Mint partners with US's Concept Searching to ease enterprise search

Mint, one of South Africa's leading enterprise search specialists, has formed a partnership with US-based Concept Searching to help its clients take enterprise search to the next level.

Concept Searching is a global leader in the supply of advanced enterprise search, classification and taxonomy management technologies. Its customers are a who's who of the US corporate and public sector worlds.

The company has mastered the ability to recognise and index compound terms (concepts), as opposed to single keywords in isolation. Mint, which develops solutions that help people find information faster, is now the African partner of Concept Searching and will be applying this search technology together with its South African-based skills throughout Africa.

Martin Garland, president of Concept Searching, says: "The partnership with Mint is a significant milestone for Concept Searching in southern Africa. Mint is a trusted Microsoft Gold partner and an expert in delivering advanced enterprise search solutions. The relationship with Mint entrenches Concept Searching's position as the premier classification and taxonomy management solution for enterprise accounts in South and southern Africa."

Mint MD Grant Hodgkinson notes with the addition of Concept Searching's technology, Mint can extend its customers' enterprise searching reach beyond the functionality found in SharePoint or from any other South African search platform vendor.

"Mint has substantial .Net development and search experience under its belt, along with unbeatable skills in searching taxonomy and query languages," Hodgkinson says. "The partnership with Concept Searching strengthens our enterprise search offering to customers on the continent and will help companies improve their knowledge workers' productivity by making all corporate content findable to anyone needing it."

These issues are important, as the business world is moving from a system of process-oriented to knowledge-based work in which rapid access to information stored in diverse locations and formats is required on a continual basis. If the required information is not easily available to workers, their productivity decreases while costs increase.

"Exacerbating the need to find content quickly and easily, companies are also producing more data faster than ever," says Hodgkinson. "Searching for information currently consumes about 30% of knowledge workers' time. This adds up to a substantial amount of money and productivity lost each day."

Enterprise search was given a boost when Microsoft included search functionality in SharePoint 2003 and enhanced it in the 2007 release. This functionality can still be enhanced to make it particularly appealing to large organisations, given the complexity and volume of content they work with.

For example, a company's cellphone policy might be filed under the topics of HR, finance and communications, to ensure anyone looking for it can find it under a topic they think is appropriate. When the cellular policy changes, however, will all three locations be updated simultaneously and at what cost? And how users find information is another matter entirely, since users will embrace different and sometimes unexpected keywords.

This is where Mint comes in. "As an expert in enterprise search based on the Microsoft platform, Mint is helping companies in South Africa and Europe refine their content hunting by providing a taxonomy layer to speed access to any information," adds Hodgkinson.