Search: Tomorrow's Enteprise 2.0 Platform?

A few months ago when I was reviewing bookmarking and tagging platforms I got to wondering whether search engines will become the platforms for enterprise 2.0 integration in your enterprise. I don't mean search on the general Internet, of course, I'm talking about enterprise search engines from vendors such as Fast, Vivisimo and, of course, Google with its OneBox appliance.

Consider that ConnectBeam, for example, ties its bookmarking and tagging solution in with Fast and Google's appliance. And its not the only one. (Got other favorite apps that tie into your search engine? Drop them in the comment section below and I'll post a complete list in a later post). And this doesn't even take into consideration IBM and BEA and others who build social networking capabilities around their own search engines.

Now today, Vivisimo announced that it was adding social networking capabilities to its search engine, Velocity 6.0. The new feature will leap frog Vivisimo to the front of the pack of social-aware searching in a number of interesting ways. With Vivisimo's search engine, employees can now

• bookmark, tag, and rank pages
• update search results with those bookmarks, tags, and ranking in real time.
• save search results in virtual folders and then share them with other individuals or groups. (Much like we've seen with Gazool. )
• Experts can create mashups against Velocity to create a single view of an employee and then marry that information with what they've tagged.
• CIOs will be able to use the dashboard feature to see what are the hot topics across the organization.

Vivisimo continues to target the large enterprise and that means that its security needs to be both varied and nuanced. In the 6.0 release, Velocity will respect whatever security settings exist for a given document, said Rebecca Thompson, Vivisimo's vice president of marketing, in a phone interview. This will allow groups to adhere to regulatory concerns by preventing others from seeing the tags members have created or the content they've tagged - something that many of the other enterprise bookmarking and tagging vendors have had problems with.

Velocity 6.0 is part of the normal upgrade. Average pricing for a departmental level Velocity server of 500,000 documents runs around $50,000.

BOTTOM LINE

The power of integrating all of those functions together looks extremely compelling to me, if one can afford the price point. But even for smaller enterprises with more limited budgets, turning search into your enterprise 2.0 integration point makes sense. Users already know the interface and the rich repository of information contained in the search engine will be critical to so many other enterprise 2.0 applications. What do you think?