The Enterprise Search (ES) layer represents information access capabilities to crawl, index, and search structured and unstructured enterprise content. ES is a key corporate information tool as it usually has access to the broadest set of information within an organization, especially unstructured content such as documents, spreadsheets, web sites, blogs, and content within corporate social networks. Enterprise Search also has the ability to connect to and search internal and external data sources through search federation, providing a consistent means to access and share information across partners, suppliers, customers, and internal data sources. Security is a key dependent layer for ES as it ensures that information assets are accessed by only the users and applications that have the right to do so.

Enterprise search can be directly accessed by users through white-box searches that appear within corporate portals, desktops, collaboration environments, and line of business applications. ES can also be embedded in ERP, CRM, SCM, content management, and custom applications through APIs to join information from multiple sources into a single contextually relevant view. The ubiquity of ES’s reach across enterprise content provides content and KPIs to Business Intelligence dashboards.

Architectural pre-requisites: User Experience, ECM and Collaboration, Data, Infrastructure, and IT Process

Architectural recommendations: Integrated Communications, Web and Social Computing, Business Intelligence, and SOA and BPM

Solution patterns it enables: User Experience, Web and Social Computing, ECM and Collaboration, and Business Intelligence