Coveo Relevance Cloud vs. HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued)

Coveo Relevance Cloud is a great solution to implement into Salesforce to provide Knowledge-Centered Support, Enhancements to a Customer Community, to provide sales aids, or to complement your customized app in Salesforce.

Incentivized

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

• Good library of connectors to enterprise repositories including MS SharePoint, Exchange, Confluence. OOTB using the Open Connector API administrators were fairly easily be able to index content repositories.
• Good security integration with existing repositories.

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.

• Coveo does its job but is lacking.
• The results displayed by Coveo are not always relevant.
• The results displayed by Coveo are not sorted, nor is there an option to sort.
• The results displayed by Coveo are not location-specific, so results not relevant to my area or country gets shown.

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?

We still have many clients which have custom search implementations supported by Coveo which crawl their Sitecore instances. From that perspective, I'm very likely to use it again. One of the main drawbacks I have heard is that Coveo is relatively expensive. The size of your project budget may have a greater influence on your decision to use Coveo if the custom features are not must-haves for your organization

Incentivized

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.

• Quick to find things in a massive database when needed.
• Results need to be more concise - sometimes we spend more time looking for the right file than if we were to just search amongst our own networks instead.
• Coveo is not always the most useful but does its job when general information is needed.

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.