This global manufacturer required an Enterprise Search Solution for their internal Sales & Marketing Portal. Read how Search Technologies helped this Fortune 5000 company develop an implementation strategy for the Google Search Appliance. http://www.searchtechnologies.com/google-search-appliance-case-study-manufacturing.html http://www.searchtechnologies.com

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A global, Fortune 500 manufacturer required an Enterprise Search Solution
for their internal Sales & Marketing Portal
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BACKGROUND AND BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
Like all Fortune 500 companies, this customer has a vast store
of corporate knowledge housed in multiple repositories, and
accessed through a variety of intranet portals.
The Sales and Marketing organization needed easier access to
research developed by an internal business intelligence group,
as well as to other sales support materials scattered around
several content repositories. As part of an overall corporate
initiative to leverage research and other intellectual capital to
improve corporate performance, the customer chose Search
Technologies to help implement the first phase of an
enterprise-wide search system.
The primary project goal was to provide Sales and Marketing
employees with an easier way to find consumer and
competitive research, information on sales trends including
seasonal adjustments, plus templates and worksheets used in
campaigns. A new sales portal would enable these employees
to easily find all of these materials from a single search box,
regardless of where the information was stored.
The project would also demonstrate the value of enterprise
search as a cornerstone of an overall corporate knowledge
management strategy.
CHALLENGES AND REQUIREMENTS
The customer faced several challenges in the development of
a sales portal:
 Search was being underused across the company, in part
because search results were perceived as being
mediocre. Search had a poor reputation
 Sales personnel needed to go to 10 different sites or
portals to search for the information they needed. And,
they had no access at all to the important intellectual
capital created by the Research Group
A lack of trustworthy document-level security was a key
factor. In such a competitive industry, preventing the leakage
of intellectual property is a priority, and this was getting in the
way of enterprise search.
In addition to these overall search challenges, the customer
had some specific requirements that a new search capability
should fulfill:
 Content needed to be extracted from several different
content sources, including WordPress, file systems, and
a new content management system (Alfresco, with a
Liferay portal)
 Search navigators were highly desired by users, although
very little metadata existed to drive them
 Many documents were very large, including PowerPoint
presentations and highly technical PDF files.
 Support for a search spell-checker and a “did you mean”
function were seen as important
The customer previously facilitated internal research and
stakeholder surveys to compile their list of requirements. A
comprehensive set of wire-frame designs had also been
developed. These helped to articulate the company’s vision
for its "ideal search system".
SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES’ SOLUTION
Armed with these requirements, and aided by further, more
detailed requirements gathered through a Search Assessment,
the Search Technologies team helped this customer to
develop an implementation strategy.
The content sources to be indexed were approached
individually. This included taking full account of document-
level security requirements. These varied depending on the
data sources, and the variations introduced complexities.
CASE STUDY:
The GOOGLE SEARCH APPLIANCE in MANUFACTURING

2. End user features were discussed. For example: query auto-
completion; "best bets"; stemming; results biasing; and search
navigators.
Taxonomy development was also discussed, and a plan was
made. Metadata was lacking in the content sources. Auto-
generation of new metadata, to a consistently high standard,
was recognized as a foundation for better search.
In discussions with the customer, it was decided that the
Google Search Appliance, working together with Search
Technologies' Aspire Content Processing platform, provided a
full set of functionality for the project.
Using the Aspire, Search Technologies developed custom
connectors to crawl documents from Alfresco, Liferay, and
WordPress. The crawled documents are filtered to determine
which ones are new, changed, or deleted. Updates are then
passed to the Google Connector Framework. This combination
is much more efficient than repository crawling. It ensures
that the GSA's search indexes are updated as content changes,
rather than having to wait for a daily crawl of the
repository. This approach mitigated a major security concern,
and helped the customer's search team to build a close
relationship with important repository owners.
DEPLOYMENT
The system was delivered on time, despite a number of
unexpected challenges. The solution included:
 Aspire-based connectors for Alfresco, Liferay, and
Wordpress
 Normalizing LDAP Proxy/ LDAP Group Expansion
capabilities into a single security resource for search
purposes. This addressed a specific and problematic
feature of the customer's overall security infrastructure
CURRENT STATUS
The customer’s Sales and Marketing team now has easy access
to all of the research, trend data, and supporting materials
they need, through a simple query interface that looks just like
Google.com. The underlying complexities involving multiple
data repositories and heavy document-level security
requirements are taken care of automatically. Users
experience a simple yet highly productive search environment.
The information they find is up-to-date and relevant. Users are
also provided with contextual navigation options, enabling
them to browse the available information through Dynamic
Navigation.
This fits a common scenario, in which the user is not exactly
sure what they are looking for. Now they have the entire
content set available to explore (subject to their permissions)
through a combination of search and browse.
Search Technologies also provided training, knowledge
transfer, and general guidance to the customer's staff who
today, are managing the implementation efficiently, and
maintaining search excellence for the benefit of their users.
COMMENTARY
This customer engagement exemplifies a number of common
themes, which can be summarized as follows:
 A key to the project was getting repository owners, who
were under huge pressure to prevent IP leakage and
protect sensitive data, to get to know and trust both the
search team, and the technologies that were being
proposed. Security was complex, but this can be fully
addressed through the application of best practices and
customization
 There is often an emotional aspect to security, which this
project was able to address
 Diligent content processing, to prepare data for indexing,
through enrichment and normalization, helps the search
engine to perform at its best. Combine this content
preparation with the core relevancy and tuneability of
the GSA, and the result is a highly efficient search
experience. "Just like Google."
 The GSA's built-in ease of administration, together with
an overall approach that identified and mitigated
potential complexities, ensures that this customer runs a
great search system at a low overall cost-of-ownership
About Search Technologies
Leadership
The largest IT services company
dedicated to enterprise search
implementation, consulting, and
managed services
Independence
Working with all of the leading
search software vendors and
open source alternatives
Experience
400+ customers and more than
50,000 consultant days of expert
services delivered in the last four
years alone