Kevin Price of the Price of Business show discusses the topic with Thede on a recent interview.
Zombie Awareness Month falls in May. Good time to check on those enterprise data zombies. As enterprise data accumulates each year, so do enterprise data zombies. I would define such zombies as anything in data that can rise up at a future time undead and ready to cause trouble for the organization. Examples would be an employment dispute, an unhappy customer, a supply chain disruption, a cancelled merger or simply a deal gone wrong. My suggestion: use enterprise search to identify as many buried enterprise data zombies as you can proactively before they emerge without warning.
How enterprise search works and supported data formats. Enterprise search finds zombie data the same way it finds everything else. With dtSearch®, multiple end users can instantly and concurrently search terabytes of an organization’s content only after enterprise search first indexes it. Fortunately, indexing is easy for we the living. Simply check off the folders to index, and the software can take it from there. So long as folders are part of the Windows folder system, the files themselves can be local or remote like Office365 files, SharePoint attachments or DropBox files. Just select the folders to index in the Windows folder system; no need to tell dtSearch if files are local or remote, PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, OneNote, web-based formats, ZIP or RAR archives, etc.
While the indexer does need to pinpoint the exact file format of each item to parse it correctly, it can do this identification on its own through the binary format. That way, a misplaced file extension like an Access database with a .DOCX extension or a PowerPoint with a .PDF extension won’t trip up the indexer’s identification process. Additionally, dtSearch can index the complete content of popular email formats, including all metadata. Plus, dtSearch can also index the full text of email attachments, even nested attachments. You can have an email with a ZIP or RAR attachment containing a PDF Portfolio along with an Excel spreadsheet with a Word document embedded within the spreadsheet and dtSearch will tackle the whole thing.
Data access runs deep. Even beyond recursively nested files, indexing cuts deep. Files can have obscure metadata that you might have a hard time spotting in a file’s native application. But all metadata is immediately present in a file’s binary format which the indexer accesses. Also, say there are tracked changes that have not been definitively accepted. dtSearch can still find that text. Some application displays can mask certain content like white writing against a write background or black writing against a black background. In addition, certain applications redact text by drawing a black rectangle over it with the text itself remaining under the black rectangle. But all that camouflaged text is readily present in a file’s binary format.
Index updates and international languages. Instant multithreaded searching can continue even while an index updates to account for new items, edited items and deleted files. That way, the network administrator can continually update indexes without affecting immediate concurrent searching. And the indexer supports Unicode covering hundreds of international languages. Files or emails can cycle through any number of different European languages, double-byte Asian text or right-to-left Middle Eastern text and the indexer will track all of that.
25+ search options. dtSearch has over 25 different full-text and metadata search features to instantly and concurrently sift through terabytes. Enter a basic “all words,” “any words” or exact phrase query to find potential employment dispute content, message exchanges with an unhappy customer, correspondence relating to a deal that went south, etc. Or enter a precision Boolean (and/or/not), phrase or proximity search to more narrowly define a search request and hone in on the exact right data. Concept searching can extend a search request to English language thesaurus matches or custom synonym rings. For example, if ABC Corp. is renamed as ZYX Corp. these can be synonyms for text retrieval.
Fuzzy searching adjusts from 0 to 10 to sift through potential OCR mistakes in PDF files or typographical errors in emails. In addition to word-based searching, the software can also locate specific numbers or numeric ranges as well as individual dates or date ranges. Date and date range searching can automatically pick up different popular date formats, like May 31, 2026 for 5/31/26 and vice versa. dtSearch even has an option to find credit card numbers that may be lurking forgotten and zombie-like in enterprise data.
Relevancy-ranking and other sorting. Default relevancy-ranking uses an algorithm that sorts files based on the rarity of search terms across indexed data and the density of search terms in each file. For example, in a search for steel, tin or aluminum, if steel and tin are common across indexed data with aluminum much less frequent, then files or emails with aluminum would get a greater relevancy rank. Files with the densest aluminum mentions would come out on top.
dtSearch also allows custom positive or negative variable term weighting to override default relevancy ranking. The software can further prioritize the appearance of certain search terms in specific metadata or towards the top or bottom of a file. For a different view on search results, re-sort retrieved files by a new criterion like folder name, file name or file date. In all cases, dtSearch will display the full text of retrieved files with highlighted hits.
So let Zombie Awareness Month serves as a reminder to get ahead of those enterprise data zombies. Get started at finding those enterprise data zombies at dtSearch.com
=====================================================================
About dtSearch®. dtSearch has enterprise and developer products that run “on premises” or on cloud platforms to instantly search terabytes of “Office” files, PDFs, emails along with nested attachments, databases and online data. Because dtSearch can instantly search terabytes with over 25 different concurrent search options, many dtSearch customers are Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. But anyone with lots of data to search can download a fully-functional 30-day evaluation from dtSearch.com
Connect with Elizabeth Thede on social media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-thede-4a5a042/
