Document and Knowledge Management Systems

Sysero DMS

Whilst modern DMS systems provide full-text searching, the single use licenses provided by the DMS vendors generally limit the functionality to word and phrase searching. The order of the hit lists returned are often unstructured and searching is limited to single databases. Sysero can index the document and profile data of all your DMS databases to provide fast, relevant searching capabilities across all your DM repositories. The ability to extract the meta data from the DM Database allows Sysero to respect the existing security model while providing fast retrieval times to unlimited numbers of documents. Large comment fields in the profile, often used in the web content, are indexed as part of the process allowing transparent searching across web and document content. With Sysero firms have the ability to tune the search performance to specific firm standards and use XSL style sheets to provide relevancy ranking, summaries, abstracts, term highlighting and related topics within the firms existing web templates.

How Sysero DMS works

Sysero used the conceptSearching engine as an extension to the existing indexing process where the metadata is harvested from the DMS databases.  The metadata includes the document access control lists and file information and the latter is used by Sysero to retrieve and index the documents.  Users access Sysero through a browser on the network.  At this point the user is authenticated and this is used to filter the search to list only documents to which the user has access.  Document title, abstract, summary and text views are available as is any additional metadata that may be useful such as client and matter.
When the user clicks the link to open a document, the URL supplied points back to the DMS web server which then authenticates again and retrieves the document.  Sysero checks the DMS periodically for new and updated documents and extracts the metadata and index information for changes only.  This method provides all the functionality of Sysero with the integral security model of the DMS as well as the DMS history and other integrations.

1. overnight a crawling process is scheduled by conceptCollector.  A SQL query is submitted to the DMS Database to extract the metadata.  Although not exhaustive this list would include:

  • UNC

  • Title

  • Document and Version Number

  • Comments

  • Author and Operator (Name and ID)

  • Client and Matter (Name and ID)

  • Group and User Access Rights

  • Edit and Create dates


2. The UNC is used to access the document.  As the crawling process is done by the application, access would typically be direct to the file to prevent security issues and to minimise the load on the DMS server.  Both the file store and the database tables are checked for changes since the last crawl.
3. The Sysero server runs on the same machine/server farm as the collection services and is used to search the index.  The DMS metadata is used to build the hitlist for the user.  Extracts, summaries and text preview with highlighting are available in the browser.
4. When the user searches Sysero, his ID and group membership are checked against the DMS database and used to filter the search.  The format of the final URL is dependent of the retrieval mechanism used but could be the DMS web server or a third party DMS retrieval application such as TiKit Link.