Syl Content Audits can provide a comprehensive inventory all the digital assets (files, emails, web pages and data records) within the various content systems in your organisation. This can include detailed metadata and content analytics including the content that is embedded within other digital assets, to build a detailed catalogue of all the information in your organisation.

You can build reports and queries on any number of attributes to better understand the information assets you hold and discover trends over time.

How is this different from Enterprise Search?

The Syl Platform can audit every single digital asset within a source system regardless of the content. Typically, an Enterprise Search system will only index those asset types (file and data formats) that it knows how to process and make available for full text search.

Content systems inside an organisation can contain data types that are completely ignored by other enterprise search systems for reasons such as:

• Formats that are proprietary to a data management system.

• Files that are password protected and unable to be opened.

• Files that are corrupt or malformed

• Files without any text data to harvest, e.g. image and audio files, etc.

• Files embedded within other files, e.g. images within documents, or files attached to emails, etc.

• Files inside package/archive files such as .ZIP and .PST files.

Understand your digital asset profile

Most organisations have little to no understanding of their digital assets or trends over time.

It is critical for every business to gain insight and control of ever-increasing volumes of data, to better understand what information you hold and how to make this knowledge work more effectively for you and your customers.

Syl content auditing can lead to dramatically improved outcomes for the management of assets, such as:

• Better utilisation of system resources.

• Proactively reduce risk of data loss and unauthorised access by ensuring permissions, archival and security policies are correctly applied.

• Gain insights into content creation trends.

• Vastly improved qualification and quantification of content held.

• Support regulated information management compliance directives.

• Provide better requirements measurement and decision-making regarding:

  • Enterprise Search implementation.

  • Projects to migrate data to Electronic Document Management and Content Management systems.

Metadata is key

Syl Content Audit has two modes, Syl Inventory and Syl Discovery:

• Syl Inventory is driven by the metadata that describes a digital asset in the source system. This generally includes detailed information for each and every asset including its file type, format, version (optional), size, when it was created and last modified etc. Inventory can quickly deliver an extensive catalogue of your content across many sources.
• Syl Discovery is a more intensive process allowing certain metadata to be generated as it processes the assets, thereby augmenting the inventory with additional metadata over and above the source system metadata. Syl Discovery can open and extract information from a range of files types including embedded files. This can significantly aid in the contextualisation of the audit data held about a given asset to determine any number of different characteristics that may be important.

In addition, Syl’s Semantic Technology can optionally be enabled to automatically generate metadata tags based on semantic dictionary concepts/terms or pattern matching such as identifying credit card numbers for each digital asset. This derived metadata and semantic tagging can enhance the overall quality of the content audit by providing a deeper level of analysis with richer and more detailed insights into the digital assets within an organisation's content systems.

Report and Analyse

The content audit information can be exported from Syl and imported into your established business intelligence tools for detailed analysis.

Implement quickly and easily within the enterprise

Syl can be rapidly deployed via hardware appliance(s), as a Virtual Machine or in the Cloud.

• Configuration is simple, allowing an organisation to be up and running within hours.
• Syl is totally self-contained and is not dependent on additional software prerequisites, i.e. licenses and costs.
• Deploy once – operate globally. Syl does not require multiple deployments and licenses to operate in a geographically dispersed organisation; true centralised, global search.

Manage Simply and Effectively

Syl provides administrators with an easy to use web based management tool.

• Understand and control what Syl is doing and when
• Easily configure Syl to connect to and process content from all your disparate content silos. Most common content source systems and types supported by default.