FACILITATING YOUR EVALUATION PROCESS

Criteria and Capabilities

In our enterprise search planning and evaluation framework, ¹ we present the criteria that we believe are important when evaluating how well any given offering will support an organization’s needs. The criteria represent six major areas: seeker interface, seeker experience management, search applications, information collection management, architecture, and company and product viability.

We base our criteria on Customer Scenarios and focus on the key differentiators in our evaluation of current vendor solutions.

Each organization is different, with different skills, requirements, and architectures. You should evaluate which features are important to your situation and which may be able to be traded off without harm. To assist you in your evaluation efforts, we are presenting the criteria in matrix form with blank columns. You can use this matrix to notate the capabilities of the short list of products you are currently investigating. ² Feel free to delete features which you don’t require and to highlight those capabilities that are of the highest priority in your environment. We hope you find this matrix useful for prioritizing capabilities as well as for collecting and organizing information about product search alternatives.

Enterprise Search Planning and Evaluation Matrix, Version 3
(Please download the PDF to view the evaluation matrix table.)

**FOOTNOTES**
1) See “ Enterprise Search Planning and Evaluation Framework, Version 3 : How to Plan and Select Search, Navigation, and Discovery Solutions for Web Sites, Applications, Intranets, and as Enterprise Platforms,” January 3, 2008, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/fw12-20-07cc .

2) * By Patricia Seybold Group, Inc. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 2.5 License. You are free to copy, distribute, alter, and build upon this document as long as attribution is given to the Patricia Seybold Group, Inc. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
**FOOTNOTES**