When enterprise databases scale to terabytes and individual documents grow to megabytes, the basic Google-like search result page is no longer enough. Enter BA-Insight, based in the U.S. with software development in Russia and India, whose Longitude product improves Microsoft’s SharePoint by adding several key features.
“We deliver an extended rich metadata profile with a set of actionables that allow users to drill down into each item quicker than normal and assess whether it is of value to them,” Guy Mounier, BA-Insight CTO told InternetNews.com.
“The second step is to quickly act on information. The actions we provide allow you to immediately consume information in the context of your the enterprise information infrastructure, delivering information better and faster and enhancing worker productivity.”
Longitude does all of this with two components: connectors and search. The connectors enable the product to import information from key enterprise software products. Currently supported software includes Oracle, SAP, Documentum, Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and more. BA-Insight is working to add Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM .
Search
For search, the company delivers some capabilities that are familiar to Web users and some capabilities that most readers will not have seen before. For every search result (click on screen shot for full image), the company delivers a tag cloud, faceted search (so that users can screen results by content type or other variables), and displays document popularity.
It even shows the top ten pages within each document in the result listing.
It shows the document type by displaying the appropriate software icon (often one of Microsoft’s icons).
When users click on an item, they stay within Longitude. It delivers a single page rather than an entire document so that users can download only a few KB instead of the entire 8 MB document and make faster decisions about whether that item is what they were looking for.
Users can cut and paste from that one page, navigate to another, or download the whole document.
Since the user stays within Longitude after clicking on a search result, Longitude’s user behavior statistics are much better than those of other search engines because other engines register as valuable those items that are useless but which are clicked on.