Tag Archives: Enterprise Search

June 11, 2025 · 9:48 AM

X1 Search Version 10: A Game-Changer for Modern Enterprise Search

By John Patzakis

Enterprise search has long been a pain point for organizations—fragmented data, slow retrieval, and outdated architectures have left businesses struggling to find information efficiently, resulting in millions of hours of lost productivity. But with the release of X1 Search Version 10, a new era has arrived—one that redefines how business professionals search, discover, and act on their information across cloud and endpoint ecosystems.

And the standout features? Full integration with Slack, enhanced support for Microsoft 365, support for Gmail and Google Drive and numerous other cloud data sources, as well as improvements to our enterprise-grade speed and scalability! With version 10, you can now search Slack in tandem with your email, files, and your Microsoft 365 data sources, including Teams.

Slack and Teams have become the modern enterprise’s water cooler and meeting room rolled into one. It is where you and your colleagues have critical conversations, exchange files, and document decisions. But until now, most enterprise search tools could not index Slack effectively, let alone allow unified searching across Slack and email.

X1 Search 10 changes the game by uniquely enabling real-time search across Slack messages, channels, and attachments alongside your Outlook, M365, Google Workspace, files, and more—all in a single interface. This allows business professionals to instantly search all their key information and full context of communication threads, no matter where their conversations took place. Imagine searching, seeing, and acting on your relevant Slack chats, Teams chats, email threads, and related documents side by side, in seconds. No toggling between systems. No data blind spots. Just instant insight and supercharged productivity.

Speed, Scale, and Simplicity with Micro-Indexing
What makes this lightning-fast and massively scalable experience possible is X1’s patented search and micro-indexing architecture. Unlike legacy systems that first require inefficient, time-consuming crawlers to collect, duplicate, and then transfer the data en masse into central repositories, which is a recipe for failure, X1 indexes data in-place. This means:

• No massive data movement
• Real-time indexing at the source
• Full maintenance of user permissions and access controls
• Lightning-fast search response times—even across multi-terabyte datasets

This distributed, index-in-place model is purpose-built for today’s data environment, where critical content lives across cloud platforms (Microsoft 365, OneDrive, SharePoint, Slack), endpoints, MS Exchange Servers, and file shares. With X1, organizations get a true federated view of enterprise content—without sacrificing speed, security, information governance, or user experience.

Legacy Enterprise Search Is Officially Obsolete
Traditional enterprise search tools—built for centralized environments—are no match for the demands of the modern workplace. As data continues to fragment across cloud platforms, remote endpoints, and collaboration apps like Slack and Teams, the old Enterprise Content Management (ECM) model of copy and migration to centralized indexing is completely untenable in terms of the laws of physics as well as creating significant security and governance risks.

X1 Search leapfrogs past those outdated architectures. With native support for Slack, robust Microsoft 365 integration, and enterprise-grade security and scalability, X1 enables rapid search and collection across the full digital workplace.

No more hours of lost productivity per week. Just real-time, precise search across your enterprise data—wherever it lives.

X1 Search Version 10 is now available. Ready to see it in action? Watch a 4-minute demo or obtain a free trial license (no credit card required) now.

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Cloud Data, Corporations, Desktop Search, Enterprise Search, Hybrid Search, Information Management, m365, MS Teams, OneDrive, productivity, Records Management, SharePoint, X1 Search 10

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July 23, 2024 · 10:55 AM

Enterprise Search is Dead. A New Approach is Here.

By John Patzakis

In today’s fast-paced digital world, employee productivity hinges on robust enterprise search capabilities that allow quick and easy retrieval of an organization’s documents, emails, and other unstructured data. Despite the critical nature of this capability, many organizations have historically invested considerable time, money, and effort into now-obsolete tools built on flawed enterprise search architectures. These legacy tools, often ineffective, have become completely untenable in the era of remote work and the widespread use of platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).

The Limitations of Traditional Enterprise Search
Traditional enterprise search architectures rely on gathering all relevant data through crawling and mass migration tools, centralizing it into a single repository. This approach, though prevalent for years, has significant drawbacks:

  1. Security and Governance Risks: Duplicating and then centralizing sensitive data in a single repository creates a prime target for cyberattacks, runs afoul with data protection regulations, and is completely contrary to information governance principles.
  2. Scalability Issues: The sheer volume of data in modern enterprises, often amounting to hundreds of terabytes, makes central repositories impossible.
  3. Incompatibility with Modern Platforms: Legacy systems are ill-suited to integrate with platforms like Microsoft 365, which are now dominant in enterprise environments.

Duplicating vast amounts of sensitive data and centralizing it in an external repository is not only risky but also extremely impractical. Despite this, some vendors continue to push these outdated solutions, ignoring the evolving needs of modern enterprises.

X1 Search: A Revolutionary Approach
X1 Search addresses these challenges with a game-changing approach that offers a distributed, individualized enterprise search workflow. This innovative architecture brings several key benefits:

  1. Distributed Index and Search In-Place Technology: X1’s proprietary and patented technology enables scalable search capabilities while maintaining robust security. Each employee has an individual search index aligned with their permissions, ensuring they only access data they are authorized to see.
  2. No Mass Data Duplication: Unlike traditional systems, X1 does not require the mass duplication of data. Users interact with original documents and emails, facilitating actions like opening, replying to, or forwarding them directly from the search interface.

Enhancing Productivity with Unified Search
The latest iteration of X1 Search transcends its desktop origins, offering the ability to instantly search across various platforms, including Microsoft email, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, as well as local files and emails, all within a single unified interface. This powerful capability can significantly boost productivity, saving users hours each day by streamlining access to critical information. Additionally, X1 Search now supports Google Drive and Gmail, broadening its utility across different cloud ecosystems.

User Experience and Endorsements
A critical aspect of X1 Search’s success is its excellent user experience. With over 100,000 users, the solution has garnered widespread acclaim. Max Underwood, a long-time user from a large defense contracting firm, states, “X1 Search is my go-to, must-have search application on my desktop. Nothing even comes close to matching X1 Search’s speed and accuracy in finding what I am looking for exactly when I need it.”

Conclusion
As organizations navigate the complexities of remote work and vast amounts of unstructured data, traditional enterprise search solutions fall short. X1 Search’s innovative approach, leveraging distributed index and search in-place technology, offers a secure, scalable, and user-friendly alternative. By eliminating the need for mass data duplication and providing a unified search experience across multiple platforms, X1 Search is setting a new standard for enterprise search capabilities, empowering employees and enhancing productivity in the modern digital workplace.

X1 Search is available for individual purchase on the X1 website and large volume, enterprise purchase by contacting X1 at sales@x1.com. To learn more about X1 Search visit www.x1.com/products/x1-search.

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Cloud Data, Corporations, Desktop Search, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, Google Workspace, Hybrid Search, m365, MS Teams, X1 Search 9

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December 3, 2014 · 7:55 AM

X1 CEO Message: A New Approach to Enterprise Search Resonates

by John Patzakis

In my two and half year tenure as CEO here at X1, we have seen tremendous progress and exciting growth with our next generation search solutions: X1 Search 8 and X1 Rapid Discovery. During this time, I have taken the very valuable opportunity to listen to our end users, executive sponsors and key stakeholders in IT about their X1 experience, their input on our product roadmap, and their perspectives on broader enterprise search.

On the enterprise search front, the recurring theme we hear again and again is that outside of the data managed by X1, enterprise search is a source of major frustration for organizations. This is confirmed by survey after survey where the vast majority of respondents report dissatisfaction with their current enterprise search platform. Simply put, the traditional approach to enterprise search has not worked. This is largely because most search solutions deployed in recent years focused on IT requirements — which see search as either a technical project or a commodity —rather than being end-user driven.

At X1, however, many of our customers report real progress with enterprise search, with firm-wide X1 rollouts being major wins at their organization. We believe that X1’s unique focus on the end-user is the key. You won’t find many other business productivity search solutions where the end users drive demand, instead of the tool being imposed on the end-users by IT or systems integrators. We continually hear countless testimonials from our users, at companies large and small who swear by their X1 and cannot imagine working without it. In speaking with industry analysts and other experts in the enterprise search field, this is an almost unheard of phenomenon, where end-user satisfaction with the companies’ enterprise search platform is usually around 10-15 percent, verses the 80-85 percent satisfaction ratio we see with X1.

So in view of this customer and industry feedback, we coined the phrase “business productivity search” to differentiate what X1 focuses on verses most other enterprise search tools, which are typically re-fashioned big data analytics or web search appliances. And the feedback we’ve received on this from end-users and industry experts alike is that this assessment hits the nail on the head. Business productivity search is not big data analytics and it is not web retrieval. It is its own use case with a workflow and interface that is tailored to the end users. X1 provides the end-user with a powerful yet user-friendly and iterative means to quickly retrieve their business documents and emails using their own memory recall as opposed to generic algorithms that generate false positives and a workflow ill-suited to business productivity search.

This analysis is crystalized in the accompanying chart differentiating X1’s approach to business productivity search versus big data analytics and web search.

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Click image to enlarge

These points are further explained in our four page white paper: Why Enterprise Search Fails in Most Cases…and How to Fix It.   But perhaps the most compelling illustration is this testimonial from 2013 Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry and Stanford professor Dr. Michael Levitt, who states: “X1 is an intimate part of my workflow — it is essentially an extension of my mind when I engage in information retrieval, which is many times an hour during my workday.” In my opinion, you will not find that level of enthusiasm by end-users for other enterprise search platforms.

And X1 is a platform. Users need a single-pane-of-glass view to all of their information – email, files, SharePoint, archives like Symantec Enterprise Vault, and other enterprise repositories.  X1 Search 8 and our enterprise extension X1 Rapid Discovery provides just that – a user-friendly interface to all information that lets workers use their minds to find what they are looking for in an iterative search tailored by the end user.

But the hundreds of thousands of X1 end users know all this. The key takeaway for CIOs and other IT executives is that search is an inherently personal user experience, and the number one requirement, by far, for a successful search initiative is enthusiastic end-user adaptation. If the business professionals in your organization are not passionately embracing the search solution, then nothing else matters.

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October 27, 2014 · 11:10 AM

The Time Has Come to Approach Search Differently

Anyone in the search / eDiscovery business lives and breathes search – we think about all day, every day because it is our livelihood.  At X1, we have many customers making real progress with enterprise search, so there can be the perception that organizations have learned to address the very real challenge of helping employees find information.  Thus, it can be surprising to run into research that shows just how bad the traditional approach to enterprise search is.

I came across the “Enterprise Search and Findability Survey 2014” on the Findwise website.  It is very interesting reading and really confirms that a new approach to enterprise search is needed.  Some of the key points, from my perspective, are;

  • Almost half of the survey respondents in large organizations (1,000 employees or more) find it difficult or very difficult to find information.
  • Almost two-thirds of respondents are either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their existing search applications.
  • Almost two-thirds of respondents believe it is very important to improve the ability to find the right information.

Simply put, traditional enterprise search did not work.  Too many employees complain about not being able to find what they are looking for.  The search solutions deployed over the last 15 years focused on IT requirements rather than end-user requirements.  These tools required end-users to tag and rate their search results, something end-users have neither the time nor the emotional investment to do.  This very point is something that Marcus Stimler, CTO of Capgemini UI, points out on the webinar we did earlier this month – the reliance of traditional search tools on end-users to tag information leads to a lack of findability.  This survey just confirms that fact.

It is not all doom and gloom, however, as many X1 customers know.  There is a better way to approach enterprise search and it begins with the end-user.  In today’s business world, end-users know what they want.  They demand good experiences with technology.   A web page with links to search results will not cut it in the enterprise.  Users need a single-pane-of-glass view to all of their information – email, files, SharePoint, archives like Symantec Enterprise Vault, and other enterprise repositories that users might access.   X1 Search 8 provides just that – a user-friendly interface to all information that lets workers use their brains to find what they are looking for.

Beyond the desktop, X1 Rapid Discovery indexes other sources of content – either on-premise or in the Cloud – and makes the information available alongside a user’s local content.  Perhaps the beauty of this approach lies mostly with its simplicity.  Workers are happy because they can find information.  IT is surprisingly happy because they have a search tool that is easily deployable, as opposed to the traditional complex science project.  This overall happiness is a result of a new approach to enterprise search starting with end-user requirements and extending outward.  It is a subtle difference, but a meaningful one that will drive the results of future findability surveys to a new level.

For more on our perspectives on why enterprise search initiatives often fail, while X1 is invariably successful, please download this short treatise. This was inspired by direct feedback from many successful X1 install sites.  In a nutshell, X1 addresses users’ personalized requirements for business productivity search.

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Click image to enlarge

A key mistake is to take big data or web search solutions and apply them to the very different use case of business productivity search. The matrix displayed here illustrates the key differences between these use cases.

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October 13, 2014 · 3:31 PM

X1’s Enterprise Search Webinar Takeaways

by Barry Murphy

Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a webinar on enterprise search and how to do it in a way that actually works.  Early feedback indicates that the webinar was well-received, mostly thanks to the involvement of Marcus Stimler, Capgemini’s UK CTO.  Marcus generously gave us his time to share lessons learned about how to make business productivity search work by putting the end-users first.  It was an important point – getting the win by making users happy and then extending the project from there.  The real world perspective that someone like Marcus can provide is invaluable and I learned a lot from listening to him.

There are a few key takeaways that are worthy of sharing and repeating:

  1. Search is a journey. Thinking of search as a “project” can be a mistake; rather, search is a journey that keeps going and, if done right, keeps providing value.  For Capgemini, it really began with a realization that people couldn’t find what they were looking for– despite having search tools in place.  Individual workers actually found X1 Search 8 and became loyal advocates.  Marcus, as CTO, learned about these passionate users and was able to roll out the X1 product more broadly so that Capgemini’s high-value knowledge workers could be more productive.  Once end-users were able to find what they were looking – most of which was in their email or desktop files – Capgemini was able to extend the journey by adding content sources like SharePoint to the search solution.
  2. The “Google paradigm” simply does not work in the enterprise. This might have been one of the most important points that Marcus made because, thanks to Google, there is a perception that search is easy.  Marcus learned that search within an enterprise is very different than web search, which relies on popularity for prioritizing search results.  Relying on popularity inside the enterprise will lead to problems because only a few employees will actually tag and/or rate documents.  Individual workers treat organizational knowledge differently and need a search tool that allows them to work their way.  As Marcus said, “relevancy is more important than popularity.”  And, it’s the business workers that know what is relevant and what isn’t.
  3. The human workflow is a huge consideration. As Marcus points out, and the major theme of the webinar, it is important to start with the end-users and win them over first.  For Capgemini, that meant using a tool that allowed people to quickly find what they are looking for and then take action on it.  That is exactly what X1 does.  For Capgemini, X1 gives their employees the ability to do their job better and faster – and that leads to all sorts of positive outcomes.  Because Capgemini values the knowledge of their workers, the company is able to leverage that knowledge for increased revenues and that leads to Marcus getting a positive ROI on the X1 investment – an important consideration for any IT person.

A huge thank you goes out to Marcus Stimler for sharing his time and knowledge with us.  If you have not had a chance to see the webinar, you can check out the recording here: http://www.x1.com/products/x1_rapid_discovery/videos/search_that_works_request.html

Feel free to be in touch with any questions.

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