Looking Beyond Enterprise Search

When people think of the term “enterprise search,” they often have a preconceived set of perceptions, capabilities and technology. It evokes lots of different reactions from various sources, depending on who you ask. If you ask Wikipedia, for instance, “Enterprise search is the practice of making content from multiple enterprise-type sources, such as databases and intranets, searchable to a defined audience.” If you ask some companies in the industry, it involves taking best practices from a standardized web approach, then translating those into an enterprise environment.

We view enterprise search from a different perspective. It’s not about what works well on the web, it’s about what’s relevant and effective in enabling shared knowledge throughout an organization and beyond, including its customers, and more broadly, people who care about their industry and contribute to it.

We say Coveo applications are beyond—way beyond—enterprise search for a reason. We believe this is less about finding the needle in the haystack and more about having a full view of relevant information related to the work at hand. It is about empowering key organizational experts to be discovered and leveraged to their full potential. It’s about extending beyond traditional enterprise data, to include content from social media streams and cloud computing applications, delivered through browsers, smartphones and tablets. And it’s about making correlations and analytics that deliver a layer of recognition and insight that the person who entered the query never thought possible.

When you look at search and insight from that perspective, the technology becomes far more than the term originally entailed.