THUNDERSTONE NEWS

July 2008 - Archive

CONTENTS

QUESTIONS ON SEARCH

Q. How are different disciplines such as enterprise search, ECM and business intelligence coming together, and what challenges or opportunities does this present to organizations in the management of their information?

A. The ever-increasing amount of information produced by and available to companies today provides sizable challenges and commensurate opportunities. To go along with that, there are a growing number of products that can help with specific aspects of handlling that information. Each of the disciplines (such as ECM, BI and search) is expanding in an attempt to provide an enterprise-wide view of the available information. Each is gaining capabilities from the other disciplines but still maintains its core view -- whether that be maintaining a central repository for all information, analyzing selected information in special ways or creating an efficient method to rapidly access and retrieve information.

Companies need to really know what information they have. And they must make intelligent decisions about how it can best be used within their workflows to provide a competitive advantage. In most organizations there are many opportunities to make better use of the available information. However, it can be a challenge to find the right tool with the features and flexibility needed.

NEWS HAPPENINGS

Free-lance writer Paul Korzeniowski interviewed, among others, Thunderstone Texis customer Derek Matthews (Lead Knowledge Architect of Arbia, Inc.) for an article to appear in the August issue of DestinationCRM magazine.

Eric Kavanagh (Host of DMRadio -- http://www.dmreview.com/dmradio) will interview John Turnbull (CEO of Thunderstone Software LLC) 21 August 2008 for a scheduled web radio show broadcast on "Enterprise Search."

How Do You Use Search In Your Enterprise?

Businesses, governments, NGOs and educational institutions use Thunderstone's enterprise search solutions in a wide range of applications. How about you? How many of the following search applications have you considered, or perhaps already implemented, at your organization?

  • auctions
    Thunderstone has worked with well-known companies (and federal government customers) to deploy some of the most highly successful online auction sites in the world.

  • classified advertising
    From real estate and automotive sales to personals and help wanted ads, Thunderstone's flexible search tools have made setting up online classified advertising a breeze.

  • CRM and help lines
    When your people need to rapidly find precisely the right response to the pressing concerns of your customers, Thunderstone provides powerful search products for results you can trust.

  • document 'findability'
    An intranet doesn't do you much good, if the file server contains documents your authorized users can't locate and retrieve as desired. Help them access data faster and securely with Thunderstone Software.

  • eDiscovery and litigation support
    Lawyers and judges began using Thunderstone's Metamorph concept-based searching technology for litigation support more than 20 years ago and for eDiscovery applications as early as 1997.

  • intelligence collection/analysis
    Customers employ Thunderstone's technology to create multiple independent search collections, each consisting of one or more websites. They can create special collections of web information for their users, or for competitive intelligence purposes, by indexing targeted third-party websites anywhere on the internet.

  • internet publishing
    Thunderstone empowers viewers of your online publications to do "parametric searches" for relevant content on a particular subject, written by a specific author and published within a certain timeframe. The parameters (defined attributes) of "author" and "publish date" enable precise queries that quickly return only the exact matches your users want. Keyword, full-text search alone does not offer this capability.

  • knowledge management
    Systems integrators can rely on Thunderstone Software for extremely robust and secure enterprise-wide information retrieval across multiple repositories that serve different types of users, who all want dynamic, context-sensitive views of defined content (structured data) with the ability to refine results through full-text searching (unstructured data.)

  • multimedia searching
    Access/retrieval needs increasingly involve many varieties of multimedia data. Thunderstone's customers can also search for audio, graphics, photos and video files stored in databases where, thanks to Thunderstone, all the content becomes immediately searchable -- including newly added or frequently changed data.

  • online product catalogs
    Thunderstone supports very large, high-volume online catalogs that contain unstructured text (product names, narrative descriptions, etc.) and structured content (styles/sizes, prices, current in-stock availability status, etc.,) giving online shoppers the ability to search by item description, to navigate by price range or to efficiently do both in combination.

  • vertical portals
    Market niche specialists, non-profit organizations and other uniquely-focused subject matter experts have turned to Thunderstone for affordable, easy-to-implement search tools with the power, versatility and scalability demanded by their vertical portal sites.

  • website searching
    Happy customers around the world have discovered that websites (public-facing or internal) with many pages and lots of potentially valuable information will enjoy substantial benefits by adding the search advantages of Texis, Webinator or Thunderstone Search Appliances.

    • If you would like to share your own story about one or more effective ways that your organization has deployed Thunderstone search technology, please call +1 216 820 2200 or send an email to

    Next month's edition of this newsletter will include a look at how the U.S. General Services Administration uses Thunderstone Search Appliances in its Unisys ClearPath Mainframe environment to handle different types of searching on a popular GSA auction site for selling excess and surplus government furniture, office products, scientific equipment, heavy machinery, airplanes, vessels, vehicles, etc.

    CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

    “We use a Thunderstone Search Appliance to search our company intranet. All the customization options are great. It has been a very valuable product to us. Overall, the product is very nice. And with all the customization options, we were able to make the search engine perform the way we wanted it to. Great job on delivering a great product.”

    Jeremy Townsend
    Programmer/Internet Analyst
    Perdue Farms Inc.

    Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome to

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