Digital Assets Management System - Autonomy Virage MediaBin

Autonomy Virage MediaBin is the advanced and comprehensive solution to index, analyze, categorize, manage, retrieve, process, and distribute all types of digital assets within an organization.

Autonomy Virage MediaBin helps organizations with globally distributed teams to effectively manage, distribute, and publish digital assets used to promote their messaging, products, and brands.

Companies would benefit from higher-impact marketing and communications, greater agility, stronger brand equity, increased team productivity, and the security of knowing valuable corporate assets will be fully leveraged and preserved for the future. By providing self-service access to digital assets, marketing personnel no longer have to spend time fulfilling content requests.

Autonomy Virage MediaBin delivers rapid return on investment and can support implementations scaling up to the largest global enterprises.

Major Features:

Unified Management: a single environment which supports standardized and automated tagging to accelerate search and streamline the creation, management, delivery, and archival of all digital assets.

Intelligent Analytics: leverages Autonomy IDOL to automate manual processes such as metadata tagging, summarization, and categorization.

Next-Gen Rich Media Technology: leverages next generation video and speech analytics technology that extracts concepts to enable cross-referencing with other forms of information.

Effective and Agile Content Reuse: provides secure access to all content for all users. Internal and external teams can collaborate more effectively to improve coordination and productivity in all marketing programs.

Transform and Transcode on the Fly: Multi-threaded transformation task engine can handle large quantities of simultaneous complex transformations involving format conversions, color-space conversions, color adjustments, resolution, cropping, sizing, padding, watermarking, and a wide variety of advanced graphics adjustments that would normally require a user to open an editing application on their desktop.

Other Features:

• browser based system;
• permissions can be defined based on users roles or by folders; search incorporates permissions;
• content can be pulled from CMS such as TeamSite and rendered on the fly;
• each asset has unique ID which is passed over to TeamSite; TeamSite "knows" when there is a different or a new revision. If an asset gets updated in MediaBin, TeamSite gets notified;
• has set of workflows such as approval and review, can define set of rules once assets are approved, they move to publishing area; also includes Process Studio which is the workflow tool and Template which is form builder;
• assets can be uploaded by "drag and drop" and it can be Dragged and Dropped to Teamsite from MediaBin;
• there is no limitation to size of the files;
• upload can be automated for assets to go to specific folders;
• after the download, assets will be preserved for individual users;
• how assets are used is reported in Teamsite;
• can pull content from SharePoint;
• metadata is preserved, it is searchable and indexable.
• content is automatically categorized by asset type and resolution; asset type is recognized on ingest, so no entering metadata is required;
• Teamsite pulls images from MediaBin;
• supports 29 languages;
• ability to link assets together (for example: associated assets) using existing metadata;
• ability to create a taxonomy of assets;
• search includes saved searches, recent searches, both preset and executed searches, custom search;
• ability to search for words in video and then go that place in the video;
• once a user finds content, an action can be taken such as download, send it e-mail, send shortcut to content or add it to light-box which is defined by permissions;
• there is Activity Manager which includes all taken actions and an ability to get to users' tasks.

Benefits:

• eliminates human error and ensures quicker access to content through automatic metadata extraction and accurate search results;
• reduces costs by automating the production, review, and distribution of digital assets;
• encreases efficiency by providing users with self-service access at any time;
• greater speed time-to-market while maintaining accuracy and consistency;
• facilitates quick reuse and re-purposing of images, as well as rapid content creation;
• produces higher-impact marketing and communications, greater agility, and stronger brand consistency;
• increases compliance by security controlled access, complete audit trail, and control of licensed content.

Search Engine Technology

Modern web search engines are highly intricate software systems which employ technology that has evolved over the years. There are few categories of search engines that are applicable to specific browsing needs.

These include web search engines (e.g. Google), database or structured data search engines (e.g. Dieselpoint), and mixed search engines or enterprise search.

The more prevalent search engines such as Google and Yahoo! utilize hundreds of thousands of millions of computers to process trillions of web pages in order to return fairly well-aimed results. Due to this high volume of queries and text processing, the software is required to run in a highly dispersed environment with a high degree of superfluity.

Search Engine Categories

Web search engines

These are search engines that are specifically designed for searching web pages. They were developed to facilitate searching through a large amount of web pages. They are engineered to follow a multi-stage process: crawling the infinite number of pages to skim the figurative foam from their contents, indexing the foam/buzzwords in a sort of semi-structured form (for example a database), and returning mostly relevant as links to those skimmed documents or pages from the inventory.

Crawl

In the case of a wholly textual search, the first step in classifying web pages is to find an "index item" that might relate expressly to the "search term". Most search engines use sophisticated algorithms to "decide" when to revisit a particular page, to check its relevance. These algorithms range from constant visit-interval with higher priority for more frequently changing pages to adaptive visit-interval based on several criteria such as frequency of chance, popularity, and overall quality of site. The speed of the web server running the page as well as resource constraints like amount of hardware or bandwidth also figure in.

Link map

The pages that are discovered by web crawls are often distributed and fed into another computer that creates a veritable map of uncovered resources. This looks a little like a graph, on which different pages are represented as small nodes that are connected by links between the pages. The excess of data is stored in multiple data structures that allow quick access to this data by certain algorithms that compute the popularity score of pages on the web based on how many links point to a certain web page, which is how people can access any number of resources concerned with diagnosing psychosis.

Database Search Engines

Searching for text-based content in databases presents few special challenges from which a number of specialized search engines developed. Databases are slow when solving complex queries (with multiple logical or string matching arguments). Databases allow pseudo-logical queries which full-text searches do not use. There is no crawling necessary for a database since the data is already structured. However, it is often necessary to index the data in a more economized form designed to inspire a more expeditious search.

Mixed Search Engines

Sometimes, searched data contains both database content and web pages or documents. Search engine technology has developed to respond to both sets of requirements. Most mixed search engines are large Web search engines, like Google. They search both through structured and unstructured data sources. Pages and documents are crawled and indexed in a separate index. Databases are indexed also from various sources. Search results are then generated for users by querying these multiple indices in parallel and compounding the results according to "rules".

Big Data and Content Management

There has been a lot of talk lately about big data. What is big data?

Big data is is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand commonly used software tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, governance, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis, and visualization.

What is considered "big data" varies depending on the capabilities of the organization managing the data set, and on the capabilities of the applications that are traditionally used to process and analyze the data set in its domain.

Big data sizes are a constantly moving target. As of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set. With this difficulty, new platforms of "big data" tools are being developed to handle various aspects of large quantities of data.

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. How does it apply to us and what we do in content management?

The sheer numbers, covered in most enterprise content management (ECM) analyst reports, also extend to all aspects of the information technology sector, prompting developers to create a new generation of software and technology or distributed computing frameworks in an effort to cope with this scalability phenomenon.

Content growth is everywhere. From traditional data warehouses to new consolidated big data stores, IT infrastructure must be ready for this continuing scale; it impacts the entire IT industry, especially ECM.

Content is getting bigger. Applications are growing more complex, challenging IT as never before. How will these changes impact content management technologies? It's difficult to predict exactly, but there are insights to be found and used to plan for the future.

ECM technology is evolving toward a platform-based approach, enabling organizations to make their own content-centric and content-driven applications smarter. Analysts, vendors and users all agree: The time for "out-of-the-box" CMS applications has passed. Now each project can meet specific needs and individual requirements.

Content and data, more often than not, come with embedded intelligence whether through adding custom metadata and in-text information or by leveraging attached media and binary files and it can be utilized, whether structured or unstructured.

This can be observed on many different levels across various domains. For instance, the arrival of what some have started to call "Web 3.0": the semantic Web and the related technology that promotes intelligence out of raw content through advancements like semantic text analysis, automated relations and categorization, sentimental analysis, etc. -- effectively, giving meaning to data.

More traditional ECM components, such as workflows, content lifecycle management and flexibility, demonstrate much of the same. Smart content architecture along with intelligent, adaptive workflow and processed or deep integration with the core applications within information systems are all making enterprise content-centric applications smarter and are refining the way intelligence is brought to content.

In short, content is getting smarter on the inside as much as on the outside.

In fact, such disruptive phenomena as Big Data or the new semantic technology on the scene are huge opportunities for enterprise content management solutions. They are bringing new solutions and possibilities in business intelligence, semantic text analysis, data warehousing and caching that require integration into existing content-centric applications, all without rewriting them.

As a result, Big Data and smart content will push more of enterprise content management toward technical features such as software interoperability, extensibility and integration capabilities.

These developments will also demand a clean and adaptive architecture that is flexible enough to evolve as new standards arise to bridge CMS and semantic technologies, as well as connectors, to a back-end storage system or connectors with text-analysis solutions.

This underscores the advancements made in the development of modular and extensible platforms for content-centric applications. Taking the traditional approach of employing large enterprise content management suites that rely on older software architecture will make it harder to leverage these new and nimble opportunities.

In order to get the most value out of smart content and refine methods of dealing with Big Data, enterprise content management architects must incorporate a modern and well designed content management platform upon which to build, one that not only looks at end-user features but stays true to the development side. Enterprise content management will not be reinvented; Big Data and smart content are evolutions, not revolutions, in the industry.

I will continue on this subject in my future posts.

Optimize Web Experience Management

Leading enterprises strive to acheeve higher levels of customer engagement through online channels, and this means they must easily, quickly and cost effectively provide fresh, personal, relevant content anytime, anywhere, on any device, through a consistent and dynamic user experience.

Traditional web content management system (CMS) solutions are no longer sufficient, and a richer and broader range of capabilities that enable web experience management - managing and optimizing the site visitor experience across the web, mobile apps, social networks and more - must now be leveraged in this new era of engagement.

The Need for Web Experience Management

Over the last few years, the Internet has undergone a tremendous amount of fundamental change in its landscape - socia1, personal and mobile.

1. Social - The Web is becoming increasingly more social and much less anonymous. The power of sharing can enhance or destroy brands in seconds.

2. Personal - While the Internet is continuously expanding in terms of ubiquity, at the same time it's becoming much more local and much more personal in terms of user experience.

3. Mobile The growth of mobile access to the Internet is rapidly expanding to the point where access from tablets and phones will soon exceed that from desktops and laptops.

The very way we communicate with customers is changing, and when fundamental change like this occurs, those who recognize the change and move quickly to adapt will benefit the most.

A New Era of Engagement

Each of these trends reinforces the others and fuels further adoption and innovation. It is these technologies, the behaviors and capabilities they foster that have brought us to a new era which Forrester calls the "era of engagement."

Driving these trends are people - our friends, leads, customers, critics, and fans. This is our audience and the other half of the conversation, and in today's age of engagement, they want to participate and expect us to engage them on their terms, on their schedule, in the context of their location, in their language and optimized for their device. To effectively tackle this challenge of serving a mass audience with limited resources, enterprises require strategy and effective tools to help get the job done.

Web experience management (WEM) provides us with the tools to take on this otherwise daunting task. The capabilities of WEM allow you to create, manage and deliver dynamic targeted and consistent content across various online channels including your website, social media, marketing campaign sites, mobile applications, etc. It takes a lot more than a traditional Web CMS to meet these new demands.

Key Principles of Web Experience Management

To effectively implement WEM, enterprises must start with their business strategy and goals which should drive their messaging and engagement strategy and which in turn should drive their content strategy. In other words, the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities that businesses face should be considered first and foremost.

Too often organizations fail to do this by jumping straight into a technology selection without due consideration of the business drivers. Around this foundation, we wrap the fundamentals of basic Web content management. It is important to remember that content is still king. Business users and marketers need easy to use, yet powerful, content authoring and publishing capabilities.

They need rich content models that allow them to create engaging visitor experiences, to easily create new content assets, to quickly find and re-purpose existing content, and to preview content and the site visitor experience for all online channels.

Upon this foundation, an effective WEM solution provides a comprehensive collection of capabilities that allow organizations to create, manage and deliver dynamic, targeted and consistent content and visitor experiences across multiple touch points -corporate website, dedicated marketing campaign sites, mobile applications, social media sites, etc.

While WEM requirements are going to vary from organization to organization, some of the most critical features needed by essentially all enterprises include content targeting and personalization, mobile device support, faceted search and navigation, multi-channel publishing, integrated Web analytics, and campaign management.

Knowledge Management Applications - Coveo for Service and Support

In my last two posts about Coveo products, I described Coveo search applications - Coveo for advanced web search and Coveo for advanced enterprise search. Today, I will complete describing Coveo products with Coveo knowledge management application - Coveo for service and support.

With Coveo, knowledge required to solve cases faster can be found wherever it resides, within and beyond the knowledge base. Many companies are challenged with the proliferation of data, in multiple systems, communities, on-premise and in the cloud. Knowledge is everywhere and hard to manage.

Coveo solves this challenge by placing information from anywhere, related to the agent’s context, directly in front of them. Coveo technology automatically "reads" case information, established context, and instantly shows contextually relevant content and experts directly within the CRM such as Salesforce, or within a separate Insight Console. Coveo creates information mash-ups regardless of where the information resides, combined with advanced enterprise search and navigation abilities that bring your entire knowledge ecosystem to your agents.

Such knowledge availability decreases case resolution time, increases first contact resolution, and empowers lower level agents to become productive faster and to solve more complex cases. The results show dramatic impact on contact center capacity and customer satisfaction.

Features

Solutions and experts from anywhere - Coveo automatically presents 360° views of customer, case, or product information and communications, as well as experts who can help. Using advanced data enrichment, solutions and customer insight can stem from multiple sources, across enterprise, community, and social content.

Advanced enterprise search and navigation - expanded views enable deep, broad, knowledge exploration for cases, securely, across any enterprise content.

United indexing - Coveo federates searches and mash-ups from cloud, enterprise, and social data securely and in real time—regardless of format or source. It indexes source data from Salesforce, SharePoint, databases, file shares, Exchange, Dropbox, Lithium, Gmail, etc.

Expertise finding - dynamically, through context and topics, from internal colleagues to external experts, Coveo locates people with experience relevant to each case and customer.

Customer is in the center - Coveo cuts across departmental and system silos and enriches cases with sales or engineering content, thus providing richer and more relevant customer interactions. Conversely, other departments benefit from information generated by agents to inform product development and sales.

Virtual interaction - consolidates all customer and prospect communication and interactions from any channel, bringing together opportunities, cases, transactions, e-mails, events, cases, calls, tweets, etc.

Customization - The intuitive admin interface enables customization of any objects and combinations of information, including custom fields.

Search Applications - Coveo - Advanced Website Search

In my last post, I described Coveo for advanced enterprise search. In this post, I will describe Coveo for advanced website search.

Coveo takes your existing Web Content Management to a new level of insight and productivity. Coveo creates a virtual integration layer between your WCM and all your company’s key information sources (knowledge bases, databases, cloud content) to provide powerful, consolidated insight.

Coveo recommends the most relevant content to visitors, powered by indexing and search across any set of diverse systems. You can increase customer satisfaction by finding the missing content your customers are looking for. Smart navigation and search makes relevant content quickly apparent for your users. Website visitors will be presented with relevant, related content without the administrator having to create the links and without the visitor having to search!

You can instantly correlate content from your WCM/CMS such as Sitecore with other key information sources, including your Salesforce, SharePoint, Exchange, Lithium, and more.

Features

WCM Features

Out-of-the-box usability - you can start getting insight immediately without any difficult set up or configuration.

Related Topics - automatically correlate site content to relevant content based on similar themes and attributes.

Composite Views - composite views that combine relevant site content with other corporate system outside WCM (Communities, Intranet, CRM, Social, etc.)

Modular, flexible design - Template-based rendering for easy customization, reusable and extensible user controls for deep customization.

Computed Facets - configurable facets ideal for eCommerce websites, providing dynamic calculations of relevant product information such as average or summed prices, as well as filtering by price ranges.

Native integration with leading WCMs - API-Level Integration with Sitecore, SharePoint and SDL Tridion provides support for live indexing, security trimming and metadata search.

Faceted Search and Navigation - More intuitive, complementing traditional keyword searches with guided navigation and conversational search that leverages metadata for increased relevance and precision.

Search Analytics - Provides valuable information about visitor search behavior, content usage (top queries) and gaps in content (unsuccessful queries), offering unparalleled insights into key trends and more agile decision-making.

Indexing

Audio-video Indexing - The speech in audio or video files can be indexed with the optional Audio Video Search module. It creates an accurate transcript of speech content that is aware of the enterprise's vocabulary (i.e. proper names, employee names, domain terms), and allows users to effectively search audio and video content as easily as they search document content. When searching, the exact location of the searched terms are highlighted in the timeline of the audio or video player.

Connector Framework - Connector APIs enable easy integration with most repositories, including a flexible security API to support the security models of the indexed repositories.

Converters - Tens of file formats are supported out of the box, including PDFs, Office documents, Lotus Notes, HTML, XML, Text files, etc. Metadata contained in audio and images file formats is also indexed, while the text contained in images can be index with the optional OCR module.

Languages - Languages are automatically identified at indexing time, improving content processing and relevance algorithms.

Metadata mapping - Regardless of the actual naming for the metadata in the indexed repositories, the system supports configurable mapping to a specified internal field representation. For instance, an index containing both Exchange and Lotus Notes emails will merge the “From” and “To” and “Subject” metadata even if they use different names for these fields.

OCR- The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module allows the indexing of text content from files such as scanned documents stored in image or PDF files.

Pre/Post conversion scripts - Conversion scripts are hooks in the indexing pipeline that allows administrators to fully customize the way documents are indexed. There are two types of scripts, those that are executed before and those executed after the conversion of the document from its binary representation to indexable metadata and text.

Push API - Provides a simple way to integrate with external systems. All the calls necessary to support all the advanced features of the indexing pipeline are available through this API.

Tagging - Metadata can be injected on documents at search time, enabling search and facets on these new metadata in real-time. An example of usage is the addition of user-created tags on documents.

Security

Document Level Security - Data sources can be configured to index document permissions with content, making Early-binding security possible, or permissions can be set directly for all documents of this source.

Index Security - Security is integrated directly in the index structures to ensure that users only see content they are entitled to see. Early and Late security binding are both handled at the index level to deliver the best performance and security.

Index Segmentation - In addition to the document level securities reflecting the underlying repository permissions, the index can be segmented into collections with their own access restrictions.

Security Freshness - Changes in the group/user structure are constantly monitored and refreshed in Coveo’s security cache. An administrator can also force a refresh of the cache if required

Security Normalization - Securities from different systems are normalized within the index so that users are automatically assigned with all proper security identifiers when accessing Coveo. This ensures that users see all the content they are entitled to see.

Super User Access - The main system administrator can grant temporary and audited rights to a specified user to search and access content for which he normally does not have access rights. Typical uses are e-Discovery, forensic, etc.

Reporting and Analytics

3rd party analytics integration - The Coveo analytics database allows the use of third-party reporting tools for more complex or custom reporting. An administrator can also easily configure the search interfaces to integrate third-party Web Analytics systems such as Google Analytics.

Advanced Query Analytics - Captures data on all user interactions with the search interfaces including result click-through and the use of different search UI functions. Reporting interface allows administrators to analyze the captured data, to elevate the most popular results, or select the correct result, for given queries.

Query & Indexing Logs - Comprehensive reports and statistics with graphical views on system status, queries, content, history, etc. Live console gives administrators a real-time view of what is going on the system.

Text Analytics

Configurable Text Analytics - An administrator can configure a workflow that will create new metadata based on content analysis, rules and context, such as Themes, Named-entities, Regular Expressions.

Incremental updates - An administrator can configure update schedules to capture recent changes in the index.

Interactive Fine Tuning - Extraction parameters, normalization and blacklisting can be refined and metadata regenerated without re-indexing the full documents set.

Named Entity Extraction - Entities such as persons, locations, and organizations are automatically extracted from indexed content. Additional entities can be configured in the system.

Plug-ins - Additional, 3rd party, plugins can be added to the Text Analytics workflow. For example, domain/organization specific taxonomies can be used in the process.

Rule-based Extraction - Configurable rules can be used to add specific metadata to documents.

Theme Extraction - Themes are Topics and Concepts automatically extracted from indexed content.

Next time, I will complete describing Coveo products with Coveo for service and support.

Search Applications-Coveo-Advanced Enterprise Search-Part 2

Yesterday, I mentioned that Coveo offers three products - Coveo for advanced enterprise search, Coveo for advanced website search, Coveo for service and support. I presented the some features of Coveo for advanced enterprise search product.

Today, I will complete presenting this product.

User Interface

Coveo InsightBox - different field values are suggested while a user types a query.

Facets: AND/OR mode - for specific facets, multi-selection can be switch from OR (default) to AND

Facets: Computed Fields - computations can be applied of specific facets: Sums (Avgs, Mins, Maxs).

Facets: Search-as-you-type - search-as-you-type on all unique values of specified facets.

Facets: Sort-by - facet values can be sorted based on their label, count or computed value.

Mobile UI - user Interface compatible with iOS browsers.

Relevance Ranking - results are ordered by default based on user profile, social and other context. This can be easily tuned and configured by an administrator.

Result Sort-by any Field - results can be ordered by any field. This is configured by the administrator.

Secure, Federated search - log in once in Coveo and search, navigate and consolidate dozens of different data sources simultaneously. Trim results based on user permissions.

Sort-by any Field - results can be ordered by any field, as configured by the UI administrator.

Faceted Search and Navigation - relevant metadata and fields can be used to populate facets within a result set. User can select multiple facet values dynamically and get instant changes in the result list.

Advanced User Interface

Export Results to Excel - results can be downloaded and opened in Excel. Administrator can select which metadata to include in the export.

Floating Searchbar - Windows users can activate a floating Search bar and search Coveo without the need to start a Web browser.

Outlook Sidebar - Outlook users get contextual results based on their context and selection. They can also search for emails, files, people and SharePoint without leaving Outlook.

Tagging - users have the ability to add custom tags and annotations to results. Tags are searchable, are applied in the index in real-time and are available to other users.

Widgets - an administrator can configure widgets to display results in advanced visual representation.

Windows Desktop Indexing - Windows users can search their local files and email archives. A desktop agent is required to capture content and synchronize it with the centralized Coveo index.

Relevance

Configurable Ranking - administrator can assign weight on more than 20 ranking attributes, such as Term proximity, TFIDF, dates, Terms in Title, Content reputation.

Query Correction - the spelling of the query is checked against the index content in order to suggest proper spelling even for words that are not normally part of general dictionaries (example: internal project codes, people names, etc.)

Query Ranking Expressions (QRE) - for each UI, an administrator can configure specific ranking rules, based on context and result set. This is an easy and flexible way to promote content based on profile attributes of the current user, such as locations, history, languages, roles.

Stemming - variations of a keyword with a similar basic meaning are treated as synonyms, broadening the search when required.

Thesaurus - an administrator can create a thesaurus and link it to the query. Thesaurus can be created from scratch or imported from existing enterprise content.

Top Results - an administrator can assign specific results to appear at the top of the list for specific queries.

Collaborative/Social ranking - click through data and Manual document rating are used in relevance calculation. This is automatically shared among colleagues based on their social proximity.

Administration and Configuration

Admin Roles - the main system administrator can delegate partial administration permissions based on roles (interface designer, system administrator, collection administrator, etc.)

APIs - administration APIs allow custom development and integration of the administration functions into external systems.

Audience Management - administrator can define multiple audiences and assign specific UIs to them.

Installation Kit - everything is installed and initially configured using an install kit for easy deployment.

Interface Editor - for each User Interface, an administrator can configure Result templates, CSS, Facets, Sort-keys and other parameters.

Monitoring/Email alerts - different system conditions are monitored and email alerts can be sent to report important system events, such a disk space running low.

Web-based Administration UI - simple, Web-based UI for easy administration.

I will describe Coveo for advanced website search in my next post.

Search Applications-Coveo -Advanced Enterprise Search - Part 1

Coveo offers three products - Coveo for advanced enterprise search, Coveo for advanced website search, Coveo for service and support. Today, I am going to present Coveo for advanced enterprise search. This product has many features, so I will start presenting them today and will finish tomorrow.

Coveo for advanced enterprise search is the enterprise search solution that automatically organizes your company’s information into actionable, on-demand knowledge. Coveo's powerful enterprise search engine correlates and analyzes all your company’s data information sources, wherever they reside. All the information in your Sharepoint, CRM, email, Cloud content, and File servers are now instantly accessible from one place.

Features

Access Real-time information from anywhere - federate searches on enterprise, social and cloud data securely and in real time—regardless of format or source.

Transform how your users access information - seamlessly integrate within existing applications and workflows to maximize impact and minimize disruption.

Digest, synthesize and utilize information faster - automatic metadata and entity extraction, themes and tagging combine to help users discover content and share findings.

Navigate content with ease - dynamic, searchable facets provide an ability to navigate to the most relevant content.

Simple to set-up and deploy with existing resources - as easy to use as any consumer web app, coupled with enterprise-grade robustness and scalability.

No hassle security integration - secure configuration out of the box is safe and easy.

Indexing

Audio-video Indexing - the speech in audio or video files can be indexed with the optional Audio Video Search module. It creates an accurate transcript of speech content that is aware of the enterprise's vocabulary (i.e. proper names, employee names, domain terms), and allows users to effectively search audio and video content as easily as they search document content. When searching, the exact location of the searched terms are highlighted in the timeline of the audio or video player.

Connector Framework - connector APIs enable easy integration with most repositories, including a flexible security API to support the security models of the indexed repositories.

Converters - multiple file formats are supported out of the box, including PDFs, Office documents, Lotus Notes, HTML, XML, Text files, etc. Metadata contained in audio and images file formats is also indexed, while the text contained in images can be indexed with the optional OCR module.

Languages - languages are automatically identified at indexing time, improving content processing and relevance algorithms.

Metadata mapping - regardless of the actual naming for the metadata in the indexed repositories, the system supports configurable mapping to a specified internal field representation. For instance, an index containing both Exchange and Lotus Notes emails will merge the "From", "To" and "Subject" metadata even if they use different names for these fields.

OCR - the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module allows the indexing of text content from files such as scanned documents stored in image or PDF files.

Pre/Post conversion scripts - conversion scripts are hooks in the indexing pipeline that allows administrators to fully customize the way documents are indexed. There are two types of scripts, those that are executed before and those executed after the conversion of the document from its binary representation to indexable metadata and text.

Push API - provides a simple way to integrate with external systems. All the calls necessary to support all the advanced features of the indexing pipeline are available through this API.

Tagging - metadata can be injected on documents at search time, enabling search and facets on these new metadata in real-time. An example of usage is the addition of user-created tags on documents.

Reporting and Analytics

3rd party analytics integration - Coveo analytics database allows the use of third-party reporting tools for more complex or custom reporting. An administrator can also easily configure the search interfaces to integrate third-party web analytics systems such as Google Analytics.

Advanced Query Analytics - captures data on all user interactions with the search interfaces including result click-through and the use of different search UI functions. Reporting interface allows administrators to analyze the captured data, to elevate the most popular results, or select the correct result for given queries.

Query and Indexing Logs - comprehensive reports and statistics with graphical views on system status, queries, content, history, etc. Live console gives administrators a real-time view of what is going on the system.

Scalability and Fault Tolerance

Distributed Indexing - indexing process distributed in many Index Slices, each one indexing part of the content. Slices can be hosted locally (on local drives or on a SAN) or on separate servers (through IP connection) providing highly scalable architecture.

Failover and Query Scalability - index mirroring system provides high availability (if one mirror fails, the others can continue serving queries). The number of queries that can be answered per second can be doubled by doubling the number of automatically synchronized mirrors.

Performance profiles - configurable performance profiles to balance indexing total throughput, query performance and time-to-index.

Query Federation/GDI - federate queries to other instances of Coveo and merge the results from all instances into a single result page while also leveraging the ranking algorithms from the different instances.

Security

Document Level Security - data sources can be configured to index document permissions with content, making early-binding security possible, or permissions can be set directly for all documents of this source.

Index Security - security is integrated directly in the index structures to ensure that users only see content they are entitled to see. Early and late security binding are both handled at the index level to deliver the best performance and security.

Index Segmentation - in addition to the document level securities reflecting the underlying repository permissions, the index can be segmented into collections with their own access restrictions.

Security Freshness - changes in the group/user structure are constantly monitored and refreshed in Coveo’s security cache. An administrator can also force a refresh of the cache if required.

Security Normalization - securities from different systems are normalized within the index so that users are automatically assigned with all proper security identifiers when accessing Coveo. This ensures that users see all the content they are entitled to see.

Super User Access - the main system administrator can grant temporary and audited rights to a specified user to search and access content for which he normally does not have access rights. Typical uses are e-Discovery, forensic, etc.

Text Analytics

Configurable Text Analytics - an administrator can configure a workflow that will create new metadata based on content analysis, rules and context, such as Themes, Named entities, Regular Expressions.

Incremental Updates - an administrator can configure update schedules to capture recent changes in the index.

Interactive Fine Tuning - extraction parameters, normalization and blacklisting can be refined and metadata regenerated without re-indexing the full documents set.

Named Entity Extraction - entities such as persons, locations, and organizations are automatically extracted from indexed content. Additional entities can be configured in the system.

Plug-ins - additional, 3rd party, plugins can be added to the text analytics workflow. For example, domain/organization specific taxonomies can be used in the process.

Rule-based Extraction - configurable rules can be used to add specific metadata to documents.

Theme Extraction - themes are topics and concepts are automatically extracted from indexed content.

More features of this product tomorrow...

Realities of Online Self-Service

Forrester Research says that business leaders must dramatically revitalize the self-service experience offered on customer facing websites just to keep pace with evolving consumer expectations. There are key realities of modern online service that expose the gap between customer expectations and website performance, and how you can take steps to close that gap starting now.

1. Customers have grown tired of your old online help tools.

Customer satisfaction with today's most common web self-service features is abysmal and is getting worse. In 2011, only 51% of consumers who used online help sections or FAQs for self-service were satisfied, down from 56% in 2009. As more companies rectify this by deploying next generation self-service solutions and virtual agents, fewer customers will tolerate antiquated self-service help tools online.

2. Customers now expect a superior experience online, not just a good one.

Exceptionally positive online experiences are now setting the bar for what customers expect when they visit virtually any website in search of answers and information. According to Forrester, 70% of online consumers expect businesses to try harder to provide superior online customer service.

3. Consumers arc impatient and protective of their time.

Consumers cite "valuing my time" as the most important thing a company can do to deliver a good online customer experience. Yet most websites are complex, hard to navigate and filled with content that provides multiple possible answers rather than a single, swift path to resolution.

4, Customer service has gone mobile.

Mobile phones are now ubiquitous. Nearly 88% of US adults own them, and 27% of US adults are already considered "super-connected" consumers, using their phones for information. research and commerce. What is more, digital tablet sales are predicted to outpace sales of PCs by 2015. Convenience and ease-of-use are the hallmarks of these mobile form factors. Websites that offer experiences contrary to these attributes will only raise the ire of today's increasingly impatient and unforgiving mobile consumer.

5. Social media is increasingly embraced as a customer service tool.

Back in 2009, just 1% of consumers used Twitter for customer service. This number jumped to 19% in 2011. Delivering a consistent service experience across multiple channels is critical, especially today, as consumers are not shy about using social media sites to publicly complain and vent frustration about any interactions with companies that fail to satisfy.

6. Dissatisfaction online = hijacked revenues.

One of the most appealing benefits of delivering a positive experience in the web channel is the opportunity for organizations to provide information that supports and encourages purchase decisions. Online, the shift from a customer service conversation to a purchase consideration conversation can be a very natural and systematic progression. This progression is thwarted, however, the moment a self-service experience fails to satisfy.

The impact of the self-service experience on revenues should not be underestimated. Fully 45% of US online consumers agree with the statement: "I am very likely to abandon my online purchase if I cannot find a quick answer to my questions."

These trends underline the urgent need to revitalize the online service experience offered by most companies. Online self-service is in need of resuscitation. Useful web self-service and virtual agent technologies that can deliver an enhanced customer experience are currently underutilized.

Where To Go from Here?

What should your organization do as the first step toward improving the online customer experience?

Begin with an honest and objective assessment of the self-service experience your website offers today. Looking at your customer facing website, ask yourself these three questions...

1. Is there a single, highlly visible starting point for self-service activity?

Today's consumers are task oriented when they go online. Your customers want their self-service journey to begin immediately and move swiftly to completion. Looking at your home page or most highly trafficked customer service page, ask yourself if the average customer would be able to identify the clear starting point for any customer service-related task in a matter of seconds. Any required navigation or clicking through to new pages is viewed as time waste and is out of alignment with their expectation.

2. Is issue resolution generally a multi-step or a single-step, activity?

When looking for information online, customers want a single accurate answer that is accessible in one step. Any content page that offers more than one alternative answer or path to an answer, requires your customer to take additional steps for sorling, scanning content and/or comparing answers. On your website, when results are served, is the customer presented with a single answer, or multiple results to sift through?

3. How will you measure how your site is performing?

A quantitative assessment of your self-service performance is the first thing you will need to establish for any improvement to the self-service experience. A free online self-service assessment tool, created by Forrester and InielliResponse, is vendor-agnostic methodology you can use for scoring your site's performance and charring a path for improvement.

Current Trends in Content and Knowledge Management

Current KM trends changed the way we work in KM environment. Let’s look at these current trends and how they affect KM.

Big Data

According to Cisco study, global IP traffic will reach 1.3 zettabyes annually by 2016 which is fourfold increase from 2011. By 2016 there will be 19 billion global network connections, the equivalent of two-and-a-half connections for every person on earth. Huge amount of data needs to be moved, collected, stored, and analyzed to create value out of it.

With social networking and global depression and exponential rate of information growth, the question becomes: how are you going to store, manage, and utilize this information in a way that meets your organization objectives. You need to be able to derive value from your information.

Social Computing

During last decade, social computing has widely spread in the work place. It has emerged as integral part of enterprise productivity. Social tools changed ways people work together. The proliferation of social software in the enterprise demonstrates that users find value in this new generation of tools.

In just a few years, social media has gone from cutting-edge phenomenon to a main-stream channel that companies use to engage clients, partners, and vendors.

Gartner predicts that by 2014 social networking services will replace email for interpersonal business communication for 20% business users.

Some statistics:

• 65% of world’s top companies have an active Twitter profile.
• 23% of Fortune 500 companies have a public-facing corporate blog.
• 58% of Fortune 500 companies have an active corporate Facebook account.
• Facebook has 901 million monthly active users.
• Twitter now has more than 140 million active users, sending 340 million tweets every day.
• Enterprise social software solutions are being used in 67% of organizations surveyed in 2013, up from 43% in 2011.

This highlights the fact that social software is becoming part of business processes in the work place. Employees want to engage socially with the people they work with and build stronger relationships within their companies. Traditional content management and collaboration solutions are incorporating new features to satisfy the social and information sharing demands of the enterprise.

Enterprises are using these emerging social computing technologies to improve collaboration among employees, clients, and vendors around the globe.

Tools such as blogs, instant messaging, wikis, social tagging and bookmarking, discussion boards with comment fields. Individuals comment on case studies, exchange ideas, and contribute their own material. Employees can follow up with people, search for subject matter experts, get updates on projects, participate in conversations that are going on.

The use of social software for collaboration in a business environment is most successful when there is a business purpose. The social capabilities of enterprise applications will continue to be extended because of the value that collaboration brings to a wide variety of business activities. Meanwhile, enterprise social software products, which have matured considerably over the past 5 years, are achieving increasing acceptance by corporations.

Challenges

Emergence of social networking has been a two-edged sword for organization. On one blade rests knowledge sharing. On the other is a ton of useless information and you need to dig thought it to get to what you need. In other words, they have added to the noise, volume and diversity of information.

When it comes to social networks, the question used to be: how much you want to connect vs how much you want to collect? The new version is: how much do you want to curate vs not curate?

Non-curated content is typical unmanaged social network content. The question is: how much of it do you want to have control over?

Companies must understand how social media use may impact the company’s ability to manage risk. It is important to understand how business and employees engage in social media, develop and deploy policies and solutions necessary to stay compliant, to meet business requirements and be flexible at the same time.

Companies need to increase information control and visibility.

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing gained significant adoption as a way for companies to shift from capital-intensive model of buying and running infrastructure and software to renting usage of shared infrastructure and applications.

With the power of cloud computing, small businesses can have the same level of IT infrastructure as Fortune 500 companies with vastly limited overhead.In addition to hosted servers, small businesses can purchase software as a service (SaaS) that is hosted online and completely scalable. Forrester predicts growth in SaaS applications.

While some companies are replacing licensed software with SaaS applications, most are using SaaS for new product categories that complement their existing on-premise software.

Benefits

With software purchased as a service, a small business no longer needs IT personnel on site to install and maintain software and hardware. SaaS allows businesses to purchase software without multi-year contracts and without painful software installation.

Rapid Deployment - with no hardware or software to install and no servers to buy, cloud content management virtually has no setup time. So, it can be deployed very quickly.

Access Anywhere - A cloud content management solution offers an application available anytime and from any internet browser. Information is always accessible and data can be shared instantly. The cloud gives the company centralized control of info while allowing users to access it from any computer or device.

Easy Collaboration - Since it can be accessed anywhere, cloud content management systems allow any authorized personnel to access and collaborate on content. Sharing lets you get information to those who need it instantly, and from anywhere in the world.

Low Cost - Cloud ECM solutions offer a highly-affordable alternative to on-premise solutions.

Speed - Cloud ECM implementations typically take 24% of the time of similar on-premise projects. That rapid time-to benefit translates directly into the higher ROI that business managers want.

Flexibility - Cloud ECM implementation gives the business this flexibility, both in terms of right-sizing capacity and in terms of aligning ECM capabilities with changing business needs.

Reduced Risk - Cloud ECM projects don’t require large outlays for uncertain results. And a variety of protections can be written into vendor contracts. For these and other reasons, the cloud fits well into today’s corporate risk mitigation strategies.

For activities that involve collaboration, SasS browser access to an application is far more superior to running it behind a firewall.

It enables IT to respond quicker to business requirements. Cloud vendor often provides an effective mobile client which otherwise you would have to undertake yourself if you were to customize your on-premise platform.

Challenges

Cloud is no panacea. Even the largest cloud vendors can experience outages.

Multiple File Formats - The documents that you might like to upload into your cloud content management system may be in many different formats. The device that is being used to display the content often may not have the correct software needed to display the document or image.

A common solution is to convert the files on the server to a generic format that can be viewed by many devices. For example, most browsers and devices today can display JPEG or PNG formats for images, Microsoft Office or PDF format for documents, CAD for drawings, etc.

Document Size - It is very important to consider the size of the document, either the number of pages or the physical size of the file. Downloading the entire document can take a long time depending on available bandwidth. This is especially an issue on mobile devices with slow or crowded data connections.

A system that provides a preview of the document can help the user to determine if they want to download the document would help.

Browser compatibility - Another challenge is that there are various browsers that are used to access the Internet and not all of them work the same way. Each browser has differences in how they operate and how the code works under the covers.

Mobile viewing - With today’s on-demand business world, it is imperative to be able to support viewing documents on mobile devices. But not all the devices behave the same way, and different operating systems are used on the various devices. Without a consistent mobile viewing platform, separate viewing applications may need to be installed on each device and results will vary. Using a single technology that supports many document types is very important in a mobile environment.

HTML5-based viewers can help resolve some of the challenges associated with browsers and mobile devices. Older versions of the browsers that are used in many government, education and businesses do not support HTML5.

Understanding that these common challenges are a possibility and preparing for them before you encounter them is important. Providing a single platform with multiple viewing technologies, including HTML5, Flash and image-based presentation, can help to ensure that all users can view documents, regardless of their specific device, browser or operating system.

Responsibility for your information in the cloud still falls on you: data ownership continuity, security, compliance. Take the same test-based approach to selecting cloud solutions as you would on-premise solutions. Focus on user experience.

Mobile Computing

The workspace is becoming increasingly mobile. Mobile computing enables access from anywhere. Forrester predicts that by 2016, smart phones and tablets will be used by a billion of global customers. Looking ahead, employees and customers will expect and demand that all business applications support mobility. Need to be able to deliver mobile experience - Ability to access content from mobile devices.

Content and systems must be optimized for mobile devices. Employees working in the field must be able to access content from their mobile devices. Employees use mobile devices to collaborate on docs, take meeting notes, create presentations, and collect data in the field. Decide what content and services make the most sense for your organization mobile devices.

"Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD)

It is becoming a reality of office life these days. It is a natural consequence in a world where people bring iPads, iPhones, Androids, and Blackberrys to work. This trend is relatively new and it continues to grow. As a result, organizations have been compelled to open up their networks to a wider variety of these devices that their employees want to use.

For corporations, trying to save IT $, it is good news – employees are now paying to acquire and maintain phones, tablets, and laptops that were once funded by IT. These organizations realized that encouraging employees to bring in their own devices can be a win-win situation for them as well as for their employees.

On the downside, the ever growing variety of BYOD devices and the fact that they are owned/controlled by employees poses serious security, workflow, and IT management issues for employers.

Employees are using their own smart phones and tablets to conduct business. While the actual device belongs to an employee, business info does not. This creates new twist in info governance initiatives.

If employees upload corporate data into a consumer-based public cloud, the cloud operator has de-facto ownership of this data.

Also, there are hackers accessing corporate data through relatively insecure consumer devices, challenge of integrating BYOD platforms with enterprise-wide corporate software, and extra IT funds being required to support a myriad of BYOD platforms.

A company can’t dictate which devices are used, in which security parameters and under what conditions.

Therefore, define and control what levels of access BYOD equipment has to a company networks, applications, and corporate data.  It is vital to establish a comprehensive governance policy.

Companies need to keep their employees happy and productive while protecting and leveraging the info they create and consume.