このページは大阪弁化フィルタによって翻訳生成されたんですわ。

翻訳前ページへ

• Home
• Search
• Google Apps
• Earth & Maps
•  
• Tours & demos
• Partners & Developers
• Solutions Marketplace
• Customers
• - Website Search
• - Universal Search
• - Google Apps
• Enterprise Solutions
•  
• News & events
• Support
• Contact sales

Stratus and the Google Search Appliance

The company is a global solutions provider with over seven hundred employees worldwide. Forty percent of the company's revenues are generated domestically and the remainder internationally.

The previous search engine could only index about 6,000 pieces of the overall data. But the company had over 100,000 pieces of content (double that with sales force data factored in) spread out over various information silos, and more information being filed every day, which meant over 94% of data was unsearchable. Once the decision was made to invest in something new, Stratus set the bar high, prepared to explore as many options as necessary to find a search solution that could scour all available information.

"Since we have been in business a long time, we have some quirky repositories," says Stratus web developer Scott Melick. "The repositories we're searching are file shares, web servers and some databases. Two of our groups use SharePoint for documentation repositories." Because SharePoint lacks effective full-text search capabilities, employees might be able to find some surface data when searching for product information, but without a more powerful search they could not find more pertinent documents.

Stratus wanted more than a thorough search, though. Other factors scrutinized included ease of use, swiftness of returns, intuitive searches, and a solution that did not require intense employee training. The previous search engine's slow, incomplete results frustrated employees who had to struggle with drop down selection menus and text boxes, with no groupings or categories. Often, they avoided searches altogether. The new solution had to be impressive enough to encourage regular usage.

With plans to expand the database significantly, Stratus also needed to know that their chosen search solution could keep up the pace and handle the growing files from both the perspective of organization and continually improving employee and customer experiences alike.

Graves recalls the first week employees were introduced to the appliance. "We said, ‘It's here, come and use it.' We had one or two questions about how to switch between repositories and that was it. Everyone just got it right away. We've had plenty of kudos."

"One of the advantages," says Melick, is that "everyone is so accustomed to the interface from using Google.com. I mirrored that interface on our web site."

The Google Search Appliance, using the same technology that powers Google.com, is compatible with SharePoint and can crawl through all available content, regardless of how many repositories that data is spread over or how the data is organized (or disorganized). Additionally, the appliance creates an index as it searches, providing simple organization of massive amounts of information. As future repositories are added, the appliance will also crawl through these and provide an expanded index.

"We're pretty excited about the OneBox feature that allows us to tie in databases," says Graves, referring to the appliance's simple single box that handles all searches over all repositories. "If we search on our intranet for the term ‘San Diego,' we find all the references."

Other advantages include a built-in spell check feature that detects if a search term is typed in incorrectly and suggests alternate spellings. Also there is a synonym search, so if a user types in "mobile" the search engine will also return results for "cellular." This extends to acronyms, too. "If someone searches for a term it searches for the corresponding acronym," says Melick.

Perhaps the biggest crowd pleaser has been application searches. Says Graves, "Scott set it up so if you type up the name of an application the first thing that pops up is the location of the app. We got several emails from users saying, ‘Thank you thank you thank you!'"

Recently the company tied the appliance in to its customer service database. "We had a lot in the database that was not searchable," says Graves. "The tie-in was a big win for us. For example if someone in customer service is working a call issue and wondering if anyone else had trouble with a part, they can look up the part then look up past references. That's a huge productivity boost for our customer service base."

And with customer service representatives better able to handle service calls and better able to quickly resolve customer issues, employee morale continues to improve as does consumer satisfaction.