Google OneBox Hooks up With Enterprise Apps

TopShelf writes "Google's OneBox for Enterprise has now been integrated to multiple top-notch business applications, including Oracle, SAS, Cognos, and Salesforce.com, according to this morning's press release on Yahoo! News. PHB's everywhere will soon be able to Google their way to the information they need - what will that mean for corporate report developers and business intelligence staff?"

What will it mean?

[Badgerman]

what will that mean for corporate report developers and business intelligence staff?"

More to do and more to play with - if it even gets much adaption.

Report development is not something you can substitute easily for with a search system like this. In complex reports it's both art and science. Such searches may make reports easier to GET.

Intelligence staff - someone has to gather, write up, and analyze the data. This isn't going away either. Besides, to be cynical, if a PHB is looking for intelligence, it'll have to be provided by someone else.

So - at best a neat new way to find stuff people are already doing.

As with the public web...

[GillBates0]

...I expect deployment of such a capable search appliance to unmask all kinds of security loopholes within current corporate intranets.

From experience, a lot of employee data in HR/Payroll/Health systems is poorly managed, and currently "secure" only under a thin veneer of obscurity. The widely disparate database systems usually used by various groups (some developed inhouse, others contracted in) serve to make it more difficult for potential "information seekers" to access poorly managed systems.

If this highly capable appliance makes Intranet searches as simple, widely accessible and effective as Google on the public Internet, we can expect to see all kinds of security/privacy problems cropping up on intranets, which were hidden uptil now.

Means nothing for corporate report producers

[joshsnow]

PHB's everywhere will soon be able to Google their way to the information they need - what will that mean for corporate report developers and business intelligence staff?

Unless the information is formatted (sorted, ordered, grouped, linked) and organised (styled) the way a business report usually is, the answer to the question is "Absolutely Nothing".

There is a reason why, for the most part, the interface to website searches is not SQL based, and corporate reports don't rely on text searches.

I suspect (not having RTFA) this box is about the providing the ability to perform Ad hoc queries against all sources of corporate data (word, excel, PDF, SQL databases/datasources etc) that data first having been spidered by a mini google in the box.

Also, this probably isn't just about providing "PHBs" this ability. Ordinary people within an organisation often need to be able to search for docs, emails etc based on a piece of text - which is possible with things like Microsofts Index Server, but probably Index Server (or whatever it is these days) isn't as efficient as a dedicated googlebox is.

What does it mean to YOU and ME?

[mythosaz]

It means WE have to produce more documentation - in all sorts of stupid templated forms.

google appliance

[SolusSD]

the company i work for bought one of these.. its sitting upstairs gathering dust. The fact is, unless your a larger company indexing all the documents you have on your local intranet isn't necessary, not to mention most smaller companies keep companty documents located in smb shares or on file servers and not on the intranet accessible via http, which, afaik, is a requirement for the google box to index the files.