Experience Management

Chris Cook joined our Google practice as a Solution Architect in 2013, arriving with over 25 years of IT experience, including technology deployments, network and security systems, and enterprise search solutions.  Chris has architected and deployed some of our largest and most complex Google Search Appliance implementations, including an aggressive project that indexed a multi-million document SharePoint repository and […]

For many years, People Search with the Google Search Appliance was essentially a glorified phonebook lookup.  Our customers could search for colleagues by name or title, and retrieve basic information like phone numbers or addresses.  Even the advent of ‘Expert Search’ did not tangibly change the situation — it just made the phonebook-style lookup easier […]

Sadly, I did not win the Powerball Lottery (I admit it is hard to win when you don’t play) so I am still here writing blog posts. Oh well, I kind of like my job. The frenzy did get me thinking about how big is a billion. A little back of the napkin math suggests […]

With Adobe Summit, GSA and Liferay, there was a lot to learn this year in digital technology. These were your favorite posts: Ten | Adobe Summit: Best Practices for Content Marketing It’s not about creating more content. It’s about creating better content. Nine | How to Script GSA Configuration Changes Google provides to mechanisms for […]

One of the challenges I’ve had over the last few years is how to easily manage multiple AEM instances concurrently. Over the last few years, I’ve often had to have several different AEM instances running during the course of the day, whether it be different versions, client codebases or for just for standing up a […]

Customers and developers upgrading to AEM 6.0 SP3 will find that there’s a new bundle in use, FSClassLoader. As I described in my previous post this bundle offers superior performance as compared to the repository based classloader, however it does remove the option for developers to access the generated Java code for their JSP’s under /var/classes. Luckily, […]

What happens? Everyone and their mother freaks out. The world literally stops spinning! Well, maybe not literally, but figuratively. In case you didn’t notice, Google Drive crashed today: And Twitter has lit up with everyone’s thoughts. From lighthearted and silly to downright angry, here’s what a few people had to say about the sudden blackout […]

Engadget has an article about the end of a decade long patent war between Microsoft and Google.  This is good news at a variety of levels.  As the article note, they both finally realized that most of the arguments are about moot points where the cat is out of the bag.  My favorite part is […]

Alok Gupta joined our Google practice in 2013 and has quickly become one of our go-to Technical Architects for complex implementations and custom connector development. Alok has worked with a wide variety of clients, including high-tech support organizations, major airlines, and retail food giants. It was a pleasure to talk to him about his experiences […]

In 2009, our Google Search Appliance practice was a practice of one – me.  By the end of the year, Shruti Sundaresh had joined me as a co-developer on our first large project.  Her programming skills and experience with web content management systems and data migrations were invaluable.  Shruti has recently started to transform our GSA practice […]

I’ll get this out of the way quickly — there is no such thing as a typical GSA implementation. With that said, I have been involved in scoping and delivering around 250 GSA implementations, and some averages and trends have emerged.  Most projects involve the same five core phases: Design and Requirements, Hardware and Security, Content […]

Google includes a comprehensive, HTML-based Admin Console for making changes to the Google Search Appliance configuration.  Adding KeyMatches, changing crawl URL patterns, exporting reports, etc.  This works very well during development and for making minor changes thereafter.  But in a large, complex deployment, it is often desirable to script changes or write code to do them automatically. […]