Doubtless you all have heard or participated in the best of breed vs the one vendor stack debate.  I can lean both ways on that debate depending on what kind of solution you need.   There is a time and place for both approaches.  However, sometimes it’s far too easy to get caught up in the debate and let commonsense go by the wayside.  The following example shows how you can do just that.

What Happened

Glenn Kline and I were called into a client to review an ongoing portal project at a very large firm on the East coast.  What we found was an ongoing content heavy portal project that had slid past the $2 million mark.  They were close to launching but had a number of problems to work out and wanted a third party view.  While many things went wrong with that project, one stands out.  They had chosen a java based portal to deliver content and applications.  They had chosen a powerful metadata based content management tool to deliver the content.  The CM tool came with an embedded search engine called Verity K2. (later bought by Autonomy).  Using the best of breed approach, the project had chosen Google Search Appliance (GSA) as their search engine of choice.  Here’s the process for how the portal delivered content:

1. User posts a search from the portal
2. Google searches all the content
3. For each search result from GSA, they would make a call to Verity to see if the user was authorized
4. The result set would decrease based on whether or not the user was able to see the results.
5. In many cases, 50 search results became five or six results that could be displayed.
6. Because of how the results came, this completely messed with the pagination of results.  Some ‘pages’ would display two results. Others. would display more or less.
7. As you might guess because of the round trips required for each search result, this was also an extremely slow way to get at the results.

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Quote of the day: “Before I show you this, please remember that I wasn’t here when they made this decision.”

What Should Have Happened

I’m actually a big fan of the Google Search Appliance. I think it’s extremely powerful and it’s true you can get it up and running quickly.   However, this was not a great way to use GSA.   It wasn’t integrated to the content engine.  It wasn’t able to get the ACL to determine who could not see content.   Conversely, the already fully integrated Verity K2 search engine did all of that out of the box.  All you had to do was post the query and get a result.  They ended up doing that anyway but instead of doing it in a mass query, they called Verity for each individual result.

In hindsight, it was obvious they should have stuck with the out of the box search engine and made their lives much easier.  The lesson here is to weigh all factors in a best of breed decision.  Many times, an already integrated solution may be far better because the integration is already done.  I’ve made that case before when I talk about Portal WCM vs third party WCM.

So when a whiteboard architect has a purist approach that will be “the best” remember to apply a pragmatic view to see if you aren’t going to get yourself into trouble.

Previous Installments

1. Where’s My Homepage?!?
2. The Business Asked for It
3. Methodology for Methodology’s Sake
4. The Never Ending Strategy
5. I Built It But Now I Can’t Support It
6. We Can Get Big ROI From a Portal

Join us this month on Wed, June 29th for our Perficient Perspectives webinar in which we explore the 12 Things You Shouldn’t Do on a Portal Project in depth.  More Info / Register