I’m Lauren, the Office Manager here at Swiftype. I love our Enterprise Search product because it’s useful for so many reasons. I use it consistently throughout my day to find information.

You’d be surprised at how quickly this office goes through food and coffee (…and beer). Though if you follow us on Instagram, maybe you wouldn’t find it so surprising. Everyone has different tastes and most people are pretty vocal about their preferences. We don’t have a formal order request system—people usually just Slack or email me their suggestions and comments. And believe me, they have a lot of opinions. The Enterprise Search web app allows me to quickly reference the requests I’ve received throughout the week before I place large orders for the office, without having to scroll through channels and individual messages.

We recently tapped our kegerator and as an office rule, the person who finishes it ceremoniously picks the next beer to be ordered. But this time around, the selection ended up being a pretty unpopular option (Tecate). The office was about to riot, so I created a poll to let the people decide. After a few hours, and what I’m sure was some voter intimidation, everyone finally agreed on a new option: Racer 5.

When I placed the order, I had to be absolutely certain that Racer 5 was the final winner over Tecate, so I just searched for “Racer 5” in my Enterprise Search web app and all of our Slack and Gmail conversations came up instantly. I was even able to see the poll I created in Slack without having to hunt through our company-wide general channel to find it. Racer 5 beat Tecate 11-9. We now have a keg full of Racer 5 for the win!

On a less alcoholic note, we also get lunch catered every Monday through Thursday by Zesty, and I always let people know what’s on the menu in advance. I put each week’s options into a spreadsheet and a surprising number of people access it daily to stay up-to-date. (I’m 90% sure the most-searched term on our Enterprise Search macOS app internally is actually “Zesty”.)

There are quite a few other processes I’m responsible for in the office, but one of the most important, is onboarding our new employees. We’re constantly looking for new talent, and have been fortunate to find some great people and continue to grow at a steady rate. As a result, I’ve had several new employees to onboard since I joined the team. Because we deal with some very sensitive and secure information, our onboarding procedures also have to follow the requirements outlined by our Security Officer. Our Enterprise Search product helps me uncomplicate this process a lot. We have a shared Confluence document outlining our onboarding processes, but they refer to a number of Jira tickets we have set up, as well as Google Docs, Dropbox files, Slack channels, and more. Not all of the docs are included in the Confluence post, so without Enterprise Search I would still have to do a fair amount of searching through other applications to find the right files. Fortunately the Browser Extension shows me all related onboarding content without me having to hunt through each of our apps individually.

The process looks something like this:

1. Email our Security Officer to give him a heads up that we’re adding someone new to our database.
2. Add the new person to our HR database sheet in Google Docs.
3. Create a new Jira ticket for the new user. Usually I can do this from a template we already have, which is already populated in the Swiftype Browser Extension, so all I have to do is click on the result to go directly to the Jira ticket template.
4. Conduct a background check—these are housed in a repository that very few people actually have access to. But Enterprise Search uses my credentials and knows exactly which folders I can access and which I can’t so all the background check documents are populated in my Browser Extension.
5. Set up corporate accounts for the new employee—like Gmail and Slack. Once I set them up in our Google Accounts Directory, Enterprise Search can use that information to populate their contact details, and read them as a user in our organization instead of a lead.
6. Print out the employee handbook for them. This lives in Dropbox, at the end of a tree of folders. Instead of having to go into Dropbox and click through every single folder, I can run a quick search for “employee handbook” in the MacOS app and find it instantly.

Once all of this is complete, I can hand off the onboarding process to Finance, Tech Ops, and the new employee’s hiring manager, knowing they have everything they need for a smooth first day.

My responsibilities at Swiftype are diverse, span multiple teams, and often need to be completed as quickly as possible. Using Swiftype Enterprise Search everyday helps me stay on top of all of my to-dos by giving me immediate access to all the information and tools I need to get the job done. Instead of wasting time searching for the right documents in dozens of different apps, I can find everything instantly!

Try it for yourself – you can sign up for a free trial here!

David Walsh is a Senior Software Engineer and evangelist for Mozilla. He also runs a wildly popular eponymous blog for web developers, where he writes about topics ranging from how to create GitHub pull requests to reviews of web hosting services. In a recent post, David detailed his evaluation and implementation of a third-party website search alternative, which you can read here. During his evaluation, however, David discovered the vendor’s enterprise search solution and shared his thoughts.

The Cloud Means (Tricky) Business

The explosion of cloud-based apps and storage solutions is nothing new. Everyone, from retailers to media companies and governments to healthcare organizations, have made the move to the cloud. It’s become so prevalent that it’s no longer a trend, it’s just how things are now done.

However, what the cloud has done, which David so eloquently stated in his quote above, is make it incredibly easy to save content without ever thinking about it’s actual location.

Yeah, it gets tricky fast. In fact, ZDNet wrote that “the average medium- to large-sized business is actually using between 300 and 400 cloud apps.” That’s incredible, and incredibly daunting if you’re trying to find something — or if you’re a developer.

Where did I see that thing about that stuff?

Enterprise search is a fairly recent need, and the prevalence of cloud-based apps makes it even more of a strategic corporate imperative. Enterprise developers are ultimately on the hook, since search is the key to helping every employee work smarter and faster.

In David’s post, he points the finger at the proliferation of these specialized web services for making enterprise search such a bear. Just your marketing team alone might be using Slack, Dropbox, Marketo, Salesforce, and Zendesk. And people today are more likely to just assume search will help them find what they’re seeking. Alexa, where’s the sales development plan for western Pennsylvania?

If only it were that easy!

So, yes, as you’re now considering all the apps your company uses (and that you’re aware of!), you’re likely echoing David’s words: “Where the hell do we find anything?”

Make Search Your Enterprise Productivity Accelerator

As with most technical tasks, implementing enterprise search likely falls to departmental teams initially. Sales Operations or Marketing Operations might take the lead for their teams, but then IT should ultimately get involved. It is enterprise search, after all. And, it is a shortcut to helping employees work faster and smarter.

For developers, working faster and smarter means removing the burden of enterprise search foundational tasks, like API configurations. That’s where a good enterprise search solution saves huge amounts of time and budget compared with trying to develop a search solution on your own.

Packaged enterprise search solutions let you choose from dozens of prebuilt connectors to speed and simplify a comprehensive enterprise search. If a pre-built connector isn’t available, APIs should enable you to create a secure and unique endpoint in just a few clicks. It should be that easy. Enterprise search vendors put their R&D dollars and efforts into making search easier to implement, configure, and administer, and you reap the rewards!

As you look for a vendor, there are two key productivity outcomes of a good enterprise search solution. Your first goal is to help employees quickly find what they need, which increases productivity. Your second goal is giving developers get more control and more productivity for themselves by choosing a search that’s both easier to configure and provides better results for employees.

Solve for Search, then Move On

IT and operations developers struggle to appease the demands of a wide range of internal customers, from sales, service, content, and marketing teams trying to drive revenue and please customers to executives, finance, auditors, and others trying to run the business. But the nirvana of enterprise search hits smack into the reality of integrating dozens and dozens of local and cloud repositories.

While you can build your own custom enterprise search, it’s never going to be as good as a commercial search solution designed to work out-of-the-box with hundreds of existing cloud and SaaS solutions.

“Instead of rolling your own search,” as David put it in his blog post, take a look at some of the available alternatives. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you find, and you might be shocked that the best solution for you doesn’t come from one of the giants who are synonymous with “search.”

Want to learn more about Swiftype Enterprise Search? Watch this video for a quick overview or connect with our team if you’d like to chat live.

Most of us can relate to something coder Sean Hickey posted to his Medium account a few years back. Here’s the gist of it: In Year One, they stick to a very tight and succinct coding style. As the years progress, most coders take things to higher and higher levels, writing longer and more detailed strings of code. Eventually, they become so experienced and efficient that by Year Ten, they’re back to square one, writing short, sweet programs that work like more complex ones.  

But one of his commenters made me laugh out loud, with this response: “The Twentieth Year: “Hey John, can you write me that Hello World program? I need it by tomorrow.”’

Yup, we’ve all been there. The pace of everything in business has increased over the past few decades, and software developers and engineers are not immune to its effects. How often have you heard, “I need it yesterday!”

This Ain’t Your Grandad’s IT Department: Supply and Demand Rules

Higher consumer demand has led to an evolution in all aspects of business. For the modern software developer this means shorter project cycles, improved software tools, a higher focus on team collaboration, and the more prolific use of open source software. And while software development tools have improved, there are now also a lot more of them, and each one does something different.

In fact, the number and types of apps being built today is more than has been built in the last 40 years. Today, there’s an open source library for pretty much everything—and if you can’t find what you need, you create it.

Collaboration Is A Double-Edged Sword: Increased Efficiency AND Increased Data

Project timelines have sped up and collaboration has increased. Whereas most coding projects were solo endeavors 20-25 years ago, today most enterprises function in a highly collaborative manner. Projects filter through many departments and cycles are measured in minutes and hours rather than days and weeks.

Creating “one size fits all” applications from scratch is no longer optimal due to the fact that they can be complex, drawn out, poorly designed, and take years to complete. Instead, developers now look to open-source libraries to create applications that can easily integrate with other solutions, including third-party SaaS services. And while APIs make it simpler to complete these integrations, that also means the numbers of APIs to keep track of and systems to monitor have grown exponentially.

The best part of this “ease of integration” is that it has opened up new sharing capacity: Whereas systems at one time were focused on a centralized database (such as with desktop software), today aggregating to the cloud is the norm, and software is being designed to be easily shared and widely distributed, mostly due to increased demand from consumers and mobile employees.

Needless to say, it can be difficult to keep track of all the content created on a daily basis, as well as manage all the different duties of a software engineer all at once. And that’s where internal search helps increase productivity.

How Cloud-Based, Internal Search Helps Keep Software Developers On Track

As you might imagine, our developers use enterprise search tools frequently. Using our own  Enterprise Search solution internally even allows our developers to address customer service issues in record time, closing some tickets in seconds by quickly cross-referencing with other clients’ information requests via search—surely that’s one for the record books! With tickets in Jira, solutions in Github, and the conversation about it all in Slack, giving developers one tool to find everything can save them a ton of time.

Enterprise search lets developers quickly inspect why certain changes are being made, tracks important and potentially disparate data, and provides the context necessary to rapidly understand a new project. No more wasting time on email streams or knocking on office doors for explanations.

Working with design teams (and their MANY changes) is easier with enterprise search as well. A frequent complaint we hear from developers is that they often don’t know why they are building something or what the end goal is. With all the information about a project easily searchable—from the first creative brief to the final code—no one is left in the dark. Using simple but powerful search queries means hours aren’t wasted wading through Dropbox or Slack. Instead, when a request from marketing comes in, developers can source all the digital assets spread over whichever apps are in use on that project.

The heat is definitely on for software developers, and it’s only getting hotter. If you’d like to explore how Swiftype Enterprise Search could help take the pressure off your team, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Managing your internal data is not an easy task. As your organization’s amount of information grows, productivity can be directly tied to your employees’ ability to find the right information in a timely and effortless manner. With the proliferation of specialized productivity tools, employees are forced to hunt from repository to repository to find the right information – from documents in Dropbox, to customer information in Salesforce, to projects in Jira.

That data is growing at a tremendous rate, and organizations are focusing more of their efforts on increasing employee productivity. 26% of organizations saw their content management budget grow over 10% in the past year.

Having an internal enterprise search solution gives employees the ability to find the most relevant information across all the cloud applications they use on a daily basis, and keeps knowledge workers productive.

4 Steps to Evaluating Your Next Enterprise Search Solution

The Aberdeen Group, widely known as a leader in the research and analysis of information technology and products, has assembled a guide to outline the 4 steps you should take when evaluating an enterprise search solution for your organization:

1. Let the Search Technology Do the Work
2. Make It Personal and Secure
3. Search Using Artificial Intelligence Technologies
4. Leverage the Cloud to Simplify Administration

The guide is meant to help your organization find the right enterprise search solution to give your employees the most relevant content at their fingertips, whenever they need it. After all, there is a lot to consider with enterprise search. Offering your employees a cloud-based platform that incorporates machine learning and natural language processing technologies, as well as one that respects your org’s role based access permissions and security policies will give them the best chance to reduce frustration and increase their productivity.

You can download the full guide here.

We often hear from people looking to solve problems with their internal search processes. And it makes sense: Your employees are the very heart of what makes your organization successful (or not), so if they struggle with search, efficiency issues begin to add up—and fast.

A poorly functioning or out-of-date enterprise search system creates issues: mishandled, duplicated, or impossible to find content; roadblocks when it comes to users’ security access; problems picking up the pieces when an employee goes on vacation or leaves suddenly; and a myriad of others.

So we thought we’d take a few minutes today to go over the pain points we hear about the most when it comes to enterprise search—and show you how a robust SaaS platform—like Swiftype—can help since these big five can hit where it hurts.

“I don’t know where the content I need is stored.”

Whether you’re prepping for a last-minute meeting or being asked on a conference call to pull up a relevant data point, it’s usually when the pressure’s on that you can’t find what you’re looking for. According to Forrester research, knowledge workers can spend 30% of their time looking for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, and/or recreating information that can’t be found. Enter a robust, new generation of enterprise search solutions that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and other intuitive technologies to help understand and organize data across your entire organization and all of your applications. Search once and you’re done.

“It takes forever to find the right info.”

One of our developers wrote recently about how Swiftype Enterprise Search helps him in his day-to-day work. He flies through customer service issues, closing tickets, quickly cross-referencing other clients’ information requests; sources digital assets spread over a number of apps to fulfill requests from marketing; and even has relevant documents automatically pushed to his phone before a meeting so he doesn’t have to think about what info to gather. With all the extra time he saves, we’re sure he’s able to get so much extra work done, (right, Brian?)

“Didn’t someone else already create this?”

What happens when an employee suddenly gets sick or takes an extended vacation, and they’re holding documents crucial to a project or client deadline? At best, using clunky, legacy enterprise search software, team members waste time digging for the appropriate data. At worst, they have to pull an all-nighter and start again from scratch. Time and money go the drain. Employee morale takes a hit. Swiftype has a handy feature called Person View, which allows you to search for content by employee name across all of your cloud data sources to find all of a specific user’s documents. So even when someone is out, you can still access the files you need.   

“Is my info secure?”

Cloud-based data sharing is not immune to security problems, especially in the BYOD (bring your own device) era. Studies estimate that corporations spend roughly $50,000 per lost laptop—and the more senior the employee, the higher that number jumps. That’s why your enterprise search platform should adhere to strict security guidelines, provide data protection and application security, and have systems in place to guard against physical and environmental issues.

“I don’t want everyone to be able to see everything.”

Not all of your employees have access to the same data, nor should they, even if they use the same applications. You may want to limit some people to only searching marketing materials, while keeping others out of the company’s legal documents. Here at Swiftype, our Administrative Dashboard helps you manage your team’s access. You can integrate with your existing authentication provider, invite users individually, as well as easily grant access, revoke access, and set permissions.

Which of these pain points have you had to deal with?

Since we know this space so well, it’s really tough to write about issues without a nod to how we can help! If you’re curious about solving any of those pain points—or others you may have—talk to the Swiftype team now to take a closer look at how your team can use Enterprise Search to help them access all the information they need, when and where they need it.

Hi! I’m Art, an Account Executive at Swiftype.

We know that time kills all deals, so the faster we can get back to our customers, the better. But when you have back-to-back calls all day and 100 emails to reply to, it can be tough to answer your customer’s questions in a timely manner.

Swiftype helps me quickly find the answers. Instead of having to jump from app to app to find something I know already exists, I can find it easily using Enterprise Search. Quick access to content is especially important when you’re talking with customers and prospects who have questions (which they always do) because it allows me to keep the conversation going while I’m searching for the right answers. Sometimes the answers are dispersed across different sources, so a single search experience gives me relevant results from all of those sources instantly.

Search Clients
When I have upcoming meetings with a customer, one of the main things I want to know is if they’ve interacted with our support team recently. I can easily see in the Swiftype browser extension, without leaving a customer record in Salesforce, if they have open support tickets. Swiftype gives me a full picture of an account while saving me the time and effort of tracking down customer success managers, support, and software developers to get answers.

I wanted to mention our Slack integration too, because it’s the primary way our team connects and communicates. I personally don’t spend the majority of my time searching in it, but I have colleagues who do, and it’s a very convenient way for me to meet them where they work. Everyone has their favorite way of using Swiftype and because there are so many ways to integrate it into your workflow, no one has to sacrifice their preference for anyone else to be able to work well together.

There are times when prospects have questions that are more technical than I feel comfortable answering off the top of my head. Just last week, I was on a call with a prospect who stumped me with a technical question. I remembered we had a white paper addressing her exact concern, so I hit shift+command+space to pull up the OS X app and was able to find the answer on the spot.

Person View
Every so often, I need to consult one of our software engineers, but I also don’t want to bombard him with questions that he’s answered for me before. When that happens, I’m able to go to his his profile page in Person View to pull up any conversations he’s had with me. It saves us both quite a bit of time – I don’t have to spend time tracking him down to ask him the question again, and he doesn’t have to spend time answering a question he’s answered before. I can go to his page and get to the content from there.

In summary, I wish I had known earlier in my sales career that a tool like Swiftype existed.  I consider myself lucky to be selling a product that I use every day—a product that makes my daily work a lot easier and much more efficient. If you want to see how it can work for you, I’d be happy to show you a demo!

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you already know a thing or two about Enterprise Search. To review: an enterprise search solution can deliver many benefits to your organization—including increase employee productivity, boost cross-team collaboration, eliminate duplication of data, and allow instant access to relevant content. Whether you’re in the process of evaluating your first cloud-based enterprise search software, or are currently migrating from an old legacy solution, have you considered the right criteria to ensure you’re making the best choice?:

1. Architecture: What architectural qualities you should look for?
2. Data Acquisition: How should cognitive search support data sources and types?
3. Core Technology: What core search technologies do cognitive search solutions need?

We’ve partnered with Forrester Research on June 22 for a live webinar to discuss this specific topic. Join Mike Gualtieri, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester, and Matt Riley, CEO & Co-Founder at Swiftype, to learn more about the key criteria your team can use to create an RFP to evaluate AI-powered search engines.

Event Details:

Date: This Thursday, June 22, 2017
Time: 10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET
Duration: 30 Min

It happens to your team (and let’s face it, YOU) every day.
You get to work, you settle in, you kick off your to-dos.
You dig into your Google Drive, login to Salesforce, root around in your Dropbox.
You find yourself scrolling through endless messages in Slack.
You know that one specific file you need exists somewhere.
Eventually you give up (and so do they).

Your employees are simply trying to find the info and details they need to get their work done, but searching through all of these different apps has become an inefficient, time-consuming mess.

Forrester Research estimates that workers can spend 30% of their time looking for information, insights, and answers. Do the math. That’s a lot of unnecessary time wasted. But it’s also a great opportunity to finally increase your team’s productivity with Enterprise Search.

That’s it! An AI-Powered Search Application that helps your employees instantly search, discover, and organize the incredible amounts of data they need to get their job done. But, wait. What about implementation? Your bandwidth is limited and with all of these cloud-based apps your team has adopted, it could take months to get a solution up and running, right?

WRONG. You shouldn’t have to wait months to start making huge gains in employee productivity. With Swiftype Enterprise Search your org can be up and running in 6 minutes. Forget 6 months! With this suite of AI-powered applications at your service, not only can your employees find exactly what they need in seconds, but they can set it up extremely easily with intuitive management dashboards: quickly connect and configure team data sources, manage teams and roles, and immediately start enhancing the way your users find information.

After all, we get it. It’s frustrating to search for content only to learn that you’ve been looking in all the wrong places. You and your employees should be able to search for documents, files, conversations and data regardless of where the information lives. Swiftype connects to all your cloud data sources and finds the right results every time. Learn more and get started today.

With so many cloud apps in the marketplace and new ones poised to leap on the scene everyday, it’s easier than ever to collect tech. But between all of your organization’s departments, that pile of apps can quickly become unmanageable and finding information amongst them impossible.

Too Many Cloud Apps? Stop Wasting Time Hunting for Information

There’s no arguing the right cloud technologies (Salesforce, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Jira, etc) get your department running faster. Each has a purpose and each adds value to your business. The challenge is in quickly finding information (documents, files, conversations, or data) scattered across these cloud-based systems. It turns a simple search for a document into a time-consuming, productivity-killing endeavor.

Did you know that the average organization is using 23 cloud-based apps? A few, 13%, even admitted to having more than 50! Are you a member of one of these teams?  While it takes a collection of solutions to meet all of your needs this collection should solve problems, not create them.

Stop wasting time hunting for information! Download this NEW eBook and learn how a single search experience platform can help your organization increase productivity, gain visibility, and eliminate content duplication.

With emphasis on worker efficiency at an all-time high, more businesses are turning to Atlassian, a leading provider of software development and collaboration tools. Two popular Atlassian products, Jira and Confluence, help teams work together, build software, and better serve customers. With the continuous expansion of Swiftype’s Connector Framework, we are thrilled to announce our new native connectors to Jira and Confluence.

Expansion is the Key to Success for Enterprise Search
Jira and Confluence are products that are widely used and trusted by millions, so, given the incredible amount of content that is created and stored in these applications, they were obvious choices. The formal and supported connections between Jira, Confluence and the Enterprise Search Platform will make it all the more seamless to find content across multiple applications at once. By bringing Atlassian-supported work into the Swiftype platform, users can quickly discover helpful content to build into projects, tasks, documents and more. Swiftype’s commitment to meeting people where they work continues with these additions, allowing users to search across more data sources without having to leave the application they’re already working in.

What You Can Expect from Swiftype for Jira and Confluence:

• Streamlined project management. Most teams use Jira for project management and Confluence for documentation, but they also use a plethora of complementary apps to get their work done, like Github for code collaboration and management, Dropbox to access UI files from design teams, and Help Scout or another customer support management system, to name a few. Swiftype’s integrated Enterprise Search solution helps teams stay agile by enabling effortless incorporation of design thinking, agile development, and release management into their process.
• Instant, relevant content for all your projects. Imagine you are assigned a pull request in Github, but you don’t have much context for why those changes need to be made. Instead of having to hunt around for similar pull requests in Github, related tasks in Jira or more relevant information in Confluence, you can use the Enterprise Search Chrome extension to immediately see related Jira tickets, documentation in Confluence, sprint planning documents in Google Drive, account records of impacted customers in Salesforce, and any other related content from your different sources.
• Global collaboration.  Atlassian takes into account the global nature of project development and encourages flexible cross-organization planning. Collaboration can take place across time zones, but also across tools, like Slack. Swiftype Enterprise Search also offers a federated integration with Slack, which allows users to easily pull up any file from any connected content repository, complete with smart filters and AI-based natural language processing, and share it directly with channels or individuals.

Get Started!
We’re excited to welcome Atlassian tools ‘to the family’ of our Enterprise Search connectors. It’s simple to set up. With just a few clicks, your entire library of cloud content is accessible right alongside your Jira and Confluence workflows. Visit us in the Atlassian Marketplace to learn more and sign up for a free trial.