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Today's enterprises create a lot of digital content, and there's no shortage of places to keep it. The content we create finds its way to company intranets, project workspaces, desktop PCs, and networked storage. It's structured, it's unstructured, it's in e-mails, and it's on hard drives. And most of all, it's valuable.

Through mergers and acquisitions, department-level projects, and a plain old lack of central repositories in the past, there is too much information in too many places. Enterprises pay the price in productivity. When the right information can't be found, it's often created, consuming time and more storage space when the information is recreated and saved again.

Enterprise search technology can help organizations discover the "who, what, and where" of their content. Search technology is more important than ever before. As the ease of use and relevance of results on Internet search engines improves, knowledge workers expect similar functionality in the office. If IT isn't providing it, they're likely to try and find it through some unapproved method.

Legal issues are also pushing many enterprises to adopt tools that can locate and retain critical information. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, corporate spending on electronic discovery solutions, which totaled $1.77 billion in 2006, should top $2.42 billion in 2007. You can thank new Federal Rules for Civil Procedure that regulate how companies find and describe electronic documents that can be used in lawsuits for at least some of the increase.

Historically, one of the big hurdles to effective enterprise search implementations, and other types of content management projects, has been the deployment. Trying to link repositories in different physical and virtual locations with different languages and file types into a federated search is a heavy task.

Relevant information should be made available quickly and easily, but security also needs to be taken into account. Not every employee should have access to every document found in enterprise repositories. The underlying security must be integrated into the search.

Because of the complications involved, an incremental rollout is often the best approach to enterprise search.

IBM OmniFind Software
IBM OmniFind software starts with a free, entry-level version developed with an Internet search giant. IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is easy to use, easy to deploy, and customizable. Out of the box, IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition lets users search intranet content, local and remote file systems (up to 500,000 documents in all), and the Web using the familiar Yahoo! search interface. You can download your free version at http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net/.

Once you've experienced some of what IBM OmniFind has to offer through the Yahoo! Edition, you might want to consider the OmniFind Enterprise Starter Edition, which specializes in bringing enterprise search to smaller enterprises and department-size implementations.

OmniFind Enterprise Starter Edition brings in ready-to-use integration with a number of content sources, including file shares, databases, collaboration tools, and content management systems. It includes native document-level security support, and it supports more than 50 languages (with advanced linguistic support for 24).

For scalable enterprise search, optimized for Lotus Domino and WebSphere Portal environments, IBM OmniFind Enterprise Search can scale to handle millions of documents and thousands of users. Pre-built integrations for indexing data and content from file shares, databases, collaboration tools, content management systems, blogs, wikis, and forums are included.

OmniFind Enterprise Search offers native security support for Lotus Domino, WebSphere Portal, IBM Content Manager, and third-party sources such Windows SharePoint Services and FileNet P8. Its open platform for processing unstructured information enables semantic queries, navigation of business intelligence results, and custom analytics applications.

Specialized Search Applications
Search applications are not a one-size-fits-all proposition. In some instances, a self-service application or a search application that understands the language specific to a certain industry will more efficiently deliver the right results to users.

IBM OmniFind Discovery Edition uses real-time understanding of the users' intent and application context to optimize search results. Its adaptive presentation options present answers, navigational refinements, and proactive guidance that help users take action after their search is completed. Through its packaged solutions, OmniFind Discovery Edition can provide industry vocabularies, configuration logic, and application UIs.

The information found throughout an enterprise can also be used to create applications that increase the efficiency of your business, optimize revenue, and make more informed decisions.

IBM OmniFind Analytics Edition provides an analytics platform for structured and unstructured data content that can be used to power a customized business solution. Based on the open Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) standard, OmniFind Analytics Edition provides multiple ways to explore and analyze information.

That information can then be used to create custom solutions in a number of applications areas: customer care analysis, quality insight, market insight, risk and compliance analysis, and research and intelligence.

Harnessing the content that exists in an enterprise environment not only makes it easier to work with your information, but it puts your information to work for you.