This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Mark Harrison. Original Post: Coveo Enterprise Search for SharePoint Feed Title: Mark Harrison Feed URL: http://markharrison.co.uk/blog/xml.aspx Feed Description: .NET Portals, Collaboration and eBiz Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Mark Harrison Latest Posts From Mark Harrison

Several month's ago we had two big Coveo users ask us if they could look into adding Coveo Enterprise Search (CES) into Sharepoint. The salesperson of course said, "Sure thing!" I of course was intrigued but could not understand why this was interesting to them. After our discussion the bar was set pretty high to look at success in this area. The plug-in had to install and be operational in short order, it had to use the existing security, and it had to be completely integrated into the existing SharePoint interface. Oh, and it had to be priced like you wanted to sell it.

Turns out since we started the core architecture of CES with the MSFT eco-system in mind we had a couple of distinct advantages. We could handle SharePoint security out of the box, we could imbed CES into the interface with no user issues on usability and our dev team figured out the install. The next step was why would they use us? Turns out there are many reasons. Rather than list them all there where three that stood out from my talks:

• Coveo is an excellent tool for data discovery and secure results rendering across an enterprise by itself. Adding it to Sharepoint gives users a way to access any repository. The administrator configures the admin interface to "bring content into Sharepoint" thus avoiding time and effort integrating into all the other apps (CMS, DMS, databases, Notes, NAS, SAN and others) by being able to quickly crawl and make this data available. This is the "Rising tide lifts all boats" (JFK) metaphor. By being able to quickly and with enterprise wide (world wide) reach add content to Sharepoint, the value of the portal to the user rises dramatically.
• The Coveo engine provides all the functionality of any enterprise search engine priced 3 to 10 times as much. So all our additional functionality--full Boolean, meta-data handling, relevance tuning, collection management, reporting ... you get the idea-- now takes Sharepoint to a new level in information discovery and retrieval. Through our GUI CES adds dozens of advance search operators, custom field handling, index driven spell check ('Did you mean?'), user set search preferences, view as HTML, concept extraction, summarization, have I lost you yet?
• Finally we look like what the IT folks expect us to look like. We use XML, COM, VB, .Net, ASP and are in line with how they operate everyday in their IT environment. No surprises, no weird code. The API we use to allow users to extend and operate CES in SharePoint is familiar territory.

We have customers using it and kudos to our dev team for the effort.

We are priced for the SharePoint market in that we start $5K for $500K documents for a server and go from there. We also have our desktop product integrated which we sell by the seat.