Document filters webinar July 28 2010

Document filter independent ISYS is hosting a webinar on Wednesday, July 28 at 1PM Eastern to talk  about the role document filters play in successful search indexing and display. You can register now.

Of course, as a search technology company, ISYS has enjoyed great success, particularly among law enforcement where search has to work right at a reasonable price. We've always liked their technology and their approach.

But like every search platform, ISYS needed filters to convert so-called 'binary' formats like Microsoft Office, PDF, or even Photoshop files into a stream of text - after all, today's search platforms primarily operate on words.. in textual format. But ISYS looked at the market at the time, and found that two of their competitors, Autonomy and Oracle, own the best of the filter technologies.

Like any company, they made a 'make or buy' decision, and in their case, making their own filters was the right answer for them, and possibly for you. You see, ISYS decided to start selling their filter technology independent of their search platform, so now you can acquire some really great filtering and viewing technology for just about any search engine, 'off the shelf'. Their customers include other vendors with the need to extract text from various types of content, not just search vendors but also eDiscovery and eCompliance companies and many others who don’t want to pay excessive prices for technology - and who want really great filtering at a reasonable cost.

Then, a few years back, ISYS decided that open source platforms Lucene and Solr - which had no filters - needed them as well. So now you can buy a great filter pack 'off the shelf' with no huge volume commitment - no volume commitment at all! And you can get world class filtering for your open source search project.

Come hear ISYS, the guys from Lucid Imagination, and us here at New Idea Engineering talk about the critical role of filters in your search applications. See you then!

/s/Miles

Comments

[Otis Gospodnetic]

Miles,

In your opinion, now that good open-source filters exist (see Tika), is there really a need for one to buy commercial filters, like those from ISYS or Oracle if all one needs to parse is, say, some common/popular formats like PDF, MS Word (versions x/y/z), RTF, Excel, and such? Or are ISYS/Oracle filters so much better or faster or both that they are worth the money? Thanks.
==
Hey Otis... I think in many cases - if not most - commercial filters at a reasonable cost (ISYS) are worth it because some companies really want to know their product is supported - and will have regualr updates as new formats come out. If you only need the ones Tika provides AND you can wait for Tika to catch up when Microsoft of Adobe or Apple update an existing file format, then it's fine. But if all of a sudden Acrobat 10 requries new readers.. well, then someone will need to make that change.
Think of commercial licenses as someone to yell at when it doesn't work. Lucid provides that outlet for Lucene/Solr; ISYS provides it for filters, which are pretty important. And do change alot...