AMR Research and Mercer discuss the ROI of Content Management Systems (hint: they need search)

In large enterprises today, employees and administrators are trying to make sense of the volumes of content created by and living inside their companies, and quite a few of these organizations are turning to enterprise content management (ECM) systems. According to Forrester Research, ECM license revenue was projected to reach $3.9B in 2008.

Yet, over the past few years, as companies have spent significant dollars on their ECM systems, they've come to realize one thing. Content management systems are great at being repositories of information, yet individual employees still struggle to find the exact document they are looking for – even if they know it's in the ECM system. In other words, finding information can be a painful process.

Which leads us to the latest thinking from AMR Research, which provides comprehensive research and advisory services for supply chain and IT executives. Jim Murphy, Research Director for Knowledge Management at AMR Research, is looking at effective search as the missing element of a content management solution. While many content management systems have a built-in search feature, the capability and relevance of this functionality is typically not up to par. Murphy has been talking to many enterprises who are increasingly looking to separate enterprise search solutions to provide high quality search across not only their ECM system, but across other major repositories in their companies as well.

One such enterprise Murphy has spoken to is Mercer. As a global services company in 180 cities and 40 countries, Mercer has 19,000 employees, many of whom need to access information instantly to effectively serve their clients. Their business depends on leveraging intellectual capital and sharing best practices. So even though their intranet linked to Livelink, an ECM system which stored 1.5 million documents, there was no comprehensive search tool spanning all of the companies. After evaluating many different search technologies, Mercer made the choice to bring in the Google Search Appliance to provide universal search across their intranet.

As Haroon Suleman, Mercer's Lead Enterprise Architect for enterprise search, explains, "The Google Search Appliance won hands down. The fact that the Google Search Appliance provided a bridge to Livelink, and can provide future SharePoint connectivity if needed, was a major selling point."

Both Murphy and Suleman will join us on Thursday, October 8 for a webinar titled "Search: A Vital Element of an ECM Strategy." Murphy will present AMR's views on the ECM and enterprise search space, and Suleman will share the Mercer story, discussing Mercer's business needs, needs behind enterprise search, and specific metrics from users on how the Google Search Appliance has been increasing productivity. Register for the webinar and join the conversation – and the question and answer session at the end of the session.

Search: A Vital Element of an ECM Strategy

Thursday, October 8, 2009

11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT

Maybe ECM systems need good search too, after all.

Posted by Vijay Koduri, Google Search Appliance team

The ROI JumpStart: a "welcome package" for new GSA customers

Enterprise Architecture A to Z reports that most enterprises allocate between 2-10% of their revenues on overall IT spending. Organizations might spend millions of dollars on systems such as ECM, ERP, CRM, BI, or DBMS.

Yet, despite that spending, AIIM reports that 73% of enterprise users don't think it's easy to find the information they need to do their jobs. As these organizations work to improve their IT return on investment, we'd like to help them start with a Return on Information – backed by the Google Search Appliance 6.0. Starting today, we are offering to help new customers "JumpStart" this equally critical type of ROI.

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) increases Return on Information by working across diverse repositories, business systems, and data structures to return the results users need. It's also easy to deploy – customers get their GSA up and running quickly, with highly relevant results right out of the box. But our JumpStart adds a lift: two days of onsite deployment services, provided by a select Google enterprise partner, as a "welcome" offer for new customers licensing a GSA covering one million documents or more.

With this ROI JumpStart, new GSA users will accelerate their onboarding experience, from purchasing to deploying to getting relevant results to end users. Our partners will work with your team on site for two days, at no cost to you, sharing proven expertise and the GSA's out-of-the-box results and getting your new GSA indexing repositories across your organization.

What's more, the onsite Google enterprise partner will show your search administrators how to work with the GSA to add more repositories for your users to search. With your new GSA and two days of professional coaching, your team will be ready to jump ahead and get a true return on information.

At this time, the ROI JumpStart is available to new GSA customers in the United States and Canada.

Learn more about the ROI Jumpstart here, or contact a Google sales professional.

Posted by Angelo Gomez and Cyrus Mistry, Google Search Appliance team

Working with Google: Business tips to help you engage customers, monetize your site and work more efficiently

On this blog, we usually focus on helping you make the most of the products we've designed specifically with IT departments in mind. But Google has lots of other tools that other parts of your organization (such as the sales and marketing teams) might find useful.

So, in this post, we thought we'd go through a quick summary of the wide range of Google products that can help you do business. We've grouped these tips into three buckets: methods to optimize your website, details about how your company info can get listed on Google properties and finally, ways to improve your business operations.

OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE

Tip 1: Help customers find you with Google Maps

Pinpoint your business by embedding a Street View image on your website to show customers your storefront, office, building, parking facilities or anything else at the street level, or provide interactive door-to-door driving directions with a simple gadget. For a complete store locator solution, check out Google Maps API Premier

Tip 2: Engage users when they visit your site

Awaken and strengthen the community that visits your website by enriching it with social features. You can choose from a gallery of gadgets to add commenting, ratings and reviews, opinion polls, and more to your site. Learn more

Tip 3: Help visitors find what they're looking for

Add a customized Google-powered search box so that your visitors can easily find what they're looking for on your site. You can choose to show targeted ads alongside search results and earn revenue while helping visitors find what they're looking for with AdSense for Search, or you can purchase Google Site Search to offer your visitors an ad-free search experience.

Tip 4: Earn revenue from ads targeted to your content

Google AdSense enables website publishers of all sizes to display targeted ads alongside their online content and earn money. Sign up for AdSense and get access to Google's vast network of advertisers. If you're already selling ads directly to advertisers, learn how you can better manage your online sales and ad inventory with one of Google's ad serving solutions.

Tip 5: Measure website conversions on your website using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool to track how visitors interact with your website. You can set up "Goals" in Analytics to track how many visitors complete a desired action, such as submitting a contact form or making a purchase. This lets you see your website's ROI and optimize your marketing efforts. Check out this post for a tutorial on how set up Goals for your site.

Tip 6: Increase your conversion rates with Website Optimizer

Every web page has room for improvement when it comes to conversions. Testing a few simple changes with Google Website Optimizer can radically increase your site's conversion rate. Try it now.

GET LISTED ON GOOGLE PROPERTIES

Tip 7: Put your business on Google Maps

People search for businesses on Google Maps and Google.com every day. Make sure your business is easy to find and your listing information is up-to-date by visiting the Local Business Center at www.google.com/lbc. It's free, and with the new dashboard feature, you can see how popular your business is on Google, where people drive from to get to you, and how they search to find you. Check out this video to learn more.

Tip 8: Submit all of your content

Google can also help you reach out to the world by distributing your content on Google Web Search, Product Search, iGoogle, and more. Learn how Google’s free products can make your online investments go further with increased distribution, traffic and monetization.

IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS OPERATIONS

Tip 9: Simplify your IT environment, encourage innovation and cut costs

Managing email and other messaging software with multiple servers can be a headache. By switching to Google Apps, you can enjoy 99.9% uptime and take advantage of Google's data center infrastructure to ensure your information is secure. With your systems online, new features are automatically incorporated and collaboration can be done at a fraction of the cost of existing setups. Learn more

Tip 10: Archive corporate email in a central and searchable repository

Many businesses rely on backup tapes or .pst files to serve as their email archive. Searching through these sources can be time consuming and resource intensive. To minimize your IT operating burden and protect your business from costly e-discovery projects, you can archive email on-line in a central and searchable location with Google Message Discovery. Learn more

Tip 11: View and style mapping data with Google Earth Pro

If your business has GIS (Geographic Information System) data then use Google Earth Pro to view this map data with built-in GIS data import tools. You can also share styled map data quickly with colleagues and clients with Google Earth as a backdrop, leveraging Google’s comprehensive mapping data to make quick, location specific decisions. Learn more

Tip 12: Easily locate ALL of your internal documents using the Google Search Appliance 6.0
Your company’s internal search system can be just as good as Google’s – and just as easy to use. The Google Search Appliance (GSA) provides universal search for business, indexing all company content in a customizable way. The Google Search Appliance can search intranets, web servers, portals, file shares, databases, content management systems, and real-time data in business applications – and serve it up to employees in integrated, easy-to-navigate results. The new version of the GSA – GSA 6.0 – which just premiered yesterday, can now search billions of documents and provides rich customization features. Learn more

Posted by Debbie Leight, Google Apps team

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Introducing Google Search Appliance 6.0: The Story Behind (GSA)n

Today we're announcing the launch of the latest version of the Google Search Appliance, GSA 6.0. We've packed it full of so many new features that it's difficult to even count them. Check out the videos linked below to see some highlights, and I'll tell you how we got to this point -- the origins of (GSA)n.


As you might know, last August, we launched "10 million docs in a box ". Building on the premise of scale with simplicity, we (the engineering team) challenged ourselves to see how much further we could go, while still keeping the architecture extremely simple. After many late-night sessions spent diagramming on the whiteboards and chugging cappuccinos, we had a breakthrough.

The end result was a new architecture: (GSA)ⁿ. When we tested it out, the product manager was pretty excited about all the new features and search power. He was used to hearing about the millions of docs we could handle – but this time we were going to push it to a new realm: billions.

The idea was simple; build technology to connect as many appliances as you'd like, whether in one location or separated across departments or even across continents - and still provide a unified set of results to the end-user – the employee searching for an elusive document or piece of information. This would not only give our customers unparalleled ability to scale, but enable them to integrate all the data in their organizations. Information doesn’t do you much good if you can’t find it! That was our guiding principle.

One of our beta customers, MTCSC Inc., really needs the geographic integration. When we caught up with them, MTCSC was in the midst of deploying over 50 GSAs all over the world for a federal customer, connecting to over 2,500 data sources and consisting of data on websites, file shares, databases, and SharePoint servers. The new GSA 6.0 architecture is now helping them integrate information from the varied data centers to provide users with a single, unified set of results.

So imagine there is a database that might “live” in Egypt, some documents in a data center in Sydney, and a fileshare whose homebase is Los Angeles. The new GSA 6.0 integration can handle searching through all those data stores and give the employee who is looking a simple page of search results – one that looks as easy to use as Google.com – even though the backend search is really complicated.

And, since we were feeling ambitious, we added a Ranking Framework (where administrators can easily feed in server logs and other enterprise-specific information to improve relevance of search results), multiple new biasing options, and an administrative API to provide more control for automation of common tasks. We also added support for both early binding and late binding, providing organizations with flexible security policies to meet their needs.

The bottom line: safer, higher-quality, more customizable enterprise search with (GSA)ⁿ.

This morning, both Google and our customers, including MTCSC, spoke at an event on all the new developments leading to (GSA)ⁿ and the 6.0 version. We talked so much about searching a billion documents, we decided to try something we’ve never seen done before: set up and showcase the actual infrastructure required to search a billion docs, and you can see it here. It is surprisingly small and simple, and pretty cool to know that we can now take the amount of content in the entire Google.com index in the year 2000 (when Google.com was searching though just a billion docs), and pack it into a server rack built that could fit in the corner of my living room. And I have a normal-sized living room.

Posted by Shamim Alpha, Enterprise Search Engineer

Learn more about the Google Search Appliance 6.0 at google.com/gsa

Leveraging rich snippets with Google Site Search

Today, we announced Rich Snippets for Google web search, a new presentation of snippets that highlight structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help users quickly identify result relevance. Experiments on Google have shown that users find the additional data valuable – if they see useful and relevant information from a web page, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their web pages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa.

Since Google Site Search leverages our web search platform, Google Site Search customers can benefit from this new functionality as well. In fact, Google Site Search customers can define their own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your site search results. In addition to microformats and RDFa, you can also provide custom metadata within your webpages via special markup called page maps. A page map identifies specific attributes that are recognized and preserved by Google at index time, and returned along with search results for presentation to the user.

So if you're using Google Site Search on your website, you can now control further how your content appears in search results. You can showcase key information, such as image thumbnails, summaries, ratings in your result snippets if you provide the appropriate markup on your pages.

Rich Snippets attribute information for Google Site Search is only returned in XML (via <PageMap> tags), so you can use your own customized presentation controls. Indexing of the rich snippets information can have unspecified latency, as some pages are indexed and refreshed more frequently than others, and page map attributes may not be indexed from all web pages.

As an illustration of Rich Snippets, the web page featured in the following example provides custom information about an image thumbnail that is displayed in the rich snippet of the result along with date, author and category information.

If you are getting results back via XML, then the custom attributes are returned in the results within the PageMap tag, as shown below. You can parse the DataObjects within the PageMap tag and provide customized presentation of the relevant attributes.

If you are new to Google Site Search and would like to provide Google quality search results on your website, visit www.google.com/sitesearch

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search

We have a winner! News on the "Where's Your Google Search Appliance?" contest

Back in February we announced a contest challenging our customers to show us their Google Search Appliances and share a picture of where their yellow GSA boxes fit into their organizations. The prize? Tickets to the upcoming upcoming Google IO conference, to be held in San Francisco on May 27-28. We had some great entries – but when we saw this picture, from the Web Dev team at Atlanta'sWellStar Health System, we knew we had a winner.



WellStar's GSA keeps "operations" running smoothly

Congrats to Rob and the Web team at WellStar in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's their story:

Before GSA: With five premier hospitals in the Northwest suburbs of Atlanta, 11,000 employees and the largest nonacademic Physicians Group in the State,WellStar Health System has become one of the biggest not-for-profit health care systems in the Southeast. As WellStar grew, it became increasingly difficult for folks to find our stuff. WellStar’s intranet houses a physician portal containing content from over 70 different clinical sites – along with unique portals for 60+ supporting enterprise departments – andeveryone's generic material permeated our content management systems (CMS ). Employee and patient volumes intensified, organically creating a nightmare of a file library, and it seemed that our system needed 20CCs of Findability Stat! The challenge was to efficiently serve everyone at once while minimizing the impact on our own busy environment.

After GSA: Our previous intranet search limited employees to each of our internal .Net portals, meaning employees would have to be sifting through the right haystack to find a specific needle, which gave them a whopping 1.4% chance of starting in the right place. This all changed with the GSA. The GSA crawls from a central location and provides a single URL to hit when employees need fast results. Its active replacement of cached, dead-end links diminishes wasted search time, and the “Text Only” document display feature is an essential business asset for clinical employees without specific readers.

After purchasing the GSA and performing a minimal setup, our team found that the appliance was pulling several hundred rabbits out of its hat every eight hours. It was finding the one-of-a-kind policy, form, safety, and class information details from long forgotten documents – all without requiring someone to organize the material. Thin-air content was rediscovered, removed, and replaced with current information, and incoming help calls starting with “Where do I find…” have been eliminated.

We had a few other standouts. Here's one.



Two GSAs were all it took to change the "State" of search

Meet Chris with the State of Missouri in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Before GSA: The State of Missouri is made up of 16 executive agencies and various other non-executive agencies, boards and commissions. Prior to the purchasing the GSA, the state was simply a collection of data silos that provided no unified search for our citizens or the companies who wanted to do business with us. The bottom line: it was difficult (at best) for tax-paying citizens or businesses to find the information that they needed on the various State of Missouri web sites.

After GSA: After implementing the GSA as a centrally-managed device, we made search available to all of our executive agencies as well as to our other agencies, boards, and commissions. The GSA allowed us to index all the relevant information from across all of these entities and provide a unified search option to our citizens. The flexibility of the device also allowed each of the agencies to integrate the search onto their unique agency site and further refine the search capabilities they offered to their taxpaying customers. Not only have the search capabilities greatly increased, from the citizen’s perspective, the data silos are no longer there and results across each agency are much more relevant.

From all of us at Google: thanks, WellStar and State of Missouri.

In the next few weeks we will be releasing their full case studies and if you are interested in knowing how other customers are using their GSAs we have more success stories here. Thanks for your participation and don't forget to register for I/O. Congrats again to the winners!

Posted by Dave Kim, Google Enterprise search team

Google Services for Websites expands to include Google Site Search

Google Site Search has now been included into an expanded version of the access provider program. The program was created last year for the web hosting community so they could easily integrate Google Webmaster tools into their customer's websites. Today we expanded the program to include three new services including AdSense, Custom Search, and Site Search under the program Google Services for Websites.

We are excited to have Google Site Search as part of the program because it provides us with better partner opportunities with the web hosting community. Webhosters who participate can enroll in the Google Affiliate program which allows them to get referral fees for every customer who creates Google Site Search.

All together, Hosting service providers can now make use of multiple Google APIs and add these services for their customers at no cost. These tools can help increase the value of customer websites by:

• Driving traffic and visibility to their websites with Webmaster Tools
• Enhancing their website and visitor satisfaction with customized search through Custom Search or Google Site Search
• Monetizing their sites through the Google ad network using AdSense

The initial access provider program has already gotten off to a fantastic start, with partners including Go Daddy (who launched the first pilot back in 2007 with Webmaster Tools), IPOWER, StartLogic, PowWeb, FatCow, BizLand, and EasyCGI. Many of these partners have already integrated multiple Google services into their customer console.

If you are an existing access provider (via the Webmaster Tools Access Provider program), you will be automatically enrolled in the new program, but will still need to integrate the new services into your control panel (with their APIs). Certain services may need additional approvals. Any hosters interested in learning more can check out the Google Services for Websites Access Provider site and sign up today.

Webmasters: let us know what you think! And if these tools aren't yet available through your hosting company, send them a link to this post and let them know we're here to help.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani and Dave Kim, Google Enteprise Search team

Oscar Night for Enterprise Search

On the heels of the Oscars, we're proud to have been named the best intranet search solution of the year by Intranet Journal. It's been a year filled with hard work, as we've seen the release of brand new search appliance software, as well as nearly ten new innovations in our Enterprise Labs.

As those who tune in know, the Oscars aren't just about the movies – they're about the fashion. In some sense, the same holds true for the Google Search Appliance: It's not just about designing the best search experience possible. It's about being well put together.

Setting up an enterprise search solution has traditionally been an "unattractive" prospect: hordes of databases, ranks of whirring servers, blinking lights and backups disks, all strung together with a mass of twisting wires and cables. Not exactly suited to the red carpet.

At Google, our approach has been to pair simple and timeless yellow attire with the power to index 10 million documents in a single box.

We're honored to have been recognized, and ultimately, we see this as being all about our users and customers. The feedback we get from you, the work of our partners and system integrators, the efforts of IT administrators who continue to push the envelope of the appliance and what search can do – none of our work is possible without you. You...complete us.

Here's looking at you GSA customers.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Google Enterprise Team

Show us and win: Where's your GSA?

As you may have read here a couple of months back, we've been focused recently on the "art of findability" – or the ability to find and locate critical information quickly through the power of enterprise search. At Google, we believe that finding relevant business information through effective search should be as easy as...well, finding a yellow Google Search Appliance in your data center!

In this spirit, we're launching a contest to see how "findable" the Google Search Appliance is in your workplace, and to learn more about how search is making a difference. Two lucky winners will receive an all-expense paid trip to the Google IO conference and have a chance to tell their story during an enterprise search session (if that's not your cup of tea we can also shoot a video). Other prizes include two HTC Dream phones, and a whole host of Google schwag. The only catch: contest rules being what they are, we can only offer these prizes to winners in North America.

Want guidelines? Read on:

1. Take a picture of you and your Google Search Appliance. Pictures can be of just you, or of your whole workgroup, as long as you're near your GSA. Yes, the GSA has to be in the picture. Have fun and be as original as possible! Oh, but make sure that this is in keeping with company guidelines – in other words, get the right "sign offs" first.

2. Submit your GSA story. Read the rules , then fill out the form to describe how your GSA has impacted your business. What do your users do better with the power of search? How much time is your IT team saving? What's easy about working with the GSA?

3. The GSA team will convene. We'll look at your pictures and read your stories, and judge on both – 50% on the quality and uniqueness of your picture (look here for inspiration!), and 50% on what you say in your story.

Come on! Enter the contest. Don't yet own a Google Search Appliance? Click here to learn more. We'll share the news here when we announce our winners, so stay tuned. We look forward to hearing your stories and seeing your GSA.

Contest Deadline: March 31, 2009. Winners will be announced on April 17.

Posted by David Kim, Google Enterprise Team Member and Avid Appliance Photographer

The Google Search Appliance: Providing Timely Information about the Peanut Product Recall

Editor's note: We always value learning how our customers use our products to meet critical business needs. Here's a case where those needs were especially critical. The FDA recently mobilized website search, powered by the Google Search Appliance (GSA), to address a major public health issue. The FDA sped information access to the public, removing barriers that could have made this type of information difficult to find.

Rajesh Sripada, a Certified Google Search Engineer with GlobalNet Services, Inc. – a fast-growing provider of web development and system integration solutions to business and government clients – explains the pivotal role of the GSA in providing this service. Thanks to Rajesh for sharing this story.

Did you think twice the last time you reached for a jar of peanut butter? You’re not alone. The ongoing salmonella outbreak in peanut products has sparked one of the largest product recalls in history. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proactively keeping the public up to date on recalled products, and they’re doing it with the help of the Google Search Appliance.

If you want to know whether the box of granola bars in your pantry has been recalled, simply visit the FDA web page and query for the type of product, like granola bars, or a brand name, to see whether the product has been recalled.

Previously, people would have had to scroll through a long list of products to try and locate the one they were looking for – a much more time-consuming process. Thanks to search, people can make fast, informed decisions.

GlobalNet Services, Inc. (GNSI) is a Google Enterprise Partner who manages and administers the intranet and Internet search for the FDA. For the peanut butter recall, GNSI is responsible for daily database and website updates to www.fda.gov. Information is available to the public through the Google Search Appliance (GSA), and visitors to the site can also download information in PDF and XLS files. The speed of the search appliance is crucial and the data in the GSA needs to be updated as soon as we receive it. Each night, the GSA re-crawls the database and refreshes any new information. This takes less than an hour and still allows late-night visitors to search for recall information.

In its first three weeks of existence, the peanut butter product search page received over 25 million page views, and the search appliance has handled the resulting search traffic with ease. This graph shows the number of queries per minute on the FDA search appliance. A spike like this happens every morning, with a sustained use of around 250 queries per minute for most of the working day. Public safety depends on the availability of this information, and the search appliance keeps it available. To help the search appliance handle the traffic, GNSI turns on caching during the day, and turns off caching at night to re-crawl the database.

- Rajesh Sripada, Certified Google Search Engineer, GlobalNet Services, Inc.

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Federal Team