Forrester: Firms need better desktop search software

IT departments should adopt desktop search tools with administrative capabilities because the large amount of data being stored on hard drives has caused many business users to download consumer search tools to find the documents they need, Forrester has suggested.

Research by the analyst firm revealed that 32 per cent of business users have downloaded desktop search software, CIO magazine reported.

Leslie Owens, an analyst at Forrester, said that this was because the desktop search tools on users' machines were inadequate for their purposes.

"People are just looking for productivity enhancers because there is just so much information to look through," she said.

Ms Owens explained that downloading consumer search tools was potentially dangerous.

One example of this is difficult email discovery.

People will "replicate email on their hard drive" so that their consumer search tool of choice can search it.

"Imagine the logistical nightmare of trying to pull locally stored email caches from every employee's hard drive in response to litigation," Ms Owens wrote in the report.

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