First Look: AltaVista Software Delivers Enterprise Productivity Application

Wayne N. Kawamoto
Managing Editor, www.smallbusinesscomputing.com

AltaVista Software announced the general availability of its AltaVista Desktop Search. AltaVista Desktop Search is a productivity application that promises to provide fast, relevant search solutions for individual desktop and laptop computers in the enterprise-computing environment.

Available immediately, AltaVista Desktop Search may enable companies and employees to use information that’s stored on personal computers by offering a collection of user-driven controls that deliver broad search and retrieval capabilities and deep e-mail crawler functionality.

“Half of the world’s digital content resides on personal computers as unstructured data and remains hidden or inaccessible in the form of email or various file types and formats,” said Phil Rugani, executive vice president of AltaVista Software. “The AltaVista Desktop Search solution addresses the very real business problem of workers wasting several hours each day seeking access to information that already exists.”

AltaVista Desktop Search offers a variety of features engineered to navigate more than 225 different file types by filename and folder, including Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. A user’s search for documents and content is further extended through a broad search and retrieval capability that views a PC’s entire index to determine priority and extract relevant results. Moreover, AltaVista Desktop Search enables this residing data to be searched and presented back to the user in a single frame interface.

According to the company, AltaVista Desktop Search delivers excellent e-mail crawler functionality, which helps users find important data and potential business opportunities buried within thousands of e-mail messages and discussion threads. The email browser function of AltaVista Desktop Search is designed to find and deliver requested information sorted by content keywords or by attributes such as “cc”, “to”, “from”, folder and date range.

AltaVista Desktop Search is a client-based Windows application designed to complement the Web browser. Users can search their local index at all times, regardless of which applications are in use, or whether the user is onsite, offsite, online or offline. Information can be gathered and indexed with or without an open browser window, allowing the contents of recently added files and email to be accessed during index updates.

AltaVista Desktop Search is available through www.solutions.altavista.com.

Small Business Computing Staff
Small Business Computing Staff
Small Business Computing addresses the technology needs of small businesses, which are defined as businesses with fewer than 500 employees and/or less than $7 million in annual sales.

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