Press Release

November 2004

Bel Selects Exalead one:enterprise for their World-Wide Intranet

The international cheese maker Bel (known for brands such as Babybel, The Laughing Cow and also Leerdammer) is using exalead one:enterprise so their 3000 employees can efficiently access all company document resources.

Inaugurated last September, this new search and navigation service allows all employees to find pertinent information from Bel's intranet with a single search request, no matter where the information may be located within their network.

Bel uses exalead one:enterprise to federate 30 diverse information sources: Lotus Notes databases, Internet sites, file systems, an LDAP directory, etc. In total, it allows users to instantaneously search through 300 000 documents in all document formats: Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, HTML, etc.

For Bel, the risk of not investing in this information access technology would have been costly. By using this tool, they:

Encourage company cohesion by making their Intranet a reference for all employees to use.

Provide a tool that assists decision making by making access to the Bel's knowledge capital easy.

Promote the creation of knowledge capital by encouraging the creation and storage of electronic documents.

"Exalead one:enterprise was chosen from a dozen national and international software suppliers¡, says Jean Marc Lazard, project manager at Bel. ´Our product selection process we made with Business Interactif quickly oriented us towards exalead one:enterprise. Its innovative features answered our technical needs, provided a short implementation time, and ensured the security of our information systems."

Exalead one:enterprise has many ergonomic features that makes searching for information much easier.

Features such as spelling correction, phonetic (sounds-like) search, and approximate matching all help to overcome user errors and misspellings that are the most common cause for receiving no search results. For example, a user is searching for a name they heard on a telephone or in a meeting without knowing the exact spelling. Exalead one:enterprise automatically displays a list names or words with similar spellings that the user can choose from.

And then there is the navigation system. It provides users with a dynamically-generated overview of the search results that allows them to quickly refine their search by clicking on an author, a date, a concept, or other axis. Users can thus access in a few seconds the pertinent documents they are looking for.

One of the reasons Bel chose exalead one:enterprise was for its ability to met the technical needs of the project: Reliability, the need for flexible deployment, and the capacity to respect the pre-existing security systems of their Bel's network. The wide variety of integrated connectors allowed Bel to easily bring together many diverse information sources. As all of Exalead's natural language functions are automatic, they do not require hand-made dictionaries or thesauruses, so the time required to bring exalead one:enterprise up and running was very quick.

Finally, it was critical that the chosen solution does not compromise the security of Bel's network. With exalead one:enterprise, the security profile of every indexed document is taken into account: Users only have access to documents that they are authorized to see.

In working with Bel, Exalead is going to implement new features in the next few weeks: Monitoring and alerts (to automatically watch for new information on a topic) and a connector to access data from Microsoft SPS applications.

Exalead shows once again its ability to bring simple and innovative information access solutions to real-world corporate problems: A single access point to information, automated and flexible tools to help guide users.

World's No. 1 in branded, pre-cut portions of packaged processed cheese, and No. 1 cheese spread producer in France and the rest of Europe - with leadership positions in a significant number of countries among the largest world markets:

Bel does business in over 100 countries; in 2003 sales exceeded three billion Euros with nearly 10,000 employees.

Bel has developed a portfolio of more than 20 international and domestic brands strongly positioned in their respective markets: The Laughing Cow® is sold in almost 100 countries, Kiri® and Mini Babybel® in over 60. The recently acquired Leerdammer® brand is one of the most dynamic Swiss-style cheeses on the market in Europe today.