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May 25, 2004
West KM/Lexis TotalSearch or Enterprise Search Engine?
According to PC Magazine, "search has become one of the hottest technologies in the computer industry." From products designed to search data on a single PC, to those aimed at small, medium or large companies, there is an ever growing number of vendors promoting full-text search products for document management systems(DMS), litigation support, databases, email, intranets, and some that try to do it all, high-end, enterprise search engines such as Autonomy, Verity and Recommind, just to name a few.
Where does WestKM and the Lexis Total Search products fit into the mix? Lisa Kellar, Practice Automation Manager at Hunton & Williams, explains the difference between these KM products and the enterprise search engines.
"West KM or Lexis Total Search don't meet the same needs as an enterprise search. West and Lexis offer tools, probably most useful to litigators, that allow you to conduct legal research while at the same time "discovering" internal work product that cite the same cases. They offer automatic updating or flagging of citations as well. They let researchers continue to use an environment they are familiar with and will need to continue to use anyway. They can also use either West or Lexis syntax to just search the internal portion of the knowledgebase. Firms are including a subset of their documents for inclusion in these systems and they are limited to documents stored in your DMS (which could include email).
Enterprise search not only would include everything in your DMS (not a subset) it would also search many other repositories within the firm. They offer conceptual searching and other fuzzy logic, but don't have the research orientation that West and Lexis offer. They might also require learning a different search syntax, although most offer natural language searching these days.
I don't think one is better than the other or one is a replacement for the other. I'm impressed with both solutions, but they meet different needs. Enterprise search is probably useful to a much larger audience than something like WestKM but the utility of WestKM might be higher for its users, than enteprise search. The difficulty comes in deciding whether or not its worth the money to have both types of solutions."
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