For various reasons, very few enterprise application vendors are focusing first and foremost on delivering EAS, which offers Google-like search capabilities strictly within their own suites of applications. Some vendors may have a hard time engineering this feature into their products because they own a large number of different applications, all with different architectures. Other vendors may find that offering EAS is not an attractive option for them given their business models, as they prefer to develop broad technology stacks beyond the scope of their applications; so developing a stand-alone search appliance is more appropriate for them.
EAS perhaps takes search effectiveness one step further than Google and other stand-alone search tools, since a generic Google-like search does not let you fully leverage context in the design of your search. With Google and other broad enterprise search tools, you get a lot of results, but perhaps very few are relevant. In the case of a Google search of the Web, for instance, a search by a keyword like "Ford" might yield information on President Gerald Ford, actor Harrison Ford, or Ford vehicles. It is difficult to tell the Google engine exactly what it is that you are looking for. Similarly, an enterprise search of your internal data can yield thousands of irrelevant documents on any customer, with little opportunity to narrow the search to find only purchase orders, only word processor documents of correspondence, only invoices, only change orders, etc.
By integrating search technology directly into an enterprise application, application designers can allow users to specify whether they are searching for a company, a person, a purchase order, or other types of information. This helps to filter out irrelevant search results and deliver even more efficiency than a typical Google-like search.
There is a place in organizations for stand-alone search products. If a company needs to index multiple sources of data, including company intranets, local documents, e-mails, databases, etc., a number of these bolt-on search appliances can do that.
Conversely, true EAS capabilities are integrated as a component within an application. The primary purpose of EAS is to make the information within that specific application suite easily searchable through a unified interface. Because EAS is integrated into the application it is designed to be used with, it offers a number of benefits for searching application data when compared to generic products like those offered by Oracle, Google, Thunderstone, Index Engines, Autonomy, Convera, FAST Search, Verity, and others. These advantages include
* Cost—Because the EAS tool is integrated into an application, it does not carry additional software licensing or hardware fees. Moreover, there is no work or cost involved in integrating the search tool with your systems. EAS functionality is part and parcel of a modern enterprise application, so no integration project is necessary.
* Security—Even if a bolt-on search tool has security features, these security features need to be integrated with each application and data source they are to be used with. A full-featured application search relies on the underlying security schema of an application, which means search results are only visible to people with the proper user permissions to view that data. For instance, general ledger data, closely guarded in both publicly and privately held companies, is automatically protected from unauthorized viewers.
* Context—An EAS tool can use contextual information, including data on what tasks that user has been performing in the applications, to deliver more targeted results. This is similar to how Google has added various tools to allow search results to become more specific, such as geographic filters so that local results can be moved up in the list of results when appropriate. But this concept can also be used to leverage business process context rather than geographic context, so that if a system user is involved in finance-related functions, results that conform to his or her organizational role can be accentuated.
* Intent—Because EAS has full knowledge of the application metadata (information about information), it is possible for the user to express intent of a search in simple, well-understood business terms such as "customer information," "order data," "product data," or other descriptors.
* Hybrid search—It should be possible to combine the EAS results and traditional database search results into a single query to deliver the best of both search methods at once.
EAS perhaps takes search effectiveness one step further than Google and other stand-alone search tools, since a generic Google-like search does not let you fully leverage context in the design of your search. With Google and other broad enterprise search tools, you get a lot of results, but perhaps very few are relevant. In the case of a Google search of the Web, for instance, a search by a keyword like "Ford" might yield information on President Gerald Ford, actor Harrison Ford, or Ford vehicles. It is difficult to tell the Google engine exactly what it is that you are looking for. Similarly, an enterprise search of your internal data can yield thousands of irrelevant documents on any customer, with little opportunity to narrow the search to find only purchase orders, only word processor documents of correspondence, only invoices, only change orders, etc.
By integrating search technology directly into an enterprise application, application designers can allow users to specify whether they are searching for a company, a person, a purchase order, or other types of information. This helps to filter out irrelevant search results and deliver even more efficiency than a typical Google-like search.
There is a place in organizations for stand-alone search products. If a company needs to index multiple sources of data, including company intranets, local documents, e-mails, databases, etc., a number of these bolt-on search appliances can do that.
Conversely, true EAS capabilities are integrated as a component within an application. The primary purpose of EAS is to make the information within that specific application suite easily searchable through a unified interface. Because EAS is integrated into the application it is designed to be used with, it offers a number of benefits for searching application data when compared to generic products like those offered by Oracle, Google, Thunderstone, Index Engines, Autonomy, Convera, FAST Search, Verity, and others. These advantages include
* Cost—Because the EAS tool is integrated into an application, it does not carry additional software licensing or hardware fees. Moreover, there is no work or cost involved in integrating the search tool with your systems. EAS functionality is part and parcel of a modern enterprise application, so no integration project is necessary.
* Security—Even if a bolt-on search tool has security features, these security features need to be integrated with each application and data source they are to be used with. A full-featured application search relies on the underlying security schema of an application, which means search results are only visible to people with the proper user permissions to view that data. For instance, general ledger data, closely guarded in both publicly and privately held companies, is automatically protected from unauthorized viewers.
* Context—An EAS tool can use contextual information, including data on what tasks that user has been performing in the applications, to deliver more targeted results. This is similar to how Google has added various tools to allow search results to become more specific, such as geographic filters so that local results can be moved up in the list of results when appropriate. But this concept can also be used to leverage business process context rather than geographic context, so that if a system user is involved in finance-related functions, results that conform to his or her organizational role can be accentuated.
* Intent—Because EAS has full knowledge of the application metadata (information about information), it is possible for the user to express intent of a search in simple, well-understood business terms such as "customer information," "order data," "product data," or other descriptors.
* Hybrid search—It should be possible to combine the EAS results and traditional database search results into a single query to deliver the best of both search methods at once.
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