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.

Recently I oversaw an internal development effort to integrate Vivisimo's Velocity search engine into Microsoft SharePoint and JBoss Portal.  CapTech has experience with several search products and many have the same integration challenges.  We found that Velocity's architecture simplifies or eliminates many of these challenges.  Here are just a few great features that we leveraged in this project.