Category Archives: Hybrid Search

April 9, 2024 · 10:53 AM

New X1 Search 9 Provides the Best Means to Search Your Microsoft 365 Data Sources

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

Last week X1 announced major new, robust features to our desktop productivity solution X1 Search. The next generation of X1 Search is no longer desktop-only focused, but instead provides a revolutionary ability to instantly search across your Microsoft email, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint as well as your local files and email all in a single unified search. This powerful capability supercharges your productivity, thereby saving hours a day. This added support also extends to Google Drive and Gmail.

While there are many innovations with X1 Search 9, the ability to search across all your M365 data sources with a single search is particularly game changing. No other enterprise or desktop search solution can match this functionality. The native Microsoft M365 search has a semblance of this, offering only a few search results displayed with a cursory preview, as opposed to full search results and full fidelity preview provided by X1.

“X1 Search is my go-to, must-have search application on my desktop,” said Max Underwood, long-time business and personal user from a large defense contracting firm. “Nothing even comes close to matching X1 Search’s speed and accuracy in finding what I am looking for exactly when I need it so I can get back to work, whether the source file is located on my local drive or hosted on a distant cloud via my company’s network. It’s an incredible time-saver, invaluable, way ahead of Windows Search or any other search tool I’ve seen – literally saving me hours each work week. X1 Search is essential to my day-to-day operations, and with the new ability to instantly search across all my Teams messages and accelerate my Gmail search on top of the current capabilities, the solution is even more compelling.”

No other solution enables you to instantly search across all your core data applications using a single prompt and return immediate results with hit highlighting and full fidelity preview capabilities. X1 Search unlocks the ability to find information no matter where it resides whether it’s lost in your spam folder, archived in your email 10 years ago, buried in a Teams chat or recently added to your OneDrive or SharePoint. X1 Search does the work for you, faster and far better than any other desktop or enterprise search offering.

The new X1 Search version 9 capabilities, include the following benefits:

• The ability to search through all your Microsoft Teams Chats and Channels history, including messages, attachments, emojis, reactions, and more, all from a single interface.
• Elevate your cloud data search capabilities with the new Google drive connector enabling you to search your complete Google drive history and immediately perform Post Search Actions.
• Index, search and find information in your Gmail 3 times faster with the new API-based Gmail connector.
• Patented fast-as-you-type search with built-in hit highlighting and full fidelity preview for immediate visibility into your results.
• Search across all your Outlook email, attachments, Outlook calendar, and contacts list via X1’s deep Outlook integration.
• Unified search across all your data sources to instantly search and find emails, attachments, documents, local files, and M365 data in a single search.
• Accelerate your email workflow with M365 Archived mail search capabilities – Rapidly index years’ worth of archived Outlook email in half the time.

X1 will be hosting a webinar on Wednesday, April 17 introducing the game-changing, new solution capabilities now available with X1 Search version 9.

The X1 Search solution is available for individual purchase on the X1 website and large volume, enterprise purchase by contacting X1 at sales@x1.com. To learn more about X1 Search visit www.x1.com/products/x1-search

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Corporations, Desktop Search, Enterprise Search, ESI, Hybrid Search, Information Management, MS Teams, OneDrive, productivity, Records Management, SharePoint, X1 Search 9

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May 1, 2018 · 8:42 AM

Data Discovery “Is the Foundation of GDPR Compliance”

Recently, I attended a very informative Microsoft GDPR Summit in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft invited their key compliance partners to brief them on Microsoft’s strong support for GDPR compliance within their Office 365 ecosystem, and to engage them in their strategy. The summit featured a slate of legal, compliance and technology experts who provided compelling insight into the GDPR, including challenges and opportunities for organizations as the May 25 enforcement date approaches.

Enza Iannopollo, a featured keynote speaker from Forrester, is an industry analyst with a deep focus on information security, data privacy and GDPR compliance. She noted that per a recent Forrester security survey, only about 30 percent of organizations report GDPR readiness. In her talks with major organizations, Iannopollo sees a strong if not belated commitment as they scramble to achieve readiness ahead of May 18. In terms of what it takes to effectuate GDPR compliance, Iannopollo presented a slide which simply stated the following: “Data Discovery and classification are the foundation of GDPR compliance.” Iannopollo said this is because the GDPR effectively requires that an organization be able to identify and actually locate, with precision, personal data of EU data subjects across the organization.

The speakers identified both a proactive and reactive requirement of data discovery under the GDPR. Iannopollo commented that a robust data discovery capability is needed to produce an intelligent data map, to classify and actually remediate non-compliant data. This data audit process should done at the outset, and also routinely executed on a recurring basis.

For reactive capabilities, Microsoft deputy general counsel John Payseno noted in a separate session that once GDPR enforcement comes online on May 25, 2018, organizations will be required to respond to data subject requests (DSRs) from individual, or groups of, EU data subjects. The DSRs under the GDPR consist of requests for data erasure, data transfer, or a confirmation that data permissively kept is done so in a minimal fashion without excessive duplication or re-purposing outside of the granted consent. Payseno said that companies must be able to document and demonstrate compliance with these DSRs, in a manner generally akin to responding to a subpoena or other legal requirement.

So a clear takeaway from the Microsoft summit is that GDPR compliance requires the ability to demonstrate and prove that personal data is being protected, requiring data audit and discovery capabilities that allow companies to efficiently produce the documentation and other information necessary to respond to regulators and EU private citizen’s requests. As such, any GDPR compliance programs are ultimately hollow without consistent, operational execution and enforcement.

While Microsoft demonstrated their capabilities to conduct effective data discovery in their O365 cloud environment, they openly acknowledge a significant gap for addressing on-premise unstructured data. Effective GDPR compliance requires the ability to gain immediate visibility into unstructured distributed data across the enterprise, through the ability to search and report across several thousand endpoints and other unstructured data sources, and return results within minutes instead of weeks or months as is the case with traditional crawling tools.

X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD) represents a unique approach, by enabling enterprises to quickly and easily search across multiple distributed endpoints and data servers for PII and other data from a central location.  Legal and compliance teams can easily perform unified complex searches across both unstructured content and metadata, obtaining statistical insight into the data in minutes, instead of days or weeks. With X1DD, organizations can also automatically migrate, collect, delete, or take other action on the data as a result of the search parameters.  Built on our award-winning and patented X1 Search technology, X1DD is the first product to offer true and massively scalable distributed searching that is executed in its entirety on the end-node computers for data audits across an organization. This game-changing capability vastly reduces costs while greatly mitigating risk and disruption to operations.

X1DD operates on-demand where your data currently resides — on desktops, laptops, servers, or even the Cloud — without disruption to business operations and without requiring extensive or complex hardware configurations. Beyond enterprise eDiscovery, GDPR and other information governance compliance functionality, X1DD includes the award-winning X1 Search, improving employee productivity while effectuating that all too illusive actual compliance with information governance programs, including GDPR.

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Filed under Best Practices, compliance, Corporations, Data Audit, GDPR, Hybrid Search, Information Governance, Uncategorized

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October 13, 2015 · 8:57 AM

A Series of Firsts: How X1 Sets the Standard for the New Enterprise Search Market

by Barry Murphy

The new world of IT demands that enterprise software support varying infrastructures – traditional managed data centers, the cloud, hybrid and virtual environments.  As a result, old-school approaches that once seemed logical no longer work in today’s reality.  For example, tightly-coupled search appliances that marry hardware and software together no longer meet the requirements of enterprises that need to make distributed workers more productive no matter what kind of device they are on.  It’s a new world for enterprise search and traditional solutions will have a very hard time adapting and scaling.

X1 is ready for the IT reality of always-on, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments and business mobility.  This is evidenced by two “firsts” that X1 is proud to announce.  First, X1 is the first search application with an app publicly available in an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) app store.  X1 Search Mobile is available in the AirWatch marketplace.  Given the rapid move to mobile devices for work, this is no small news.  Google just announced on Friday that searching the web is now predominantly done from mobile phones.

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It’s clear, then, that enterprise search from the mobile device is now an essential requirement for business professionals.  The mobile search app is important, but what X1 is building out is much more than that.  In order to effectively deliver enterprise search from the mobile device requires having the back-end infrastructure to support full enterprise search in virtual environments.  It also requires supporting the next-generation desktop (VDI or DaaS) where the users live. X1 has uniquely mastered such back-end infrastructure with the only desktop search (VDI or otherwise) and enterprise search solution that are VMware Ready certified.

The second “first” that X1 is proud of is the listing of X1 Rapid Discovery in the Amazon AWS Marketplace.  Again, this is no small feat – this is the first enterprise-grade search and eDiscovery application to be available in the AWS Marketplace.

AWS marketplace

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Organizations storing content in AWS can now get full-featured enterprise search and eDiscovery deployed right next to their content.  And, if these organizations store other content locally, they can deploy Rapid Discovery in their own data center as well and have a single-pane-of-glass across all information no matter where it lives.

X1 will continue to provide solutions that work in the infrastructures that organizations utilize today.  The traditional approach to search will not work, but with X1, companies will have the flexibility to deploy into any environment and give users a powerful search experience on any device.  That is a powerful productivity tool – and businesses require worker productivity the same way humans require oxygen.  It is a new enterprise search market out there and X1 is uniquely positioned to lead the charge.

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Filed under Cloud Data, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, Hybrid Search, Information Management

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March 16, 2015 · 5:59 PM

X1 Changes the Game in Hybrid Cloud Search with Box Connector

by Barry Murphy

The Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) category is hot right now.  This is not a surprising fact.  In the research document Parting Enterprise Users From Consumer EFSS Solutions Will Be a Challenge, Gartner estimates that, “by 2018, 50% of an enterprise’s data will reside external to the data center.”  EFSS vendors provide enterprises with more structured ways to collaborate and share information both on-premise and in the cloud.  The Gartner document goes on to state that, “an off-premises public cloud implementation of EFSS can help an organization isolate data from its data center and simplify easy sharing of information assets to individuals outside the firewall and located across multiple regions.”  For these reasons, EFSS vendors like Box are growing rapidly and gaining large enterprise customers.

Obviously, if half of an enterprise’s data will reside external to the data center, then half will still live within the data center or locally on users’ machines.  No matter where data is being stored, though, the fact remains that the ability to search that data will be critically important.  Workers still demand unified access to their most important information assets, and they want a highly intuitive search experience with fast-as-you-type search results regardless of where the data lives.  In other words, users require business productivity search.  X1, with the Box connector, provides just that in a way that not only pleases users, but also gives IT a lot of flexibility.

With X1’s Box Connector, users can now add Box accounts as data sources, and search emails, files, SharePoint, and now Box content in a single-pane-of-glass.

Box screenshot

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Not only do users get a single interface in which they can search across all of their critical content, but they also get all of the benefits that simply come with X1 – fast-as-you-type search results, full-fidelity document preview, and post-search actions (PSAs).  In the case of Box content, the PSAs are valuable because they are specific to things users would normally do within Box.  For example, directly in the X1 interface, users can elect to send a document as an attachment or as a link.

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In addition, users can integrate Box more directly into their personal workflows because X1 will allow a PSA on content from other data sources (e.g. SharePoint) to Box.

This is important, as IT organizations like the flexibility that X1 provides in terms of how users can search Box content.  There is an option to index Box documents and store them in the users local index.  The content is not stored locally, but the index is, so users get immediate results.  Of course, it may not be feasible to have an index stored locally for a variety of reasons, so there is also an option for users to remotely query their Box account without the need to store each item in the local index.  IT also has fine-grained control over how indexing takes place.

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Any solution that makes both end-users and IT happy is a promising one.  In this way, X1’s hybrid cloud search capability is a game-changer. As more and more organizations systematically use EFSS vendors like Box, this federated search capability will become even more important.  And, the great news is – it’s available right now from X1.

So far, beta customers are extremely enthusiastic about the search experience that X1 provides for content in Box.  In fact, we strongly believe that no other solution provides this kind of search experience across local and Box content.  Customers tell us that they can search and filter through Box content faster than ever before.  At X1, we would respectfully challenge anyone to identify a better solution for this purpose – neither we nor our many joint X1/Box customers are currently aware of one.

We invite you to try for yourself:

X1 Search is available for sale at $49.95 per license for single users (Box connector included), with an annual support fee of $19.95. Buy now >

Silent installation of the X1 Search client and other enterprise deployment options are available for large-scale deployments. For more information about enterprise licensing and purchases, please contact info@x1.com.

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Filed under Business Productivity Search, Desktop Search, Enterprise Search, Hybrid Search, Information Access

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November 17, 2014 · 12:01 PM

Amazon Re:Invent – With the Cloud, Avoid Mistakes of the Past

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the Amazon Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Over 13,000 people took over the Palazzo for deep dive technical sessions to learn how to harness the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS). reinventThis show had a much different energy than other enterprise software conferences, such as VMworld.  Whereas most conferences feature a great deal of selling and marketing by the host, Amazon Re:Invent was truly more of a training show. Cloud architects spent a lot of time in technical bootcamps learning how AWS works and getting certified as administrators.

That is not to say that there was no selling or marketing going on; the exhibition hall featured myriad vendors that augment or assist with AWS deployments and solutions. The focus on the deep technical details, though, does point out the fact that we are still in the very early days of the cloud. Most of the focus of the keynotes was about getting compute workloads to the cloud – there was not a lot of mention of moving actual data to the cloud, even though that is certainly beginning to happen.  But, that is how the evolution goes. IT departments need to be comfortable moving workloads to the cloud as they begin to leverage the cloud. Building this foundation is also important to Amazon – the goal would be for many companies to completely outsource the IT data center.

It is important, however, to proactive plan for information management as more workloads and, importantly, data move to the cloud.  As the internet first emerged, companies dove into new technologies like email and network file shares only to create eDiscovery nightmares and make it virtually impossible to find information within digital landfills. It is key to learn from those mistakes rather than to repeat them when leveraging cloud-based technologies. In order to ensure both that end-users are happy with search experiences on data in the cloud and that Legal can do what they need to do from an eDiscovery standpoint. This means providing business workers with unified access to email, files, and SharePoint information regardless of where the data lives. It also means giving Legal teams fast search queries and collections. But, Cloud search is slow, as indexes live far from the information. This results in frustrated workers and Legal teams afraid that eDiscovery cannot be completed in time.

If a customer wanted to speed up search, it would have to essentially attach an appliance to a hot-air balloon and send it up to the Cloud provider so that the customer’s index could live on that appliance (or farm of appliances) in the Cloud providers data center, physically near the data. There are many reasons, however, that a Cloud provider would not allow a customer to do that:

  • Long install process
  • Challenging Pre-requisites
  • 3rd party installation concerns
  • Physical access
  • Specific hardware requirements
  • They only scale vertically

The solution to a faster search is a cloud-deployable search application, such as X1 Rapid Discovery. This creates a win-win for Cloud providers and customers alike. As enterprises move more and more information to the Cloud, it will be important to think about workers’ experiences with Cloud systems – and search is one of those user experiences that, if it is a bad one, can really negatively affect a project and cause user revolt. eDiscovery is also a major concern – I’ve worked with organizations that moved data to the cloud before planning how they would handle eDiscovery. That left Legal teams to clean up messes, or more realistically, just deal with the messes. By thinking about these issues before moving data to the cloud, it is possible to avoid these painful occurrences and leverage the cloud without headaches. At X1, we look forward to working closely with Amazon to help customers have the search and eDiscovery solutions they need as more and more data goes to AWS.

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Filed under Cloud Data, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, Hybrid Search, Information Access, Information Governance, Information Management

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