The new version now delivers a search dashboard that taps into content management by IBM Lotus Domino and WebSphere Portal environments.
IBM launched OmniFind Yahoo Edition in December last year as a free-level addition to its OmniFind enterprise search software that lets corporate users find and access files and web content on corporate intranets and Websites.
The software bundles Yahoo’s web search engine, and is an entry-level version of IBM’s existing OmniFind offering that can search up to 500,000 documents.
The latest upgrade now provides users with a single interface for full-text search and indexing of Domino database fields including attachments as well as fielded search. It also comes with pre-built support for Lotus Quickr, QuickPlace and Domino.Doc databases, SharePoint Services and Microsoft Exchange. A crawler tool for IBM’s Workplace Web Content Management platform
IBM has also tightened up the search platform’s security and search capabilities for WebSphere Portal clients. For example, these clients can now search through WebSphere Search Center portlets or OmniFind portlets directly through the WebSphere Portal using native security protocols.
IBM also pointed to several Web 2.0 features in the administration console that allow for easier customization of search applications and results.
This is IBM’s second upgrade of the software this year. In April it added more robust searches on metadata, customization and international support
IBM already offers more advanced Enterprise and Discovery editions of OmniFind search that add semantic search that incorporates synonyms, analytics and natural language query, along with features from IBM’s Information Server that aggregate, cleanse and transform structured information.
Our View
IBM’s move to team up with Yahoo to offer free entry-level search tools is very much a if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em strategy. That strategy has met with some success – in the six months since its debut OmniFind Yahoo Edition has garnered over 21,000 downloads and scores of companies are developing add-ons to the platform including those that further enhance its search, visualization, and matching capabilities.
The obvious comparison with OmniFind Enterprise Edition is Google’s search appliance, which mainly focuses on Intranet searching. The advantage that IBM holds is the tight hooks into collaborative workgroup offerings – Domino, SharePoint Services – and its managed content repositories – Filene, Exchange, shared file systems, etc.
The integration into WebSphere Portal allows users to integrate unstructured search capabilities into business applications as a workflow-driven process. And IBM’s UIMA framework for bringing together unstructured data management with analytics opens up opportunities for broader applications of search across the enterprise.
