Searching within your Enterprise

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