Interwoven IDOL Announcement

Can anyone make sense of the announcement on the Autonomy Interwoven web site?

http://www.autonomy.com/content/News/Releases/2009/0319.en.html

Are they simply referring to Interwoven Search being IDOL now as opposed to another Verity product? Or has something larger happened within the TeamSite 6.7.2 product?

I am a little confused on this one.

Thanks for any clarification.

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Jamik

From my understanding they've replaced Verity with IDOL in the TeamSite Search application. Which makes sense since Verity was bought by Autonomy and the Verity Search app no longer exists. Also our Autonomy rep tells us that it takes Autonomy about 6-8 months to integrate all their products into the companies they purchase. So I'd expect more product changes/announcements like how they announced that MediaBin will use Autonomy's Visage component for searching audio/video.

If you go to the support site and look at the product download page for TeamSite 6.7.2 you'll see a TeamSite Search version 3.1 readme file. It basically details how to get the new TeamSite Search. Of course, you have to get approved for the download which I've been waiting since Thursday to get approved for the new app.

Jeffc

I have been approved (after 2 weeks), but now they want to come in and install it for us ???? Not the typical model.

ScatterAverageLine.rptdesign

Jamik

I have been approved (after 2 weeks), but now they want to come in and install it for us ???? Not the typical model.

oooh let me guess. they won't let you install the product yourselves or give you any support documentation until you have someone attend a training class, correct? This is Autonomy's policies at work. You have to be trained in Autonomy's products first before you're allowed to do anything with the products you purchased. You're not even allowed to receive documentation on the product until someone has been trained.

When we first got Autonomy IDOL, I had to go to training before they gave us anything. Then they still wanted to have us bring their consultants out to do the install.

Yeah, not the typical model. I can understand from one standpoint why they'd want to do it that way, but in my opinion it's a pretty horrible model.

cliff1

On the initial question, the answer is yes. The TeamSite search was OEMing the VerityVDK on the back-end and that has been replaced with IDOL. As mentioned in another post, other integrations are underway to integrate and cross-leverage Interwoven and Autonomy technology. As to the training and install topic, I have no idea about that one? Perhaps just being cautious with the earlier adopters to make sure the transition goes smoothly? Our internal TeamSite server in engineering was upgraded to use the IDOL engine.

-Cliff

Ottawa_IWOV

On the initial question, the answer is yes. The TeamSite search was OEMing the VerityVDK on the back-end and that has been replaced with IDOL. As mentioned in another post, other integrations are underway to integrate and cross-leverage Interwoven and Autonomy technology. As to the training and install topic, I have no idea about that one? Perhaps just being cautious with the earlier adopters to make sure the transition goes smoothly? Our internal TeamSite server in engineering was upgraded to use the IDOL engine.

-Cliff

Thanks for the clarity on this Cliff; I am glad to see someone from Interwoven responded.

Any chance you can provide some feedback on how the IDOL experience has been on your R&D TeamSite servers?

Like most IWOV developers (starting an assumption), I am excited about this, but cautiously optimistic (ending assumption). IDOL is another tool that needs to be learned in order to make the proper use of it for business solutions. Like anything else, it will have quirks and nuances that will only be mastered with lots of experience integrating the tool into CMS projects. I am looking to Interwoven Autonomy (what kind of name is that anyways) to offer some extensive training on the covergence of the tools so partners can hit the ground running on this stuff.

My 0.02

cliff1

I need to break my answer into separate responses:

1. Specifically with respect to TeamSite search, the customer view does not change. Install, configuration, CSSDK, and ContentCenter usage remains pretty much the same as before (for now). For customers that are using TeamSite search (upgrade), I believe the content will need to be re-indexed. Essentially, we have OEMed our own product and pre-configured it to serve a specific purpose (find content stored in TeamSite). The search results may come back a little faster or have a better relevance ranking by comparison to VerityVDK, but the external view of TeamSite search has not changed (yet). The version of IDOL shipped for TeamSite search has much of the capability disabled as the intended goal is TeamSite search.

2. As you hinted, the IDOL product is itself a very sophisticated enterprise-class product with tons of capability. Several folks on my team have been to IDOL training and I'm scheduled to go later this month. Thus far, the feedback I have is that the product has lots of capability and that the learning curve is less than TeamSite. While I can't really discuss product directions, there are several projects moving forward in the Interwoven Autonomy (aka WCM=web content management) part of the company to leverage additional features of IDOL. Pioneering customers and partners will surely find lots of ways to leverage IDOL to solve addition WCM problems that are not currently on our radar. The ability to for customers and partners to build new and creative solutions is exactly what we (the entire community) want and need.

Hope this helps a little.
-Cliff

yanSi

I am looking to Interwoven Autonomy (what kind of name is that anyways) ...

The new entity should be named Autowoven.

cliff1

Funny, lol. I'll mention that to our marketing folks Smiley Wink

Jamik

I need to break my answer into separate responses:

1. Specifically with respect to TeamSite search, the customer view does not change. Install, configuration, CSSDK, and ContentCenter usage remains pretty much the same as before (for now). For customers that are using TeamSite search (upgrade), I believe the content will need to be re-indexed. Essentially, we have OEMed our own product and pre-configured it to serve a specific purpose (find content stored in TeamSite). The search results may come back a little faster or have a better relevance ranking by comparison to VerityVDK, but the external view of TeamSite search has not changed (yet). The version of IDOL shipped for TeamSite search has much of the capability disabled as the intended goal is TeamSite search.

I just hope they let us configure which directories to index and which not to index because that was our biggest complaint with the Verity version of TeamSite Search (we do not want to index the templatedata folders). So I hope this version allows us to configure it a little more.

2. As you hinted, the IDOL product is itself a very sophisticated enterprise-class product with tons of capability. Several folks on my team have been to IDOL training and I'm scheduled to go later this month. Thus far, the feedback I have is that the product has lots of capability and that the learning curve is less than TeamSite. While I can't really discuss product directions, there are several projects moving forward in the Interwoven Autonomy (aka WCM=web content management) part of the company to leverage additional features of IDOL. Pioneering customers and partners will surely find lots of ways to leverage IDOL to solve addition WCM problems that are not currently on our radar. The ability to for customers and partners to build new and creative solutions is exactly what we (the entire community) want and need.

I would say it's not any more sophisticated than the Verity product that you use to use. In fact I'd say it takes a step forward in a couple areas(better algorithm for search results) but a few steps back in others areas(linear indexing of content, no threading of indexing jobs so each job is done in the order received).

One of IDOLs best and worst things about IDOL is that you can just keep throwing hardware at it to improve performance. The worst part is you never know how much hardware you're going to need to throw at it. We've heard of companies who have a server farm for IDOL with 70 servers and each server only indexes 3000 documents. Ourselves have 2 servers running 2 instances each and we're looking to expand that by 1 more server with 2 new instances because we found indexing jobs getting backed up on a 100k document Database.

So yeah, it's got some nice features for search, but it could use some streamlining on the performance side.

Anyway, I can't wait to get my hands on the TeamSite version to see what it can do. I'm still waiting to hear back from support on when I can get a copy.

Adam Stoller

The new entity should be named Autowoven.

Hmm - I suppose that's better than Interonomy ;-)