IBM introduced two new entry-level versions of its leading enterprise search and content integration software. These new additions to IBM’s broad portfolio of information management solutions help customers make valuable information more accessible throughout the enterprise.

The two new offerings are designed for departmental projects and mid-sized businesses, providing a lower cost of entry for organizations to begin taking advantage of IBM enterprise search and content integration capabilities. These quick-start offerings provide fast deployment of secure enterprise search and content integration while providing the flexibility to add advanced search and discovery features as needed. In addition, they provide the ability to connect to information from numerous data sources and applications from other vendors including EMC, FileNet, Hummingbird, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, Stellent and CRM applications.

IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Starter Edition provides easier and more affordable business-focused search. It analyzes and indexes information stored throughout an organization, and allows users to quickly and securely search intranet portals, databases, public Web sites and file systems to obtain highly relevant results. It also includes the ability to plug in advanced information extraction capabilities through the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), an open source framework for building advanced search and text analytics applications, enabling users to search for facts and concepts within the underlying content.
The new software can be used to enhance use of WebSphere Portal and Lotus Domino applications. A dedicated Lotus Notes/Domino crawler can be configured directly from the OmniFind Web Administration client. This crawler uses native Domino interfaces, understands the structure of Lotus Notes databases and comes with pre-built support for Lotus QuickPlace and Domino.Doc databases. The ability to crawl IBM Workplace Web Content Management is also included.
As content management systems proliferate, even mid-sized organizations and departments need to access multiple content repositories of forms, emails, audio and video files and documents and images where information continues to be kept in silos. WebSphere Information Integrator Content Starter Edition lets users work with content from multiple, disparate content sources as if it were stored in one unified system.

WebSphere Information Integrator Content Starter Edition provides real-time, bi-directional access to numerous content sources and workflow systems. It is ideal for projects such as enabling customer service agents to access and work with customer and product related information stored in disparate content management systems directly from within their CRM application. It can also be used in federated records management projects to consistently apply and manage recordkeeping policies across multiple content management systems through a single records management application. Finally, it is well-suited for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) projects that require an SOA content bus that extends the information as a service framework to include unstructured information.
WebSphere Information Integrator Content Starter Edition includes a large library of out-of-the-box connectors to provide access to native content and metadata stored in multiple systems. A toolkit is also provided for building custom connectors.