Glean vs. HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued)

When I am interviewing candidates and they start asking specific questions that I dont know the answer to, I use Glean chat to quickly find answers. It helps save time because I can really quickly find the answers to anything. I think if leaders care about their employers, they would get Glean!

Incentivized

It does a decent job at its core functions (that other free software does just as well or better).

• Single search capability across all systems
• High accuracy of search results
• Saves you time in day to day work
• Offers customization with the homepage and go links

Incentivized

• It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.
• It provides OK search results. Not great, but OK.

• The AI Chat can definitely improve. I will ask it questions about our sales process and it should be referencing documents that I know are in our company Glean, but it will give me the wrong answer.

Incentivized

• There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.
• The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.
• Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"
• It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

Management wants to see ROI on the (hefty) cost of purchasing this software, and has mandated that we continue using it. We would prefer to switch immediately.

I give it a 5 because of the chat not giving accurate answers and also sometimes I will search for documents that I know used to be in Guru before we had it but now it is no longer in Glean

Incentivized

Personally I am not from the evaluation team but I feel ChatGPT , Gemini are good as well.

Incentivized

• Quickly able to find answers for customers allowing me to be more proactive with them
• allows me to quickly access info for all follow up emails for customers

Incentivized

• I have learned to tack a zero onto the end of any estimate I make for how long an Autonomy change will take in both planning and implementation.