A well designed search application shrinks hour-long searches to seconds. This IDC Flash looks how a global energy firm used the the X1 Enterprise Platform Platform, from X1 Technologies to shrink searches from hours to seconds, and thus to unify access to disparate content stores within a Microsoft-centric environment. For knowledge workers,within the firm, finding things became much easier. For the IT group, taking stock of the millions of shared files and weeding out the stale content was finally a possibility. Using enterprise search for unified access leaves the existing file sharing infrastructure in place ? augmenting what's already installed rather than replacing one environment with another.

The company intranet, based on a foundation of Microsoft Exchange servers and network file shares, enabled the energy company's project teams to exchange messages and store files on shared network drives. Secured through an enterprise directory server, teams could readily share project-related documents and data around the globe. But the easy access had unforeseen consequences: As teams stored more folders and files to the network file shares, the environment quickly became unmanageable. Invariably, the IT group is left to clean up the mess. X1 Technologies controlled the content chaos by creating a platform for ad hoc information sharing across a global enterprise.