Killer App – Mobile Email Search: Instant Access to Every Email

Coveo

BlackBerry® and Windows Mobile Get Secure, Flexible, Efficient Access to Active and Archived Email, Including Attachments.

If you access corporate email on a mobile device like BlackBerry^â to keep in touch when you're out of the office, then you most likely also know the limitations of trying to find email-based information.

At first, the "standard" email search usually found on these devices seems to be just what you need. But most businesspeople soon discover that they don't have smartphone access to everything that they initially think they do - attachments, older emails or archived email-based information, for instance.

This may be mildly irritating when the need for this kind of information isn't critical or time sensitive. But it can have a substantial negative impact when you're in a situation where getting to email-based information can make the difference between closing or losing a deal, making a profitable or unprofitable decision, or having a happy or angry customer.

And the frustrating part is that you know the information you need is sitting right there, somewhere, in email. You could probably get to it if you were sitting in your office. But you're not, and so, you can't.

It's a problem that most of us who work at least some of the time outside the office have experienced. It's also a problem that has been solved by Coveo's G2B^TM for Email information access solution.

A Simple Application, An Elegant Solution

As it happens, even in the office, people have similar challenges finding and accessing "the information I need" somewhere in email. And the simple and effective solution to that office-based problem not only enables mobile email search capabilities, but also makes the most efficient use of your mobile time and takes up the minimum of space on your BlackBerry or other device.

(For the sake of brevity, we'll say BlackBerry throughout the rest of this article, but the solution actually supports BlackBerry, iPhone and any Windows Mobile device.)

Consider, for example, one of the more irritating aspects of retrieving information via BlackBerry: the document download. You're not sure which of several attachments is the one you're looking for, so you pick the most likely one. It takes time to download to the BlackBerry, and then open. Nope, that's not the one. So you move to the next most-likely document. In the process, you're chewing up time that you'd rather be spending more productively (and less expensively).

The better alternative is a simple search, refine and display scenario that enables users to navigate, locate and quick-view attachments - like PDF, Word or Excel, for example. So you can now locate and view only the information you're looking for, not hit-or-miss guesses. This accelerated discovery process is especially helpful when you're in a spot with poor or intermittent wireless speeds.

Mobile real estate and processing loads are also considerations. On the BlackBerry, all you need is a small 'midlet' that connects you to your enterprise email search servers - active and archive. All the processing happens there, which means minimal impact on your mobile.

Solving the Basic Problems, In and Out of the Office

Apart from the unique equipment and connectivity factors, mobile email search and office-based email search share a core of common needs. So, much of the problem is the same whether you're mobile or in the office.

Many people are familiar with the dreaded message from IT "your mailbox is over its size limit" and immediate action is needed. A very common concern is that valuable information will be lost in the bowels of enterprise archive systems, or worse yet, will be deleted altogether. So people frequently create their own personal stash of old emails and attachments.

This actually makes the problem even worse. First, it removes chunks of information from the enterprise's collective body of knowledge and history (which can critically impact compliance posture, for example). Second, it complicates the individual's challenge of "finding that attachment" because there's no easy, effective way to rapidly identify and locate the needed information across disconnected sources.

And, of course, PSTs back at the office are of absolutely no use when you're mobile.

By maintaining a current, comprehensive index of all emails and their attachments, including those in the archives, Coveo's G2B for Email reassures people that they will still be able to find and access the information they, even when they've cleared it out of their individual mailboxes.

This has significant positive effects:

• It reduces, if not eliminates, individual PST repositories; first because people are confident they won't lose information, and second, because they quickly see the value of "one search" delivering comprehensive results, particularly if they work both in and out of the office.
• The integrity of the enterprise's largest body of critical information is improved so that any discovery processes, such as compliance-related activity, can be more complete and faster to execute.
• Since the email search index is server-based, you have the same extensive access whether you initiate it from your office machine or your mobile.

It's Also a Question of Economical Scalability^TM

Any discussion of enterprise-class capabilities must include the questions of scalability and total cost of ownership (TCO), especially these days.

It's easy to create simple, elegant solutions on a small scale. It's not so easy when you're talking about rapidly accessing enterprise collections that range up to billions of documents, accessed from thousands of locations, and growing larger by the minute.

It's easy to design a search system that runs on its own hardware and storage resources. It's not so easy when you make "a minimal impact on the existing IT infrastructure and resources" a design requirement.

Yet, when you understand the needs of today's modern enterprise - from the viewpoints of both "the organization" and the people in it - you also understand that scalability and TCO are just as important as ease of use and speed/relevancy/security of access. These are two of the factors that drove the development of Coveo's G2B^TM Information Access Suite, which includes G2B for Email.

So, G2B solutions are capable of indexing millions of documents per hour, hundreds of millions in a few days, and upwards of a billion documents within a few weeks. This was proven by tests held in conjunction with Hewlett Packard early in 2008 that included a mix of standard Office, PDF, HTML, and XML documents.

A third, and equally important, design factor was to make it simple, but not simplistic, both for the users and for the enterprise.

For the users, a familiar, consumer-like browser gives access to the full range of search functions. After all, if it's cumbersome to use, then people won't use it, which makes scalability and cost of ownership irrelevant.

From an enterprise point of view, the solutions typically run on the hardware you already have; they don't require the purchase of high-end servers, for example. In fact, the drive for simplicity is so embedded that the full solution can be downloaded - not a trial version, but the actual, full solution - and implemented on your servers in typically less than a day.

One result of this is that people can be experimenting with and proving mobile and office-based email search before the typical enterprise solution has even left the manufacturer's shipping dock.

Don't Take Our Word for It, Find Out for Yourself

Coveo's mission is to deliver simple, but not simplistic, solutions to tough enterprise-class information access challenges. This has led to developing products that can be downloaded and implemented in typically less than a day.

While we're adding new capabilities all the time, the solutions we currently offer for search-based information access to email, CRM, intranets, multimedia and custom applications have been in use at some of the world's best-known companies. For example, as they were researching solutions to a significant customer service problem, CA, one of the world's largest IT management software companies, discovered Coveo's solution. It has helped CA deliver on its promise of better customer support.

"The Coveo configuration was straight-forward and simple," said Sam Detweiler, VP, Technical Support at CA. "Everything that we did during the installation was guided by Coveo's easy-to-use online help and the documentation that's available on Coveo's support site, which is limited...but that's because the product is so easy to install, you really don't need it. In six hours, we had 1.6 million documents loaded from our database into the Coveo search engine."

Other enterprises, such as HP, Proctor & Gamble, Fujitsu, Verizon and Dow Jones have similar experiences.

But don't take our or their word for it. Try it yourself at www.coveo.com.

About Coveo Solutions, Inc.

Coveo has radically simplified the delivery and deployment of platform-class Information Access solutions for accessing critical information located anywhere across the enterprise.

Winner of numerous industry awards, Coveo's G2B^TM Information Access solutions deliver top-level security, unparalleled accuracy, and consumer-style ease of use. Our fully functional solutions are free to try, with continuing, uninterrupted use through a simple licensing activation. Implementation takes less than 24 hours, and includes "black-belt" level customer support even during the initial free trial period.

Coveo's enterprise clients include HP, Procter & Gamble, CA, Rabobank, PwC, Deloitte, Nomura, National Grid, AMN Healthcare, Lockheed Martin, NATO, NASA, AC Nielsen, US Navy, Yellow Pages Group (Canada), Haley & Aldrich, simyo GmbH, and Michigan State Appellate Defenders Office.

For more information, or to try Coveo G2B solutions free, contact our Sales department at 1.800.635.5476 or visit our website at www.coveo.com.