The Ides of March Is Fast Approaching; Take Heed of Any Warnings in Your Enterprise Data

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Kevin Price of the Price of Business show discusses the topic with Thede on a recent interview.

The Ides of March is fast approaching. Take heed of any warnings in your enterprise data so you can prepare in advance before a hidden risk gets the jump on you. While I don’t know exactly what lurks in your data, there’s a good chance something represents a hidden risk. Maybe it’s a deal that went south. Maybe it’s a former client. Maybe it’s a former employee. But you won’t fully know what’s in your data until you deploy enterprise search.

What does enterprise search do?

Enterprise search enables instant concurrent searching through terabytes from a standard Windows network, from an “on premises” web server or from a cloud server. To instantly concurrently search terabytes, enterprise search first needs to index the data. Indexing identifies each individual word and number in the data and its location in the full-text and metadata. A single dtSearch index can hold up to a terabyte of text and there is no limit on the number of indexes the software can create and simultaneously search.

How much work is it to start indexing?

All you need to do is check off the folders to index. dtSearch’s “off-the-shelf” Windows software can cover both local files as well as remote files like SharePoint, Office365 and DropBox files that present as part of the Windows folder system. No need to tell the indexer whether a particular file is local or remote or what type of file it is. While the indexer needs to identify the file type of each file before parsing it, the indexer can on its own figure out if each file is a word processing document, a spreadsheet, a database, a presentation file, a note file, a PDF, an email with attachments, etc.

How does the indexer make this determination?

The indexer uses the binary format for file format identification and subsequent parsing. It doesn’t matter if the file has a mismatched file extension like a OneNote file saved with a .PDF extension or a PDF saved with a .ONE extension. The indexer can even process recursively nested files like an email with a ZIP or RAR attachment holding a spreadsheet with a Word document nested inside. By going directly to the binary format and bypassing the retrieval of each file in its associated application, the indexer has the advantage of not only greater speed but also enhanced access.

Like what?

All metadata, even obscure metadata that you might miss clicking around in an associated application display, is immediately available in the binary format. Text that is camouflaged in an associated application view like black writing against a black background or white writing against a white background is just regular text in the binary format. The indexer can also access tracked changes that have not been fully accepted, or text marked for redaction that even if not visible by default from an application display still remains with the file. The indexer can even flag “image only” PDFs requiring OCR for full-text indexing.

How does dtSearch handle data updates?

dtSearch can automate index updates so the indexer can tackle only the new, modified or deleted files, without re-doing the entire dataset “from scratch.” Critically for enterprise use, re-indexing does not prevent searching, so instant concurrent searching can continue while indexes automatically update.

So what types of searches can you do to identify suspect data?

Say you were searching for the ides of march. You could do an exact phrase search for ides of march. Or you could enter an “any words” search finding files that reference either ides or march. Or you could perform an “all words” search retrieving only files mentioning both ides and march. You could also add other Boolean and/or/not components to your search, like requiring both deal that went south and former employee with no mention of sunny day.

You could further enter a proximity search for ides appearing within 15 words of march. Or you could narrow that search request, retrieving only files that contain ides within 6 words before march. Or you could require ides of march in specific metadata. Or you could look for a number or numeric range. Or you could add on a date or date range element in certain metadata or across all text. Searching 3/5/26 to 4/1/26 would pick up both 3/15/26 and March 15, 2026 in the text.

Anything else?

Concept searching lets you enter a synonym like Joe for Joseph. Fuzzy searching adjusts from 1 to 10 to sift through typographical or OCR errors like emplovee for employee. For multinational organizations, dtSearch works with not only English text but also any other Unicode text, including European languages with different alphabets, double-byte Asian text and right-to-left Middle Eastern text. In addition to word-based searching, dtSearch can also search for other Unicode characters like specific Unicode emojis. The product can even flag any credit card numbers that may appear in indexed data.

What about sorting?

Default relevancy ranking will sort by hit density and rarity. Take a search for ides or march. If march is in millions of files while ides is in just a few, then ides will get a higher relevancy score with files with the densest mentions coming out on top. Users can also define their own relevancy-ranking like giving ides a positive weight of 8 and Caesar a negative weight of 6. For a different perspective on search results, instantly re-sort search results by a completely different metric like file date or file location. Whatever the sorting, dtSearch will display the full text of retrieved files with highlighted hits for convenient browsing.

Final thoughts?

dtSearch.com has fully-functional 30-day evaluation downloads to start your organization now on instant concurrent searching in anticipation of the Ides of March—or simply to find what you need to get on with your day.

=====================================

About dtSearch®. dtSearch has enterprise and developer products that run “on premises” or on cloud platforms to instantly search terabytes of “Office” files, PDFs, emails along with nested attachments, databases and online data. Because dtSearch can instantly search terabytes with over 25 different concurrent search options, many dtSearch customers are Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. But anyone with lots of data to search can download a fully-functional 30-day evaluation copy from dtSearch.com

Connect with Elizabeth Thede on social media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-thede-4a5a042/