Boston, MA – May 2, 2017 – BA Insight announced availability of a new application, Search for Dynamics, which provides instant, contextual, enterprise-wide search results related to the specific case or opportunity a user is viewing. It automatically searches Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft SharePoint, and content from over 70 other enterprise systems (such as Yammer, Jive, Veeva Vault, iManage, and Confluence) and displays results directly within Dynamics 365. In addition, it directly embeds compact search results within all common Dynamics 365 objects (e.g. Case, Account, Contact, Opportunity), as well as provides enterprise-wide search from the Dynamics 365 home dashboards.
Search for Dynamics provides customer service and sales representatives who live in Dynamics with easy access to the knowledge they need to close more deals and resolve cases. A support agent working on a case, for example, can automatically reference knowledge bases stored in Confluence and discussion threads from Yammer to quickly answer customer questions and link that information into the Dynamics record.
The full Enterprise Edition includes an indexing connector for Dynamics 365, which results in global search within Dynamics 365 across any field on any entity. It also makes Dynamics 365 information available to SharePoint users who may not use Dynamics 365.
The Express Edition includes only SharePoint content in results. This is currently available at no charge.
The result is a customer-facing portal with all of the information users need, directly accessed from within Dynamics by agents and sales professionals.
As an innovator in the Cognitive Search Market, BA Insight’s best of breed approach helps companies make search intelligent by providing technology that connects machine learning, cognitive computing, and enterprise systems, powering a new generation of intranets and cognitive search solutions. Our customers have the freedom to leverage the best search engines and cognitive computing capabilities available, providing users with an internet-like search experience while saving them precious time looking for needed information. We support multiple search platforms including Azure Search; Elasticsearch and Elastic Cloud; and SharePoint search (online, on-prem, and hybrid).
Our modular software product portfolio features SmartHub, delivering a personalized, internet-like user experience; connectors, providing secure connectivity to a wide variety of systems; classification, increasing findability using auto-tagging, text analytics, and metadata generation; and analytics, providing valuable data to make intelligent decisions about your intranet.
Hundreds of organizations and over 3.5 million users benefit from BA Insight’s software on a daily basis to provide compelling intranets that people love to use. This includes respected organizations such as the Australian Government Department of Defence, CA Technologies, Chevron, DLA Piper, Keurig Green Mountain, Mars, Pepsi, Pfizer, and Travers Smith. BA Insight is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, a member of the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Alliance, and an Elastic Partner.
Visit www.BAinsight.com for more information and follow us at @BAinsight.
Organizations have long been struggling with how to make knowledge assets available to employees, partners, and customers. Although there have been major technological advances in how this information is captured and made available over the past two decades, these have mostly been around a single business process. For example, when I joined Servicesoft, we were pioneering the idea of using search and classification engines to help transfer information to customers as part of the emerging eService market. At OutStart, we initiated the idea of objectifying learning and making the development of learning component-based so that it could be consumed via a “just-in-time” model. This meant that learners interacted only with learning objects that helped them increase their knowledge, and therefore their value, to the organization. In the last decade, another silo of information capture has emerged in the form of Social Business Software, making it easier than ever to capture nuggets of knowledge that can help others. The interesting dynamic in all of this is that there are large investments being made to capture information and knowledge assets, but very little of it is actually accessible by employees or customers.
In the ‘90s, multiple software vendors tried to address the issue of information access by providing software to implement portals, whether they were used for helpdesk integration, customer support, intranets, or R&D to help with the collaboration and reuse of IP. As the technology evolved and search engines and appliances became available, the portals were replaced with implementations of enterprise search. The problem with this approach is that it views the search engine as a ‘one size fits all’ solution, as opposed to viewing it as an enabling technology that helps organizations address a business issue. Failed enterprise search projects became the norm as companies tried, and continue trying, to resolve their information access challenges by implementing new search appliances while they still have underlying issues around integration with other systems, classification and tagging, and a sub-par user experience.
I joined BA Insight because I saw an immense opportunity to transform the way enterprise search is being implemented. I am sure you know that the amount of content that is being generated is growing exponentially across an increasing number of sources, and the inability to find the information assets our people need is costing us billions of dollars in lost productivity while leading to low morale and customer dissatisfaction.
When I evaluated the opportunity at BA Insight, I found the company to be uniquely positioned to provide a new approach to the unification of information that stops the pattern of enterprise search failures. We do this by transforming SharePoint, which has become ubiquitous across enterprises, into a unified information access platform that enables fast implementation of search-driven applications at a fraction of the cost of other options while de-risking search projects.
There are many notable and successful search-driven applications available on the Consumer Internet. Many are ‘killer apps’, and as a class they have fundamentally changed the way people interact with information. However, in comparison, corporate Intranets, customer support portals, helpdesk applications or knowledge management solutions don’t come close to being killer apps, nor do they provide a remarkable user experience.
I found it intriguing that BA Insight has the technology, people, and partners to help catapult enterprise search to the next level. We replace a people-intensive, SI-oriented approach to implementation with a technology-based approach that is lower cost, lower risk, easier to implement, and easier to upgrade. We do the heavy lifting to make our products work with different versions of SharePoint as well as various versions of other software applications that exist within a customer’s infrastructure. We automate how content is tagged to improve findability and also provide out of the box capabilities to improve the user experience with how information is found and accessed.
First is customer-centricity. Customers put their trust in startups with a vision, and we must partner with them to make sure they succeed. I am so proud of all of the customers I have had the honor of serving, as well as their achievements, and I consider it the cornerstone of my past success and BA Insight’s future success.
Second is our team. Our people have the experience and the desire to help our customers implement and deploy incredibly powerful applications. We want to help our customers build killer apps, as opposed to search portals. This is a team of high energy, committed, customer-centric experts who have embraced the idea that search-driven applications could be a lot better and are working to change how they get implemented. I am fortunate enough to have become part of the BA Insight team and am so proud of everyone who works here. In a short period of time, we have made incredible progress on many fronts and I feel strongly that everyone’s loyalty and belief in the company will continue to provide an incredible depth for us and help our customers transform how they work with search technology.
Third is the technology. We have a broad set of capabilities that extend the value of existing SharePoint investments, so we eliminate the need to change the underlying infrastructure, saving a lot of time and money. We have over 50 out of the box connectors, a world class auto-tagging engine for content within and outside of SharePoint, visual refiners to let users drill down and find information quickly, an active workspace with content assembly, and document preview capabilities. We also provide a lot of flexibility in how our technology can be implemented. Our full platform, for example, is particularly well-suited for new projects. On the other hand, if search-driven applications have already been implemented within an organization, then components of our platform can be leveraged to augment the existing technology to improve results.
ROI, which is the pure quantitative and financial analysis, often measured as productivity gains.
My preferred approach is return on value (ROV), which is qualitative and focused on items such as customer loyalty, employee morale, better decision-making, and the ability to find information faster to increase customer responsiveness. Many of these things impact productivity and are therefore ROI, but they aren’t often measured and are therefore difficult to quantify. Isn’t the impact of finding the right knowledge to be able to do one’s job priceless? If we are smart about how we invest our time, money, and energy based on return on value, then we will naturally bring tremendous value to our customers and market and end up as a growing, profitable company that is resilient through the ups and downs of the economy and market.
And fifth is promoting a strong work/life balance. Work is important, but we cannot forget our families and shouldn’t compromise being with them due to office pressures. For a long period of time I was a workaholic, but after my first son was born I committed to change. Over the years I have done my best to practice what I preach, successfully balancing work and family life, and I encourage our employees to do the same. I enjoy nothing more than spending time with my incredible wife and our great boys.
These attributes are prevalent at BA Insight, and I am very enthusiastic about the opportunities that lie ahead. I am extremely confident that we are well positioned to enable the future of unified information access as we help visionary organizations around the world realize the value of the collective intelligence that is being captured every day within the massive volumes of content they produce.