Brilliant Leap

Search engines on my mind

I have search engines on my mind. Johnny Gee put an interesting bug in my bonnet when he blogged that EMC will be coming out with an enterprise search engine that promises to challenge Google enterprise search. I don't want to misinterpret what he says, so judge for yourself; here are his words:

With FAST being acquired by Microsoft, there has been a lot of talk on what will happen with the FAST search engine that is currently OEM with Content Server. Well, it seems that Lucene, which FAST also uses, will be the core of the how content is indexed with Documentum. However, the core search engine is going to built by EMC. I'm guessing this is to compete with Google's entry into ECM space with its own adaptors to Documentum repositories. Since the core of any search engine is the search algorithm and/or technology it uses, I'm not going to reveal anything that is proprietary. I will say the architecture for this new search engine is quite REVOLUTIONARY.

I can't wait to hear more about it, but I'll stop short of calling Johnny to see if I can get him to spill; he's far too ethical, besides, he's probably signed something that says he can't. (As a complete aside, though, I wonder if open source vendors handle the "special people get to sneak a peak at our cool new toys, flaunt the fact, and reveal nothing " in the same way.) I'm also wondering how likely it is that anyone is going to build something that outperforms Google in the near term.

Yes We Can!

By now it's clear that those three words are the chant of the American majority. The promise of possibility has won over the voice of fear; and the idea that big business can keep you safe and secure (think about your 401k, your job, your insurance company) has all but vanished.

So why am I talking about this on an ECM blog? Because I think that Generation X,Y and the Millenials have been saying "Yes We Can" in the workplace for quite a long time. They've stuck their noses up at, or simply ignored, the corporate voices who have tried to keep it all behind the firewall; they've installed third-party applications like AIM and Talk and accessed their Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts on company hardware regardless of policy. I've heard IT Managers from companies as large as Pfizer say that they know that people are sharing their music collections at the office and admit that they can't police it all. And even if IT policies could keep folks from free-wheeling on their desktops, there are always iPhone, Blackberrys, or PALMs that are becoming more and more able to get the job done. And if you try to tell these generations that they can't use their personal devices in the workplace. they won't argue, their behavior will speak for them, "Yes We Can."

So what are Corporate Officers to do when they're charged with the duties of keeping Information safe, secure, and compliant; when it's their responsibility to insure that only certain folks get to view/and or alter certain documents, when "sharing" and collaboration and workflow have to be controlled?