Increase Productivity with Sharepoint Federated Search
If your business has several departments that are located in different cities or even different
countries, you may have useful business information that you don’t even know exists. Your
business may already have the data you need to solve a problem, or track business
performance but you can’t search it. You don’t know if the answer to your question exists,
because the data may be located on a server in some other department or in one of many data
file formats. Sharepoint Federated Search is an effective solution to this problem.Federated Search Helps Find Data Scattered Across Different Business Units
Different business units develop their databases and reporting separately because they have different needs. Especially if your business units are spread out in different geographic areas, they could have different document storage dictated by varied local government rules or reporting needs unique to their departmental function or even data solutions using different data file formats.
Your business may have data stored on spreadsheets, on custom built database applications or on large enterprise data platforms like Documentum or PeopleSoft. These disconnected pipelines of information can lead to people’s spending hours in finding the relevant information they need to solve a business problem or create a report.
These scattered sources of data result in business users who don’t know what data is available outside of their own department. So users must determine if relevant data is available and then locate the needed data. Once located, users must make multiple requests to different data sources. Then the users must manually integrate the results from separate reports into one common data format.
How All Your Business Data Can be Consolidated Using Sharepoint Federated Search
If the scattered data in all your business units can be located and searched from one central hub, then business users can see the complete data picture more quickly. A central data integration hub, like Sharepoint 2007, can use Federated Search to access data residing on large enterprise data platforms, departmental applications and on internet search engines.
Our consultants can connect your Sharepoint platform to different data sources even when they’re geographically separate. With thousands of hours of Sharepoint integration experience, Unbounded Solutions consultants can locate and connect your varied data sources using Federated Search. Federated Search works by allowing your Sharepoint system to pass search queries to a target system and display results returned from that system. Sharepoint Federated Search is based on the Open Search standard, making it possible to configure federated searches for a wide variety of existing data file formats and applications that may exist in your business networks. Several enterprise data systems can connect to Sharepoint federated search because of available Federated Search Connectors from third-party vendors. Here are some examples; You can search enterprise content management systems such as EMC Documentum and IBM FileNet by using Federated Search Connectors. These Connectors, available from several vendors, provide the search integration between SharePoint and many enterprise content management systems.
Law firm document management systems, storing millions of documents in OpenText Hummingbird or Interwoven iManage can also be accessed by Sharepoint enterprise search. Other Federated Search Connectors make it possible to search data in Excel or search the web using internet search engines. Data systems with no available Federated Search Connectors can still be integrated by using the Sharepoint Business Data Catalog.
Better Decisions through Business Intelligence
When the Sharepoint Federated Search makes the scattered business data searchable, then useful tools, like Business intelligence, become available. Business intelligence tools organize historical business data to guide executives and department managers in seeing business trends and opportunities. Business Intelligence gathered from scattered data sources can also provide data for dashboards and key performance indicator scorecards.
Unbounded Solutions consultants can use SharePoint Federated Search to bring all these data file formats and applications together to give the business user the complete data picture presented by Business Intelligence. The business users can quickly find and use different kinds of business data from the central Sharepoint interface, without having to learn several different applications.
Let Unbounded Solutions consultants guide you in consolidating all your data from multiple applications. Gain the advantage of creating consistent reporting, from any of your data sources. Give your business users the ability to search across all your enterprise data sources from one platform. Use Federated Search to see all of your enterprise data, making the whole business picture visible.
Does your business need help searching all your business data sources with Sharepoint Federated Search? Unbounded Solutions can solve all these business needs. Our consultants and architects are ready to answer your Federated Search questions right now.