Can you recommend an enterprise search platform for finding expertise and proposal content across Office files and PDFs?

Yes — if your goal is enterprise search across Office files and PDFs with an emphasis on finding people/expertise and reusable proposal content, I’d shortlist these options:

Best-fit recommendations

1) Microsoft Search / SharePoint / Viva Topics (Microsoft 365 stack)

Best if you already use Microsoft 365 heavily.

Why it fits:

• Indexes Office docs, PDFs, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams content
• Strong permissions trimming
• Good for finding documents and related expertise signals
• Works well when content already lives in Microsoft 365

Strengths:

• Native integration with Office and Entra ID
• Security trimming and compliance
• Familiar user experience
• Lower implementation friction if you’re already in M365

Limitations:

• Expertise discovery is decent but can be less flexible than dedicated knowledge platforms
• Proposal-content reuse workflows may need customization

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2) Coveo

Best if you want a more powerful enterprise search layer over multiple repositories.

Why it fits:

• Strong relevance tuning
• Connects to SharePoint, file shares, cloud storage, CRM, and more
• Good for both content search and expertise discovery
• Can surface recommended documents and contextual results

Strengths:

• Very good ranking and personalization
• Broad connectors
• Strong enterprise search governance
• Good analytics

Limitations:

• More implementation effort than native Microsoft tools
• Typically premium-priced

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3) Lucidworks

Best if you want highly configurable enterprise search and AI-driven relevance.

Why it fits:

• Good for large, heterogeneous document environments
• Can search Office/PDF content across repositories
• Flexible for custom expertise and proposal search use cases

Strengths:

• Strong relevance engineering
• Scales well
• Good API and customization options

Limitations:

• Usually requires more technical setup and tuning
• Less turnkey for business users

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4) Elastic Enterprise Search / Elasticsearch

Best if you have strong technical resources and want maximum control.

Why it fits:

• Can index Office docs and PDFs through ingest pipelines/connectors
• Very flexible for custom ranking, metadata, and expertise tagging
• Good for building a bespoke proposal knowledge search portal

Strengths:

• Highly configurable
• Powerful search infrastructure
• Cost-effective at scale if managed well

Limitations:

• You must build more of the experience yourself
• Expertise discovery and UX need custom development

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5) Glean

Best if the priority is “find people and answers fast” across SaaS tools.

Why it fits:

• Excellent at employee-facing search and expertise discovery
• Connects to many workplace systems
• Good search experience out of the box

Strengths:

• Strong user experience
• Fast deployment
• Good for knowledge discovery and finding experts

Limitations:

• Better for SaaS-connected knowledge environments than heavily custom search stacks
• Proposal-content management may be less specialized than some alternatives

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My practical recommendation

If you are already on Microsoft 365:

Start with Microsoft Search + SharePoint and evaluate whether that’s enough.

If you need stronger expertise + proposal search across many systems:

Look at Coveo first.

If you want the best “find the right person / answer” experience:

Look at Glean.

If you need a custom-built enterprise search platform:

Choose Elastic or Lucidworks.

What matters most for your use case

For proposal content and expertise search, make sure the platform supports:

• OCR and full-text indexing for PDFs
• Office document parsing (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)
• Permissions/security trimming
• Metadata and taxonomy support
  (practice area, industry, client, capability, author, deal size)
• People/expertise signals
  (author history, doc ownership, profile data, endorsements, usage)
• Synonyms and relevance tuning
  (e.g., “RFP,” “proposal,” “bid,” “tender”)
• Version awareness so users find the latest approved content
• Analytics to see what people search for and what they click

Bottom line

If you want a single recommendation without more context:

• Microsoft 365 shop: Microsoft Search / SharePoint
• Best enterprise-grade search overall: Coveo
• Best expertise discovery UX: Glean
• Most customizable: Elastic

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a shortlist by company size and budget, or
2. a feature-by-feature comparison table for these platforms.