Experience Management

Decision makers today are all about the bottom line, how can we increase productivity while still lowering operational costs?  These are typically mutually exclusive goals, but does it have to be that way?  Reducing costs may not maximize profits, if we consider technologies that increase production efficiency and we agree that greater productivity is a direct […]

I would like to congratulate Anu Pidaparti, Lead Technical Consultant, for achieving her Google Search Appliance (GSA) Qualified Deployment Specialist certification.  Anu is the 6th GSA Qualified Deployment Specialist on our Google team. The 4-part certification process is rigorous and designed to validate the experience of individuals among search partners. The qualification process includes certification […]

Written by Paul Plakut This is installment three of a multipart series on Sitecore 8 – A Modern Experience Manager. If you are wishing to start at the beginning of the series, please begin HERE. I left off with an explanation of FXM or Federated Experience Manager; a powerful way to extend Sitecore 8’s toolset […]

I recently helped one of our clients configure their website to get sitelinks search box working. The following is a brief recap of my work. [Although metlife.com is used as an example in this post, I have had no working relationship with metlife.com] In early September, Google announced an improvement to sitelinks search box, which […]

Yesterday a client asked me what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they should be tracking on their public site search. At first I was afraid I would not be able to answer this question – I don’t know their business or website nearly as well as they do. I know the wide variety of statistics that are […]

Gartner has released its Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals 2014 and it contains some interesting surprises.  For the first time in several years, Gartner has moved IBM and Liferay ahead of the other vendors in both vision and execution ability. The leaders for 2014 are still the same leaders as in 2013 and 2012. For […]

In last installment, we carefully examined the usage of document filters in creating feed XML. Feed protocol is a push mechanism for the content source to send information to GSA. Since GSA connector framework 3.0, GSA introduced a Lister/Retriever model, which was first implemented in File System Connector. The connector is no longer using the […]

In this installment, we will discuss how the document filter is utilized by Connector Manager to achieve its functionality. Sometimes it’s very easy to show what’s happening with the code itself. I duplicated many section from Google site, and also provide link to the original source. Since Google engineers keep updating their implementation, the observation […]

Last time, we discussed the basics about document filter. In this installment, we will talk about practical aspects of document filter. How to configure document filters? Google had a document explaining the usage of document filters. There are two ways you can configure document filters. The first is at Connector Manager level, specifically within <Tomcat>/webapps/connector-manager/WEB-INF/documentFilters.xml. […]

Document Filter is a mechanism from Google connector framework 3.x to manipulate document during traversal for connectors. It is mainly supported at Connector Manager (CM) level. Thanks to the open source nature of Google connector framework, we could examine carefully about how document filter is defined and implemented. com.google.enterprise.connector.spi.Document Document is an interface defined by […]

If you have read Google’s product literature, you know that the Google Search Appliance is a very secure device.  The bright yellow appliance runs a hardened version of CentOS, and the inner-workings are safely hidden behind root login. So, assuming we are dealing with an appliance with Fort Knox-level protection, what risks remain?  Below are several potential […]

With the new release of Google Search Appliance 7.2, many organizations have plans to upgrade their systems in order to take advantage of the new features. Here is a list of steps with brief description that could help you for a smooth ride during the upgrade. Stage installer files For production upgrade, you would like […]