Many of my clients have been through several iterations of improvements and refinements to their enterprise portal / corporate intranet environments to include portal personalization and customization, improved content management integration and content authoring, and basic search.  In fact these features are now considered to be “Phase One” items on new implementations as well.

What is emerging now is the expansion of these portals / intranets to include a truly integrated enterprise search.  Vendors such as Vivisimo (Velocity), Google (Google Search Appliance), and Microsoft (FAST) provide search engines that provide an extended reach beyond portal and content managed information to include data from enterprise systems such as PeopleSoft, SAP, and Cognos, etc.  These systems can be searched via vendor specific connector technologies, which is typically accomplished through a customized API and an extension to an organization's services tier.  These search vendors also provide information optimization capabilities such as faceted results (categories), user tagging, and relevance rating, etc.

At several of our clients, we have integrated the Google Search appliance into a Portal.  In order to accomplish this integration we could take 1 of 2 approaches:

1.     Utilize GSA’s built-in ability to format the presentation logic via a XLST.

At several of our clients, we have integrated the Google Search appliance into a Portal. In order to accomplish this integration we could take 1 of 2 approaches:

1. Utilize GSA’s built-in ability to format the presentation logic via a XLST.

2. Utilize GSA’s ability to return straight XML.

Both approaches work well and can suit the needs of a portal. Option 1 though will not work if you need to sort the entire result set prior to displaying it to the users. The reasons for this is as follows:

In order to provide searching within the portal a strategy had to be defined with how to integrate Alfresco with GSA. There were two approaches considered:

1. Utilize the traditional approach and have GSA crawl Alfresco through either a webscript mechanism or via CIFS.

2. Utilize the GSA Feed based approach.

After careful review we decided upon the feed base approach for the following reasons:

1. Meta Data: In order to support the Faceted searching, we need to find a way to attach metadata to each content item. Given that our HTML code is just snippets and does not contain a header with this information and that we are indexing documents, the only way to reliably accomplish this was via the feed.