EXTRANET NEWS * Week of
Editors: Joel Orr and N'omi Orr
http://www.extranetnews.com
1. ENFISH: FIND EVERYTHING FAST, EVEN IF YOU DON’T REMEMBER WHERE YOU PUT IT
2. THE LIST
3. TIDBITS
4. QUOTE OF THE WEEK
1. ENFISH: FIND EVERYTHING FAST, EVEN IF YOU DON’T REMEMBER WHERE YOU PUT IT
“Computers store things in ways convenient for them, not for people,” said Louise Wannier, founder and CEO of Enfish (http://www.enfish.com). “It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Wannier has a passion for making technology serve people—rather than people serving technology. Her last company, VCR Plus, helped many VCR owners use the sophisticated programming features of their video recorders without having to learn the arcana devised by the device manufacturers.
“Enfish” is short for “enter, find, share.” The product concept is simple: Using patented technology, it creates—and maintains—an index of all the stuff on your hard drive or server, including individual email messages. Ask for a word or a phrase, and it retrieves everything that contains what you asked for.
The technology comes packaged in different ways. I use Enfish Find ($69.95), a simple desktop application. I just don’t worry about where I put stuff, because Enfish can find and retrieve anything for me faster than I can navigate among directories.
Enfish Personal ($99.95) constantly analyzes your desktop activity and information to determine what is important to you, then identifies, presents, and links relevant data from disparate sources for you—and organizes it for quick access.
Enfish Professional for Desktops ($229.95) can also index network drives, and integrate with enterprise solutions.
There is also a server-based product, priced around $50,000, for high-volume multi-user installations.
Moreover, Enfish’s “View” function lets me view whatever it finds, without having to open the application that created the document.
Installation is trivially easy. The first time you run Enfish, it needs to go find everything and index it; that typically takes a couple of hours, and works faster if you leave it alone. But once the initial index is created, Enfish constantly “Dexes”—their apt neologism for the indexing process—your information unobtrusively.
So when you are looking for anything related to the Morris contract, and someone from Morris just sent you an email that you haven’t even seen yet, and someone else posted the newest Morris contract addendum on a shared enterprise server just ten minutes ago, both those items will be in the list of things Enfish finds when you ask for “Morris contract.”
You can have named searches, called “Trackers,” for combinations you look for repeatedly. You can search for specific document types. You can filter, using a wide range of criteria. You can search the Web; Enfish uses a multi-search-engine approach.
The technology works with intranets, extranets, portals, with Microsoft Exchange, AOL, and now with Lotus Notes, and with a wide variety of document types. It has been installed in a wide variety of organization types, including (just recently) the US Air Force (in partnership with SAIC), HP, Cisco, and many others.
Our take: In my view, this is a no-brainer. I use Enfish constantly on my PC, and I wish there were a Mac version. It is an ideal and essential support for any extranet. I see only upside—no downside to it. Enfish allows me to think less about what I am doing, and just do it.
2. THE LIST
Total companies: 259 (see who's on The List at http://www.extranetnews.com)
3. TIDBITS
* COLLABORATE WEST Conference -
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* EXTRANETS III -
* Interested in blogs and blogging? John Hiler has compiled a wonderful annotated survey of available software. http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/blogware.htm
* A good feature-comparison table of blogging tools can be found at http://www.urldir.com/bt/
* Get CUSTOMIZED up-to-the-minute nuggets of well-organized news, press releases, and commentary from Joel and his associates in Cyon Research Corporation. http://www.cadwire.net/ is the place to go to find out what is going on in the world of engineering and architecture automation. And now you can have it emailed direct to you, daily or weekly!
4. QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”
- Victor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning”