THUNDERSTONE NEWS

February 2008 - Archive

CONTENTS

SEARCH AT WORK

Enterprise search has become essential to a broad range of mission-critical applications in businesses, NGOs and government agencies. Each search solution must satisfy a particular set of information access and retrieval challenges that are unique to its specific users, environment and functional requirements.

Sometimes enterprise search is designed to quickly find reliable answers to posed questions from prospects, customers, vendors, partners, investors, etc. In such cases a search query that returns hundreds of potentially relevant 'hits' does not satisfy the immediate need for a single, authoritative, correct response.

In other instances the searchers actually do want the ability to view everything in their institutional knowledge base that may relate to an identified issue, process, component, timeline, location, etc. These users expect to simultaneously search multiple databases, intranets, wikis, archives and other information repositories containing structured and unstructured data in very many different file formats.

E-commerce sites provide "parametric search" capabilities that allow users to filter their searches by the desired products, styles, sizes, price ranges, etc. E-commerce search results should include always-accurate information updated continually by means of zero-latency data insertion that enables real-time searches of all available inventories.

Online publishers also understand the importance of making their content rapidly searchable by author, title, subject, publication date ranges, etc.

Enterprise search deployments will typically limit access to certain types information in order to protect an organization's valuable property or to maintain necessary confidentiality of private, personal data.

How you use search in your enterprise should depend not so much on the built-in features of the search tools employed but rather on the nature of the information you need to access/retrieve and on the particular work objectives you want to accomplish.

HAPPENINGS

Thunderstone Welcomes Fred Harmon to its Sales Team

Thunderstone has hired Frederick A. Harmon, an accomplished senior sales executive, for a leadership role charged with helping us deliver more presentations of our powerful, scalable and flexible search solutions to large, medium-sized and smaller enterprises in both the public and private sectors.

Fred has an extensive background that has focused on consultative sales, sales training and management, sales process enhancement and documentation, C-level contract negotiating and the aggressive pursuit of mutually profitable business relationships. His email address is and his phone number is +1 216 820 2200 x105.

Upcoming Events

AIIM 2008

Come visit us at AIIM 2008 in Boston March 3-5 and hear Thunderstone customer Derek Matthews of Ariba along with John Turnbull of Thunderstone explore the importance of using search as part of a Business Intelligence (BI) solution.

Compliments of Thunderstone Software LLC (Booth 2159), your free expo pass gives you admission to:

  • unlimited access to more than 300 exhibitors on the AIIM floor
  • access to the co-located ON DEMAND Exposition hall floor
  • keynote speaker series
  • application showcase theatre presentations.

Your free expo pass is good for all three days, March 4-6. Register today at http://aiimexpo.com or call +1 888-824-3004. When registering, just use discount code: 51K3V2.

FOSE 2008

We will be exhibiting at FOSE, the largest trade show designed for government technology professionals in Washington, D.C. April 1-3 2008. The exhibition is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and you can visit us at booth 2635.

Enterprise Search Summit 2008

The Enterprise Search Summit, in New York City May 19-21, is focused on extending search as a major computing platform. It is held at the Manhatten Hilton New York, and Thunderstone is a Gold Level Sponsor.

If you are going to be in town for any of these events please let us know and we can schedule some time to get together and make sure we are serving you as well as possible.

AIIM CONFERENCE SESSION: BRINGING TOGETHER BI AND SEARCH

Derek Matthews, Lead Knowledge Architect of Ariba, Inc. and John Turnbull of Thunderstone Software LLC will be co-presenting at the AIIM Conference session BUI03:

“Enhance Search With Structured Data: Bringing Together Business Intelligence and Search&Rdquo;

Abstract:

If 60 percent to 80 percent of your enterprise's data is unstructured, that means 20 percent to 40 percent is structured. Find out how you can significantly improve enterprise search results by simultaneously including, rather than ignoring, known intelligence about your business or organization.

  • Discover the performance advantages of simultaneously searching both the structured and unstructured data you need to satisfy user search objectives.
  • Learn the importance of real-time data insertion capabilities that enable immediate searching on fast-changing data without waiting for updates of the index.
  • Realize the value of implementing an optimized relational database as a full-text search engine that uses the SQL known by DB developers everywhere.
  • Explore how to cut through the hype about so-called "brand new" functionality such as concept-based searching, fuzzy logic, natural language processing, and geographic searching.

Details;

This session will take place as part of the AIIM Conference on Tuesday March 4, 2008 at the Boston Convention Center. Free registration is available. See earlier article in this newsletter or contact us.

Quote of the Month

“The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, ‘That is all there was!’ But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.”

Victor Hugo

LET US HELP YOU

If you are getting ready to implement a new search solution, enhance your existing search solution, or looking for ideas on how to improve your search solution we would like to encourage you to give us a call.

With our experience helping customers solve many varied search problems since 1981, we can usually provide assistance in a few hours or days that can save weeks or months of headaches if you try to solve it yourself.

We can customize how we work to your needs, from consulting on ideas and architecture, to prototyping and training, or provide a turn-key application. Call us today at +1 216 820 2200.

Customer Quote

“A lot of companies, when you talk about knowledge management, tend to believe there's one out-of-the-box solution you can install that's going to solve all your problems with no customization. But, that's not reality. What Thunderstone allowed us to do was to completely look at any and every requirement that we have. With Thunderstone Texis we get a platform that we can customize down to the most technical level.”

Derek Matthews
Lead Knowledge Architect
Ariba, Inc.

Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome to

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