Tag Archives: Business productivity

June 8, 2015 · 5:49 PM

Using Search to Solve the Email Overload Problem

by Barry Murphy

There was an interesting article from The Information Governance Initiative about email overload and information governance. The quote that caught my eye is “in today’s fast-paced business world, the name of the game is productivity.”  X1 Search is a tool that many are using for just that – business productivity search. But, more than that, X1 Search can complement information governance efforts and help solve the email overload problem.

The IGI article states that “IG practitioners need to take a proactive approach in order to truly understand the realities of email overload and the entire scope of their organizations’ communications.”  I believe that IG is extremely important, especially in an information economy. The challenge is that it can be hard for IG to gain real traction unless companies have a senior executive with clout, power, and money who cares about it. Whether or not that executive exists at a given organization is hit or miss at best. IG programs will take time to gain traction and help employees be more productive.

But the email overload problem continues to exist. And, it is not simply about inbox management. Rather, it is across email that is on a server, or in an archive, or in a PST file. It is easy to forget that many organizations still have PST files on desktops or have moved them out to file servers. There is a customer using X1 to solve the “PSTs on file shares” problem.  What this customer does is use X1 Rapid Discovery to index the PSTs once, and then use X1 Search as the interface to that information. Users can quickly filter through years of emails to find exactly what they are looking for and to take action on it.

This customer uses X1 to complement IG processes and policies. With Rapid Discovery, those PSTs are now easily discoverable for litigation needs, instead of the previous need to forensically image desktops to get at the information. This creates a win-win and negates the need to do expensive migration of PSTs to an archive or to the cloud. At the same time, employees can deal with the email overload problem better because they are much faster at finding the right emails to do their jobs. It is an interesting use-case whereby the customer solved several problems at once and did so in a pragmatic way. The employee happiness with the X1 Search tool is the cherry on top of the sundae because it is a lasting benefit over the long-term.

IG projects can be painful and time-consuming and, if funded properly, often go nowhere. Fitting X1 into your IG program can save time, save money, and keep employees productive at the same time. For any organization seeking a quick IG win to prove the value IG brings to the company, X1 should be on the list.

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December 3, 2014 · 7:55 AM

X1 CEO Message: A New Approach to Enterprise Search Resonates

by John Patzakis

In my two and half year tenure as CEO here at X1, we have seen tremendous progress and exciting growth with our next generation search solutions: X1 Search 8 and X1 Rapid Discovery. During this time, I have taken the very valuable opportunity to listen to our end users, executive sponsors and key stakeholders in IT about their X1 experience, their input on our product roadmap, and their perspectives on broader enterprise search.

On the enterprise search front, the recurring theme we hear again and again is that outside of the data managed by X1, enterprise search is a source of major frustration for organizations. This is confirmed by survey after survey where the vast majority of respondents report dissatisfaction with their current enterprise search platform. Simply put, the traditional approach to enterprise search has not worked. This is largely because most search solutions deployed in recent years focused on IT requirements — which see search as either a technical project or a commodity —rather than being end-user driven.

At X1, however, many of our customers report real progress with enterprise search, with firm-wide X1 rollouts being major wins at their organization. We believe that X1’s unique focus on the end-user is the key. You won’t find many other business productivity search solutions where the end users drive demand, instead of the tool being imposed on the end-users by IT or systems integrators. We continually hear countless testimonials from our users, at companies large and small who swear by their X1 and cannot imagine working without it. In speaking with industry analysts and other experts in the enterprise search field, this is an almost unheard of phenomenon, where end-user satisfaction with the companies’ enterprise search platform is usually around 10-15 percent, verses the 80-85 percent satisfaction ratio we see with X1.

So in view of this customer and industry feedback, we coined the phrase “business productivity search” to differentiate what X1 focuses on verses most other enterprise search tools, which are typically re-fashioned big data analytics or web search appliances. And the feedback we’ve received on this from end-users and industry experts alike is that this assessment hits the nail on the head. Business productivity search is not big data analytics and it is not web retrieval. It is its own use case with a workflow and interface that is tailored to the end users. X1 provides the end-user with a powerful yet user-friendly and iterative means to quickly retrieve their business documents and emails using their own memory recall as opposed to generic algorithms that generate false positives and a workflow ill-suited to business productivity search.

This analysis is crystalized in the accompanying chart differentiating X1’s approach to business productivity search versus big data analytics and web search.

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Click image to enlarge

These points are further explained in our four page white paper: Why Enterprise Search Fails in Most Cases…and How to Fix It.   But perhaps the most compelling illustration is this testimonial from 2013 Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry and Stanford professor Dr. Michael Levitt, who states: “X1 is an intimate part of my workflow — it is essentially an extension of my mind when I engage in information retrieval, which is many times an hour during my workday.” In my opinion, you will not find that level of enthusiasm by end-users for other enterprise search platforms.

And X1 is a platform. Users need a single-pane-of-glass view to all of their information – email, files, SharePoint, archives like Symantec Enterprise Vault, and other enterprise repositories.  X1 Search 8 and our enterprise extension X1 Rapid Discovery provides just that – a user-friendly interface to all information that lets workers use their minds to find what they are looking for in an iterative search tailored by the end user.

But the hundreds of thousands of X1 end users know all this. The key takeaway for CIOs and other IT executives is that search is an inherently personal user experience, and the number one requirement, by far, for a successful search initiative is enthusiastic end-user adaptation. If the business professionals in your organization are not passionately embracing the search solution, then nothing else matters.

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