Search Tools that Knowledge Workers Actually Need

Written By Shawn Freligh, VP, Document Workflow Chief Technologist

For over a decade, we have been helping customers in the legal, business services, and life sciences industries digitize their businesses. Our document capture, workflow, and content generation technologies are at the core of transforming and automating business processes that are reliant on document lifecycles and governance. Along this journey, our customers have frequently expressed to our team the need for more effective enterprise search software. Lawyers, scientists, financial analysts, really nobody likes wasting time looking for information stored in obscure locations or spread across multiple sources making it difficult to aggregate information efficiently.

As we spent time understanding their challenges, we found:

• Most portal search bars connect to one or two data sources when they need to connect to many.
• Most search taxonomies are simplistic, so they don’t deliver relevant results for users who need to pinpoint specific documents and information.
• Most search technologies do not have analytics and AI that incorporates natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to help improve future search results, so the experience never gets better or smarter.
• Search capabilities across repositories or built into business applications, such as Microsoft SharePoint, are limited to their content world, but users need to search the entire universe of content sources they access, not just one document repository.

Each of these challenges need to be addressed and are critical to solve to deliver a smarter search experience. Each presents unique technical challenges, which is why we’ve welcomed BA Insight to our company and expanded our knowledge management product library.

Built to Drive Knowledge Worker Productivity

Upland has several Knowledge Management products, each providing a specialized solution to meet critical challenges found in different markets, but none focused solely on the challenges presented by enterprise search. And while we have search built into all our Document Workflow products, we did not have a standalone product designed specifically for enterprise search across the myriad of content sources business users are challenged with today. But that changes now with the addition of BA Insight.

Designed from the ground up, BA Insight helps organizations:

• Eliminate blind spots with the ability to connect to many different systems and types of file systems, such as Microsoft SharePoint, out of the box with over 90 connectors
• Organize the results with the ability to set up industry and company-specific taxonomies to organize, retrieve, and sort the most relevant documents for every search
• Deliver more relevant results every day using analytics and machine learning to make each search better
• Put a search capability wherever the user wants it by supporting embedded search in any application or portal as well as a standard web-based search

Delivering Document-Level Search

At the end of the day, customer value is our fuel. We know BA Insight is a great solution for companies that need to give their teams a tool they use all day every day―smarter, deeper, more relevant search across all their sources of knowledge.

For example, the reality of business at a law firm is content is spread out across Electronic Content Management (ECM) or Document Management Systems (DMS) such as NetDocuments, as well as traditional content sources like shared drives. Giving legal teams the ability to search across firm-wide systems to find the client or matter-related content they need is going to help deliver more value for their business.

Our business services customers need to find customer contracts, work orders, project plans, and people with special knowledge more quickly. That information is typically split across many systems, and this may be exasperated by the fact that business services organizations are very acquisitive. This means that they are frequently adding new content repositories that need to be accessible to search. BA Insight provides value here as well.

Every organization that relies on quick access to information wants great document-level search―few have it. BA Insight is delivering it, and we are excited to add this product to the Upland portfolio.

For more information about our latest acquisitions, please see our press release about BA Insight.