I want to share this post I did that first appeared in AppGap to make you aware of a free search tool for those in a Microsoft environment. Coveo offers enterprise search technology including their enterprise search modules and
search-based applications for such functions as call centers and litigation
& compliance. It has now launched a free, entry-level
enterprise search solution, Coveo
Expresso™ Beta. Coveo’s new offering provides a basic, but robust, set of
search functionality, at no cost, for up to 50 users, 1M desktop files and
email items and 100,000 Intranet documents. I recently spoke with Louis Tetu, executive chairman, Laurent Simoneau, CEO, and Diane
Berry, VP Marketing & Communication, about this new offering.
We first discussed the top two
of their three levels of offerings to put Expresso in context. Louis describes their three tiers. At
the top are enterprise search solutions that apply their search technology to
specific business processes such as call centers, human resource management,
knowledge management, e-commerce, and others. I am especially interested in their call center solutions,
as I have tackled this issue from the knowledge base side. In these cases having good search often
was a critical factor. I can certainly see the logic of making search the front
end and leaving the content in place. We will discuss these solutions in more
depth in a subsequent conversation.
Their enterprise search modules cover
such areas as desktop search, email search, CRM search, intranet search and
search through mobile devices. A subset of these modules forms the core for Expresso
and they are the migration points for people who want to move beyond what the
free product offers.
Next,
Laurent took us on a tour of Expresso. We began with the email search. You can
search your own email account to find both conversations and attachments. You
can also filter by facets such as document type, person, date, etc. In addition, there is an Outlook
Sidebar, a search plug-in, which provides related conversations, related
people, and related attachments as a side bar item. You can search any indexed
content without leaving Outlook. If these results are not sufficient you can
launch advanced search with guided navigation through search facets. Here is a
sample email search screen below. You can see the search results in the left
column and facet related information in the right column. You can search other’s email account if
they give you permission.
I
could see the value of this capability from the start and wanted a copy for
myself but they have currently focused Expresso on the Microsoft world which
makes a lot of business sense as that is over 85% of the market. It works with
Exchange Server, Outlook, Active Directory, Sharepoint, and related products.
You can get Coveo’s capability for other platforms including the Mac
environment, where I work, and Lotus Notes through their advanced search
modules.
With
the Outlook Sidebar shown below you can select a person and see all the
conversations with this person, as well as attachments. They are sorted by
date. As I mentioned, if you want to move from browsing these lists, you can
still bring up the search box.
Next, we covered the desktop
search that looks at all the content on your computer. Unlike some search engines this tool
does not actually process its searches on your computer, taking up processing
power. All of the content on your machine is pushed to a server and searched at
the server level. You can exclude content from this process for privacy and/or
security purposes. Security can be
at the file level so you have granular control over what occurs. Below is a sample file search.
You can also search your
company’s intranet. These searches
can be ordered by relevance or date. The relevance factor is available on most
search types. The relevance of a document is determined by a mix of 75 factors.
Your administrator can set weights on these factors such as credibility of
author, popularity of file, etc. A sample set of intranet results is shown
below. Again you see the results in the left column and facet related
information in the right column such as document type and author. The type of facets offered varies by
what type of search you are conducting.
We also looked at a people
focused search. You can pull information from Outlook, Exchange Server, and
Active Directory. If you are using Salesforce.com you can also pull this
content into the search process. You can even narrow the search to a subset of
your Salesforce.com data such as a particular pipeline, though not in the free
version, currently.
There is an administrator
dashboard that shows you how much of the free capacity you have utilized (e.g.,
users, files, etc.) and it conveys how to get more capacity if needed. I think this free offering is an
excellent sales tactic. Since you access this product in a self-service mode,
the cost of sales is virtually zero.
There is only upside to
getting it in the hands of people who will likely want the additional features
and capabilities available at the next tier. At the same time there is enough
functionality at the basic level for users to see the value. These users are
also not taking a risk as there is no time limit to the free offer so they can
continue to make use of the tool and their investment in understanding it even
if they do not move to the next level.
I am impressed with what they are doing. Others seem to feel the same
way as they recently received $8.2 million in Series B funding led by BDC Venture Capital.
Coveo is based in Quebec City,
one of my favorite places in this world. I have been there many times as it is
driving distance of Boston. Louis very kindly gave me an excellent collection
of great local restaurants to add to my list. I will be covering these on my
personal blog in the coming weeks and will start trying them the next time I
can get up there.