Introducing AIE for SharePoint Integration

Increasing the Return on Your Information Assets

The growth of SharePoint is exploding as departments and work teams embrace this easy-to-use way to set up new sites, share information and collaborate. A problematic outcome of this viral growth, however, is that the proliferating number of SharePoint sites within the enterprise has created dozens, hundreds, and in some cases thousands of disconnected silos of information.

Finding content can be difficult when users need insight on a topic that is spread across multiple SharePoint sites. It's even more challenging when important related material is also stored on diverse corporate systems, such as email, file servers, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligence (BI) and so on. In either case, users are forced to undertake a multi-step manual process – one that can overlook important sources the user is unaware of.

Legacy enterprise search engines can't fully address the challenge of enabling users to search across multiple SharePoint instances in one step because they:

• Provide only a partial answer to a query for the information a user needs since they do not include or integrate with related data sources
• Lack rich interactive interfaces with dynamic navigation for browsing and exploration
• Don't support sophisticated query types, such as SQL
• Usually require cumbersome re-indexing when new sources are added
• Become expensive when document volume grows, as tends to happen quickly with SharePoint

The Right Way to Integrate SharePoint Content

Attivio's new AIE for SharePoint Integration, based on our award-winning Active Intelligence Engine, addresses this challenge by integrating information across multiple SharePoint sites and servers.

While having the ability to search across all SharePoint sites greatly increases the accessibility and value of your content, it's just the first step in improving the overall return on your information assets. Many organizations will want to expand the scope – or plan for a follow-up stage – to address another critical problem: integrating SharePoint with other sources, including databases, so each query for information can deliver all the intelligence on a given topic.

AIE for SharePoint Integration combines diverse information sources in a universal index and JOINs entities from SharePoint and other content to relevant data, so the information is fully integrated, and users get the insight they need quickly – whether from SharePoint sites only or from combined sources. AIE also includes sophisticated search features, such as relevancy profiles and document classification and clustering, and text analytics, such as sentiment analysis and statistical entity extraction, so you don't sacrifice any functionality – but you gain a great deal more.

On-Demand (Pull) or Automated (Push) Information Delivery

AIE makes information available immediately, allowing users to query for complete intelligence on demand, and delivers it automatically via workflow and alerts. On-demand access is facilitated by queries and navigation devices such as faceted menus, tag clouds and clickable graphics and links.

Active Security with Real-time Permissioning

One of the IT challenges for administering SharePoint is ensuring both information security and availability when content could include sensitive material. Balancing security and availability, especially with content, is complicated because most systems rely on marking documents and folders with access rights and then using databases to manage the permissions. But updating the permissions in a database is rarely done in real-time. As a result, IT often outright restricts sensitive documents from ever appearing in response to queries, which ensures security but limits information availability.

Attivio has resolved this issue with a hybrid security model that manages all permissions for people and documents in an indexed table that can be immediately updated without re-indexing. This real-time updating means documents don't have to be excluded to ensure they are withheld from recently unauthorized users and that the authorization restrictions are absolutely current. AIE includes an Active Directory connector to simplify security processes.

Summary

Attivio AIE not only solves the findability conundrum for SharePoint, it provides the foundation for continued advances in information integration. Attivio AIE unlocks the full value of SharePoint when any of these conditions are issues:

• Users need to search for information in multiple SharePoint sites
• Complete intelligence can be found only when other sources are integrated with SharePoint
• Results are more useful after analytics and filters are presentation to the user
• Applications benefit from automatic population with SharePoint content
• Users need an interactive interface to facilitate deeper exploration

Attivio AIE delivers insight that matters, assuring that people find the information they need, and information finds the people who need it.

Please click here to read our new paper on AIE for SharePoint Integration.

Attivio and Active Intelligence Engine are trademarks of Attivio, Inc. All other names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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