Two guys walk into an office.  The first one asks, “Do you know what’s different between searching the Internet and searching your intranet?”  The second one exclaims “Just about everything!”  Sometimes it can seem like everything that you know about searching on the Internet just doesn’t apply to your intranet.  You expect when you search the Internet you’ll find something.  (It may not be the right thing but that’s not relevant right now.)

eDiscovery activities can leverage search to dig up more dirt than a Caterpillar convention.  Do you want to know the best data discovery tool that auditors have right now?  It’s your search engine.  You’ve already indexed the content.  All they need is an account and they can find any piece of information that you didn’t want found by just anyone in the organization.  Maybe they’re searching for credit card numbers for a PCI audit, or social security numbers for a PII audit, whatever it is the search tools are going to find it.  And yet, when you want to find something you’re left out in the cold.

Last Wednesday I conducted a Webinar entitled “Using SharePoint Search for Corporate Email Governance”. The Webinar was well attended with an great audience who asked terrific questions. The following topics were covered:

• The three pillars of effective email governance
• Why SharePoint / FAST doesn’t index private email out of the box.
• Connecting SharePoint / FAST to Exchange – build or buy a connector?
• Configuring BA Insight’s Exchange connector
• Using Search Alerts to automatically detect compliance violations

I don’t use a lot of features when I’m searching on the Internet. In fact, beyond filtering a search result by a certain file type (images typically) I can’t recall the last time I’ve used anything other than keyword search. This weekend I was reminded that there is in fact a feature that I’m always using, but took it for granted; Search Alerts.

Both Google and Bing have Search Alert capability. This features let’s you save a query. What the search engine will then do is monitor for any new information it finds that matches your query. When it does, you are notified automatically by email, or an RSS feed. All of this happens automatically.