Best Of Breed Infrastructure
Most organizations today deploy a “best-of-breed” infrastructure, meaning that they use the best software that solves a specific business problem really well. These systems typically aim to include member management, payment gateways, event registration and more all in one platform. While these tools have many advantages, there are a few problems.
- Information is scattered across multiple systems
- Related conversations are happening on multiple channels
- Users need to go to multiple systems to get the full picture on a topic
Problem For Members
Association members frequently come to the website of an association using the website search. Usually, they only see pages within the CMS that have that specific keyword. Many times, they may be searching for one of their LMS offerings or an event session. This information is not available in the website search, thus frustrating the member and forcing them to create a support request.
Problem For Staff
Association staff struggle to find information easily on their back office systems right now. They typically rely on the AMS or CRM for information, but that doesn’t give them a Customer 360 view of the member. This also doesn’t capture all of the communication, both internal and external, thats happening on multiple channels such as Chat, Email, Office Documents, and the CRM.
Global Search
An ideal solution to this problem is to create a single easy to use search that combines data from all different systems. This solution provides a single search interface, which searches across all of the platforms that are being used in the organization.
We can implement functionality like this with ElasticSearch. With Elastic Search, we can implement a cloud based Google-like search interface that can search across multiple data sources, and present a single unified result. Furthermore, the search interface can function as its own website, or can instead be incorporated into any existing system like a CMS or a CRM.
Single global search engine can serve distinct content to audiences based on the role and access level. Furthermore, it can show results from “your gmail” and “your google drive”
Case Study: fusionSpan One Search
We implemented this within fusionSpan and combined all our data sources including Google Apps, Slack, Zoom, Asana, JIRA, Confluence and are adding more.
Conversations for a single client or project are happening on multiple channels – some of these channels like Slack are internal facing, while others like Asana as external/client facing. This has given our staff a singular search to search all their content buckets.
Connectors
Elastic Search comes with dozens of built in connectors that can connect to different sources like Slack and Dropbox. fusionSpan can also add custom data sources like Salesforce etc, with over 200 connectors we have featured on our fusionConnect Platform.
We can also provide a single search engine that can be integrated into an internal staff accessible system like Salesforce CRM, and an external customer facing system like a website.
Get Started With Global Search Today
We have had great success implementing a global search solution at fusionSpan internally. One fusionSpan search combines search results from Gmail, Google Workspace, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, Asana, Zoom, and more. We no longer have to go to multiple applications to look for assets, and even have our own private google search.
Stay tuned as we add more tips and trick on global search functionality. For users looking to get started right away, reach out to the fusionSpan team for more guidance!
The official gear-head of fusionSpan. Manav has over 14 years of enterprise software development experience. Previously he spent 7 years in various lead development and architect roles at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Notably, he contributed to the architecture and development of some of the core components of the caBIG infrastructure, for which he received the NCI caBIG Outstanding Achievement Award.
