Nintex

Nintex Switches to AddSearch and Spends Zero Time on Search Maintenance

Nintex is the global standard for process management and automation, empowering more than 10,000 public and private sector organizations across 90 countries to accelerate progress on their digital transformation journeys by quickly and easily managing, automating, and optimizing business processes.

Nintex has a centralized website in English and a number of smaller local language sites. Additionally, the organization maintains microsites, as well as content and audience-specific subdomains, some of which use WordPress and others that are external and hosted by third parties.

Nintex needed to index content from a variety of different sources and formats and implement the content across third-party sites that aren’t built on WordPress.

The challenge

Previously, Nintex was using Coveo as their site search platform. They found it to be expensive and it was very time-consuming to make changes. Jason Miller, Corporate Marketing Web Developer at Nintex, mentioned, “I likened it to a cruise ship. If you wanted to change something, it took a lot to turn the ship.

“There were also a lot of specialists required to work on the code and integrate it with the site, so when we wanted to make small changes, we couldn’t just go in easily and do what was required.”

The search for a site search solution

Nintex was looking for a solution that was more flexible, easier to control, and more intuitive. When they came across AddSearch, Jason was surprised and thought there had to be a catch: “All the other providers we were evaluating had the features we were after, but they were much more complex and much more expensive.”

Jason continues: “We had 12 essential criteria on our checklist and our final shortlist included Elastic Search and AddSearch. In the end, the AddSearch team’s responsiveness to our initial questions put them in the lead.”

Why Nintex loves using AddSearch

Implementation and support

“The rollout was exceedingly easy. I’m astonished at how easy it ended up being! Also, the support we got was amazing.”

“The AddSearch Support team was very responsive to any of my questions, and there was also quite a lot of documentation available for reference. In situations where there wasn’t an obvious solution, AddSearch was also very proactive in suggesting effective workaround solutions, often sending me pre-written code to try.”

Jason was happy that the implementation process was complete one month ahead of schedule.

“With a small internal team, I felt that AddSearch support was like my backup team. I can’t even tell you how grateful I am for those guys.”

Site areas

“Anything that makes it easier to work with multiple subdomains has been incredibly useful. The fact that we can prioritize one subdomain over another has been super nice, and even areas within a particular subdomain.”

One example is Nintex’s community website which has around 25,000 pages and was generating almost 100,000 results in the index. “It turned out that there was an issue with inconsistent capitalization of certain letters from some third-party domains.”

Using AddSearch’s site areas, Nintex was able to disregard certain spellings and only index what they preferred. “By using site areas, and excluding those domains or subdirectories, we were able to craft an index that didn’t require us to change our code or server. The fact that the AddSearch platform was able to do that and basically ‘fix’ the third-party issues was just amazing.”

Custom fields

Having so many different groups and different types of content, it wasn’t always possible to use the same type of filtering across all sites. With certain sites like those built on WordPress, it was easier, but for other sites using a completely different system, the problem became more complex.

There were around nine different systems that Nintex needed to be matched across. “With AddSearch we were able to configure things so that when a user searched on our site, you could not only limit it by subdomain but also limit it by type of content, across subdomains, which was incredible.”

Synonyms

“Like most companies, we have phrases that we use that are shortcuts, but we don’t always put them in the blog posts. With synonyms, we were able to set a rule so that if someone searches on a certain term, say ‘NWC,’ we’re able to pull up any results with, say, ‘workflow’, or ‘workflow cloud’, or ‘NintexWorkflowCloud’ as one word, for example. We were able to get all the results without having to change the content; simply by linking it all together in the platforms’ back end. It alleviated a lot of stress!”

API

“Being able to add code into the backend of WordPress that, for example, updates the index when a post is set to ‘draft’ or a new page published, has been a godsend. It allows us to hand indexing off to the editors. No waiting a week for new posts to show up in search!”

Ranking tools

“One of the questions I’m asked the most is: Why can’t we search using quotes and have only that term show up? With AddSearch’s new ranking tools I was able to have exact matches show up at the top, which to me provides a better UX. Having all the results show up, but then the perfect match results showing at the top is ideal. What we see a lot is that people think they know what they’re searching for, so they try to do an exact match search, and when they don’t get any results, they’re confused as to why.”

With ranking tools, Nintex was able to completely overcome this issue.

“Right now, the ranking tools are my favorite. However, there seem to be new tools and features being released often, and all have been great!”

What improved by using AddSearch?

Noticeably better search experience

After a month of having AddSearch on the website, three other business units went to Jason requesting to have AddSearch implemented on their sites too. “To roll something out and to have people be that impressed with it, so quickly – that says a lot.”

Cross-search results

“Our cross-search results have increased, meaning that the people who start their search on our main site and then continue to our other sites have increased quite a bit. It definitely suggests that people are finding things much more easily and intuitively.”

Time saving

“The search maintenance is just amazing. We don’t need to worry about it anymore. The flow is simple and indexes are updated immediately, we don’t need to wait a week. Changes are painless. The speed of maintenance alone is a huge benefit.”

“Once the implementation was done, I literally had to spend zero time maintaining it.”