A question I like to ask in demonstrations: :)

Whats the biggest document database you've worked in? I'll sit and watch folks talk with me about working on thier part of the Enron debacle, Data Treasury, AIG, you know.. BIG cases. 

While they're war storying, I'll launch my browser and open Amazon.com, browsing to the 'shop by department' feature. I'll ask, have you ever used this database before? Thats a billion record document database. It's pretty plain jane, but it's super effective. 

Then I'll ask if they needed training to learn how Amazon.com works.. They didn't. 

So how do you use Amazon? Zappos? Whatever? You can keyword search- which works great if you have an exact name of an item lets say, for cost comparison purposes, but I think my favorite way to search  is through elminiating the things I don't want. You need proper metadata to do that... Electronics> Televisions> LCD> Under $1,000> By Samsung.... bam. I've got my document collection. I make my choice, add to cart and produce. 1 billion records queried and I found exactly what I was looking for in moments. We take it for granted, but it's kind of a feat. 

So how do we lead our client and partner to the key facts within a document database? We lean on existing smart technologies that we all use every day. Familiar elements that we allready know how to use. When we keyword search, we want to use natural language instead of boolean operators and,or,not,west/lexis/($ynt@x) :)

Enter Xera. The new era of document management and discovery technology. Faceted searching is baked right in with no additional fees, no 3rd party royalties and no expensive workflows to organize data for the functionality to shine through. It's standard and it's awesome. 

In my demo I sift through a million records by selecting a custodian from my faceted searches, selecting the email document type, identifying a year, month and even day to return. All the while, visual identification of tally counts for each unique metadata class and variable while I filter with facets. Less than a minute later I've got 410 documents to gracefully batch and review or divy the documents amongst my reviewer team. 

It's a no-brainer stroke of genius that noone but Xera has figured out yet. 

Really there's tons of little gems within Xera. I cant tell you how proud I am of our Canadian developers at iConect. Guys and gals, if you havent seen Xera yet, get on board in a hurry. It's a quarter of the cost of Relativity, uses the same canned CAAT analytic toolkit everyone else uses and it's beautiful. ESI and Litigation Support professionals really need to check this out.

At Platinum, we're in the process of migrating all of our legacy iConect nXT/qXT databases to Xera. The response from our clients has been unbelievable.

Mike Fedorowski explains the faceting concept and demonstrates its functionality in this short video. Enjoy! Schedule a demo or a no-cost pilot today! 

 Thanks for stopping by :) 

-Sid