Syl 3.12 was announced at the Syl User Group meeting and the feature list was quickly recognised as providing significant new capabilities and immediate benefits. To avoid further marketing hype, let's highlight a couple of the new features so you can decide for yourself.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detection

Syl has ramped up its use of pattern recognition to detect a wide array of PII data and tag content to utilise this information in searching, reporting, and actionable insights.

Topic Modelling

Syl applies statistical modelling to identify prevalent topics within the content and add the discovered topics as searchable metadata. It also presents a new visualisation of topics as they relate to other topics, allowing users to explore content in a powerful way. This level of metadata enrichment opens a doorway to more powerful analysis of your unstructured content, as well as providing users with another approach to information discovery. 

Tree View

Data becomes information when you add context. Users are therefore very pleased to have the option of viewing search results in the containers (folders, files, aggregations) that the document was found in. This provides additional context to the results that can help quickly locate relevant and related information. Providing hierarchical contextual information at a glance has already been highlighted by users as providing a benefit that will likely be utilised on a high proportion of all searches.

Language Detection

This new feature which is optionally enabled instructs Syl carry out an analysis of document content to determine what language the content is recorded in. In its initial release Syl will detect: English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese and Te reo Māori. Content is tagged with the appropriate language code for the language that was detected. 

Wildcard Search

This feature comes into its own when combined with the PII capability mentioned above. Once personal information has been identified in the corpus of content indexed, wildcard search applied to the various PII tags can help locate items of interest, no matter how much they are spread across your content. For instance, a search query can be used to retrieve all content where a PII entity such as credit card has been potentially detected. Wildcard search also applies to all derived metadata properties by default. 

Dropbox

Syl now supports Dropbox as a content source. Files within Dropbox accounts are crawled, harvested, and made available for search and security permissions are honoured. In addition, specific Dropbox content types such as ‘Paper’ documents are also supported. Syl support for Dropbox is aimed at organisation subscription plans and includes a new Dropbox uses and groups directory sync. 

Extract Mode

We cannot end this news item without mentioning the Extract Mode. This mode allows Syl clients to utilise the Syl Platform to extract content from source systems. Extract Mode extracts content and metadata to a staging area in preparation for migrating from (for example) a legacy system such as Lotus Notes, or SharePoint. Extract mode can also be used to simply archive content. Content and meta data extracted can also optionally be made available for search in Syl. The use cases for this mode will likely expand over the next few releases, as we have some innovative ideas being worked on by our amazing dev team.  

If any of these features piqued your interest, or you just want better control and discoverability of your content across the Enterprise, then please, drop us a line.