Autonomy Corporation (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today announced its information processing technology extends Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to meet customer requirements for scalability, connectivity and conceptual search.
Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) software is hosted by Microsoft or deployed onsite by hundreds of large, global MOSS customers to enable SharePoint users to find and process content based on understanding the meaning of information. As an example, IDOL's highly scalable, distributed architecture is in use in one of the world's largest SharePoint retrieval projects, which consists of 400 000 users, 25 000 sites, and over one billion documents.
SharePoint's portal and collaboration capabilities have led to rapid adoption and widespread use in large, geographically dispersed organisations. IDOL's distributed and modular architecture complements MOSS by enabling users to access SharePoint files over Wide Area Networks (WANs), overcoming a major challenge for global companies with distributed servers as Shared Service Providers (SSPs) do not natively support WAN communications. Moreover, encrypted inter-machine and intra-process communication protocols are woven into the fabric of Autonomy's modular design at a fundamental level, providing secure transmission of information throughout the architecture. IDOL routinely supports millions of documents, hundreds of thousands of users, and hundreds of thousands of transactions on distributed commodity servers, with the largest installation exceeding 10 billion documents.
Autonomy further extends global MOSS scalability through its distributed, brokered architecture and "geo-efficient" design, which allows data to be automatically replicated in the most sensible location based on bandwidth, lag time, availability and demand. This enables high performance and gives users aggregated access to all enterprise information in a unified view in globally dispersed environments, while reducing bandwidth overhead. Because IDOL creates a stub, or shortcut, to the data and supports tiered storage rather than requiring that data be stored in SQL Server, organisations using IDOL with SharePoint can further benefit from dramatically reduced SQL Server licences and associated scalability limitations. In addition, large enterprises with complex deployments can take advantage of IDOL's redundancy, load balancing, mirroring and high failover to enable linear scalability, high availability and rapid performance of MOSS.
Autonomy IDOL's mature connector framework, which supports over 400 repositories, is additionally leveraged by organisations with SharePoint to avoid custom creation of IFilters and Protocol Handlers and ensure all data will be indexed. Autonomy IDOL can index and automatically analyse any piece of information from over 1 000 different content formats, unifying enterprise information to allow an unprecedented view of the organisation's information assets. This enables SharePoint to transform from a departmental collaboration solution to enterprise collaboration.
Furthermore, Autonomy's advanced conceptual search functionality supplements native MOSS capabilities to enrich the search experience. IDOL forms an understanding of the content of any given page and makes contextual associations between pages, documents, multimedia and search queries to ensure users are always provided with information that is particularly relevant to them. Using the idea behind the given words, and not just the words themselves, IDOL avoids inaccuracy and retrieves not just the most popular content, but the most pertinent.
"SharePoint delivers excellent 'interface and workflow' frameworks for productivity and content applications, but the large and growing volumes of users and rapid increases in content in SharePoint deployments necessitate the highest levels of security and scalability, which Autonomy delivers," commented Mike Lynch, chief executive officer of Autonomy. "The advanced pan-enterprise search capabilities of IDOL leverage Meaning-Based Computing technology to form a conceptual understanding of all data, regardless of what or where it is. This enables customers to capitalise on their SharePoint investments and harness the full richness of human information."
Autonomy provides Microsoft's SharePoint Server customers with:
* A conceptual understanding of the information within MOSS to proactively make connections between users, enhancing collaboration among them.
* A modular, distributed architecture supporting enterprise-class scalability for hundreds of thousands of enterprise users accessing hundreds of terabytes of data with sub-second response, indexing in excess of 110GB/hour and supporting over 470 million documents on 64-bit platforms.
* Unique Mapped Security and native support for all enterprise security models, permitting MOSS to be run within security sensitive environments, such as DOD 5015, EAL, and Bell-LaPadula.
* Extension of standard Microsoft's IFilter file support from 16 to 1 000+ file formats, including ODF and PDFX, with native support for over 400 repositories regardless of operating system.
* Over 500 advanced functions, such as expertise location, communities, implicit profiling, explicit personalisation, automatic categorisation, clustering, geo searching, automatic query guidance, and automatic hyperlinking.
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