Interwoven presented a webinar on enterprise search focusing on their Interwoven Universal Search product using the Vivisimo Velocity search engine. Interwoven wants to be the exclusive provider of enterprise search to the professional services area.
Gerald Reid CIO of Milbank Tweed Hadley and McCLoy LLP was the presenter. Milbank has over 600 lawyers and over 1000 employees in ten offices.
In 1999 Milbank tried saving emails into their matter management system. It turned out that the search for emails would be too slow to work. In 2001 they brought in AltaVista (remember them) to implement a search engine for their document management system. Attorneys quickly saw the value of the system. The search engine combined the full text search and metadata for the document. This was particularly valuable because it enabled you to easily search across the multiple document libraries. It was easy to search your local library, but hard to search outside other libraries. The attorneys loved it. Gerald got love notes. How often does IT get love notes praising a new tool?
Then, AltaVista went out of business. Milbank kept the product running, but did so naked, with no further vendor support. At this point they were running DocsOpen and Hummingbird. They ran a bake-off between FAST and Hummingbird's Search Server. FAST took days to index the documents and had an index bigger than the document library. The Hummingbird product never quite met the performance of AltaVista.
They moved on to test Autonomy, Recommind and Vivisomo. They presented each of the three with a 700,000 document library. Autonomy took 6 weeks to index. Recommind and Vivisimo took two days. Autonomy also split big documents into multiple pieces. Recommind had performance issues. Recommind did not multi-thread (each search runs in order so you need to wait for the search in front of you to finish).
Vivisimo's initial search results were not as relevant. But with a few minutes of tweaking, the results were just as good as Reccomind. They do have multi-thread processing. The semantic clustering was a bonus feature.
His word of advice is that enterprise search is a killer-app. If you do not have enterprise search, any one of these products will provide extraordinary results. Since Milbank already had an enterprise search, they were a little picky.
Advantages of Vivisimo:
* searches all versions of a document many just search the latest version
* searches email attachments
* Snippets. You can see a piece of relevant text in the search results.
* Clustering. They group similar results. See Clusty.com
* Stemming. Deals with plurals and tense.
* Thesaurus. They have a legal specific thesaurus. And have some for other industries.
The document environment for Milbank's deployment consisted of:
* 3.5 million documents
* 8.2 million saved documents
* 5.7 million email attachments
The initial indexing of documents took 2 days and emails and attachments took about 7 days. He thought the time could be decreased if you used better hardware than they did.
He had a few surprises, but mostly in the searching philosophy on how results should be returned. They are deploying to a pilot group of secretaries and attorneys this month.
I found it interesting that they do not use Interwoven as their document management system. They use DocsOpen.
They allow the individual to decide whether to show snippets or not.
He ran a complicated search that returned 31 documents from documents around the world, with the results coming back almost instantly.
He ran a generic search for: Chase citibank citigroup. 3,100 documents from around the world came back quickly, clustered into "proposal", "credit agreement", "Goldman Sachs", and a few other clusters. He quickly filtered those results on metadata such as author.
It was an impressive display. I had been skeptical of how the clustering would work with a set of legal documents. Let's face it, legal documents generally do not have a diverse vocabulary to distinguish among them. But the clustering worked well.
They are planning to add their internal portal to be indexed and searched by the product. They also want to index the finance system to add other metadata from that system onto the documents.
Interwoven also announced that DLA Piper has selected Universal Search. [Correction: The US Branch of DLA Piper has selected Universal Search]
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query vivisimo. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query vivisimo. Sort by date Show all posts
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration
I sat in on this webinar sponsored by KM World. I was knocked over by the demonstration of Vivisimo's new Velocity 6.0 search tool.
Lynda Moulton from the Gilbane Group started off the presentation.
Clustering and federating searches is a great tool from an enterprise search tool. It comes from the machine trying to put the documents into context and groups that the machine thinks makes sense. Adding the human factor can add more value than what the machine can do. A person's annotations or tags can create more value than the machine.
One of the goals of using a social search is that it elevates discoveries into teaching moments. By sharing with the crowd what they found and they can put it into context and wrap more information around it. That way you can find it again and others can find it and reuse it.
You are more likely to go to someone in your network for help and expertise. That same behavior should carry over to tagging. You are more likely to rely on the tagging and notes from people you know and trust.
Social search can have enlightened self-interest by getting something back when you give something yourself.
Lynda recommends looking for early adopters by looking for groups that have serious information gathering needs. Start small.
This was big softball for Vivisimo to show how the new release of their product.
Next up was Rebecca Thompson from Vivisimo to showcase the release of their new Velocity 6.0 tool. She labeled as Enterprise Search 2.0.
First thing is the ability to vote on whether the item in the search result is useful. It displays the percentage of people that voted up and down. This in turn is fed back into the relevancy algorithm of the search engine. The next step is adding a rating. You can give up to five stars. It also displays the average rating and the number of votes. Administrators can get reports on the rating and use this highlight useful items and bury bad ones.
They also give the ability to tag an item in the search result. They allow both a free text and a force vocabulary. They also will auto-suggest tags. The big plus is that this adds concepts and words that do not actually appear in the text of the document. (I gave a search vendor the task of finding a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida where we represented the purchaser. The words "Florida" and "retail shopping center generally would not appear in the document. Even if the word did appear it may only be once or twice in a 25+ page document. The key was tying the matter identification from the document in the document management system to the matter information in our matter tracking system.)
They allow annotations to the search items: free text with no limitation on the size. Like tagging, this allows context that does not appear in the document. It allows others to see what the document is about, without opening it.
They also allow you to saved search items into shared virtual folders, such as around topics.
They also allow searching for experts. They create an employee mashup from different sources. One item is pulling the person's tagging activity.
They also provide dashboards showing top taggers, top tags, etc.
Vivisimo thinks that web 2.0 technologies are setting higher standards for the tools within the enterprise. (I agree. I can set up a blog or a wiki for free on the Internet in 30 seconds. Why can't I do that inside the enterprise.)
I was blown away by the features of this product. I have been following enterprise search for a while as we have been shopping vendors. This product is a quantum leap above anything I have seen.
Wow!!
This seems to fit into the personal knowledge management theme in my post from Friday. You make it easy for the person to characterize their information, but allow this information to be shared across the enterprise.
Lynda Moulton from the Gilbane Group started off the presentation.
Clustering and federating searches is a great tool from an enterprise search tool. It comes from the machine trying to put the documents into context and groups that the machine thinks makes sense. Adding the human factor can add more value than what the machine can do. A person's annotations or tags can create more value than the machine.
One of the goals of using a social search is that it elevates discoveries into teaching moments. By sharing with the crowd what they found and they can put it into context and wrap more information around it. That way you can find it again and others can find it and reuse it.
You are more likely to go to someone in your network for help and expertise. That same behavior should carry over to tagging. You are more likely to rely on the tagging and notes from people you know and trust.
Social search can have enlightened self-interest by getting something back when you give something yourself.
Lynda recommends looking for early adopters by looking for groups that have serious information gathering needs. Start small.
This was big softball for Vivisimo to show how the new release of their product.
Next up was Rebecca Thompson from Vivisimo to showcase the release of their new Velocity 6.0 tool. She labeled as Enterprise Search 2.0.
First thing is the ability to vote on whether the item in the search result is useful. It displays the percentage of people that voted up and down. This in turn is fed back into the relevancy algorithm of the search engine. The next step is adding a rating. You can give up to five stars. It also displays the average rating and the number of votes. Administrators can get reports on the rating and use this highlight useful items and bury bad ones.
They also give the ability to tag an item in the search result. They allow both a free text and a force vocabulary. They also will auto-suggest tags. The big plus is that this adds concepts and words that do not actually appear in the text of the document. (I gave a search vendor the task of finding a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida where we represented the purchaser. The words "Florida" and "retail shopping center generally would not appear in the document. Even if the word did appear it may only be once or twice in a 25+ page document. The key was tying the matter identification from the document in the document management system to the matter information in our matter tracking system.)
They allow annotations to the search items: free text with no limitation on the size. Like tagging, this allows context that does not appear in the document. It allows others to see what the document is about, without opening it.
They also allow you to saved search items into shared virtual folders, such as around topics.
They also allow searching for experts. They create an employee mashup from different sources. One item is pulling the person's tagging activity.
They also provide dashboards showing top taggers, top tags, etc.
Vivisimo thinks that web 2.0 technologies are setting higher standards for the tools within the enterprise. (I agree. I can set up a blog or a wiki for free on the Internet in 30 seconds. Why can't I do that inside the enterprise.)
I was blown away by the features of this product. I have been following enterprise search for a while as we have been shopping vendors. This product is a quantum leap above anything I have seen.
Wow!!
This seems to fit into the personal knowledge management theme in my post from Friday. You make it easy for the person to characterize their information, but allow this information to be shared across the enterprise.
Friday, October 19, 2007
The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search
After looking at my post on the Vivisimo Social Search, I thought back to how it relates to each of the four types of search. For those of you who missed my post from a few months ago on types of search, my studies show there to be four types of search: fetch, recall, precedent and research.
With the fetch, you have exact identifying information. For instance, with a document in the document management system you have the document number, or you have a filename and path, or a URL. Obviously, an enterprise search engine adds little to this type of document search. The social search would allow you or others to annotate that item. For instance, the law has changed and a provision in the document does not work anymore.
With the recall search, you have some distinct information about the nature of the item. You remember a matter it was associated with, who created it, when it was created, etc. With this type of search you typically get back several or many items and you need to sort through the results to find the item you were looking for. The social search may help with this sorting. For instance, if an item were tagged as the final document. Or just the opposite, the item was tagged as being an interim or discarded draft.
The research is the type of search that an enterprise search was built for. You want to find information on a topic and you may have no idea if the enterprise has any information on that topic. Information could be stored in a variety of sources/databases. The social enterprise search should pull back information that others found useful, more so than just an enterprise search. If I am looking for information on "poison pills" it would be great if the search pulled back intranet pages on the subject, documents on poison pills and personnel with experience with poison pills. It would be even better if those search results were improved with tags and annotations from others: "useful summary memo", "helped me get poison pill approved by the board", "the courts overturned this poison pill", etc.
The enterprise social search also gives you a tool to allow for or improve your search for a precedent. With a precedent search, the information that makes the item relevant is generally not in the text of the document. For instance, if I were looking for a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida that is buyer favorable. The words "Florida" "retail shopping center" and "buyer favorable" may not appear in the document and if they do they may only appear once or twice. To enable this kind of search you need to harness the document collection to another database of information. The social search gives you another option. You can just add an annotation to the document that it is a "buyer favorable agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida."
Some skeptics of the social search will point out that you can already accomplish some of the same results. For instance, if you have a comments field in your document management system, you could use that comment field for annotations. The problem is that the comment field is anonymous and therefore the annotation is anonymous. I do not know if I wrote it, someone smarter than me wrote it or someone less competent wrote it.
I think Vivisimo's new search tool offers a lot of promise to improve all of the types of searching and better harness the knowledge of an enterprise.
With the fetch, you have exact identifying information. For instance, with a document in the document management system you have the document number, or you have a filename and path, or a URL. Obviously, an enterprise search engine adds little to this type of document search. The social search would allow you or others to annotate that item. For instance, the law has changed and a provision in the document does not work anymore.
With the recall search, you have some distinct information about the nature of the item. You remember a matter it was associated with, who created it, when it was created, etc. With this type of search you typically get back several or many items and you need to sort through the results to find the item you were looking for. The social search may help with this sorting. For instance, if an item were tagged as the final document. Or just the opposite, the item was tagged as being an interim or discarded draft.
The research is the type of search that an enterprise search was built for. You want to find information on a topic and you may have no idea if the enterprise has any information on that topic. Information could be stored in a variety of sources/databases. The social enterprise search should pull back information that others found useful, more so than just an enterprise search. If I am looking for information on "poison pills" it would be great if the search pulled back intranet pages on the subject, documents on poison pills and personnel with experience with poison pills. It would be even better if those search results were improved with tags and annotations from others: "useful summary memo", "helped me get poison pill approved by the board", "the courts overturned this poison pill", etc.
The enterprise social search also gives you a tool to allow for or improve your search for a precedent. With a precedent search, the information that makes the item relevant is generally not in the text of the document. For instance, if I were looking for a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida that is buyer favorable. The words "Florida" "retail shopping center" and "buyer favorable" may not appear in the document and if they do they may only appear once or twice. To enable this kind of search you need to harness the document collection to another database of information. The social search gives you another option. You can just add an annotation to the document that it is a "buyer favorable agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida."
Some skeptics of the social search will point out that you can already accomplish some of the same results. For instance, if you have a comments field in your document management system, you could use that comment field for annotations. The problem is that the comment field is anonymous and therefore the annotation is anonymous. I do not know if I wrote it, someone smarter than me wrote it or someone less competent wrote it.
I think Vivisimo's new search tool offers a lot of promise to improve all of the types of searching and better harness the knowledge of an enterprise.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Knowledge Management with Folksonomies and Tagging
Although tagging and the folksonomy the tags create have interested me, I have a hard time figuring out how they would work inside a law firm.
Sure it would be great to allow users to add tags to pages on our intranet or other web-based applications. It would also be valuable to compile tags for external websites that would be useful to the practice.
But the vast majority of our knowledge artifacts are documents in our Interwoven Worksite document management system. Interwoven does not have a way to tag. If I can't tag my documents, then I might as well not have enterprise tags at all.
Sure, you can add comments and profile fields to the document in Interwoven. But that is not the same thing. Since you can only have one profile, you can only have one tag set per document. You also do not get the attribution. If I do not know who made the tag, I am less likely to rely on it. The tag has much more value when you know who made it.
Collecting and displaying tags by person then turns the tags into a person's expertise and areas of interest. If you look at my Del.icio.us tags you can see what I found interesting. My tags are in the lower right corner of the website.
One of the interesting tools that Vivisimo has apparently packaged with the new release of its Velocity search tool is the ability to tag documents in Worksite. Actually, it should give you the ability to tag any knowledge artifact in any system you connect to the Vivisimo enterprise search tool.
The tagging in Vivisimo gives you ability to enhance the findability of the knowledge artifacts inside the law firm and find out more about the people inside the law firm.
Sure it would be great to allow users to add tags to pages on our intranet or other web-based applications. It would also be valuable to compile tags for external websites that would be useful to the practice.
But the vast majority of our knowledge artifacts are documents in our Interwoven Worksite document management system. Interwoven does not have a way to tag. If I can't tag my documents, then I might as well not have enterprise tags at all.
Sure, you can add comments and profile fields to the document in Interwoven. But that is not the same thing. Since you can only have one profile, you can only have one tag set per document. You also do not get the attribution. If I do not know who made the tag, I am less likely to rely on it. The tag has much more value when you know who made it.
Collecting and displaying tags by person then turns the tags into a person's expertise and areas of interest. If you look at my Del.icio.us tags you can see what I found interesting. My tags are in the lower right corner of the website.
One of the interesting tools that Vivisimo has apparently packaged with the new release of its Velocity search tool is the ability to tag documents in Worksite. Actually, it should give you the ability to tag any knowledge artifact in any system you connect to the Vivisimo enterprise search tool.
The tagging in Vivisimo gives you ability to enhance the findability of the knowledge artifacts inside the law firm and find out more about the people inside the law firm.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Interwoven New Features Demo
Four firms have Worksite 8.3 in production, four will be live in 30 days, 8 firms live within 90 days.
Interwoven presented areas of improvement:
Worksite 8.5 will have greatly improved offline access. They have a new, ground-up offline mode. It will have background synchronization and on-demand synchronization.
Rafiq also talked up records management. (I am not familiar with the records management piece.)
Worksite 8.5 will offer some access through the browser so they can expand access through more mobile devices. Certainly some email management through the blackberry will be a plus. I have not seen much demand for documents through the blackberry.
First up on the demo was Worksite Mobility 8.3. It is a mini-browser based access to Interwoven WorkSite. One key thing that caught me attention is that you can access the email in Worksite and forward and deal with the email. This actually could be a big improvement over current functionality. Right now I have a hard time accessing email filed in my email folders. This will be a big plus for encouraging people to file into WorkSite. You can find the email from your blackberry. Good stuff!!
Worksite 8.5 will have server side filing of email instead of client side filing of email. Right now if you file a lot of emails, it can bog down Outlook and your computer while it processes the emails by moving them from Outlook into WorkSite and profiling them in WorkSite.
You will be able to link a mailbox sub-folder with a WorkSite folder. You can take an email folder, click a button to link it to a worksite folder and synch the two folders. After moving an email into the outlook folder, they will be filed into WorkSite. A copy stays in the folder as a convenience copy. It is not clear if the purge and filing works in these folders. It is an interesting direction, but will depend on execution.
Offsite 8.5 allows you take matter workspaces or individual folders with you. You can pick the container. The synchronization takes place in the background. I have a lot of questions about how the documents are affected if multiple people access the documents and edit them in different places. If I have it offline and edit the document and someone is online and edits the documents, what happens and which version wins first. In the current version of WorkSite, only one person can access a document at a time. This offline mode seems to indicate that multiple people can edit the document, not knowing that other people are also editing the document. The audience had many questions and concerns about this feature. The Interwoven folks did not have a clear message or understanding of some of the issues and concerns.
Worksite 8.5 will bring improvements to Express Search. In the result set for Express Search, a mouseover will reveal more profile information about the document. They added intelli-type and recently used terms in the search. F2 will pull up the pop-up field for particular fields.
Next up was exploring some of the features of Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0 and how it may fit into WorkSite and Universal Search. This introduces things like ratings, tagging and annotations. [I previously expressed my excitement about this feature:Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration and The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search. No, I do not think lawyers will immediately jump on to these features. But from the knowledge management perspective, it will provide a great tool for highlighting the better content in the document management system. Even if only a few attorneys use these features it will have an enormous impact on the system and the return on documents. The ability to tag and annotate documents will be available in the underlying tools like MS Word. You also should be able to generate the usual 2.0 features like tag clouds. I am still excited about this feature and am looking forward to it coming out. You can also generate some reports with top tags and top taggers. These tags are one of the ways I see that we can get the document management system to be more effective on a precedent search.
Next up was the records management features. We do not use this and I do not particularly understand it. I admit that I am big ignorant on the needs of records management. I just want to be able find my stuff.
WorkSite 8.5 is scheduled for release in fourth quarter of 2008. Universal Search 6.0 with the social features is also scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2008. Hopefully, I will get them in my Christmas stocking.
Rafiq also mentioned Project Meritage which is the next generation of WorkSite. It would still be compatible with 8.5 clients. It will be compatible with Unicode, will improve compatibility, allow for consolidations and consolidate records, documents and images in a single server.
Interwoven presented areas of improvement:
- Email filing is still complex and requires desktop computing power
- Only support blackberries and no other mobile devices
- Offline mode is antiquated
- Records management user interface needs to be improved
- Have not exploited Vivisimo's search capabilities
- Application integration is cumbersome and the use of macros is tough
Worksite 8.5 will have greatly improved offline access. They have a new, ground-up offline mode. It will have background synchronization and on-demand synchronization.
Rafiq also talked up records management. (I am not familiar with the records management piece.)
Worksite 8.5 will offer some access through the browser so they can expand access through more mobile devices. Certainly some email management through the blackberry will be a plus. I have not seen much demand for documents through the blackberry.
First up on the demo was Worksite Mobility 8.3. It is a mini-browser based access to Interwoven WorkSite. One key thing that caught me attention is that you can access the email in Worksite and forward and deal with the email. This actually could be a big improvement over current functionality. Right now I have a hard time accessing email filed in my email folders. This will be a big plus for encouraging people to file into WorkSite. You can find the email from your blackberry. Good stuff!!
Worksite 8.5 will have server side filing of email instead of client side filing of email. Right now if you file a lot of emails, it can bog down Outlook and your computer while it processes the emails by moving them from Outlook into WorkSite and profiling them in WorkSite.
You will be able to link a mailbox sub-folder with a WorkSite folder. You can take an email folder, click a button to link it to a worksite folder and synch the two folders. After moving an email into the outlook folder, they will be filed into WorkSite. A copy stays in the folder as a convenience copy. It is not clear if the purge and filing works in these folders. It is an interesting direction, but will depend on execution.
Offsite 8.5 allows you take matter workspaces or individual folders with you. You can pick the container. The synchronization takes place in the background. I have a lot of questions about how the documents are affected if multiple people access the documents and edit them in different places. If I have it offline and edit the document and someone is online and edits the documents, what happens and which version wins first. In the current version of WorkSite, only one person can access a document at a time. This offline mode seems to indicate that multiple people can edit the document, not knowing that other people are also editing the document. The audience had many questions and concerns about this feature. The Interwoven folks did not have a clear message or understanding of some of the issues and concerns.
Worksite 8.5 will bring improvements to Express Search. In the result set for Express Search, a mouseover will reveal more profile information about the document. They added intelli-type and recently used terms in the search. F2 will pull up the pop-up field for particular fields.
Next up was exploring some of the features of Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0 and how it may fit into WorkSite and Universal Search. This introduces things like ratings, tagging and annotations. [I previously expressed my excitement about this feature:Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration and The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search. No, I do not think lawyers will immediately jump on to these features. But from the knowledge management perspective, it will provide a great tool for highlighting the better content in the document management system. Even if only a few attorneys use these features it will have an enormous impact on the system and the return on documents. The ability to tag and annotate documents will be available in the underlying tools like MS Word. You also should be able to generate the usual 2.0 features like tag clouds. I am still excited about this feature and am looking forward to it coming out. You can also generate some reports with top tags and top taggers. These tags are one of the ways I see that we can get the document management system to be more effective on a precedent search.
Next up was the records management features. We do not use this and I do not particularly understand it. I admit that I am big ignorant on the needs of records management. I just want to be able find my stuff.
WorkSite 8.5 is scheduled for release in fourth quarter of 2008. Universal Search 6.0 with the social features is also scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2008. Hopefully, I will get them in my Christmas stocking.
Rafiq also mentioned Project Meritage which is the next generation of WorkSite. It would still be compatible with 8.5 clients. It will be compatible with Unicode, will improve compatibility, allow for consolidations and consolidate records, documents and images in a single server.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Interwoven's New Search Tools
I saw a preview of two new search tools from Interwoven. I think they will dramatically improve the ability of users to pull relevant information from their document management system.
[Disclaimer: Shortly after their presentation, Interwoven brought me and dozens of others to EPCOT for dinner, followed by a private desert reception overlooking the fireworks.]
The first tool is their WorkSite Miner tool. It is an improved search tool built into the Interwoven application. The results are returned in their typical results grid. But, you can group the results based on any column of information. This feature looks like it operates similar to the grouping function in Outlook. You grab the column heading with your mouse and drag it into the table header. You can pull additional column headings to have multiple layers of grouping.
In connection with this tool, they also made a simple search box available. This new search box operates outside the application and can be pulled up at any time using desktop commands.
The second tool is their new Universal Search. This is a new enterprise search tool powered by Vivisimo's Velocity search tool. The Universal Search has faceting searching that allows you to focus a broad search using the document metadata. You can filter documents by a particular client, document type, or whatever else you force your users to profile on a document when they save it into Interwoven.
It also has the semantic clustering of topics in the documents from Vivisimo (To see how this works, try some searches on Clusty.com, which is powered by Vivisimo.)
The Universal Search can be set up to index other datasources, such as your intranet, CRM or other information repository. Also, when you search, you can limit your search to a particular repository. Out of the box, it will have connectors for SharePoint, some CRM systems and email systems.
I really liked their approach to limit the date range. They show a histogram with a graphical representation of the number of results on each particular date. You can use a simple slider to limit the date range and visually see the volume of documents being included or excluded. This looks much easier to deal with as compared to using a pop-up calendar to limit and supplies much more information to the user.
The Universal Search will also have an alert feature. When new items would be returned by the search, it will show the new additions to the results set.
Universal Search is targeted for release at the end of September 2007.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Lexis Web Search
The Lexis Web product includes important, legal-oriented Web content selected and validated by the LexisNexis editorial staff. You can trust that all content has met LexisNexis criteria for being authoritative and accurate.I see that my Real Estate Space blog is included in the index. I also saw JD Supra, Connie Crosby, Slaw and Goodwin Procter in the search results. I assume they have included most law firm websites. They even included Kevin O'Keefe's Real Lawyers Have Blogs.
I could not find a list of the included sites.(KM Space is not one of the included sites.)
At first I thought Lexis had merely wrapped a frame around a Google Custom Site Search, like I did when I put together the KM Sites Search. But I saw some great tools to help you deal with the search results:
- Navigation based on Lexis Search by Topic or Headnote legal classification system
- Navigation based on Lexis LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology
- Navigation based on legal citations
- Recommended list of sources to search in LexisNexis
It is a great free product from Lexis. (It is odd to put "Lexis" and "free" in the same sentence.) There are links to premium lexis content and a Google adwords panel. Perhaps that will be enough to support the creation and maintenance of Lexis Web Search.
Thanks to Kevin O'Keefe of LexBlog and Leslie Street of Due Process: The Georgetown Law Library Blog pointing out this new service: Lexis Offers (in Beta) Legal-Specific Search Engine for the Web.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Enterprise Search at Procter & Gamble
Bud Miyahara, Section Manager, Procter & Gamble shared his company's take on enterprise search during the webinar: FROM VISION TO REALITY: ENTERPRISE SEARCH AT PROCTER & GAMBLE. The user experience is guided by consumer websites and searches. Internally, the content does not have as wide a variety of information. You need to meet their expectations.
The companies internal search average was 1.58 words which is much less than the 2.7 word average on the internet. A huge number of queries were for acronyms. Over half of the queries were not in their search engine (the search did not return relevant results).
The user benefit they were looking for:
Find the documents you need, the people you should talk to, and the places to look more efficiently than before. Reduce the time spent searching for information, increase the time to make productive connections, and enable action.The company chose Vivisimo. They liked the end-user experience. What came out of the box was close to what they wanted. They also like the clustering of Vivisimo. They also liked the flexibility of connectors and architecture. They ended up with rapid deployment, going from start to live in 8 weeks.
Bud struggled with the ROI on enterprise search. His advice:
- Throw hard numbers away
- Possibility of increase in employee productivity
- Reduced rework around the globe
- Increased number of searches being performed
- Search as the “glue”
Monday, May 19, 2008
Interwoven Roadmap, Strategy & Vision for 2008 and Beyond
Rafiq Mohammadi the CTO of Interwoven was the presenter for this session.
Three drivers for professional service firms: risks, client expectations and battle for talent. Interwoven wants to position itself as a productivity tool.
The strategy is to provide a complete solution to organize, find and govern information. Rafiq acknowledged that find or search was a weakness of their product, but the 8.3 release now turns it into one of their strengths.
The want to meet the ease of use expectations of Google. They are moving to a simple user interface, available in many devices. They also want to embed access to the Interwoven product in many platforms instead of having to go to a free-standing, separate program.
They also realize they need to scale up to handle many more documents. If they are going to be a repository for email, they realize that the number of emails will greatly exceed the number of documents. [Law firms are not ready to tackle Luis Suarez's reduction in email.]
Interwoven wants to focus on opening the platform to integrate with other applications and be able to support new applications without difficult development.
They gave a demo of email filing and management, in particular the send and file functions. Send and file really requires their matter centric environment to work. The presentation had two buttons with "send" and "send and file." With send and file, a screen pops up and asks for the client matter designation. Unfortunately, the file screen that pops up is terrible. It does give you the option to pull down a list of recent matters, the ability to just put in client matter numbers or send only. One nice feature is that a reply email has a "luggage tag" that designates where the original message came from. When you file the email, that tagged matter comes up automatically.
The email integration also allows you to keep courtesy copies in their inbox with a flag designating that the email has been filed in WorkSite. There is a button that purges all of the filed emails out of your inbox. (It is not clear if the purge only works on the inbox, or also in other email folders in exchange.)
One problem that pops up is that if the recipient is also on email management client, there will be competing "luggage tags" for the emails and the email chain. (ouch!)
They moved on to Interwoven Express Search. It is a floating toolbar that pops up with a simple "Google-ish" search box. It also returns results based on relevancy. There is also a query builder that you can pop-up to do an more advanced search by limiting the search results to particular fields.
The problem with the query builder is that they introduce some new terminology. We are used to limiting based on particular document types, Adobe, Word, PowerPoint, etc. They lump Office documents into one category. They also introduce the concept of "my stuff" and I am not sure what the definition of my stuff is. One problem we are having with 8.3 is that it does not seem to work well for searching for a document when you have the document ID.
Lastly, is onto Universal Search, powered by Vivisimo. This a great move forward on Interwoven's approach. I am a big fan of Vivisimo's approach of semantic clustering of results, along with the more straight-forward clustering of results based on hard-coded taxonomy. I have found the semantic clustering to be somewhat hit or miss. If the documents are rich in words you can get some interesting clusters. Otherwise the clusters can look very odd.
I very excited to see some graphical representations of some of the taxonomy. So you can see that a particular person is the author of most of the documents in the results. That starts exposing expertise.
Three drivers for professional service firms: risks, client expectations and battle for talent. Interwoven wants to position itself as a productivity tool.
The strategy is to provide a complete solution to organize, find and govern information. Rafiq acknowledged that find or search was a weakness of their product, but the 8.3 release now turns it into one of their strengths.
The want to meet the ease of use expectations of Google. They are moving to a simple user interface, available in many devices. They also want to embed access to the Interwoven product in many platforms instead of having to go to a free-standing, separate program.
They also realize they need to scale up to handle many more documents. If they are going to be a repository for email, they realize that the number of emails will greatly exceed the number of documents. [Law firms are not ready to tackle Luis Suarez's reduction in email.]
Interwoven wants to focus on opening the platform to integrate with other applications and be able to support new applications without difficult development.
They gave a demo of email filing and management, in particular the send and file functions. Send and file really requires their matter centric environment to work. The presentation had two buttons with "send" and "send and file." With send and file, a screen pops up and asks for the client matter designation. Unfortunately, the file screen that pops up is terrible. It does give you the option to pull down a list of recent matters, the ability to just put in client matter numbers or send only. One nice feature is that a reply email has a "luggage tag" that designates where the original message came from. When you file the email, that tagged matter comes up automatically.
The email integration also allows you to keep courtesy copies in their inbox with a flag designating that the email has been filed in WorkSite. There is a button that purges all of the filed emails out of your inbox. (It is not clear if the purge only works on the inbox, or also in other email folders in exchange.)
One problem that pops up is that if the recipient is also on email management client, there will be competing "luggage tags" for the emails and the email chain. (ouch!)
They moved on to Interwoven Express Search. It is a floating toolbar that pops up with a simple "Google-ish" search box. It also returns results based on relevancy. There is also a query builder that you can pop-up to do an more advanced search by limiting the search results to particular fields.
The problem with the query builder is that they introduce some new terminology. We are used to limiting based on particular document types, Adobe, Word, PowerPoint, etc. They lump Office documents into one category. They also introduce the concept of "my stuff" and I am not sure what the definition of my stuff is. One problem we are having with 8.3 is that it does not seem to work well for searching for a document when you have the document ID.
Lastly, is onto Universal Search, powered by Vivisimo. This a great move forward on Interwoven's approach. I am a big fan of Vivisimo's approach of semantic clustering of results, along with the more straight-forward clustering of results based on hard-coded taxonomy. I have found the semantic clustering to be somewhat hit or miss. If the documents are rich in words you can get some interesting clusters. Otherwise the clusters can look very odd.
I very excited to see some graphical representations of some of the taxonomy. So you can see that a particular person is the author of most of the documents in the results. That starts exposing expertise.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Knowledge Management in a Fragmented World
Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge started a new column in KM World magazine. Borrowing from Dave Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous, he calls it Everything is Fragmented.
On many knowledge management projects, people ask for a very structured way of organizing content. Inevitably, they query the system for something that is outside the structure they requested.
The improved power of search, adding metadata and adding user comments have changed the way we should approach knowledge management.
If you are a KM practitioner I am sure you have received a request for matching the Google search. There is only one field to enter information; you just type in a few words. Obviously, the Google page rank algorithm is unique to the web and does not work well inside the enterprise.
We need a way to manipulate the search results inside the enterprise and add more context to our internal nodes of information. Google does this by interpreting links to the nodes of information (webpages). We KM practitioners need some way to replicate this ability to add metadata to our knowledge artifacts. We need to better describe them, attribute authorship, rate them and add notes to them.
That is one of the reasons that I am enthusiastic about products like Vivisimo's social search. [Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration][The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search].
Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are very useful for law firms. As law firms we need to highlight the better forms and precedents for reuse. I believe we need to rethink how they are highlighted, where they are stored and what people can do with them to keep them organized. Organized in a way that is meaningful to each individual.
"I wanted to build on that by pointing to the shift during the life span of knowledge management from the "chunked" material of case studies and best-practice documents to the unstructured, fragmented and finely granular material that pervades the blogosphere. So when I was asked to contribute this column to KMWorld magazine, it seemed an appropriate title; it allows me to talk about not only trends in technology but also social issues, the scientific use of narrative, and to fire off the odd invective about over-constrained and over-controlled systems."Since I started following the Enterprise 2.0 movement, I have shifted my philosophy of knowledge management. I fall pretty close to Dave's position.
"It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction."Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are still useful. But, as Dave Weinberger points out in Everything is Miscellaneous, everyone has a different view on what the structure should be. Whatever taxonomy I create or a group decides upon, it will only be meaningful to some of the people some of the time. As the taxonomy gets more and more complex, the less useful it will be.
On many knowledge management projects, people ask for a very structured way of organizing content. Inevitably, they query the system for something that is outside the structure they requested.
The improved power of search, adding metadata and adding user comments have changed the way we should approach knowledge management.
If you are a KM practitioner I am sure you have received a request for matching the Google search. There is only one field to enter information; you just type in a few words. Obviously, the Google page rank algorithm is unique to the web and does not work well inside the enterprise.
We need a way to manipulate the search results inside the enterprise and add more context to our internal nodes of information. Google does this by interpreting links to the nodes of information (webpages). We KM practitioners need some way to replicate this ability to add metadata to our knowledge artifacts. We need to better describe them, attribute authorship, rate them and add notes to them.
That is one of the reasons that I am enthusiastic about products like Vivisimo's social search. [Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration][The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search].
Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are very useful for law firms. As law firms we need to highlight the better forms and precedents for reuse. I believe we need to rethink how they are highlighted, where they are stored and what people can do with them to keep them organized. Organized in a way that is meaningful to each individual.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Interwoven Express Search = WOW!!
I have been a basher of Interwoven for years, ever since we deployed it (when it was called iManage) almost a decade ago. It has always been good at managing documents and retrieving your documents. It shortcomings was in finding other people's documents. Especially when you were not sure if the document existed. Interwoven is taking a big step to curing that problem.
We are pretty far down the path of deploying version 8.3 of their Worksite product. The big change is the new Vivisimo Velocity search engine. So far it is giving us blazingly fast search results.
They have also delivered a new way to search: Express Search.
Interwoven is giving us "The Google" for documents. It is one simple box that combines several of the metadata fields into one cohesive fast search. It combines the full text search with the document name and other metadata fields to one unified fast search. The results come back fast and based on relevancy rather than a grid sorting on a field.
Did I mention fast?
I can run a simple search. Add other terms one at a time to narrow results and delete terms to back out the search. All with results coming back at the snap of my fingers.
Having the results come back based on relevancy is fantastic. Getting two hundred documents back based on the last edit date is not giving you a meaningful search result.
The Express Search is especially compelling when you compare it side by side with the traditional Interwoven search.
We are still running some testing and deciding on some global settings. But we hope to have it deployed by the end of the month.
We are pretty far down the path of deploying version 8.3 of their Worksite product. The big change is the new Vivisimo Velocity search engine. So far it is giving us blazingly fast search results.
They have also delivered a new way to search: Express Search.
Interwoven is giving us "The Google" for documents. It is one simple box that combines several of the metadata fields into one cohesive fast search. It combines the full text search with the document name and other metadata fields to one unified fast search. The results come back fast and based on relevancy rather than a grid sorting on a field.
Did I mention fast?
I can run a simple search. Add other terms one at a time to narrow results and delete terms to back out the search. All with results coming back at the snap of my fingers.
Having the results come back based on relevancy is fantastic. Getting two hundred documents back based on the last edit date is not giving you a meaningful search result.
The Express Search is especially compelling when you compare it side by side with the traditional Interwoven search.
We are still running some testing and deciding on some global settings. But we hope to have it deployed by the end of the month.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Improvements to the Interwoven Document Management System
Some representatives of Interwoven gave my group a look at the new searching tools that are coming out in their 8.3 release in December. These upcoming changes look like they will transform their document management system into a powerful knowledge management tool.
We use Interwoven Worksite as our document management system, with the Desksite client application and Filesite Outlook integration. We are lawyers. We write lots of agreements, memos and briefs. So, the document management system has always been our largest knowledge repository.
It has worked well to store and manage the document, but it has never worked well at retrieving the knowledge from the system. As I mentioned in earlier posts, a document management system typically is great on the management side and less on the knowledge side. The key role of the document management system is controlling the drafting of documents. It makes it easier to identify particular documents, fetch them back from the system, and edit them. A document management system works great to recall particular sets of documents back from the system using profiled metadata, like client and matter designations.
The document management system usually comes up short in searching for a precedent or research. Interwoven is particularly hampered because the search engine in the product seemed to be underpowered for the multi-million number of documents in our system. The other problem was the scattering of information across the profile fields for a document. For example, I am looking for a purchase and sale agreement used by ABC Corp. to buy the Blackacre Shopping Center. The key terms in the search "purchase and sale agreement", "ABC Corp." and "Blackacre Shopping Center" may be in any number of metadata fields: the client name field, the matter name field, the document name field or the full text of the document itself. You would have to run multiple searches to deal with the multiple combinations of which fields may contain the search criteria.
Interwoven is planning to improve its performance in these types of searches with its new 8.3 release. The big change is adding in the Vivisimo Velocity search engine under the hood. This appears to give searches in the system a big boost in speed and responsiveness. This 8.3 release is separate from the Universal Search web-based product but uses some of the same hardware and indexing technology.
The first great change is Interwoven’s goal to give the user a single textbox to search. (Just like Google.) In giving the user one box to search, Interwoven combines that across all (or at least many) of the metadata fields. This new version should allow you to find my earlier example of the "purchase and sale agreement used by ABC Corp. to buy the
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Serving Multiple Generations Presentation at the Legal IT Leadership Summit
This morning's keynote session is "Serving Multiple Generations - The Role of Web 2.0 and Strategies for IT." Andrew McAfee is the presenter with myself and Jason Lichter as co-panelists. The session is planned to be released in a wiki later this month.
Andy got into this space three or four years ago when he first heard about web 2.o. At first he was skeptical. He finds companies are very innovative and that they are even better at talking about how innovative they are.
Andy was going watch wikipedia and see it an example of the implosion of the web 2.0 movement. Much to his surprise, it did not. I fact, he found the entries to be incredibly useful and informative. His next thought was how this could useful inside an organization as opposed to the world-wide web.
His definition: "Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers." This is not an incremental change, these are novel technologies and approaches. They offer more than incremental improvement in areas of innovation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, collective intelligence, search and discovery.
There are a few underlying trends that are key to the nature of the change. Social software is new way to look at these. There is the network effects and Metcalfe's Law. There are free and easy platforms for communication. There is a lack of up-front structure. There are mechanisms that exist to let structures to emerge, so you can find the information you are looking for.
He distinguished between channel technologies and platforms. Email is a channel communication. It is point to point, invisible to others and cant' be consulted or harvested. Websites are a type of platform; it is universal, visible and consult-able. The problem with the platforms is that you need to know technology and have security rights. Now there are free and easy platforms that remove the expertise and cost associated with the website.
Andy told the story of Wikipedia and Nupedia. He then moved on to del.icio.us and showed us his del.icio.us tags. He compared the del.icio.us tags to the taxonomy of the early days of Yahoo. He pointed out the del.icio.us tag page that shows the most popular tags and which you share.
In talking about clusters and tags it highlighted the powers of the next version of Universal Search and Vivisimo's semantic clustering.
Andy moved onto the business benefits of Enterprise 2.0. He focused on his Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye. He moved on to the story of the cost savings at Intrawest based in internal blogs: Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking.
He moved on to adoption challenges. The biggest is overweighting the advantages of the incumbent and the under-weighting the new. Something new needs to be ten times better for people to shift to the new. Dion Hinchcliffe mentioned this on his Introduction to Social Computing at the 2007 Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Andy got into this space three or four years ago when he first heard about web 2.o. At first he was skeptical. He finds companies are very innovative and that they are even better at talking about how innovative they are.
Andy was going watch wikipedia and see it an example of the implosion of the web 2.0 movement. Much to his surprise, it did not. I fact, he found the entries to be incredibly useful and informative. His next thought was how this could useful inside an organization as opposed to the world-wide web.
His definition: "Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers." This is not an incremental change, these are novel technologies and approaches. They offer more than incremental improvement in areas of innovation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, collective intelligence, search and discovery.
There are a few underlying trends that are key to the nature of the change. Social software is new way to look at these. There is the network effects and Metcalfe's Law. There are free and easy platforms for communication. There is a lack of up-front structure. There are mechanisms that exist to let structures to emerge, so you can find the information you are looking for.
He distinguished between channel technologies and platforms. Email is a channel communication. It is point to point, invisible to others and cant' be consulted or harvested. Websites are a type of platform; it is universal, visible and consult-able. The problem with the platforms is that you need to know technology and have security rights. Now there are free and easy platforms that remove the expertise and cost associated with the website.
Andy told the story of Wikipedia and Nupedia. He then moved on to del.icio.us and showed us his del.icio.us tags. He compared the del.icio.us tags to the taxonomy of the early days of Yahoo. He pointed out the del.icio.us tag page that shows the most popular tags and which you share.
In talking about clusters and tags it highlighted the powers of the next version of Universal Search and Vivisimo's semantic clustering.
Andy moved onto the business benefits of Enterprise 2.0. He focused on his Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye. He moved on to the story of the cost savings at Intrawest based in internal blogs: Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking.
He moved on to adoption challenges. The biggest is overweighting the advantages of the incumbent and the under-weighting the new. Something new needs to be ten times better for people to shift to the new. Dion Hinchcliffe mentioned this on his Introduction to Social Computing at the 2007 Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
How To Be A Hero: Develop An Enterprise Search Strategy
Matthew Brown, Principal Analyst and Research Director at Forrester Research presented on Enterprise Search strategies in a Webinar sponsored by KM World and Vivisimo.
User behavior is driven by consumer experiences
This was just a snapshot of his more complete coverage in Matt's foir purchase report: How To Be A Hero: Develop An Enterprise Search Strategy
User behavior is driven by consumer experiences
- Simple queries
- Illusion of comprehensiveness
- Connectivity to specific repositories
- Business content lacks context, text, and links
- Security really matters, often mandated by law
- Application, and worker context is king
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Interwoven Express Search and Worksite 8.3 Update
The document management system is the assembly line of large law firms. We sell our knowledge to our clients. But we package and deliver a lot of that knowledge in documents. I keep a close eye on the document management system to make sure it is keeping pace and hoping that it will show some functional improvements in this 2.0 world.
Our document management system vendor, Interwoven, has been throwing out some good ideas on how they are going to improve their product. Back in February, we ran a quick test of Interwoven's new Express Search tool: Interwoven Express Search = WOW!! Last month I presented a Case Study on Worksite 8.3.
After a lot of load testing, checking configurations and hardware upgrade, we sat down to test them again.
The concept is still great. They stripped the cranky old search engine and plugged in a fancy new search engine from Vivisimo. They also combine several of the metadata fields into one search box, so you get a much more Google-like search. The search is still very fast.
In our current tests we ran into a lot of issues. We are still trying to figure out if is our problem or Interwoven's problem or some combination of both. These were the problems:
Our document management system vendor, Interwoven, has been throwing out some good ideas on how they are going to improve their product. Back in February, we ran a quick test of Interwoven's new Express Search tool: Interwoven Express Search = WOW!! Last month I presented a Case Study on Worksite 8.3.
After a lot of load testing, checking configurations and hardware upgrade, we sat down to test them again.
The concept is still great. They stripped the cranky old search engine and plugged in a fancy new search engine from Vivisimo. They also combine several of the metadata fields into one search box, so you get a much more Google-like search. The search is still very fast.
In our current tests we ran into a lot of issues. We are still trying to figure out if is our problem or Interwoven's problem or some combination of both. These were the problems:
- Multiple Versions. If there are multiple versions of the documents (which almost always the case for our important documents) each version comes back in the search result as a separate item. Our prior configuration was just a single entry for the multiple versions.
- Document ID. One of the core functions of a document management system is the fetch search. You enter a single unique document identifier and that one document is returned. We operate with multiple document libraries, so our document identifier numbers are only unique in each library. The identifier will be in the system multiple times, but can be limited by library. With DeskSite product from Interwoven, the search results show the document library so you can easily distinguish the document you are fetching for. In Express Search, the search results merely show the document application symbol and document name. That means you can't distinguish the document from the list presented. This is especially problematic when you combine this the multiple version problem. Today we had a new problem. When we search by placing the document ID in the Express Search window, the search just fails to return results.
- Exact Phrase. Putting quotes around a phrase is a powerful search technique. For some reason two word phrases worked fine, but three or more words in the phrase failed. "one two" works but "one two three" does not.
- Three Letter Words. The search engine seems to ignore words with three letters or less. When the three (or two) letter word is put in quotes to search for a phrase, the search fails.
- Wild cards with numbers. We configured the application to automatically put wildcards around searches in DeskSite. 1995 proxy fails.
- Differences Between Data Miner and Express Search. A search for "1995 Proxy" worked in Express Search, but not in Data Miner.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Connections in Context
I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster. The presentation was a retake of the presentation he gave at the Enterprise Search Summit.
Oz has done some great work on finding documents. So I was enthusiastic to see his take on finding people.
My Notes:
The goal of CRM has been to help you find someone and to deliver information about that someone to help you decide if that someone is the "one." We need to make it easy to find people, whether internal or external, and see our shared experience with this person.
Oz set forth Amazon.com, with all of the related content related to the product. With Facebook, he pointed out the flow of information from Facebook.
There are three keys around people: who, why and what. Who are the People and Contacts. The Why is the client, matter or project. The What are emails and documents. It also important to coordinate those with when and where.
The goal is to make the information findable in a Google-like manner. That is one simple search box that integrates all systems. It also important to filter the results like you do in Amazon or Clusty (powered by Vivisimo).
Oz moved onto a presentation of the contacts module of his AnswerBase system. AnswerBase is powered by Recommind. The tool uses a relationship analysis tool from Contact Networks (in a proof of concept). This tool looks at the email traffic between internal and external people to show the strength of relationship. They also add info from the CRM system, HR databases, document management system, billing system, matter management system and marketing systems.
They had a privacy issue related to harvesting email. They limited it to emails that were put into their email filing system. This allows you to expose the email and alleviated privacy concerns.
Oz moved onto finding contacts in context. This involved some entity extraction. They use West KM to find courts, judges and parties mentioned in the document. (This is very litigation focused.)
Oz moved on to finding internal expertise. They mash together information from the HR system, the documents the attorney has drafted, the information on the attorney's matters and the attorney's time entries.
Oz has done some great work on finding documents. So I was enthusiastic to see his take on finding people.
My Notes:
The goal of CRM has been to help you find someone and to deliver information about that someone to help you decide if that someone is the "one." We need to make it easy to find people, whether internal or external, and see our shared experience with this person.
Oz set forth Amazon.com, with all of the related content related to the product. With Facebook, he pointed out the flow of information from Facebook.
There are three keys around people: who, why and what. Who are the People and Contacts. The Why is the client, matter or project. The What are emails and documents. It also important to coordinate those with when and where.
The goal is to make the information findable in a Google-like manner. That is one simple search box that integrates all systems. It also important to filter the results like you do in Amazon or Clusty (powered by Vivisimo).
Oz moved onto a presentation of the contacts module of his AnswerBase system. AnswerBase is powered by Recommind. The tool uses a relationship analysis tool from Contact Networks (in a proof of concept). This tool looks at the email traffic between internal and external people to show the strength of relationship. They also add info from the CRM system, HR databases, document management system, billing system, matter management system and marketing systems.
They had a privacy issue related to harvesting email. They limited it to emails that were put into their email filing system. This allows you to expose the email and alleviated privacy concerns.
Oz moved onto finding contacts in context. This involved some entity extraction. They use West KM to find courts, judges and parties mentioned in the document. (This is very litigation focused.)
Oz moved on to finding internal expertise. They mash together information from the HR system, the documents the attorney has drafted, the information on the attorney's matters and the attorney's time entries.
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