My colleague James posted an interesting article on a set of comparisons that Techology and Business did between the:

• Google Mini
• ISYS Desktop
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 beta (:-))
• IBMs Omnifind v8.3

Some interesting insights into the different choices customers have, some of the highlights for me were:

• 'Because of installation issues, we were unable to test a properly installed version of OmniFind at the Lab...'
• 'On MOSS 07: ...given the tight integration with Micrososft’s range of products it should be no surprise that security, an issue with some vendor’s products, is not a problem with this Beta 2'
• 'file-type support is very good and SharePoint extends this further by making use of publicly available I-Filters'
• 'Upon launching the product Microsoft will have out-of-the-box support for SAP 4.7+ and Siebel, which should follow closely as a free download patch, via the Business Data Catalog (BDC) which is the feature that effectively links the SharePoint Portal to the backend business applications'
• 'You might think there goes the privacy but you can mark documents or expertise as anonymous. If a search finds the document it will return the author as anonymous, but SharePoint internally maintains a link to the actual author so you can send an email to this anonymous person and in the background SharePoint will email the request to them. The author can choose to ignore the email or choose to help—pretty cool stuff'
• 'Google Mini is an easy-to-use search appliance with an interface familiar to any web surfer. We did not benchmark its crawl time, however, we did observe that it is relatively slow indexing our data repository. It also has very limited security—essentially it seems that if your data is crawled using a login with a high-level of permissions then a search using that index will return results and therefore documents that are accessible to all, regardless of their permissions'

Full link here: http://www.technologyandbusiness.com.au/Its_not_what_you_look_for-1.htm

Hmmmmm seems like things are hotting up!

Enjoy!