    - set words and phrases that must necessarily appear in the document;
    - set words and phrases from which at least one must meet in the document;
    - set words and phrases that should NOT be in the document;
    - set exactly where to search for terms: document name, document text.

    By file metadata you can specify:

    - document format;
    - language of the document;
    - the time frame when the document was last modified;
    - the author of the document;
    - format of the document.

    Also based on indexes, a search could look for duplicates and similar documents. After such filtering, the required document (version) will be found very quickly.

    But now let's look at the problem from the other side. But will the employee find documents that he should not have access to? Or, for example, she willfully enter the phrases “passport data”, “for official use”, etc. in the search line. In this situation, it is necessary that the search uses a metadata database that contains all the information about the rights of each user, membership in AD groups , statistics (logs) of access to enterprise resources. Thus, each user of the system sees only the information that he should see. Moreover, it is possible to exclude from the search results information that falls under the classification rules, for example, passport data, at the administration level of a search resource.

    Additionally, the use of metadata provides several advantages:

    - incremental indexing: due to the audit of events, we know where the changes occurred, new files appeared;
    - high speed of increasing the relevance of the search and high relevance of the search: the analytical core uses data from auditing user actions, as well as data from AD about group membership. A behavior model is built for each user: consists of such and such groups, uses such and such files. Accordingly, “similar” users receive similar selections. For example, employees of different departments (and at the same time members of different security groups) over time see different samples for the same requests, subject to equal rights;
    - Support for any data format, including specific for any area: for indexing, full-text search based on iFilter is used. Accordingly, if there is an iFilter implementation for the format, then it can be indexed.

    Integration with AD greatly improves search security. For example, only domain users can use the search, all search queries are logged. The IS service will always be able to track who was looking for passport data, etc.

    As a result, we have a simple and effective tool for business and at the same time a cross-platform, scalable and secure IT tool with audit capability.

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