Enterprise Search

Information is typically stored according to its type - customer records are held in a CRM system, catalogue information in a database, letters and reports in Document Management Systems. However, for an individual to perform a business task efficiently, they need to access all relevant information at once. A complaint from a customer will appear in the letters DMS, but that customer's details are hidden in the CRM application and without understanding the product they bought (information that is held in the Products database) it will be difficult to help them.

Autonomy's Connectors feed the Intelligent Data Operating Layer with information from all of these distributed repositories and as a result, when an individual performs a search, whether keyword or Conceptual, all results are returned, wherever the original data actually resides.

Autonomy In Practice

Soon after a merger, two investment banks decided to produce a unified research portal so their clients could have instant access to all research-related material the now-combined bank offered. This included a distributed mix of PDF stores, Lotus Domino Server sites and many Microsoft Office documents, held in Document Management Systems and network drives, across the globe. To combine all of this data into one front-end would traditionally have required the crafting of a number of bespoke interfaces, each speaking to a different repository. Instead, the newly merged bank was able to deploy IDOL above the collected repositories and simply configure the required Autonomy Connectors to each. Once the information was stored within the unified layer, a single JSP-based front-end could provide automatic hyperlinking, suggestions and search and retrieval across all of the data - whatever its format and wherever it resided.

Connectors

Autonomy provides a wide variety of connectors and supports more than 200 file formats. Furthermore, Autonomy actively monitors the market for popular formats and repositories and aims to support all such 3rd party technology.

In addition, Autonomy's Import API (part of the Autonomy Application Builder) allows clients and integrators to develop their own Connectors in order to support proprietary or bespoke repositories that may exist within the organization.

Security Support

When distributing functionality such as enterprise search over an entire organization, it is vital to be able to respect security architectures that are already in place.

Autonomy provides a fully integrated architecture that ensures such security arrangements are honoured at the infrastructure level of our technology.

Multilingual Support

The modern enterprise is unlikely to own information in only one language. An important part of making distributed search function in the real world is being able to support the many languages and encodings inherent in a multilingual organization.

Autonomy's technology is fundamentally language independent, with no limit on the number of languages a given repository or document may contain. Our use of XML (which uses UTF-8) as an internal storage format enables us to respect multiple encodings and ensure that IDOL output matches what is expected within existing enterprise systems.

Geo-Efficient System Architecture and Scalability

When many large repositories are accessed by a considerable number of users over a wide geographical area, architectural complexity grows rapidly and scalability and Quality of Service requirements have to be proactively built into system deployments. Autonomy's IDOL and Enterprise Search assists the design and building of such systems through a number of products, including the Distributed Query Handler, the Distributed Index Handler, the Distributed Service Handler and the Autonomy Service Manager products.