Searching within your Enterprise

Index all kinds of documents within your organization and over the Web for easy text search and retrieval that reduces the tedious process of going through content manually

Monday, January 01, 2007

We all know of search engines for the Internet. What if you want to quickly pull out documents you need from your file server or NAS or from whatever common storage you have within the enterprise? Popular Web based search giants are not easy to configure for this. So what to do? One way is to install a desktop search utility out of the many available freely. Unfortunately, that does not suffice all the needs. You might require searching for text within mails, PDFs and Docs, located on your machine, or a location shared over your LAN. It is here that 'Indices' based text searching brings the much needed time conservation in information.

We look into one such solution-dtSearch and how it can be useful for your enterprise. The software's search utility comes in two versions-Desktop for personal use; and Network for usage over a network. For more details refer to the website.

Getting started
You can install dtSearch on all user machines for usage over network or go for an automatic deployment of dtSearch over your network. The details for automatic installation over network are available on the manual provided. Launch 'dtSearch Indexer' from Programs> dtSearch. We first need to create an index. This is where the solution starts looking impressive.

You can create indices for almost anything in your intranet and even a website. To create an index, click on 'Create index' button. This opens the 'Create Index' dialog with a host of detailed options. When you click on 'Yes,' the tool will prompt for updating index after creation. The 'Update index' box appears where you can add all that you want to index in the 'What to Index' section. The section gives four options in form of buttons.

The 'Add folder' button is for adding folders while the 'Add file' is for adding a file either on your local machine or on the network. 'Add Web' button allows you to add a website for indexing, and 'Add Outlook' opens up your Outlook Personal folders to add for indexing. You can add almost anything over the organization's network for indexing and even websites.

You can add different locations, varying from files over LAN to websites and Outlook folders while creating indices

Other than this, the tasks provided by the Index Manager tool include advanced index creation that allows you to select whether to cache document text (default) or document itself in the index, turning on/off case-sensitive and accent-sensitive indexing. 'Update Index' button is for editing indices. Other buttons facilitate scheduling updates, updating multiple indices and merging indices. The 'Index Library Manager' stores library definitions for the indices created. You can even manually add a library to it. For installing dtSearch over a network, you can either set dtSearch to run from a shared directory or you can install dtSearch on users' computers. If dtSearch is installed separately on each user's computer, it will generally load faster as local disk access is comparatively swift. But in both cases, users can use shared index libraries or 'Recognize Index' in the Index Manager to access shared network indexes.

Searching for content
The 'dtSearch Desktop' is the agent used for searching after you are through with creating indices. You can configure the search tool for a wide variety of search expressions, and retrieve results at a very good speed. It is not just specifying expressions that help in text and document retrieval; for advanced purposes you can utilize additional options provided.

While searching, choose from available options such as 'Fuzzy Search,' which allow you to set an acceptable level of mis-spellings

Checking the 'Stemming' option activates grammatical forms of a word's inclusion in search result. For example, the search for 'act' returns 'acting' and 'acted.' This can help if the search string you have used exists in different contexts across documents. The option 'Phonic' returns results that sound similar. There is also an option for 'Fuzzy Search' with a slider with units of 1 to 10 for setting the degree of misspellings acceptable. There are also options for searching synonyms that can be activated by checking the 'Synonym searching' option.

If you still want more, you have the thesaurus at your service that can be opened from the same window by clicking on 'Thesaurus' button.

Diagnostic tool
The software also has a diagnostic tool that provides you with options for reporting and 'Diagnostic Logging'. The former generates a report from the logs in case of errors that you can mail back to dtSearch for analysis. Use the latter option to track down errors if they occur during indexing or searching processes. You can also zip your log files and send over mail or clear registry settings from the diagnostic tool.

The search results can be arranged categorically and even viewed in external viewers with hits highlighted

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