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What is enterprise search?

Enterprise search allows organizations to quickly and easily find the information they need, regardless of its location or format.

The definition of enterprise search

Enterprise search enables you to access content across all locations in the enterprise, be it email, databases, websites, applications, legacy systems and more. It turns up results for structured and unstructured data, and even image files that would otherwise remain siloed in their respective repositories.

Beyond keyword-based search functions, enterprise search also provides capabilities like discovering information around a topic or theme, monitoring search results for new developments and deriving insight from information extracted based on certain criteria.

Benefits of enterprise search

An unprecedented amount of information is generated and received by organizations each day, which are then filed away by different people in different locations. It is impossible to expect that every employee will know exactly where to find the information they need without a search function that connects these disparate systems.

Enterprise search provides a solution to this problem and creates benefits like:

  • Reducing the time it takes to locate information. An intuitive and fast enterprise search function makes it easy to find, access and analyze information. This reduces the frustration that employees experience when failing or taking too long to find the information they need.
  • Boosting performance and productivity. Employees are able to securely access critical information even when they are out of office by using their mobile devices. This ensures that work does not have to come to a halt because employees do not have access to corporate systems.
  • Improving decision-making and empowering employees. Every employee can quickly find and share information, which leads to more informed and efficient decision-making. This helps to avoid improper analysis, lost business opportunities and wasted time.
  • Minimizing business risk and exposure of confidential information. Organizations can mitigate legal and regulatory compliance risks with a complete view of all information. Any missing or confidential information can be easily identified and proper action taken to reduce potential exposure or penalties.
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Enterprise search: How it works

Enterprise search is one of the key capabilities of Hyland's OnBase that makes locating key information simple, fast and straightforward. It leverages faceted navigation, conversational search and natural language support to intuitively return search results.

The OnBase enterprise search function works by:

  • Unifying information access. Users can search for information of any type from any device while maintaining pre-defined security and user rights.
  • Returning perfect results even without entering a perfect search query. The intuitive, menu-assisted and natural language search option allows users to build customized queries with contextual filters that produces more accurate results.
  • Extracting more meaning and insight from content. Conversational search predicts the context of your search and provides suggestions. Users can also drill down into content relationships and open up new lines of investigation to further understand the information needed.
  • Adding value to business processes. The user experience is easily customizable to suit the needs of different roles and processes, and different departments and industries. Search results can be made usable and actionable to other users, and exported in different formats.
  • Allowing access to advanced search functions from anywhere. The search function works from any browser or operating system and can handle complex processes with minimal hardware requirements.

> Learn more | How federated search consolidates multiple search results from various sources 

Explore OnBase for enterprise search