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Challenge |
Overview
Generating $16 billion in revenue in 2002, Xerox Corporation is the
global leader in the document management business. The company offers
an innovative array of color and black-and-white digital printers, digital
presses, multifunction devices, and digital copiers, as well as a broad
range of services, solutions, and software. Xerox sees its corporate
mission as helping people find better ways to do great work by consistently
leading in document technologies, products, and services that improve
work processes and business results.
The Challenge
The Xerox Office Group is based in Wilsonville, Ore.,
and employs more than 1,100 people. The Group intranet contains thousands
of PDF and HTML files and a smaller number of Microsoft Office documents,
all hosted on one Solaris server running Apache.
A year of using an in-house categorization system yielded extremely poor search results. With growing complaints from the sales team that they were unable to quickly find essential sales program materials such as rebates and current promotions, Chris Smith, lead Internet technologist for the Office Group at Xerox, set about to find a different search solution.
“I evaluated other search solutions,” says Smith. “They were expensive, involved a great deal of IT configuration time and ongoing maintenance, and required us to find a server to host it on. We had a very small budget to work with, and I needed to find an inexpensive solution that didn't require a lot of effort.”
The Solution
The low cost and easy deployment the Google Search Appliance offers won Smith over. He purchased the GB-1001, which can crawl up to 150,000 documents.
“Google had it all,” says Smith “It was inexpensive and easy to use. I spent about half a day going through our document collection, and the other half tweaking the look and feel of the search pages to match the Xerox brand.” He used the Page Layout Wizard to cut and paste HTML from their existing templates. “That's all it took to get up and running. It required no additional resources to deploy. It simply worked right out of the box,” he says.
Smith was also pleased that the Google Search Appliance required no user training, noting, “Our employees were already comfortable using Google for web search. We simply put the search box in the corner of the web page and let the team have at it.”
End Result
Since it was installed in April 2002, Smith has been
pleased with how well the Google Search Appliance has performed, noting,
“The best overall benefit is that there is no ongoing maintenance.
We've never had to call for support, because we've never
had any problems. That's been a huge win for us.” Equally
important, the Google Search Appliance has enabled the sales team to
spend more time selling – and less time searching. Whether it's
sales collateral or the latest promotional offer, team members can now
find what they're looking for without the old frustrations. “Since
we started using the Google Search Appliance,” says Smith, “the
sales force is able to find what they're looking for, and we've
stopped receiving complaints.” Which leads Smith to believe that
the adage rings true: silence is golden.
About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google's award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies, the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications, and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units.
Contact sales for more information.
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