An enterprise search appliance platform comes with a host of benefits, of which perhaps most important is improved employee productivity. There are a lot of points to consider when it comes to selecting a provider, however, and it all comes down to what product will best suit your needs.
With so many options available, it’s extremely important for companies to do their due diligence before deciding on an enterprise solution. For one, what do you expect to get from it? Can it refine your search? Can it offer a quick gateway to find all relevant information to your organization? Will it reduce search time? Will it index all company data?
It might seem a bit overwhelming, but these questions are important and necessary to figuring out which solution is going to work best for its intended purpose.
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Once selected, there are a number of further considerations that come along with deploying a search appliance platform. While challenging, they are not difficult to overcome. If you have a lot of data, for example, you might want to consider narrowing down the scope of the search so that the platform is more likely to give you desired results. If you give it full access to old mail files that are really just clutter, chances are they will turn up in results, making it harder and more difficult to get to what it is you needed in the first place. Choose data that is only necessary and only relevant.
Keep tabs on metadata, too. If everyone is publishing a document to a specific template that has a root term, they will all come up every time someone searches under that term, which will mean a lot of scrolling. Clean out metadata to ensure that the search system is working for you, not against you.
Last but not least, if it’s not working, make it work. If employees are consistently not finding what it is they are looking for, find out why they aren’t getting the desired results. Improve as you go along, taking notes of what has gone wrong and why.
Solutions like MaxxCat can help overcome the challenges involved in implementing a search appliance platform. With the ability to perform up to 25,000 queries per minute and at 2,250 MB per minute index speeds, searching has never been better.
MaxxCat searches all relevant data, with search-as-you-type and query suggestions to make looking easier and more efficient. It’s fully customizable and allows you to put it to work for you, with easy integration with HTML, CSS (News - Alert) and JAVA, to name a few.
The bottom line? Search appliance platforms can be a challenge, but they don’t have to be. Just keep your data in check and you can maximize how the solution will reap many benefits for your business.
Edited by Blaise McNamee