HCR Manor Care Selects Endeca ProFind To Power Search and Navigation of Corporate Intranet

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 18, 2005 -- Endeca, the leading provider of Guided Navigation®, Search and Analysis solutions, today announced that HCR Manor Care (NYSE: HCR) has selected and deployed the Endeca ProFind™ enterprise search, navigation and Content Spotlighting platform for its corporate intranet. The new solution is designed to give employees quick and intuitive access to the latest must-have information, as well as collective company knowledge and best practices.

Manor Care is the leading owner and operator of long-term care centers in the United States. With its staff dispersed across a network of more than 500 skilled nursing centers, assisting living facilities, outpatient clinics and hospice and home health care offices, the company's intranet serves as a primary information resource for its nearly 60,000 employees. The intranet contains thousands of documents in a wide array of file formats, including certain content of a highly sensitive nature that can only be viewed by select employees through specific permissions.

"The goal for our intranet is to get people what they need to see every day -- information that helps our staff deliver the highest quality patient care, run successful operations at our facilities and meet key business goals," said Ken Kutz, Senior Manager Web Development at HCR Manor Care. "With advanced capabilities like Guided Navigation and Content Spotlighting, Endeca helps us promote important, new content while helping employees quickly access the specific information most relevant to their individual tasks."

HCR Manor Care's new Endeca-powered intranet search features advanced information retrieval capabilities, including:

  • Highly Relevant Search: Makes keyword and linguistic searching on HCR Manor Care's intranet as quick and easy as searching the Web. Endeca offers multiple, flexible relevancy ranking techniques to optimize the order in which results are returned. In addition, Endeca ProFind offers spell correction/suggestion, wildcard searching, stemming, and thesaurus management to improve search success rates.
  • Guided Navigation: An information retrieval breakthrough that presents results and dynamically generated refinement options to help users find content most relevant to their unique needs
  • Content Spotlighting: Promotes and highlights specific content based search terms, Guided Navigation refinements and user profile
  • Document level security: Ensures users are only able to retrieve documents that they are authorized to view. Endeca stores Access Control List information at a document level, and integrates into HCR Manor Care's NTLM authentication framework to enforce security. All navigation options, spelling suggestions and other features are determined in the context of the user's authentication.
  • Taxonomy Integration and Management: Integrates existing homegrown taxonomy into Endeca ProFind enabling HCR Manor Care to leverage the investment that they have made in document categorization through Endeca. In addition to maintaining the existing taxonomy structure, Endeca's Guided Navigation also separates aspects of the taxonomy such as document type and line of business, which users can now browse independently. This gives users more ways to reach documents and substantially increases findability.

Used on Web sites, intranets, extranets, and within enterprises, Endeca ProFind is a next-generation information retrieval platform that combines highly advanced search with Guided Navigation and Content Spotlighting capabilities to help people quickly and easily find the information most relevant to their unique needs. Endeca's approach to information retrieval mimics the human discovery process by integrating the two most common means of finding information online -- searching and browsing -- allowing people to continually adapt and hone their search based on their own determination of relevancy. Endeca ProFind's robust and easily managed Content Spotlighting capabilities promote relevant content based on defined rules, such as user profile or workgroup, search terms, navigation options, and time of day or day of the week. This combination gives organizations the powerful and intuitive tools to maximize the value of internal and external information, regardless of source, structure or file type.

About HCR Manor Care
HCR Manor Care, Inc. is the leading owner and operator of long-term care centers in the United States. The company's nearly 60,000 employees provide high-quality care for patients and residents through a network of more than 500 skilled nursing centers, assisted living facilities, outpatient rehabilitation clinics, and hospice and home health care offices. Alliances and other ventures supply high-quality pharmaceutical products and management services for professional organizations. The company operates primarily under the respected Heartland, ManorCare and Arden Courts names. HCR Manor Care is committed to being the preeminent care provider in the industry. Shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HCR.

About Endeca
Endeca's award-winning Guided Navigation, Enterprise Search, and Analysis solutions help organizations integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve business problems associated with information overload. Endeca's customers include a wide range of enterprises, including retailers (Barnes & Noble, The Home Depot, Wal-Mart); financial services (Bank of America, MFS Investment Management, Putnam Investments); manufacturing and distribution (IBM, Arrow Electronics, and John Deere); media and publishing (World Book and IHS) and government (the Library of Congress, NASA, and the National Cancer Institute). Endeca is a private company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. More information: www.endeca.com or info@endeca.com.


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