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Overview
RSA is one of the world's leading insurance groups with more than 20 million customers worldwide. It writes business in 130 countries and offers personal products to consumers (such as vehicle, household, travel, pet and health insurance) and commercial insurance to businesses (in areas such as liability, property and professional finance).

Challenge
The corporate intranet is used widely by the group's 24,000 global employees - not just for the usual HR information and telephone directories, but also applications that employees might need in their day-to-day job, such as a calculator to provide a quote to customers, for example. "The entire electronic knowledge we have in the company is stored on the intranet," says David Copp, UK intranet manager, RSA.

Locating individual documents wasn't always easy, as RSA had taken the decision to turn the search function off in the existing enterprise search technology used to manage intranet content. "It wasn't because we had a problem with the previous solution," clarifies Copp. "But we had changed the design of the intranet and the way it was configured meant it wasn't picking up new pages."

As a result, search was one of the key areas RSA decided to address as part of a global review of the intranet. The review was carried out through interviews with employees in focus groups and employee surveys. "The number one finding was that we needed a search engine that worked," reveals Copp. So the insurer decided to tackle the issue immediately.

Solution
First, RSA assessed whether it could solve the integration problem within the existing enterprise search technology, but this proved too costly an option. So RSA looked at other search tools on the market, including the Google Search Appliance. "We spoke to industry analysts, Gartner, to find out their opinion of Google's search tool and based on their recommendations we decided to try it," says Copp.

Copp adds, "The Google Search Appliance also offered extremely good value for money." With Google's appliance meeting all of RSA's criteria, the insurer decided to invest in two licenses to improve search functionality and enable employees to work more productively.

One of the selling points of the Google Search Appliance is that it is extremely user-friendly, since it is based on the same front-end as the Google search engine. Copp also found that the same principles of simplicity extended to the ease with which the application could be implemented and managed by the IT team.

Copp admits the entire process could have been difficult: "We're a Lotus Notes/Domino environment so it's always a little bit trickier implementing new applications than it is within a standard web hosting environment," he says. Copp did have to make some changes to the design of the intranet to ensure Google Search Appliance could crawl the Notes environment properly, "but it didn't end up being an overwhelming challenge and when we made the changes it took all of three minutes," he adds. "Overall, I would stress that configuration of the appliance is very simple, as the interface is easy to use and it was a pretty easy installation."

Results
Users have clearly accepted Google Search Appliance, as they are conducting about 7,000 searches a day now. "The feedback we've received is that, unlike other new applications we've implemented, Google Search Appliance is not a new tool they need to find out how to use first, as they recognise the interface," reports Copp.

In fact, such is the level of user enthusiasm that employees have already been requesting more functionality. "We didn't integrate Google Search Appliance with our Windows directories or Microsoft web server hosting pages, but we've already had enquiries from some departments about the possibility of being able to search the directories and company web site as well," points out Copp. "The number of requests we've received is a real indication of success."

Copp admits it's difficult to quantify the benefits of implementing Google Search Appliance, but he estimates that the time taken to search for a document on the intranet has fallen drastically. "It's definitely the fastest page on our intranet," he adds. "There's almost no point in benchmarking its performance because it delivers a sub-second response." The relevance of hits is also much higher than it was before. "It never fails to surprise me when I type in a search term that it returns the document I've been looking for," he says.

Copp recounts a message he received from a colleague the day Google Search Appliance was launched: "One of the feedback reports we received was from an employee who had been searching high and low for a form he required, but he'd had no luck. Then bang, along came Google and it was the third link on the results page when he conducted the search. So it's definitely helping people locate the information they're after more successfully than before," he says.

Copp acknowledges there's further opportunity for RSA to refine its use of Google Search Appliance, such as the use of keymatch configurations around people's names. "What we have done, however, is a fair amount of work around pigeonholing content into various collections, which has helped and that aspect of configuration is very useful," he notes.

Some employees are also using the search functionality in ways that Google might not have first anticipated. "Google Search Appliance can convert file types, for example, you can obtain text-only versions of spreadsheets or pdfs, which is very useful," observes Copp. Similarly, he wants to capitalise on the popularity of the Google search facility by "using the page for some communication needs as well," he adds.

About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google's award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies; the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications; and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units. For more information, visit http://www.google.co.uk/enterprise/.