Intranets + Enterprise Discovery = Familiarity and Capability

Combining application functionality is frequently a project for today's IT departments. The drive to place more functionality in fewer pieces of software is notable because operational environments can be extremely complex, which is detrimental to users. Giving workers a few tools that can do more helps them stay focused and accomplish more. Enterprise search improvement through indexing is one capability that can be placed in the context of other software suites to enable all-around productivity. For example, this approach could be used to enhance the search capability of intranets and other enterprise portals.

Improving the intranet feature set

The more time employees spend using social applications like intranets, the better these networks become. The best of these environments are full of user-generated content, meaning the more central they are to everyday operations, the richer they will grow. IT departments may realize that the basic search capabilities of these tools lack something, however. After all, they are typically siloed by individual sites and, altogether, only hold a fraction of the firm's data. If there was a way to bring the rest of the company's rich content environment into the picture and make that wide variety of information available within the portal, it would be much more applicable.

This is where indexing comes in, making the vast array of different content possessed by today's companies searchable from various interfaces, including those within intranet environments. This is a subtle change on the surface, but one that could have massive repercussions for the end-users actually working within the intranet environment. Now, these employees can carry out daily searches within the familiar portal, no matter what they are looking for.

Efficiency through indexing

Adding a new component to the mix can change the way leaders and end-users alike look at an intranet. With solutions like ViaWorks, the IT team can both add a vital new search capability to the company as a whole and align it with another technology that could use a boost in functionality to ensure its own popularity. This is a strong way of incentivizing a certain type of IT use and can help get a business on the same page. The need for such measures is especially pronounced now, as information volume, velocity and variety have all spiked, with no sign of decline in sight.

In the end, the most powerful argument for new enterprise search features may be pure necessity. Finding anything in the data sprawl-afflicted enterprise can be a struggle, meaning the new features are perfectly suited to the situation. Couching these capabilities in another piece of useful IT infrastructure is a smart way to consolidate the office down to a few vital applications rather than a variety of tools that users must switch between regularly to accomplish their varied everyday tasks.