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GCN Home > 07/02/04 web stories

AKO deploys Autonomy for search

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

The Army has purchased search engine software from Autonomy Corp. for its Army Knowledge Online portal, Autonomy announced this week.

The search engine will be used by AKO participants to search material in the portal’s Knowledge Collaborative Center, said Lt. Col. Kenneth Blakely, chief of AKO.

Collaboration is AKO’s second most popular feature, used only less than e-mail, Blakely said. The feature allows participants with shared interests, either work related or personal, to create a common workspace for sharing documents such as manuals, files, photos, plans, e-mails and briefings.

More than 840,000 workspaces have been created on the site, according to Michael Beckley, vice president of product strategy for the Vienna, Va.-based Appian Corp., which supplies the portal software for AKO.

The new search engine will index documents that workgroups choose to make available to other users of the AKO portal, Blakely said.

Blakely’s team also tried a search engine from Verity Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif. They chose Autonomy because it worked better with the unique file format used by Appian’s document management system, which underpins the Knowledge Collaborative Center.

“KCC is a unique beast,” Blakely said. The AKO office had to work with Autonomy to customize the search company’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer search application.

The price of Autonomy’s IDOL server varies depending on configuration and options. The average cost of an implementation is $340,000, according to Kris Marubio, vice president of marketing at Autonomy of Cambridge, U.K.

More news on related topics: Defense IT



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