Google’s Universal Search for Law Firms & Interwoven  

Presentation on March 12, 2008, Vijay Koduri, Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise and Gautam Malkamekar of Persistent Systems. 

My notes from the presentation:

• Google Enterprise overview:
  • “mission organize the world’s information…”
  • enterprise information (i.e. info behind the firewall) is 40% world’s information.
• 600 Google employees dedicated to G Enterprise.
• 15,000 customers.
• Google Apps – the suite of apps (now also including Google Sites [see my gripe about Sites here]).
• 2000 new Apps customers every day!
• “Search is the starting point to the world’s information.”
• Knowledge workers (“KWs”) spend 25% of time looking for information.
• KWs search about 5 repositories looking for information.
• Expertise location is important 
• Impact on business is loss of productivity, not optimizing billable hours.
• What is Universal Search?
  • one search searches multiple repositories
  • the results are delivered without categorizing
  • the results are ranked by relevancy
  • an example of Universal search is Google’s Moma internal knowledge base
• Universal search allows client access via extranets (security is observed to only give access to allowed material).
• ROI: increase of billable hours – eliminate some time searching so that billers can spend some of that time doing billable activities (time is money).
• The Google Search Appliance (GSA) searches pretty much all repositories in the enterprise (file shares, intranets, databases, enterprise apps, content management).
• “OneBox” – Can make real time queries into various apps (ex. see a snapshot of a regional sales report in the search results – not just a link to the report).
•  Case Study: Akin Gump (not many details).
  • deployed GSA
  • used it to search intranet pages

Second part of webinar – Persistent Systems & Live demo 

The info here is spare because there were some technical problems)

How Universal Search is “extended” to interwoven

• Persistent Systems overview
• Connector Deployment – there is Persistent Systems connector between the Interwoven databases and the GSA (fed via XML)
• Quick – easy install, simple configuration. 

Live demo of Connector

• an apparently simple “walk through” set up – it took 5 minutes. 
• A Google browser is used, allowing to search just public content or public & secure content. 
• only content to which the user has access appears – demonstrated this feature by signing in as different users with different access credentials. 
• demonstrated Google OneBox – shows relevant real time information in the search results.
• They can also connect into other DMS products, like Hummingbird

Q&A:

• The GSA is a closed box and Google does not share the info with anyone outside of the enterprise
• GSA can search MS Exchange databases, too.
• It can search across multiple Worksite servers in different geographical locations.
• Security is checked
• The search must originate from the web page, but can be embedded in FileSite, with some custom work.
• Pricing: based on number of documents in organization.  Starting $30,000 (for two-year license, hardware, software, support) for 500,000 documents.  Can index up to 30 million documents with stacked GSAs.
• There is a small business version of product “Google Mini” 50,000 documents – $3,000.
• Application can search Word Perfect, as well as Word and many, many other file types.
• Information can be compartmentalized so that only certain people can see it.
• Works with single sign on mechanisms. 
• OneBox works by doing a real-time query. 
• Google does not keep your search statistics, but you can keep track of your own search statistics within the enterprise with Google Analytics. 
• They skipped my question: how many Am Law 100 firms have deployed GSA and how many have deployed the Persistent Systems connector?

Webinar is archived here.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

If you liked it, please share it.