In the past couple of days tech giants Microsoft and Google both made aggressive moves to securing more of your intranet business. Both announcements from the two avowed corporate enemies did not directly involve competitive services, but the indication is clear: the employee audience is an increasingly bigger priority for both.

The Microsoft chiefly targets the health sector – specifically health companies that are looking to bolster their communications and collaboration technology for employees.

Microsoft has launched a new healthcare offer called Knowledge Driven Health Plans, “the company’s shared vision and solutions framework for the health plan industry.”

See Microsoft targets healthcare

Under Microsoft’s vision and solutions framework, health plan employees are able to connect islands of information for improved collaboration and knowledge delivery, driving more informed decisions. The solutions based on this framework span key business areas, including care management to business intelligence, enterprise-wide project management to risk management and risk compliance, and member-centric communications. Industry customers around the world are realizing business success under the Knowledge Driven Health Plans vision and solutions framework.

Horizon Healthcare Services Inc. (Horizon) recently deployed Microsoft BizTalk Server to provide translation and orchestration services for its provider portal applications and HIPAA transactions. With Microsoft’s technology in place, Horizon has achieved improved visibility into transactions, increased first-call resolution of support requests, and it projects a 50 percent reduction in cost of ownership.

In short, Microsoft is repackaging existing business software and solutions for the healthcare sector with an eye to employee collaboration and communications tools.

Google has unveiled two new intranet services that expand on previously announced but scaled-back solutions including the new, smaller, faster Google Mini.

As the Motley Fool put it, “Google is the king of Internet search. Now, it looks like it wants to be the king of intranet search.

See Google on the Inside

Google Mini integrated hardware/software search appliance now searches multiple sites and can help businesses create an instant intranet by searching the contents of shared Windows file systems.

Starting at just $1995, new features for the Mini include:

Access to more, fresher content

• Search across multiple web sites with the ability to create an almost unlimited number of document collections and user interfaces
• Create an instant intranet by directly indexing shared file systems
• Choose between automated continuous crawling to maximize freshness and minimize network traffic, or crawl the entire site on a set schedule
• Faster crawling and query serving, with support for up to 25 queries per second (a 25X increase) for growing websites

The hardware itself is event smaller than the original and now can fit under the desk of your intranet administrator.

What is refreshing is that both companies have spent recent years focusing most of their energy on the Internet, customer-facing space. There appears to be a reinvigorated focus towards the ever-improving and increasingly vital intranet space.

“The search engine sucks!” is one of the most common complaints I come across. Naturally, most organizations immediately blame the search engine. They should point the finger at themselves.

Five years ago I wrote the article The search isn't broken, we're broken  (Part I : Search success depends on people and rules). Five years later, not much has changed.

While the search technology itself sometimes is the problem, this is rarely the issue. Search technology has advanced impressively in recent years and yet inaccurate and irrelevant search results continually defeat users performing search queries.

Though some search engines may be sub-par, the more likely problem is an absence of people processes and rules for managing information.  “People are lazy,” Cory Doctorow, a   technologist who maintains the popular weblog Boing Boing, told me when I first talked to him 5 years ago. “People are remarkably cavalier about their information and how it is stored. This laziness is bottomless…”

One way of capitalizing on the potential of the search function to insert keywords as meta tags within the actual content pages. But this requires rules and a rulebook, otherwise known as the corporate taxonomy. A taxonomy is a set of rules, or dictionary, for classifying or cataloguing information – whether on the Internet, intranet or shared drives via a LAN or WAN (see Don’t forget to add the tax(onomy).

Meta tags, simply put, are the tags or data that describe the information contained on a page or site. Think of a meta tag as the tag on your shirt collar – it identifies the type of shirt and describes it with information about the materials and the manufacturer. Meta tags can be used to describe the type of data in terms of keywords, description, department, date, author, etc.

However, searching the intranet is fundamentally different than searching the Web:

·         Employee intranet queries are generally far more precise in nature than the average consumer Web search

·         Employees have to find information quickly to do their jobs – not finding the right information is not an option

·         The Internet doesn’t have a taxonomy; the intranet requires one

Autonomy has released an interesting ‘white paper’ (brochure) on 5 Differences Between Business Search and Consumer Search. Most of the paper is designed to get you to buy the Autonomy engine (Ultraseek) and therefore this paper requires a ‘grain of salt.’ Nonetheless, the Autonomy list of 5 differences underlines some important points:

1)     Return Role-based Results - The tasks for which employees use information vary widely, depending on their department and their role within their company.

2)     Provide Multiple Methods of Searching - Standards for search relevance is higher in business. Employees want a single, correct answer to their information request.

3)     Search All Corporate Information Repositories - Corporate information is spread across a host of specialized secure business applications, databases, content management repositories, email systems and Web servers—all of which require special interfaces.

4)     Support Multiple Languages and File Formats - Employees need to access business documents in any language and from a dizzying array of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, graphic, multimedia, compression and encoding formats.

5)     Enforce Corporate Security Models and Compliance Policies - Access to corporate content must be securely managed in the face of a new matrix of government regulatory mandates and privacy concerns.

The last time I saw Autonomy at work I was impressed; but its expensive and not the answer to every organization’s problems. To underscore my earlier point, search is more than technology. Effective information retrieval and knowledge management principally requires:

• rules and defined processes (taxonomy and meta tagging)
• employees who are not only willing to follow the rules but actively participate in sharing information and knowledge
• effective supporting technology (search, content management, etc.)

Therefore, like most enterprise challenges, there is no silver bullet – and it certainly doesn’t come off the shelf.

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One thing I do like about Autonomy (no I don’t own any shares) and other similar products is their relevance ‘tuning’…. “Ultraseek’s search results can be tuned to match information structure and end-user needs with relevance tuning options that deliver comprehensive control over the relative weighting of metadata fields. In addition, Ultraseek’s exclusive Quick Links feature provides editorial control over search results, allowing keywords to be manually associated with specific URLs that are returned above normal search results.” Cool.

RELATED READING:

Intranet vs Internet Search  

The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part II : Intranet Search & Taxonomy

Well Beyond the Search Box

Next generation inference engines

The lost meaning of knowledge management

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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media