Network

Document management software provider NetDocuments (ND) has introduced its newest product NetKnowledge, looking to upgrade its flagship product's search capabilities through a collaboration with search software company BA Insight.

NetKnowledge aims to create a single index for searching by incorporating all of a firm's or legal department's data found both within NetDocuments and applications that are connected to it. The NetKnowledge system allows for enterprise search to be connected directly to NetDocuments' application programming interfaces, meaning in practical terms that large, enterprisewide searches can be done from within the ND platform itself.

Previously, many NetDocuments users downloaded and indexed content from within the ND platform for use in outside enterprise search, which the company's chief product officer Dan Hauck told LTN was a major pain point for those broadly evaluating their content and knowledge management strategy.

"While search capabilities of document and email content has always been a hallmark of NetDocuments, extending search into areas outside of NetDocuments required going to each other product and conducting the same search," he explained. "Now, a single search in NetKnowledge returns results from potentially dozens of connected applications as well as NetDocuments."

Both NetDocuments and BA Insight touted the interconnectability of the two systems in the press release announcing the new product. BA Insight CEO Massood Zarrabian called it a "market changing event" in explaining NetKnowledge as "a 'first of its kind' enterprise search solution that provides customers with the flexibility to implement federated search at index/query time or a hybrid implementation combining the two to provide an extraordinary, internet-like user experience."

Hauck told LTN that the two companies' combined solution was a natural fit as well, given that 20% of BA Insight's customers are in the legal world. He also said the fact that BA Insight focuses specifically on enterprise search, as compared to site search or other technologies, was a major positive for the partnership.

This meant that BA Insight had both the customer base and tech knowledge to build a custom solution for NetDocuments, "enabling NetKnowledge to search directly against our cloud-based service, rather than requiring a duplicate copy of content stored on-premises, which is a major disadvantage found in other solutions," Hauck said.