Our client has a significant array of internal systems, reports, and tools available to its users, however users find it difficult to know what applications, functions and data are available. InnovaLab was engaged to improve discoverability within the Core suite of applications, our brief was to make artefacts such as users, applications and reports within Core systems accessible to its users. It was critical the search was intuitive, accurate and performant.

The challenge for InnovaLab was to integrate Azure Cognitive Search (ACS) into the existing complex architecture, technology stack and proprietary security model. Further we were engaged to understand existing data sources within their microservices architecture and leverage those to populate indexes within ACS. Each index was designed to store business and application data coupled with the user permissions required to access that index item. A further customisation was developed to provide admin users with the ability to add custom tags to indexes thereby allowing for recursive, intelligent searches. This allowed us to provide users with helpful suggestions for further searches. InnovaLab was additionally engaged to develop the user interface a global widget to allow users to search from any page within Core.