Slashdot Mirror
Google OneBox Hooks up With Enterprise Apps
TopShelf writes "Google's OneBox for Enterprise has now been integrated to multiple top-notch business applications, including Oracle, SAS, Cognos, and Salesforce.com, according to this morning's press release on Yahoo! News. PHB's everywhere will soon be able to Google their way to the information they need - what will that mean for corporate report developers and business intelligence staff?"
"With Google OneBox for Enterprise, corporate information -- such as contact and calendar info, HR benefits, sales leads, or purchase order status -- is now instantly searchable through a Google search box as part of the Google Search Appliance."
I assume that in order to access this sort of information, Google is searching through the stores on an Exchange server. I have not heard of any deals w/MS regarding the connector used to connect to Exchange thus I assume it is something Google has either written or had written for them. My question is, how long is it until MS "updates" Exchange under the guise of security or what have you in order to "F'n kill Google" (and their appliance)?
Just a thought.
OneBox to search them all;
OneBox to find them;
OneBox to bring them all,
and under Google bind them.
what will that mean for corporate report developers and business intelligence staff?"
More to do and more to play with - if it even gets much adaption.
Report development is not something you can substitute easily for with a search system like this. In complex reports it's both art and science. Such searches may make reports easier to GET.
Intelligence staff - someone has to gather, write up, and analyze the data. This isn't going away either. Besides, to be cynical, if a PHB is looking for intelligence, it'll have to be provided by someone else.
So - at best a neat new way to find stuff people are already doing.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
From experience, a lot of employee data in HR/Payroll/Health systems is poorly managed, and currently "secure" only under a thin veneer of obscurity. The widely disparate database systems usually used by various groups (some developed inhouse, others contracted in) serve to make it more difficult for potential "information seekers" to access poorly managed systems.
If this highly capable appliance makes Intranet searches as simple, widely accessible and effective as Google on the public Internet, we can expect to see all kinds of security/privacy problems cropping up on intranets, which were hidden uptil now.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I was alway of the opinion that if managers in larger corporations had more effective intranet indexes they would be excreting masonry objects from their posterior orifices. Development teams and internal projects publish a lot of intersting and sensitive stuff - test data sets with real customer information, log's with ssn's embedded in them, project contact and role information that any wardriver would love to have.
I bet the infosec departments are about to pop some champaigne corks over this one...
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
PHB's everywhere will soon be able to Google their way to the information they need - what will that mean for corporate report developers and business intelligence staff?
Unless the information is formatted (sorted, ordered, grouped, linked) and organised (styled) the way a business report usually is, the answer to the question is "Absolutely Nothing".
There is a reason why, for the most part, the interface to website searches is not SQL based, and corporate reports don't rely on text searches.
I suspect (not having RTFA) this box is about the providing the ability to perform Ad hoc queries against all sources of corporate data (word, excel, PDF, SQL databases/datasources etc) that data first having been spidered by a mini google in the box.
Also, this probably isn't just about providing "PHBs" this ability. Ordinary people within an organisation often need to be able to search for docs, emails etc based on a piece of text - which is possible with things like Microsofts Index Server, but probably Index Server (or whatever it is these days) isn't as efficient as a dedicated googlebox is.
the company i work for bought one of these.. its sitting upstairs gathering dust. The fact is, unless your a larger company indexing all the documents you have on your local intranet isn't necessary, not to mention most smaller companies keep companty documents located in smb shares or on file servers and not on the intranet accessible via http, which, afaik, is a requirement for the google box to index the files.
I recently deployed the small google box in my organization and it works great. I no longer have to dig for files because somebody in accounting doesn't remember where they saved a file. It makes my job easier and leaves me more time to play City of Heroes at work. Thank you Google!
WTF?
Maybe they aren't using it because it didn't "plug into" their "enterprise" business apps. Now it does. I'd say that's a major selling point.
Developers: We can use your help.
With the google search appliance, you're supposed to point it at your company's intranet, then it starts indexing the pages it finds and gives you a web page (let's call this "google search appliance web page") from which you do your searches.
That's the way it's supposed to work. But if you want to, you can point the google search appliance at google.com, and have it index that.
Then you go to google.com and give it the address of the "google search appliance web page" so that google starting indexing *your* appliance.
And that is guaranteed to tear a whole in the fabric of spacetime, ending the universe as we know it.