I would summarize all this under the term “Wiki Life”, real-life stories. Mindbreeze InSite is the navigator within your news cosmos. One of the top websites in Austria has also been won over – futurezone.at is now “powered by Mindbreeze”. Their site users can quickly and easily find the exact information that they want on futurezone.

Semantic Search

The key term is semantic search, which means “understanding content”. And I’m proud to be able to report that Mindbreeze InSite can do this perfectly. But how does it work? It’s not magic code, just statistical mathematics and sophisticated content analysis. Both aspects molded together in one program give Mindbreeze its power to “think”.

Through content analysis and statistics, Mindbreeze InSite really can be tailored to meet the individual needs of each website operator. Essentially the result is always the same: The perfect search results you need quickly. You can also search, for example, according to author, topic, tags and terms.

Furthermore, in this manner, connected (search-based) content is kept up to date without manual or technical effort. This means that Mindbreeze InSite always displays the latest blog article or newsletter for example and of course the most relevant content for a topic on the relevant homepage/website. This takes place automatically and in the background.

Faceted search

I would describe it as a taboo word but searching with facets makes me happy, particularly when it allows me to find the proverbial needle in a haystack of thousands of search results… easily and without any real effort.

The search results can be broken down further. This means that with the help of so-called “search tabs” content can be organized into categories, for example in reports from the area “products” or “B2B” or – if the company has been mentioned in a comment – “opinion”. These search tabs are both individual and useful and can be adapted for every site with minimal effort – the “products” tab can be replaced with “people” and so on…

A small but particularly fine detail is the fact that Mindbreeze InSite also recognizes images. An image is recognized and indexed alongside the article in which it is contained. The image is then displayed in the search results for that article. The recognition value of the article is therefore higher, since a picture always says more than a thousand words.

In any case, futurezone.at visitors are impressed with Mindbreeze. Thousands of searches processed daily in under 200ms, you could even say in the blink of an eye. Searching in the news cosmos really can be sexy when you know that you’re getting the best and not just any search result.

Best regards,

Daniel Fallmann

Multimediadocuments are searchable with Mindbreeze so that text, audio and video files can be found. It is also completely irrelevant whether the content is stored in PDF, JPG, AVI etc. format. Mindbreeze InSite understands these multimedia files, makes them searchable and delivers search results with pinpoint accuracy.  This is possible through so-called “web harvesting”. What this essentially means, is that Mindbreeze understands a website’s structure and content and therefore enables a multidimensional search. In other words: Where some search machines gave up long ago, Mindbreeze  dives deeper into the endless depths of digital information and returns to the surface with the results you need. This “web harvesting” is particularly ideal for news portals. Each searched article is displayed with respective images. So if you’re on a news site and search for „Statue of Liberty“, you receive all articles on the statue of liberty and simultaneously the images that belong to each article.

Special navigation aids such as facets and search tabs structure the results of the query into topics. With regard to our statue of liberty example, this means an optimization of the search according to date, author, file type and topic (e.g. only articles that deal with the renovation of the statue of liberty). As I said, all the information from all the different file formats is always displayed – nothing is forgotten or overlooked. In this way, Mindbreeze is your center of excellence for accessible finding.

You can try out our service with all functions for 14 days free of charge.

Register now!

Apparently my local council’s website and possibly even the council itself had never heard of an energy performance certificate. I was pretty sure that this wasn’t the case. Sometimes you really can’t find anything in the internet. And it could be so easy! The company that I work for is an Austrian software manufacturer and one of their products is Mindbreeze InSite.

Federated search – How council websites become information hubs

The multi-site or so-called „federated” search is the key. It turns any internet page into a portal to a world of information that stretches across many other pages and sites. To refer concretely to the example of my local council website: If Mindbreeze InSite was integrated there, I would have found all the information on energy performance certificates without needing to leave the page. Such is the way that Mindbreeze InSite deals with search inquiries. In other words: No matter what search term you enter, Mindbreeze InSite combs through each connected website – this can be just one or a few up to an unlimited number. The relevant website operator, in this case my local council, decides what websites should be connected. Ideally, my local council’s website would be connected via Mindbreeze InSite to Upper Austria’s county website and to the federal help.gv.at site. Then I would have all the information I need on the energy performance certificate without actually leaving my local council’s site.

From my point of view, I can see this bringing a whole host of advantages. Without maintenance effort, my local council’s website is always up-to-date, informative and all duplicate content can be got rid of. The icing and cherry on the cake is that Mindbreeze InSite also delivers perfect search results on the respective council websites, turning them into information hubs for the entire local community. In my opinion, a genuine business card for the perfect community service.

Somehow it feels good to write away your frustrations!

You can try out our service with all functions for 14 days free of charge.

Register now!

My personal call center

In some ways every manager, businessman and employee is their own personal call center. In meetings you need quick answers to questions or plain and simple knowledge to make a decision. With pinpoint accuracy.

The Fabasoft Mindbreeze 2012 Spring Release is specially designed for tablets and smartphones. Everything that Mindbreeze could previously do on a desktop it can now do on tablets and smartphones too. Apple, Microsoft or Android – it makes no difference. This is important to us, since we’ve been working on strategy 100 for many years – 100% functionality on all platforms.

Take the “collect” function for example. The collection basket in Mindbreeze is like your cart in an online shop – an overview of your purchases. It contains all the information for a search term that is relevant for you. In other words: Mindbreeze remembers what’s important for you.

Relevance model

The Spring Release 2012 lends itself as the perfect opportunity to answer a question that I continue to be asked on a regular occasion: Why does Mindbreeze deliver optimal search results but every now and then a result that I don’t expect? The answer is simple – the so-called relevance model. Mindbreeze has configured a general relevance model that fits 90% of our customers perfectly. But the relevance model can also be tailored to meet anyone’s needs. This means that Mindbreeze relevance and your relevance can easily become the same thing!

Mindbreeze InSite: Maximum benefit through hybrid

Mindbreeze InSite doesn’t just make your website informative and up-to-date. With the hybrid Enterprise + Cloud model, it beco mes the center of excellence for your company and employees.

Try Mindbreeze InSite.

Mindbreeze InSite integrates itself smoothly. You can now make your website searchable in the Cloud with InSite and make this data instantly available to internal users.

In this way your website becomes a company- internal information center with maximum synergy effects. To exaggerate it slightly, new products, blog posts etc. concerning the company no longer need to be distributed via e-mail – instead the website automatically becomes the knowledge platform for everyone.

Because nothing is more embarrassing than a customer asking about a company innovation and you aren’t up-to-date with the latest information.

Best regards,

Daniel Fallmann

Why does your website need a professional search?

 1. Pin-point accurate finding

The fundamental motivation behind visiting a website – which is not a social network or video portal – is to find information. In particular in times where the length of time spent on a website continues to decrease and the number of webpages increases, it is becoming increasingly difficult to simply present the user with data they want. A user-friendly, easy-to-use search is therefore essential for a modern internet presence.

2. No server or maintenance effort via Cloud service

Most website searches suffer from the problem that they’re not only slow but that they also take up a large amount of the server’s computing power. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite removes this issue. You just need to paste the embed code into your website. Finished. Our Cloud service then automatically generates the search index. Worrying about the performance of the search on your website belongs to the past. Even maintenance and software updates are taken care of by Mindbreeze – you don’t need to lift a finger.

3. Instantly available

A new search on your homepage in just 10 minutes? Not possible! Think again…!

The embed code can be simply copy & pasted into your site. Integration couldn’t be easier and takes a matter of minutes.

The following video demonstrates how quick and easy it is to integrate Mindbreeze InSite.

4. Optimal usability: Navigation + search

We all know the following situation: You find yourself on a sub-page of a large website in an often complexly structured navigation and want to search for further information on the site. With most search functions you have to leave the current page in order to view results. That can sometimes be irritating – especially if you then can’t find your way back to the original article. Mindbreeze InSite offers the advantage that results are displayed in an overlay. So you can stay on the current page and still search for a term and view the results.

5. Dynamic navigation via semantics

Our service automatically recognizes the structure of your website and deduces suitable topics/keywords for the respective page. This personalizes the searching experience for each website.
You can read more about semantics in our blog article: 4 Points for Perfect Website Semantics.

You can try out our service with all functions for 14 days free of charge.

Register now!

There is of course a remedy, a keyword that has already been talked to death but that’s worth a mention again anyway: semantics! The possibilities that semantics open up offer ingenious added value to any web portal.

Using semantics means understanding websites

1. Use of the existing website structure

Website designers nowadays have a wide range of possibilities to make their site semantically more valuable. For example, with instruments such as Meta tags, Dublin Core, HTLM5 and MicroFormat/MicroData and breadcrumbs etc.

2. Automatic indexing of articles with the main topics of the site

Mindbreeze InSite recognizes connections and automatically derives suitable topics/keywords for the site.

 3. InSite optimizes the website for the designer

You can discover what your website visitors are looking for and directly address the expectations of the user/visitor via “Information Pairing“ and ”Actionable Intelligence“.

 4. InSite gives the visitor „insight“

The best search machine is one that doesn’t attract attention but that simply always delivers the right results. Individual, personalized, exact and relevant. Wherever and whenever. It knows what the customer wants and leads them with pinpoint accuracy to the relevant information. Your search environment becomes your center of knowledge.

So back to my meeting with the marketing agency. They’re impressed and want to show the result to their customer.

Best regards,
Daniel Fallmann

PS: For those of you that have fun understanding the technical background on Microdata, should watch the following video:

What happens on the other end of the phone can be described as follows: During a customer inquiry call center employees hastily, desperately and sometimes hopelessly comb through up to 20 different applications or knowledge platforms. To have no answer is simply not an option.

In response to this problem area I asked myself the following question. Can Mindbreeze be implemented as a customer service solution? The answer is a clear YES. Mindbreeze is ideal as a customer service solution. Via information pairing all related information, whether structured or unstructured, from internal or external applications (e.g. client portals), new or old, is linked together.  A company’s entire knowledge becomes instantly accessible. Instead of combing through 20 different applications, you need just one tool. Mindbreeze makes customer service quicker, easier and more efficient, whilst simultaneously increasing quality and customer satisfaction. As a bonus, costs are reduced and your call center employees are happier!

I can prove this claim, since Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise has already been successfully implemented in call centers. Managing to reduce complex, time-intensive research to a minimum. The temporary storing of information in file systems can be completely abolished. Call center employees compile and send the reply directly within Mindbreeze – this is enabled by a collection basket directly within the Mindbreeze user interface, similar to a shopping cart in online shopping portals.

Call center employees remain exclusively within the Mindbreeze user interface for the duration of processing an inquiry. At no stage do they need to switch to a different interface or application.

The information is displayed as a preview and formatted as in the original document. The entered search term is highlighted.

I claim that what Mindbreeze cannot find in your company, has never existed. Mindbreeze supports all current formats and sources from Microsoft, Apple, Linux and the Open Source world.

Furthermore, market analysts such as the Gartner Group consider Fabasoft Mindbreeze to be on the same level as the sector’s global market leaders. European software know-how that I’m proud of.

Best regards,

Daniel Fallmann

It enables all information that is connected to Mindbreeze to be displayed in Microsoft SharePoint. This takes place smoothly via Web Parts. In this way not only information contained within Microsoft SharePoint, but also all other information that is available within the respective company, can be consolidated within one “platform”. Mindbreeze therefore delivers real additional value to Microsoft SharePoint in the form of an add-on. The Microsoft SharePoint search is replaced by Fabasoft Mindbreeze, with the added value of information pairing, which extends the search to the entire connected company knowledge – all on one page. So-called search-driven dashboards can also be created. What does this mean? All information of a page is displayed by Web Parts made available by Mindbreeze. A simple configuration is all that’s needed. The displayed content is always up-to-date and to the point. And after the initial configuration, this takes place automatically and maintenance-free. Furthermore, our 2012 Winter Release is the link between the Cloud and Microsoft SharePoint. Data from the Cloud can thereby be integrated just as easily into Micrososft SharePoint.

In my opinion, Fabasoft Mindbreeze is a company’s center of excellence. With our product you get to the point quicker.

The strategy that we follow is based on 3 pillars:

• Speed,
• simplicity and
• efficiency.

A further example of this is Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite. The software achieves what would normally only be possible with intensive maintenance – to keep internet sites constantly up-to-date.

What do I mean by this? Imagine you want to post a current blog article on your internet site. This is normally only possible via the use of personnel resources. The Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite model is extremely easy. What if search results could appear without anyone realizing that a search engine is working in the background. In other words: Always up-to-date, without anyone needing to take care of or dedicate working time for it. For example the updating of blogs, news or whatever else you want to post on your site.

This way your website or “digital business card” becomes friendly and clear and remains constantly informative. Information pairing technology is also in use here.

This is my understanding of an efficient and simple search with results that are exactly to the point.

Best regards,
Daniel Fallmann

Behind this “magic”, however is a great deal of digital know-how. The key term here is information pairing, under the motto “bringing together what belongs together“. To put it in concrete terms, the current Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite release enables a maintenance-free, always up-to-date conflation of information from different areas. Always relevant. Always interesting. Always to the point. For both you and your website’s users.

With the help of a small code snippet this service can be integrated into your website quickly and easily via copy & paste. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite doesn’t just appear as a search, but delivers cross-linked additional information as a sort of newsflash taken from different areas. For example the latest blog posts about topics that fit your product or services. This can also be conducted in conjunction with Wikipedia articles. The Cloud service itself takes care of the updating independently.

But Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite doesn’t stop there. It smoothly integrates itself into your website so that the user doesn’t even realize that Cloud services are working in the background. Furthermore, InSite always knows what a user is interested in. Navigation behavior on the website serves as the basis for recognizing their interests. If the user finds themselves on one of your sub-pages on the topic mobility for example, even at this level Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite still displays further information such as blogs, news, Wikipedia etc. on the relevant topic.

Being able to understand and offer such adaptive content is part of the Mindbreeze information pairing technology.

Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite adheres to open standards (such as HTML and JavaScript) and therefore supports all conventional websites. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite also conforms to the WAI web accessibility initiative (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAI, More on the topic).

With Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite your website doesn’t just get more intelligent, it becomes “magic” for the user!

Best regards,
Daniel Fallmann

Linz, Austria, December 1, 2011 – Mindbreeze, a subsidiary of Fabasoft and leading provider of software for enterprise search and digital cognition, today announced that Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise received a “positive” rating in Gartner’s report entitled MarketScope for Enterprise Search¹.

The “positive” rating demonstrates strength in specific areas, but execution in one or more areas may still be developing or inconsistent with other areas of performance and encourages existing customers to continue planned investments. Potential customers should consider this vendor a viable choice for strategic or tactical investments, while planning for known limitations.

“Companies store more and more data and users search typically in five to seven different data sources, most unstructured, in order to discover the requested information. Our customers are already reaping the benefits of Fabasoft Mindbreeze products by having a 360° view of their company information. Regardless of whether the user is in-house or searches via mobile devices. In such a competitive environment, the ability to implement agile decision making processes gives our customers a real competitive edge.” said Daniel Fallmann, Founder and Managing Director of Mindbreeze. “We believe Gartner’s “positive” rating confirms our position in the market and our commitment to providing customers with Fabasoft Mindbreeze products that meet and exceed their unique challenges.”

Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise

Offers unified information access to enterprise and cloud resources. It combines and links the information. Information can be grouped and classified. A user can scan the results using search tabs and categories and find a relevant document without having to click through a list of links. The information’s semantic context is recognized and depicted, and navigation elements for drill down are provided; one click and the preview of any result is available. Fabasoft Mindbreeze provides a 360° view of your business, customers, competitors and more.

About Mindbreeze

Mindbreeze Software GmbH, located in Linz, Austria, is a leading provider of software for fast and intuitive search solutions for relevant company and Internet data. Searching with Mindbreeze is simple: the software not only provides the required contents, but also all relevant and related information, such as corporate interconnectedness. Mindbreeze Software GmbH is a subsidiary of Fabasoft AG. http://www.mindbreeze.com, http://blog.mindbreeze.com, http://www.twitter.com/mindbreeze

Marketscope Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose

¹ Gartner MarketScope for Enterprise Search by Whit Andrews, November 18, 2011.

However, this newly acquired knowledge often doesn’t reach anyone except for the individual who appropriates it. The crucial issue here is how to make this dynamically growing knowledge usable across the entire company as instantly as possible. A hierarchical organization is often not possible or simply not implementable in terms of time and cost efficiency.

This is where a very simple strategy comes into play: Bringing together what belongs together.

Information Pairing

It sounds easy at first glance but it’s technologically highly complex. 6 years of research and development work later, Fabasoft Mindbreeze has the answer: Information pairing. This involves the boundless networking of company relevant information within an enterprise or organization and placing it in the Cloud. In my opinion acting in this way in all business issues is reliable, dynamic and profitable – the basis for competitive advantage.

Usability & Style

The Fabasoft Mindbreeze web client is the driving force for professional unified information access. It gives employees a flexible and easy platform of knowledge that grows with you.

Elegant. Quick. Pinpoint accurate.

The information that you’re looking for is delivered quickly and with pinpoint accuracy by Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Access rights are still maintained – since the practical and time-saving use of this technology mustn’t compromise data security in any way.

Existing identities and access rights to company-internal and Cloud data remain preserved. The user only receives information displayed for which he/she has access rights for. This ensures that Fabasoft Mindbreeze fulfills the strictest compliance requirements. Furthermore, Mindbreeze is certified according to all relevant security standards.

A small side-step: During the development of Fabasoft Mindbreeze we focused 100% exclusively on European values – not one single bit of American software product is to be found.
Why am I mentioning this? The „US Patriot Act“ doesn’t apply. Not using US American manufactured software ensures that US authorities have no right to access European Cloud data. Did you know that?

… You see, knowledge grows constantly.

Best regards,
Daniel Fallmann

5 tiring conference days behind me, the joy of returning home in front of me. Even a 5 hour flight delay is no longer a big deal. An e-mail from a business partner still is however. He wants to know there and then which settings he needs to activate so that our embedded client runs smoothly in a Kerberos environment. As I said – to briefly re-set the scene – I’m sitting in JFK Airport in New York, 6 hours time difference, 5 hour delay, dog-tired and still need to shoot this detailed, precise information out from the hip. Roughly what he needs to do is in my head but the question warrants an exact answer. A second-grade response would be to write back: “take a look at the embedded client handbook”, it details exactly what you need to do. But this isn’t my understanding of service and service quality…

This is the perfect scenario for Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise to flex its muscles. iPad out of my pocket, connect to WLAN or 3G and click on my favorite button. The white M against a yellow background. My personal assistant who can answer such complicated queries as this one at anytime and anywhere, 24×7. And it’s undemanding – a small portion of electricity, a little bit of internet and my “Mindbreeze assistant” researches for me and delivers the exact answer within seconds.

Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise searches my company’s entire knowledge, including umpteen thousands of E-mails in my PST files. And sure enough it’s in one of my PST files that Mindbreeze strikes gold. Copy from the preview displayed in Mindbreeze and paste into the reply to my business partner. One click later and the e-mail is on its way. Time taken: 2 minutes, including reading the e-mail and sending the reply. That’s my understanding of service. Now I’m bored again at the airport – still 4 hours and 58 minutes to negotiate before my delayed return flight.

Talking of being bored: New York JFK. When, how and why was it actually built? Was JFK built first, then Newark Liberty International Airport and La Guardia Airport? Or the other way round? My intelligent little personal assistant “Mindbreeze for Wikipedia” (www.mindwiki.com) provides me with the answer from Wikipedia just as quickly as the customer query before, and complete with the same convenient preview function.

I find it even cooler that I can find exactly the information that I need via semantic categories. But still 4 hours and 56 minutes until my flight home takes off – I’ll pass the time with my tablet and new eBook „empowered“ by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler. Alongside Mindbreeze also highly recommendable!

Best regards,
Daniel Fallmann

Cool. Smoothly operated. Fast. Welcome to the web requirements of the Web 2.0 generation. Here you can quickly end up looking old and left behind – without really wanting to. For me personally, it’s important to be able to find what I’m looking for – quickly. No great surprise seeing as I work in the search technology sector. I just feel particularly at ease on websites with quick, precise searches. It’s service for site visitors, a digital business card for the company or organization.

The Messe München International (MMI) is also convinced by the qualities that a precise search machine can bring and has therefore opted for Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite.

The product stands out with its intuitive, user friendly search. As a Cloud service it’s ready to use straight away! Further advantages lie in the fact that it’s more than just a search. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite recognizes connections using semantic and dynamic search procedures. In this way it delivers a pinpoint accurate “finding experience”. No installation, no configuration, no maintenance. What more could a company wish for?

“We’re pleased to be the first trade show organizer in Germany to offer this service on our websites. The visitor accesses the information they’re looking for quicker via the clear display. Particularly impressive was the rapid implementation; the product was ready to use in less than 10 minutes”, confirmed Prof. Dr. Manfred Mayer from Messe München.

The Messe München International (MMI), with around 40 specialist trade shows for capital goods, consumer goods and new technologies, is one of the leading trade show organizations worldwide.

Take a look yourself.

Messe München International (MMI) (www.communication-world.com)

To enable this unique search experience for your website visitors, just three steps are needed:

1. 14 day free trial

Register (http://info.mindbreeze.com/fabasoft-mindbreeze-insite/) and get started straight away.

Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite will soon be offering a demo to allow you to test the new “finding experience” for your own website for free and without obligation.

2. Integration as easy as 1, 2, 3

With the code snippet sent to you, you can integrate Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite on your website and the search machine is active and fully functional on your site for 14 days free of charge.

3. Get started!

And that was it – you didn’t really expect an intelligent search to be complicated?!

Click here for your own 14 day free demo.

More Convenince and Relevance

The Fabasoft Mindbreeze 2011 Summer Release alleviates search with search restrictions via tabs. In other words: if you are looking for records then you find records, not everything and anything that contains the term “record”.

Tutorial 1 – More Convenience and Relevance

Dynamic Queries

With the 2011 Summer Release, Mindbreeze integrated support for dynamic queries in its standard product. For example synonyms and taxonomies can be integrated now with more ease.

Tutorial 2 – Dynamic Queries

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Connector

Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise now supports Microsoft SharePoint 2010
out-of-the-box with its standard product functionality. All standard types of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 are indexed and line of business applications are supported as well.

Tutorial 3 – Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Connector

Mindbreeze for Wikipedia

Starting with the 2011 Summer Release Mindbreeze offers a „Mindbreeze for …“ series of apps. The already well porven search in Wikipedia is now available for free to your Smartphone and Tablet. The free app (iOS, Android) is now available.

• Download at Apple iTunes Store: Free App
• Download at Android Market: Free App

Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise

COMPUTERWELT publishes on several websites such as www.computerwelt.at, the company data base www.top1001.at and portals www.seitenclicke.at, www.itheads.at and www.it-termine.at. Over 300 articles are newly published each week.

The search available on the website was database driven and static. It was also incapable of displaying semantic contexts. The search was available via an online portal, was not state of the art and didn’t meet the requirements of the readers. These deficits caused the people in charge to search for a newer, better solution.

Search as a Cloud Service

Detailed tests took place, in which Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite proved capable of satisfying the requirements. The Cloud system searches the COMPUTERWELT website for changes several times a day. The service itself is processed in the Fabasoft data center. This means no maintenance effort for the customer. The online editor is able to tailor the search according the requirements of the reader at any time. The search in the different portals is grouped in several tabs which makes the search easy and clear.

Try it now: www.computerwelt.at

The Cloud Service searches over 600,000 documents and articles with 300 new articles each week and roughly 20,000 searches each day. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite was ready for use within 30 minutes.

You can find further information at Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite.

Search in…

Mindbreeze "Search in" menu in Folio Cloud

Dynamic object tabs

Mindbreeze object tabs

Enterprise value

Mindbreeze + Folio Cloud = Agile business tool

Refine the search to "rooms"

Try out Mindbreeze in the Cloud now!

• Fabasoft Mindbreeze extracts more from Wikipedia articles than just the plain content: So for example, category information is harvested and extracted, as well as dedicated metadata e.g. of info boxes (example article with an info box).
• Once you’ve found your article, Fabasoft Mindbreeze provides a quick preview page, comprising the essence of the article, while all the inter-Wiki and external links are preserved in the extract.
• Using dynamic facet classification as a simple and flexible method to narrow down your search results. For example, you can use the date facet to focus on the newest articles, or the category facet to restrict the results to a single Wikipedia category.
• Breadcrumb navigation provides awareness for the chosen navigation path, and a simple means to backtrack and choose a different path, for example to undo a single facet category restriction.

Try out MindWiki (Mindbreeze for Wikipedia)

Mindbreeze for Wikipedia enriching Fabasoft Folio Cloud

Mindbreeze for Wikipedia is also available as a Fabasoft Cloud App.

Try out the Fabasoft Folio Cloud App

Mindbreeze for Fabasoft Folio Cloud searches all structured and unstructured information from Folio Cloud such as team rooms, Word documents, etc. After installing the Mindbreeze for Wikipedia App, Wikipedia appears as an additional data source.

That way, a seamless side-by-side integration/search in both data sources becomes possible, providing a perfect combination: Enterprise knowledge is easily extended by the knowledge provided in Wikipedia. Cloud users cooperating in team rooms can gather information about a technology, acronym, a standard or another company at a glance without having to switch to an external Wikipedia session.

Mindbreeze for Wikipedia mobile versions

Mindbreeze for Wikipedia is also available for Apple iPhone / iPad and Android in the respective App Stores.

The mobile versions use the same search engine behind the scenes, but the user interface is optimized for mobile devices.

Try the Apple iPhone/iPad version

Try the Android version

Fabasoft Mindbreeze InApp fulfills expectations of developers, software vendors and system integrators alike:

• Higher precision of search results
• Increased domain knowledge
• Specific unique context actions based on content and users
• Powerful query refinements

Fabasoft Mindbreeze InApp provides a platform that runs under both Linux and Windows. It can be integrated into applications using whatever language, but only provides samples for one of the following programming languages out of the box: Java, C# or C++. Open interfaces and multiple configuration options leave room for adapting to individual requirements. We support (web) services with SOAP interfaces and RESTful interfaces. We offer wrappers for Java, C#, C/C++, JavaScript so that every integrator can look at our samples using those wrappers and interface.

Our software development kit can be downloaded at http://www.mindbreeze.com/en/mindbreeze-downloads/enterprise and you can get a ready-to-run development VM and tutorials from the Mindbreeze Developer Web.

Our samples include wrappers for the main languages and jQuery controls that can be used within Web Parts as well.

In the latest version of Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise SDK we support developers with:

• An easy to use RPM package for Linux developers alongside a setup for Microsoft Windows supporting: C/C++, Java 1.6 and .NET 4.0 (Windows)
• A new developer tool “mesjavaplugin”, which is used to create projects for filter and connector plugins (crawler, authorization and contextualization) based on Java.
• Version detection: Fabasoft Mindbreeze detects the version of a plugin zip file based on binary information saved in the zip file – isolation of program if necessary.
• Support for extension point plugins in Mindbreeze Manager: Extension point plugins can be configured in Manager.

A concrete partner scenario

Their patent records are publicly available and have a common XML format but all records are from different countries, written in different languages with local formats and specifications.

Fabasoft Mindbreeze InApp shortened the development process of search-enabling these patient records by factors, in comparison with other solutions available.

The developers had the opportunity to…

• focus on their use cases
• define unique metadata,
• retrieve relevant contents
• provide specific context actions rather than project organization and configuration.

Fabasoft Mindbreeze InApp provides a fast and reliable search experience for them and a number of dynamic and access-checked search facets based on the extracted and retrieved metadata, that help the user to refine their searches.

Advantages at a glance

• Cost efficient
• Field-tested and approved quality
• Focus on shortest possible time to market
• Simple integration with the Fabasoft Mindbreeze – InApp Client
• Platform independent (Linux and Windows)
• Documented samples in C++, C# and Java available online

Interested? Go to http://developer.mindbreeze.com and learn more about Fabasoft Mindbreeze InApp.

We’re looking forward to getting your feedback on our latest version.

Let me explain the most common use cases and show how they can be made easier using federation.

1. Combine multiple Query Services in your enterprise

If you have multiple Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise installations in your enterprise you can easily add Query Services of one installation to another. Just type the URL of the Query Service into the “Additional Query Service” option of your Client Service. This approach has the benefits of being fully controllable by the administrator and authentication occurs transparently for the user. We call this approach server side federation because the search requests are issued from one server to the other.

The downsides of this approach are that you have to have your authentication infrastructure set up to allow the two installations to communicate with each other and you have to use the same authentication mechanisms and user names for all your services.

Moreover, your server infrastructure needs to have access to all federated sources, which can sometimes  lead to security questions in your enterprise infrastructure.

2. Search your enterprise data sources across multiple domains

If you have multiple installations in different domains and/or different user names, client side federation is the way to go. Client side federation happens entirely in your browser using HTML5 postMessage goodness. We have been using JSONP for years and are really happy to have a standards-based means for comunicating with different servers now.

You can use the Account settings to activate data sources from a source directory.

If a federated data source needs authentication a dialog will appear. Each user can activate and deactivate the data source he/she needs.

Your administrator defines a source directory and everything else is up to your users. No domain level trusts have to be established.

3. Federating public services

Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers public services for you to federate. These sources are available by default in your Account settings. Currently the offer includes services for searching the English and German Wikipedia, and Fabasoft Folio Cloud.

This offer is a really great way to enhance your search experience with other data sources. The great benefits of public offerings are:

• Guaranteed service levels monitored by a professional team of administrators
• A certified Cloud and SaaS infrastructure with highest security levels (SAS 70, ISO 27001 certified)
• Zero setup and configuration
• Zero hardware to buy
• Each user can activate the sources he/she needs
• A fast-growing, professional infrastucture of additional services

One last thing

These federation use cases are also available using our Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise Mobile Client.

Try it yourself

Activate the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Wikipedia services for Fabasoft Folio Cloud in the Cloud Apps Shop or federate it in your own installation. To search Wikipedia with Mindbreeze goto mindwiki.com.

In the case of filters the processing methods are determined by the type of the input. Post filter transformation services in contrast, provide tools for processing and transforming the document model produced by the filters, in many cases based on the semantic information extracted during filtering.

Post filter transformation services can plug into the the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise infrastructure via dedicated extension points.  They can be installed and activated on demand for certain filter services, which makes their deployment flexible and easy.

Now let us take a look at a few possible deployment scenarios of Fabasoft Mindbreeze where post filter transformation plugins can play a key role.

Intelligent deduplication

Especially in the case of crawling web content it is a common problem that a large number of web pages with identical content or with irrelevant content differences are harvested. If each of these documents is individually indexed, the search results are overloaded by identical hits, sometimes making it extremely hard for the user to find relevant items among the results.

Several deduplication techniques are known that are specially developed for web search solutions. Using near hashing techniques, like the TextProfileSignature from the Apache Solr project, we can compute a key for each document based on the textual content extracted by the filter.

Using a post filter transformation plugin, we compute hash values for specific areas of each document. The plugin assures that only one item with a given content hash can be found in the index by setting this hash value as the doucment’s unique identifier.

This plugin is already available at http://www.mindbreeze.com/de/mindbreeze-downloads/enterprise

Extracted content annotation phase for document categorization

The extracted information available can be used in many ways for document categorization. As an illustrating example it is possible to customize a mail search solution based on Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise using post filter transformation services that index the mails with a certain adressee and sender and add a special label to them. This label can be used later in the search expressions. In this way mails sent for example to a given mailing list can be easily retrieved. Moreover, statistic or dictionary-driven algorithms can be plugged in.

Customizing access rights

In the case of a Portal Search Solution based on Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise, post filter transformation plugins can generate access control lists for the crawled documents based on various metadata (for example by using URL patterns or processed microformats)  that can be harvested during filtering. In this case using a custom plugin allows the fine tuning of the metadata used for access control as well as the process of how these metadata are used in building the access control lists.

We offer the following delivery models that are tailored for specific customer needs:

On premise

For on premise installation we offer a 30-day free trial via our website and the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance.

Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance in your datacenter

The go live time for a typical on premise installation with all included standard connectors is a matter of hours, up to a few days for more complex and distributed environments. Even our small appliance is good for up to 10 million documents and up to 5000 users.

A typical rollout process is as follows:

1. Put the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance into a customer’s  datacenter and add it to the network and domain infrastructure
2. Configure the appliance with privileged user accounts for all your sources
3. Make an initial crawl run to crawl/filter/index all available and selected information
4. Test with Fabasoft app.test primo (free edition) that everything works as it should by replaying recorded use cases (30 minutes)
5. Go live with the first test users
6. Analyze performance with Fabasoft app.telemetry primo (free edition)
7. Fine-tune if needed

SaaS and Cloud

The Fabasoft Cloud which is SAS 70 and ISO 27001 certified (www.fabasoft.com) runs the Cloud and SaaS services for Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise and Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite (for Secure Site Search). Using our SaaS and Cloud services you are up and running immediately.

Give us feedback and try out our Cloud services:

• Fabasoft Mindbreeze for Wikipedia (free)
• Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite (free 14-day trial)
• Fabasoft Folio Cloud (free primo edition)

Reference article: Transforming Queries with Fabasoft Mindbreeze.

In this article we will discuss the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Synonym Transformer, a plugin which implements one particular transformation use case: Expanding the query by transforming a single user-provided query into multiple alternatives, thus dramatically increasing the possibility that users find what they are looking for. This allows, for instance, a user to find the terms „automobile“ OR „vehicle“ OR „passenger car“ when the search term “car” is entered.

Taking things further, the mechanism can be used out-of-the-box to include associated terms. For instance a search for “analyst” can be expanded to “gartner” and “forrester”.

Read about Taxonomies, Thesauri and Controlled Vocabulary.

Controlled vocabulary

To allow such transformations, the Synonym Transformer relies on a synonym database (similar to a thesaurus). For simplicity and easy editing, the synonym tables are stored in CSV files, which can be opened in spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers or OpenOffice. Each row in the table defines a list of synonyms, for example:

Readily usable synonym database files can be downloaded for example from Gutenberg.

The Synonym Transformer periodically monitors the underlying CSV file, this allows users to edit the database at run time. After an update interval of less than a second, newly added synonyms are immediately usable.

Fabasoft Mindbreeze plugin architecture

To allow multiple extensions of Fabasoft Mindbreeze, we employ a flexible plugin architecture with so-called extension points. The Synonym Transformer is such a plugin and can be activated simply by installing it. This way development, maintenance and installation of multiple plugins becomes simple and straightforward. After installation, the query engines that are intended to use synonym transformations can be chosen in the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise – Configuration UI.

Synonym Transformer in action

In the screenshot below the user searched for “analyst”, which is expanded to “analyst OR gartner OR forrester”, therefore those term matches are highlighted.

For further questions please don’t hesitate to contact us.

What is CMIS ?
Content Management Interoperability Service (CMIS) was published by major ECM vendors to define a common domain model and a set of bindings, such as Web Service and REST/Atom for different ECM software. OASIS approved CMIS on 1 May 2010 as an OASIS specification. By providing interoperability at repository level CMIS allows old and legacy systems to remain running, with documents and contents at least accessible in new systems. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise supports CMIS to support an open standard to access information of different indexed/connected sources in a uniform way.

Uniform information access
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise provides all services and interfaces needed for CMIS out-of-the-box.

Fabasoft Folio Cloud App

Let me explain the interoperablity use cases with an example of an iPad application implemented for Fabasoft Folio Cloud. The Fabasoft Folio Cloud App accesses documents and folders in Fabasoft Folio Cloud through CMIS. Searches performed by users issue CMIS queries against Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise. The returned results provide information (CMIS properties) for accessing these results in Fabasoft Folio Cloud. The results are either from object type document or object type folder. This information allows the iPad App to

• either show the document, in the case of document object type, or
• navigate further, in the case of folder object type.

Interoperability use cases during user interaction with Folio Cloud App:

• In the following screenshot we see that the iPad App shows the contact in Folio Cloud by touching a search result. Showing the contact is based on the CMIS document object type property provided in search result.

• Showing a PDF preview of a PowerPoint presentation based on the CMIS document object type property provided in search result.

• By touching a search result from CMIS folder object type, the client shows documents contained in that folder.

Try out the Fabasoft Folio Cloud App: http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/folio-cloud/id409369862?mt=8

Since the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is a highly scalable and distributed system, it requires a sophisticated possibility to measure all components that are involved in answering queries. With Fabasoft app.telemetry we integrated a high-end application performance management tool. Let’s look at some top-level uses cases.

Unterstand your user’s search requirements

It is very important to understand what users are searching for and how. Discovering search trends helps you to add missing information like synonyms and taxonomies for the right sources so that relevancy and result quality is improved at the right hot-spots.

Understanding your user’s search behavior is key for improvements that must be measured to be effective and successful. Nevertheless it’s important to respect the privacy of all users and to only analyze anonymized data.

With Fabasoft app.telemetry there is a so called “Top-X” portal. This portal shows search results in an aggregated fashion. The Fabasoft app.telemetry web client shows information on various levels. The information can be drilled down to so called “Log Pools” to analyze a semantic fraction of all available data.

In oder to aggregate search terms, for instance, select “search:user_query_expr” in the combobox. Now you can browse through all queries in a certain time frame and drill  down further on them.

Using dashboards for monitoring the system

Fabasoft app.telemetry provides a graphical representation of all important performance figures of your Mindbreeze infrastructure. This enables you to monitor the correct operation of your Mindbreeze installation anytime you want. Different types of diagrams including bar charts and function graphs give you an idea of what is going on in the system. A very interesting figure, for instance, is the number of average ms per query over time:

Another important measure is the duration of search queries. Users always ask for relevant (in the sense of ansers to their questions) and very fast results. It is very easy to check the search performance by looking at the client service table in your dashboard. This shows the percentage of queries conducted within a second and the portion of searches lasting more than ten seconds.

The app.telemetry Dashboard is fully configurable so that you can add new diagrams of whatever kind very easily. You can use every value of the rich Mindbreeze performance instrumentation in your diagrams including browser, Web Client and Query Service instrumentation points.  Therefore you can adapt your dashboard to perfectly suit your specific monitoring requirements.

Tracking performance issues with ease

One key benefit of Fabasoft app.telemetry is the ability to track search requests over process and server borders in often highly distributed systems in real-time. The “Request Statistics” tab in the “Top-X” section provides a good survey on process durations at any hierarchy level.

Moreover, a graphical representation of a user’s query request is often very helpful to understand the blocks that consume time and get a quick overview what’s going on. Switch to the “Request Overview” tab to see the temporal build-up of a request executed on various hosts.

This can be especially useful when analyzing search performance end-to-end from the browser to the Query Service. The graphical “Request Overview” illustration of all involved components helps newcomers as well as system administrators to proactively find (performance) issues with ease.

Take care of your user’s feedback

Fabasoft app.telemetry provides an integrated functionality for user feedback.  Click on the “Support” Button in the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Web Client to post a feedback message. A set of all valuable monitoring information essential for a detailled analysis of this explicit case is added to the sent message. This gives your operators the possibility to react very efficiently to a concrete user request.

Summing up

Performance monitoring of highly distributed systems like Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise requires professional and out-of-the-box monitoring functionality that not only shows that the processes are fine but allows analysis of all the flows and components involved. The Fabasoft app.telemetry dashboard visualizes the important information in an overview fashion and moreover enables the semantical and temporal analysis of Mindbreeze searches e.g. by providing performance summaries and graphical presentations of what’s going on.

Want more?

• For more information contact us or
• download a free trial of Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise and
• Fabasoft app.telemetry and see for yourself how nicely they work together!

During the last few months many companies have been in touch with me regarding our Mobile Search (Enterprise and Cloud) capabilities. People (sales, marketing, support, management) face the challenge of being able to access their enterprise and Cloud data anywhere and anytime on their tablets. Even content such as e-mails, attachments and contacts stored within Microsoft Outlook PSTs files located somewhere on a file share in their organization.

To give you a better overview of what Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile can do for you, I created a short video to show how you can access your enterprise and Cloud information in a secure way with the iPad.

Secure mobile access to enterprise information is often a very tricky challenge. Nevertheless it’s extremely easy if you use Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile. Watch my short demo video and see what it feels like for the user.

Short Video of Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile

Empower your teams

Contact us for a free 30-day trial: http://www.mindbreeze.com/de/mindbreeze/contact-us

Try it with your tablet right now!

Try out our Wikipedia Search on your iPad: https://wikipedia.mindbreeze.com/en/search

Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite is our product to empower websites with professional high-end search cababilities. We offer InSite as a Cloud service and for on premise installation. Today, I would like to show how you can adapt the search-experience by defining views.

Views allow you to group search results by search queries. It’s a really great and simple concept and you can adapt your search results without any need for server configuration. The following 5 scenarios should get you started on the topic, but we are open for your views as well.

1. Search all your sites

If you host multiple web sites, you can unify searches for all of those sites. But always searching all sites can overwhelm your visitors. By grouping the results by site, you help your users to find the relevant information. The estimated result count in the tab header helps as well. The magazine Computerwelt uses this approach on their web site www.computerwelt.at.

2. Group by various dimensions e.g. products

The Fabasoft Group web site took a different approach. To display the best known aspects of the companies, the search results are grouped by products.

In the case of Fabasoft there are websites for each product, but you could use this grouping as well, if you have keywords on your product pages.

Did you notice a difference to the first example? The tabs now contain images, allowing your visitor to identify the contents of the tab more easily.

3. Use your metadata

What I described so far could all be described as metadata views, but metadata views can reach further if the crawler is configured to harvest special metadata on your site. Some metadata, like keywords, are searchable by default. But the crawler can be configured to extract specially formatted elements as metadata. This option is great if you have a nicely marked up breadcrumb trail. Let’s say the crawler is configured to save the breadcrumb as metadata named breadcrumb. Then searching for breadcrumb:”People” yields all search results where the breadcrumb trail contains the People entry.

4. InSite understands your content: content-based views

But not only grouping by metadata is possible. You can define views based on searching for a word or phrase as well.

This works if the user added this word to their query.

5. What’s new

You can have a “What’s New” tab as well. This can be a great aid for your users, if they want to find the newest information first. This approach works especially well if you update your site very often. But beware: You have to set up your Content Management System to set the correct date on each of your pages.

Master InSite

To learn more about the possibilities of Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite visit  developer.mindbreeze.com. The page explains all the customization possibilities with samples.

Free 14-day trial

Want to test Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite for your website? Register and get a free 14-day trial.

With our latest release, the 2011 Winter Release, we have released a brand new feature that empowers the individual user to make use of Cloud services to seamlessly

• search,
• enrich and
• relate enterprise content with content from e.g. Wikipedia or any Cloud application such as Fabasoft Folio Cloud.

Let me sketch how easy this is to use in just 4 steps from an end user’s perspective with Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise:

1) Go to your “Account”.

2) Activate the Cloud services you want to include, for instance Wikipedia and for collaboration purpose you might want to search your personal Fabasoft Folio Cloud team rooms.

3) Log in in with your personal Fabasoft Folio Cloud account and add the service to your search as well. The content is seamlessly integrated into your search. You can of course have a single login over all services via our SAML support.

4) The login for Fabasoft Folio Cloud is available via e-mail address, OpenID and certificate. After you’ve logged in to the system the additional source is successfully activated.

The bottom line: Understanding activities, requirements, and relationships in your organization means processing information in a comprehensible form at the right time and being able to utilize context. Intelligent conversational search is the key to serendipity. Search must spawn over all information sources to work as it should. Furthermore, the interface guides you through relevant information and leads to immediate action.

It is not just retrieving information you need, it is all about getting a 360° view of your enterprise’s people, customers, business, activities, and competitors.

The key to high-quality web search results is to harvest detailed site information with the Fabasoft Mindbreeze – Web Connector. In this article we’ll briefly summarize how we try to take the perfect, contextualized and enriched understanding of your web content.

Phase 1: Setting the Frame

Where is the content that needs to be crawled?

The first phase of the web harvesting process is to tailor our web crawler of choice for crawling exactly the pages that are relevant. Using our Mindbreeze Web Connector provides various possibilities for fine tuning the harvesting sources.
Some of them are:

• Setting multiple crawling roots,
• Regular expression-based selection for the URLs to be crawled,
• Regular expression-based selection for URL blacklisting,
• Detecting and/or configuration of seed lists and crawling depth.

Phase 2: Adjusting the Focus

What is your relevant content? What needs to be emphasized?

The next challenging task is to filter the relevant information from the crawled documents. We need to extract such information as the title, an identifier of the search hit or the textual content. The possibilities of data extraction end by far not here. Several technologies are emerging for semantic markup of HTML documents, for example the Microdata format defined in the HTML 5 standard, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative or the popular and often discussed Microformats. These provide tools for adding semantic information to HTML elements, such as marking it as contact information, geographical position or access control information.

The  metadata extraction mechanism of our Filter Suite and Connectors aim to provide flexible tools to extract such semantic data and already supports the parsing of a large subset of microformats.

The harvested information is then added to the indexed document, annotating it with semantically enriched context. These technologies enable a whole new palette of possible use cases for search-based content and websites, far beyond traditional full-text searches. For example:

• Search for people and contact information on websites,
• Location-based search, for example search for documents related to a given street address,
• Access control of search results based on metadata,
• Or even search-driven landing pages, taking care of the user’s specific context.

Phase 3:  Usability & Style for your Users

How can we access the search results?

The already mentioned Fabasoft Mindbreeze InApp client is maybe the best example of how easy and adaptable can be to display the website search results on the site itself. With just a few lines of code one can easily integrate and customize the Mindbreeze InApp Client to include exactly the needed UI Widgets and to have the look-and-feel that fits the hosting site.

The web indices built by the Mindbreeze Web Connector are also accessible from the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise client as well as from the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile client.

Using the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise client a search can cover sources from the intranet (mail, fileshare etc. ) combined with the company’s website, providing the user with a common access point to all his relevant content.

With the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile client the search results can be displayed on a wide range of mobile devices making website search easily available from just about anywhere.

Mobile Information Access, Enterprise Search and Mobile Search are a perfect fit for today’s enterprise requirements. With Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile, accessing your corporate knowledge is possible with just 3 steps:

1. Configure your Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance (for fastest possible on-premise deployments) or make use of our SaaS and Cloud Services.
2. Crawl and Index your corporate content
3. Secure search and access to all information via your mobile device, with access rights enforced.

What’s special about Mobile Search Applications?
It’s mainly two points:

• form factor and
• device features.

That’s why our Mobile Client is specially-tailored for the restricted screen sizes and special haptic requirements of modern touch mobiles (like the iPhone or Android based mobiles). This empowers you to access information anytime from anywhere without any hassle.

You start simply by entering your query in the search field, as you submit the search, a result list will appear underneath it, providing only the most important information (document title and modification date).

Scroll down the list using standard touch gestures to locate the document of your interest.

By tapping a document in the result list a preview page will come up showing the metadata and contents of that document (as HTML preview). Simply touching the Results button will take you back to the result list.

Throughout the user interface, terms in the text matching your query will be highlighted to provide awareness of all relevant passages in the text.
If more results are available than displayed, the last element in the result list is a button  “Load more results …”.
After clicking that button, a search for more documents will be started in the background.
As soon as they’re available, the button will disappear and be replaced by those results.

On your iPad, we make use of the larger screen. You get a full featured version of our Web Client, matching the capabilities of this larger touch device. Touch elements will be optimized for your fingertips to ensure state-of-the-art usability.

Throughout our client palette, you can federate any sources (like Wikipedia or Fabasoft Folio Cloud search infrastructure), enabling company infrastructures to add data sources on the fly, such as Wikipedia, but nevertheless upholding the individual user’s freedom to turn on and off these data sources for his/her account as they wish.

Try it yourself from your Smartphone via our Mindbreeze Wikipedia Search.

As we all know, e-mail is mission critical for today’s daily business. Besides its communication function it is often still the most important knowledge base in many companies, e.g. to cooperate and collaborate with other companies. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise supports among others the three big enterprise mail systems: Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus and Novell GroupWise. 

Nevertheless,  a considerably large amount of emails is stored in archives, on fileshares, on your desktop or even, as is now very often the case, in the Cloud. Users of Microsoft Outlook often have to handle lots of PST archive files on their own because of enterprise-wide mailbox limits that force them to keep their mailbox small. PST means Personal Storage Table. It is the archive file format generated by Microsoft Outlook. Users can move and archive emails, calendar events, contacts, notes and even tasks to a PST file in a copy and paste fashion or just via an export job. This feature is mainly used to archive your mailbox content and helps to keep your “online” mailbox size small.

Crawling and filtering PST files

The PST filter integrated in Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise works as an add-on to e.g. a configured filesystem data source. It extracts all items such as emails, calendar events, contacts and tasks from a PST file delivered by a crawler (e.g. the filesystem crawler). All items are attributed with a rich set of extracted metadata. The PST filter extracts two objects for every item in a PST file. The first one provides the analysed content and metadata describing the item, whereas the second one is a binary representation of the EML data and used to offer the original email to the user during a query.

Enforcing access rights: All extracted items inherit their access rights from the original PST container as defined e.g. on filesystem directories or shares.

Empower your users

Leverage the power of your content. Anywhere and anytime. Whenever you need it.

Don’t bother any more attaching every single PST file in your Microsoft Outlook client. Just put them on a secure file share. The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise – Web Client gives you immediate search access.

• You can search for certain time spans, email senders, keywords in the email content, refine to emails of high importance.
• For every mail you can immediately see the sender, all recipients, even those in carbon copy. If you want to see the entire message body just click on “Preview”.
• Extracted contact items are displayed with all necessary personal data such as company name, job description, address and phone number. If it is available even the person’s portrait is shown. Find all acquired contacts during a certain period of time or every meeting you had with a certain person. Get a customers name by his/her phone number.
• Combine several constraints using the Advanced Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise – Query Language.
• Facets in the web client show you the set of possible email recipients within the constraints of your search.
• Search for business contacts from a certain company or department.
• You don’t remember the office location of one of your customers? Simply look up the address in one of your contacts.
• Search in all your emails to find business related emails. Narrow your search to a certain recipient to find out when the last communication took place. Find out who was involved in the last common meeting with a certain company.

Act immediately on your content

By clicking on a search hit you can immediately open every email, calendar event, contact, task from your PST in Microsoft Outlook. This allows you to leverage the power of Microsoft Outlook for every item in your PST files.

You don’t need to attach your PSTs in Microsoft Outlook  any more since you can access them via Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise – Web Client, secure and from anywhere in the world.
If you want to share items from PST archives you can download them in standard file formats like EML, iCalendar or vCard.

Ubiquitous search access

Use mobile devices (smartphones, tablets) to search and access your PST archives anytime and from anywhere.

1. Connected? Via a UMTS data card or WLAN? Great!
2. Authenticate: Username/Password or a client certificate authorizes you to the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise – Web Client.
3. Access rights are enforced.
4. You have complete access to all crawled resources that you are allowed to read/access.

Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile comes with a UI especially optimized for mobile devices such as a BlackBerry, iPhone, Android smartphone. This means you have all your emails, contacts, calendar data in your pocket.

Take a look at search hits in the user interface of an iPad

Conclusion

Our support of PST files enables you to extract the information contained in your PST archive files. All extracted items are stored with a set of content specific metadata allowing searches for almost all kinds of aspects. Search access from mobile devices enables you to search for information in any of your PST archives. Both convenient and quick. According to our motto: “Knowledge is a matter of seconds.”

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How-To: Easy integration

Using Fabasoft Mindbreeze to search-enable your application is as easy as one two three.

• One - include our InApp Javascript snippet into your website
  <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.example.com/api/js/inapp.js”></script>
• Two - include the default (CSS) stylesheet or supply your own
  <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”http://www.example.com/css/inapp.css” />
• Three - use the following one-liner to start searching
  via client = new mindbreeze.search.Client();

You are all set and done. Start searching straight away.

And yes, that’s all. To show you what is possible with Fabasoft Mindbreeze InApp, let me sketch some use cases for embedding the search within your website, intranet and web applications.

Use Cases

Searching your company data from your intranet

If your intranet is (or you want it to be) the entry-point for your company and information workers, you can easily search your company’s Fabasoft Mindbreeze installation by displaying the search field on every page. This makes the features of Fabasoft Mindbreeze available on your intranet site. No need for any back-end integration, everything is set up and loaded in the browser. If you crawl your intranet, all your intranet users can search the site, their e-mails, files and all other configured sources as soon as they start their browsers. And they can access all the information they are allowed to read simply via a browser. Of course on an iPad as well.

Display search results as part of a web page

You can customize the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Web/InApp Client by including the UI widgets you need. If you want to display the results in the look of your website, no problem, just don’t include the stylesheet supplied. The results should look like a the rest of your web page now. If you would like to tweak the look, our HTML has reasonable handles for styling, so feel free to style the results to your liking.

You do not want the results to be displayed in an overlay, but instead replace a part of your web page. No problem either, you can easily specify where the results are displayed.

Still no enough control? You can also create your own widgets for displaying search results or reuse your existing widgets and populate them with search results.

Enrich your website with search-driven and personalized content

By search-driven, personalized and contextualized content I mean search results looking like normal content on your website. You can automatically search your installation using a predefined term and display the results as if they were a part of your website. For example, if you index your Microsoft SharePoint installation and search for PDFs sorted by date you can see the 10 latest PDF documents added to your Microsoft SharePoint site.

Which brings me to the next point:

Authentication and Authorization

All user rights are enforced. Authentication works using

• Kerberos
• SAML

So no need to worry that anyone sees anything that she is not allowed to see.

With the Lotus Domino product family, IBM aims to provide, besides the preconfigured groupware services, a fully-fledged platform for creating and deploying line-of-business (LOB) applications.

From the perspective of an enterprise search solution provider like Mindbreeze these Lotus Domino-based LOB applications present an interesting challenge: to build a customizable, fast information retrieval solution that covers data stored in a possibly wide range of Lotus Domino-based database-applications.

From local search to enterprise–level information retrieval

Application-specific search possibilities, usually based on database search are available by
default in the Lotus Domino/Notes environment.

Lotus Notes provides for example a basic search functionality for e-mails and calendar items when deploying the e-mail application. The database search is available in most cases for custom Lotus Domino applications as well. Nevertheless, the major drawback of using only the standard search capabilities is that only “local” information is available for the user, namely by default only the database(s) of  the current application or explicitly loaded
databases (see Multi-Database Search Plugin for Lotus Notes) are searchable. The application user has to know about the structure of the underlying databases in order to find relevant data. Another important drawback of these solutions is the difficulty to
customize how search results are displayed and published.

The objectives we provide with the Fabasoft Mindbreeze – IBM Lotus Connector are to offer enterprise-wide search and views to all your IBM Lotus information. This enables, amongst others, the following main advantages:

• Ability to search over several Lotus Domino applications,
  covering all LOB applications with their databases (.nsf) stored on the servers and locally. The flexibility of our IBM Lotus Connector for crawling different type of Lotus Domino databases lies on the mapping between the Lotus Domino objects, the notes and the document representations stored in a Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise – Index.
  It is possible to specify in a configuration what object classes need to be crawled and what the relevant items and note attributes are that must be stored as metadata.
• Search results need to address the relevant content
  first available in a human-readable and usable form with contextual information (including metadata and actions). It is important that by searching in Lotus Domino data sources, the user receives only results that preserve the original application context. The results should be reusable and the original document  easily reachable from the search interface. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise provides advanced mechanisms for defining context for specific hits. Annotations are available for adding links to other, related search hits and additionally context actions are available for performing different tasks with the search hit. Use cases like displaying the addressees of an e-mail as links to hits representing contacts should be possible also for IBM Lotus Domino search hits.
• Device-independent information access,
  from the traditional desktop PC to smart phones or tablets (such as Apple’s iPad). The binding of information retrieval to the Lotus Domino application where the original data resides is unnecessary. Using the Mobile Client search, this functionality for IBM Lotus is available on your mobile devices “out of the box”.
• Security:
  access check of the displayed information is crucial in a collaborative and distributed environment. Lotus Domino provides fine-grained access checking possibilities, even at field level. Therefore it’s important that the enterprise search products takes care of that as well and enforces all access rights that are in-place.

Searching for particular information and getting concrete views on your customers, contacts, appointments, etc. throughout all your mailbox(es) and archive(s) can be quite time-consuming.

What do Typical Mail-Infrastructures look like?

On the one hand, emails are stored in different locations all over your entire company network and beyond. On the other hand, emails are spread across different formats, products and services, for instance as on premise, SaaS or Cloud deployments:

• In PST or NSF files of users (distributed on workstations or on fileshares)
• On company mail server (like Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus, Novell GroupWise, …)
• In shared mailboxes and public folders (typically called multi-mailbox search)
• Users often have access to shared sub-folders of other user’s mailboxes (as they share them)
• Stored in document and records management applications
• Stored in CRM application
• Stored in Microsoft SharePoint® sites
• Stored in fileshares
• etc.

There is great potential – current studies tell up to 90 percent - that company email is not stored in your company’s mail servers, but in the Cloud.

Finding Data swiftly puts an End to Searching

For compliance reasons, it is absolutely critical to have retention and legal hold policies in place. Compliance is a must-have that needs to be fulfilled. But it’s of course not only the legal aspect that you need to take into account. Even more important: It’s about accessing your company’s knowledge and gaining competitive advantage.

We at Mindbreeze call it the company mind – how a company leverages its knowledge in the most effective way so that the company remains at the leading edge of its industry/sector. Email today is an important piece of the company mind.

Typical archiving solutions mainly address the need to keep content for legal reasons, not optimizing the  stored/archived information for the end user. In our view it’s critical to be able to access the information from everywhere and anytime whilst still enforcing user security.
For your end users (information workers) it’s about getting answers to questions, such as:

The Fabasoft Mindbreeze query language

The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Query Language is a powerful query language by itself.
Users can intersect document hits using an AND expression, join hits with an OR expression, restrict queries to  metadata, and much more.

Customizing the query language

Despite our powerful query language, sometimes you need to customize the query language to your own domain specific requirements. Because of this Fabasoft Mindbreeze provides an API extension point, which makes it possible to transform a given query. The possibilities are manifold: transformations can replace, extend or even remove parts of query expressions.

Use Case 1: translating between query languages

One use case of these transformations is to map query expressions or keywords from other query languages to the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Query Language.

For example, some people accustomed to the Google Query Language use the expression “filetype:jpg”, which can be easily replaced with the corresponding expression “extension:jpg”.

Use Case 2: integration of Synonym / Taxonomy Libraries

Another use case is to support synonyms and taxonomies at query-time.
The basic idea is to extend the query by transforming a single user-provided query term into multiple alternatives, thus dramatically increasing the possibility that users find what they are looking for. This allows for instance to find the terms „automobile“ OR „passenger car“ when the search term “car” is entered.

Use Case 3: multi-lingual queries

So why not extend the concept of synonyms to (natural) languages?
Using translation libraries, a query for the English term “car” can be easily extended to the German term “Auto” and the French term “voiture”.

Use Case 4: spelling corrections

To cope with misspellings and typos, the query can be extended to corrected terms.

Use Case 5: refining queries using geo location

Use case 2, 3 and 4 are aimed at expanding the query to access more documents. Sometimes we want the opposite: To filter a vast amount of information, and get out only what really matters.

For example a query for “hotel” or “restaurant” could yield a magnitude of document hits.
So a query can be restricted to local hotels and restaurants, by mapping the geo location to a city name or even a street name.
Such a geo location could be obtained from the browser in mobile devices with GPS support or the IP address of the user.

When working with partners and customers using Microsoft SharePoint we often see teams starting to use the software as a replacement for their file shares or wikis. This approach often results in multiple Microsoft SharePoint installations, as well as many sites being newly created. Some companies install separate instances for each project-team, to get the most flexible solution. Sometimes this happens to “work around” grown organizational processes, other times it is because of “firewall” considerations. When working on one project or in one team this approach may not pose a problem. But what if you want to look something up and you are not sure in which “island” the information was stored?
What if you need to find all projects that a coworker and you have been working on together?

Use Cases we see

As mentioned before, two typical use cases are the replacement of file shares and wikis. Creating or migrating Line of Business (LOB) applications is an additional scenario. Search is a means of navigation as well as a means of research and needs to include information from all relevant data sources. Having actionable results is as crucial to staying in the flow as having an easy way to refine your query using facets.

Searching one Microsoft SharePoint site does not pose that much of a problem, but …

… how to search accross multiple Microsoft SharePoint installations and sites?

There are a lot of solutions to search in all sites of one installation but integrating the results of multiple installations poses a problem. One solution is the federation of  OpenSearch compatible search engines which can be achieved in Microsoft SharePoint as  described in the article SharePoint Federated Search by Andy Dawson. Being able to integrate results from your e-mails, Microsoft SharePoint installations, file shares and all your other data sources enriches your experience and thus your ability to act in an optimal way.

A richer “on site” experience

A Microsoft SharePoint site is often the starting place for teams if they want to look up what has been done on a project or what is to do next. Having all essential information available is key to successfully managing projects. Having your documents and data in a team repository is a huge step in the right direction, but being able to reach all the relevant data sources will boost your productivity. Web Parts allow you to customize your site according to your likings and to embed custom elements (see Getting Started with Web Parts in SharePoint 2010).
Embedding enterprise search via a Web Part is a way to speed up your information access by having search available at your fingertips while at your command center. Even better, using a Web Part automatically showing the latest updates to a project by conducting a predefined query gives you a head start. You can easily see new e-mails, files or application data without conducting a search.

In enterprise search, quality, usability and style are as important as relevancy of results and performance to engage your users right from the start.
Let’s take a look at typical scale-out scenarios that become relevant when implementing enterprise environments with Fabasoft Mindbreeze.

Starting with Entry-Level

The first configuration consists of a single Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance. It allows you to crawl all your data sources, analyze and process all your documents and records and provides  comprehensive unified information access to all your users.
Don’t get me wrong, with “entry-level”: you can go all up to at least 6 million documents with one entry-level appliance. However, in large-scale enterprise environments, your data volume can easily blow this limit. So we go to the next level.

Taming huge data volume by automatic data partitioning

So what can you do if your data sources hold so many documents and records, that one server is not enough?
The scale-out configuration aims at large-scale enterprise infrastructures with terabytes of data from millions of documents and records.  To support such scenarios, you only need to add additional appliance nodes.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze will automatically and uniformly distribute the documents over all available appliance nodes, thus scaling-out to match the data volume while maintaining excellent query performance.

You need highest availability? Index Replication is the way to go

Another axis of scale-out is targeted in the third configuration: High Availability End users demand their systems to be available 24/7 and to guarantee shortest query times.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze achieves that via index replication. By scaling-out an existing appliance infrastructure, the replica nodes inherit the data sources crawling capabilities as well as the queryable index of the original nodes.

Ultimate query performance through designated query nodes

Complex document analysis and document processing demands resources.
On the other hand, Web 2.0 applications and Cloud Computing demand high
availability with exponential growing numbers of concurrent users as the mission critical requirement.
For ultimate query performance, the fourth configuration decouples data source crawler (producer) nodes completely from query (consumer) nodes:

1. Data sources can be crawled independently of the query nodes in terms of time and resource consumption.
2. The indices produced by the crawler nodes can be replicated to the query nodes and made searchable without any downtime, using our Hot Reopen technology.
3. Combined with a load-balancer, the appliances hosting the query nodes can be
   scaled independently of the crawler nodes, to keep up with the growing number of concurrent users.

A short introduction to Linked Data:

Linked Data is a project of the W3C with the goal of allowing you to discover, connect to, describe, and re-use all kinds of data. It is to data and information what the World Wide Web was to documents back in the 90′s. There is a good chance that it will once again change the way we interact with information.

A great place to start to understand Linked Data is Sir Tim’s TED talk, embedded below. It’s just 15 minutes and recommended if you want to grok where the Web is headed. The slides are also available.

The concept is straight forward and received lots of attention from people and companies over the last three years. Today we are familiar with linking from one website to several others and vice versa. We are using embedded objects like YouTube videos, SlideShare slides or Google Maps mashups as part of our website content and make use of many information services around by embedding and linking their content.

Let’s think of every piece of information on the web such as

• places,
• people,
• conferences,
• lectures,
• presentations,
• projects and lots more

as unique entities/objects that can be used and related to each other as trivially as we work with documents today. A “document” is then kind of a graph of entities (linked data) and additional semantic information and relationships are the “glue” for these entities.

Note: This of course does not only work for web content, it works for every piece of information. This might be one of the most important basic building blocks for information-driven organizations. Getting a 360° view on a business, customer, product or even competitor quickly will be the game changer in the next few years. Companies that are able to face that faster and more precisely tha their competitors will succeed. Security, nevertheless, is the most important aspect that needs to be enforced without any exception or compromise.

Digital Cognition: Make use of linked and related information

We at Mindbreeze have developed our technology from the early beginnings to perfectly fit the concept that was outlined by Tim Berners-Lee. Fabasoft Mindbreeze is able to relate objects with each other like entities in a very efficient and dynamic way. We apply security, context and actions to all of these objects/entities.

What is it used for today?

For example one of our partners developed an application based on Fabasoft Mindbreeze InApp that reads HL7 messages (a healthcare information exchange standard) and  extracts entities from these messages. These entities are then related, even with medical information such as patient information sheets.

So they created a search-based application, to find out which medicine has which ingredients. Moreover they are now able to relate all this information to generate added value for their patients and doctors.

So they can now get answers (and not just a list of results) to questions like:

Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise empowers you to

• enrich and annotate information,
• display contextualized meta-information (as objects and not just basic data types like strings)
• apply context and
• take action on these objects immediately.

Add momentum to your information landscape. Now.

In 1992 the first smartphone was presented as a concept product of IBM at the COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was called Simon and sold in 1993 by BellSouth. It already contained the following features: calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, notepad, e-mail, send and reveive fax, games.

18 years later, 4 billion people worldwide use mobile devices. And it’s no secret that more and more people (and all generations without any exceptions) make use of smartphones as their mobile devices. Interesting to know that in comparison just over 1 billion use desktop computers.

The age of consumerization

In the age of consumerization protecting corporate data is a challenging game. As Bruce Schneier (a well-known American cryptographer, computer security specialist) points out in his article “Should enterprises give in to IT consumerization at the expense of security?“:

Mobile (Enterprise) Search supports organizations of any size to say “yes” to organization  internal information stores, while working within the context of the organization’s overall risk management framework and makes sure that enterprise applications’ toughest security models are enforced.

Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile

Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile makes sure that employees can access the information in their filestores, mailstores, document management systems and other important corporate and Cloud datastores in a secure and intuituve way.

No matter which file format, the information can be displayed as a HTML preview to the users, even when the source application itself has no mobile client. The display of search results equals that of the trusted Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise Client on desktop PCs in respect of a clear overview and intuitive navigation.

Existing access rights to internal corporate documents and data also remain in place when the information is displayed on smartphones. The user is only shown information to which he/she has at least reading rights.

Furthermore, Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile proves that practical and time saving
utilization of comprehensive mobile information access need not compromise data security.

You’re going to see all kind of changes but mobile is going to be a big part of it.

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Modern administrated chambers face the problem of finding all their information quickly and easily whilst maintaining the required discretion. The main goal is to get the information that can be located in  internal databases, Microsoft Exchange, Cloud applications and in specific line of business applications (such as the line of business applications from Advokat in Austria, www.advokat.com).

Since 1954 Hochleitner Ransmayr Lawyers have been a very successful and innovative Austrian administrated chambers, who have combined their local competence with an international  network of know-how.
Some months ago they contacted us to discuss and realize state-of-the-art information access for their large information stores within a tight time frame and at low costs. The chambers are located in Eferding, Linz and Perg (Austria) and offer a holistic legal consulting to its clients in business and private affairs. www.iura.at.
The first step to roll out a solution that meets all requirements of the chambers was to review all existing processes. In this context, it was important to find all information quickly and easily and maintain the required discretion. Another requirement was to illustrate the results clearly in a list.
How to start?

Day 1

1. Take the search box (Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance)
   
2. Make yourself a clear picture of the Search Use Cases the customer needs
3. Put the box into the rack and configure it
4. Index all the data sources
5. Make several test searches yourself and with the customer
6. The customer sends out an email with the link where the employees can start testing

Day 2

1. End-users test the search solution
2. Analyse query logs
3. (Tuning if needed)
4. Go live!

Find out more

The solution rolled out was Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance, a combination of hardware (server) and pre-installed Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise software. The implementation was completed in only two days.

Download Case Study

Being able to search all relevant data sources of your company allows uniform
and quick information access. Typically search vendors offer a set of connectors for data sources, like email systems, document management systems and file systems. Advanced products offer these connectors in a plug and play fashion and will extract the relevant information, provide secure access and efficient delta crawling capabilities.

This post deals with the typical steps you can follow when connecting (crawling, indexing, querying) a custom data source, like self-built line of business applications, to an enterprise search infrastructure. You will find out about the possibilities to search-enable your data
sources, as well as how to enhance the experience for the user. This is the typical 5 step approach:

1. Crawl all relevant information
2. Verify the results
3. Customize how results are displayed
4. Enforce access rights
5. Provide actions for results

Crawl all relevant information

The common approach to connect/crawl a custom data source is to use the Application Programming Interface (API) provided by the enterprise search vendor. You have to implement a so called crawler to access the data source, then transform the data to the
structure needed by the search engine to support your use cases and submit the data. This approach provides the maximum flexibility and dependant on the product you can implement very powerful and hopefully easy to use functions. But there is also a big pain point: you have to set up a development project to even get somewhere.

Another approach is to use “Extract, Transform and Load“ (ETL) mechanisms to ease the process of getting data into the index. ETL tools allow the user to graphically configure a process for extracting data from the data source, transforming the data to a different (and
possibly varying) schema and loading it into a target system.

ETL tools also allow combining multiple data sources, as well as data cleansing and normalization, to name just a few possibilities. Being able to use your enterprise search system as target in your ETL process allows for great flexibility in accessing a multitude of data sources. ETL tools also allow for a more explorative approach, since you can validate the data in the graphical user interface and adapt as necessary. One ETL product I did experience to be worth spending time on is Talend Open Studio. Talend Open Studio ships with 500+ components to start with and can be extended by Talend Exchange which is maintained by Talend’s community.

Verify the results

After the first crawl run you have to verify if all data was indexed as intended. Try behaving as a typical user and query for common use cases. Get your users for a feedback loop into this verifying process. Moreover use the available log files to verify if all metadata needed is present or if the ETL Job needs to be adapted.

Customize how results are displayed

To enable your users to get most out of the results you should refine the display of the results. Only display the data needed for the specific task; define formatting options for values such as dates; adapt the facets available for drill down. All these steps will provide your users with a convenient interface.

Enforce access rights

One really important step is to enforce secure access. You have to make sure and enforce that everyone sees only what he/she is supposed to see. Search engines use Access  Control Lists (ACL) for determining the access rights for each user or conduct live access
checks against the data source while searching. Adding and updating ACLs can also be done using an ETL tool.

Provide actions for results

At last, after finding the results, your users need to be able to act on them. Being able to execute other actions, such as sending, editing or deleting the result object, allows the user to quickly work through his/her tasks without a lot of context switches.

In our opinion, step one “Crawl all relevant information and keeping all semantics” is by far the most elaborate part of integrating a custom data source. We have experienced that we can eliminate or at least bring down the project specific implementation parts to a  minimum for most of the customers by using an ETL tool.

Start integrating your custom data source into Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise, see the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise downloads page. We recommend taking a look at the Talend Open Studio to define your ETL Jobs.

What you need to know: It’s not just black or white!

Strong query and content federation capabilities are a must have for enterprise search  applications as knowledge workers need to retrieve the enterprise’s internal content as well as important content that nowadays often resides outside the enterprise.

As we mentioned in our previous blog there are several ways to connect with standard and even highly customized line of business applications. An effective information access tool needs to facilitate users’ access to all of these content sources while preserving value and context of each information object and knowledge asset.

Federation raises its own challenges

• Each repository offers different levels for searching and accessing its content. Starting with simple metadata search in a database and standard full-text search in documents up to highly sophisticated enterprise search capabilities with dynamic facets, adaptive relevancy models and advanced possibilities such as actionable results.
• Most repositories support different authentication standards and protocols like Kerberos, OAuth, OpenID, SAML or just Basic Authentication.
• Very often the repositories maintain their own user administration.
• If you have five repositories you might have at least five different ways of how these rank their results.
• Different and often very slow access times to information in federated sources. What about quality of service to your end-users, how can you make sure you can meet their needs?
• Do you need real-time alert on information / data changes over all your data sources? This can be tricky or impossible to realize for federated sources.

Even with standards like OpenSearch, CMIS or OData, which leading-edge content applications support today, there is no standardized route to success.

5 most important questions you should think about

So what are the 5 questions that need to be taken into account to decide whether you want to connect or federate a data source?

1. Supported search capabilities:Does the federated source have sophisticated search capabilities? You might want to use e.g. navigational elements all over your data sources for unified information access.
2. API: Does the federated source offer an API to access the information objects in a secure and fast way? Does the API offer contextual information such as actions for a document/object? Is there a way to access an object/document and not just the abstract thatcan be used for features like entity extraction or fact extraction from your enterprise search software? Note: If your content application vendor supports a standard-compliant exchange format you should stick to those open standards to make sure that your investment will last for a longer period.
3. Authentication: What about authentication? Is Kerberos or SAML already in place?
4. Authorization: Make sure access is checked when using the API as well. This should bethe case with most content applications I know of. But is the performance to authorize the retrievable information online really fast enough and scalable?
5. Ranking/Relevancy model: What about the result ranking of your federated source? Is there a relevancy model? Do you need to unify the relevancy with your enterprise search solution? Often a search group or portlet for exclusive display of the federated results is a good enough and often easy way to start.

Our perspective: For federation to succeed, information repositories will need to offer more meaningful access than returning the top few results for a search query. If we can support you, let us know: info@mindbreeze.com.