Corporate search

At present, there is hardly a company that does not use IT technology in the course of its activities. The explosive growth of corporate information stored on servers, in a sense, determined the development of the data storage market and at the same time created new niches. One of these niches is corporate search. Increasingly, companies are coming to understand that, within their infrastructure, an intuitive and familiar search string is needed.



Corporate search is a tool for business, for employees of the enterprise - end users who are not related to IT. The first is the search for information on file servers, where essentially there is no structuring, as well as a search on platforms such as Exchange and SharePoint. Thus, on the one hand, the search tool should be easy to use and tailored for corporate specifics, and on the other hand, it should integrate with existing systems and regulations, be able to index many modern data formats and meet many other technical requirements.
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So, let's take an employee of the legal department who needs to find a contract template made by him or by his colleague. No matter how adequate the search is, the output will still result in a huge sample of similar documents for different counterparties, many versions of the same document, its copies in different places, including the most unexpected ones. This is notorious corporate specifics. Ideally, an advanced search will then take effect - some filters by file content and metadata.

According to the contents of the file, you can:

- set the words and phrases that must be met in the document;
- set words and phrases, of which at least one must occur in the document;
- set words and phrases that should NOT be in the document;
- set exactly where to look for the terms: document name, text of the document.

By file metadata, you can specify:

- document format;
- language of the document;
- the time frame when the document was last modified;
- the author of the document;
- document format.

Also based on indexes, a search could search for duplicates and similar documents. After this filtering the desired document (version) will be found very quickly.

But now let's look at the problem from the other side. And if the employee will not find documents, access to which he should not be? Or, for example, deliberately enters the phrase “passport data”, “for official use”, etc. in the search line. In such a situation, it is necessary for the search to use the metadata database, which contains all the information about the rights of each user, membership in AD groups , statistics (logs) of access to enterprise resources. Thus, each user of the system sees only the information that he should see. Moreover, it is possible at the level of administration of the search resource to exclude from the search results information that falls under the classification rules, for example, passport data.

Additionally, the use of metadata provides several advantages:

- incremental indexing: due to the audit of events we know where the changes occurred, new files appeared;
- high speed of increasing search relevance and high search relevance: the analytic core uses data from the audit of user actions, as well as data from AD on group membership. For each user, a behavior model is built: is in such and such groups, uses such and such files. Accordingly, “similar” users receive similar samples. For example, employees of different departments (and at the same time members of different security groups) see different samples for identical requests over time, provided that the rights are equal;
- support for any data formats, including those specific to any area: full-text search based on iFilter is used for indexing. Accordingly, if there is an iFilter implementation for the format, then it can be indexed.

Integration with AD greatly improves search security. For example, only domain users can use the search, all search requests are logged. The IB service will always be able to track who was looking for passport data, etc.

As a result, we have a simple and effective business tool and at the same time a cross-platform, scalable and secure IT tool with the ability to audit.