Hi, my name's Brian Babineau, and I'm an analyst with theEnterprise Strategy Group. And today I'd like to talk to you about two conceptsin the information management software world. The first is enterprise searchand the second is enterprise navigation. And I'd like to talk to you a littlebit about the difference between the two.
Enterprise search helps us find things when we know whatwe're looking for. We enter in a term and we get a series of links based onrelevancy of that term. Enterprise navigation helps us understand and find informationwhen we may have an idea or a basic premise of what we're looking for, but weneed to see more information grouped. Now they can be the same technology, justa different indexing capability and a different grouping capability when youget the results.
But to illustrate it, let me give you a little bit of anexample. Assume we're searching on the term dog. We're going to get a series oflinks that could involve breeders, dog breeds, dog groomers and so on. Each onerepresents a link to a different website. Now if we did the same search and weused navigation capabilities with unique indexing, we would actually get agroup of links that all relate to breeders, breeds, groomers and any othercategory. So here, instead of getting links we'd get groups of links and thenwe can further navigate based on those categories.
Now let's turn our attention to enterprise search. If I'm anew sales rep, I may want to find all the presentations given to a customer bymy company. When I do a search, the results will be numbers, millions ofPowerPoint presentations that may be from executives, from HR, from the FinanceDepartment, and some may include customer presentations. It could take me avery long time to find exactly what I'm looking for.
However, as a sales rep, I may want to start by looking atall the presentations and then finding the ones that apply to me. That samesearch term but using navigation technology I would get all the executivepresentations as a category, all of the HR and the customer presentations. WhenI further expand my navigation, I would get links to files of healthcarecustomers, manufacturing, retail, and because I'm going to be selling to thehealthcare community, I can find a subset of files that are the most relevantto me.
The difference in enterprise search and enterprisenavigation is really how the results are presented. Search presents you linksthat you can go quickly and follow. Enterprise navigation groups those linksinto relevant results for you to then further refine what you're looking for.
Utilize enterprise search if you have an idea and know whatyou're looking for. Utilize enterprise navigation if you're basically startingfrom scratch. If you're an IT user evaluating enterprise search to help youfind files, emails and database information, you want to make sure that youalso evaluate products that include enterprise navigation. The reason being isthat you never know when you're going to have to start from scratch to findwhat you're looking for.
