Coveo Expresso: Robust Commercial product, completely FREE, but limited to Microsoft stack
While there are numerous free search solutions, only a few of them are robust and capable enough to compete with any heavyweights of Enterprise search like Autonomy. The latest news from Coveo is a first step towards significant changes in the Enterprise search market and affects both Open Source and Commercial search products -- free Coveo Expresso is bringing coffee to the free beer party.
As always, "free" sounds too good to be true, as anyone who has reached the 25,000 document limit of the free version of Ultraseek (now owned by Autonomy) can attest ("Reached your 25K document limit? Call Sales at 1-888-3287-EEK!"). In the case of Expresso, the limits are much more hip to the times: 50 users, 1 million emails and attachments, and 100,000 documents - -enough for most SMBs. The product won't suddenly stop functioning at those limits, just nag you about it, and what's more, the licenses for more users or documents are in the thousands of dollars (not tens or hundreds of thousands, as with Ultraseek).
Well, I had to try this out. Coveo claims you can get Expresso up and running in under 45 minutes; and I must admit I got running and indexing within 20 minutes without any troubles. And after that, it performs exactly as I'm used to with Coveo: a straightforward search interface, which immediately, out-of-the-box, facets on document metadata (like document type, date, author).
Still too good to be true? Well, yes. If there's one qualm I have with Expresso, it's that it's relatively limited. It's easy to get going, sure, but so is the full Coveo solution. If you want a trial run before committing to the full CES, you're better off requesting a download for that, instead of trying to extrapolate from Expresso. Actually, I find the full Coveo product is easier to use than Expresso -- CES already is one of the most straightforward solutions to implement of all that we evaluate in our Search & Information Access Report, and if you need to, you can dig into all the detailed controls -- Expresso has hidden all that.
Expresso really is Coveo Enterprise Search -- light. If this really were coffee, it'd be black, no sugar, hold the milk. It's good espresso, no doubt -- it indexes file shares, Exchange, and SharePoint, and even offers a mobile interface. So if you're a small-to-medium business that runs all thing Microsoft, you should certainly give Expresso a go. However, it doesn't currently index websites or other mailservers (let alone other sources). If your intranet isn't on SharePoint, and your email isn't on Exchange, you're not going to get a lot of value out of the software. Free or not. And that's a bit sad, given the world is moving towards Web 2.0 with a speed of level 5 hurricane.
- Michael Venford
ECM Practice Director
CIGNEX USA Office
