When Google announced the end of the Google Search Appliance (GSA), the other major players in the space rapidly put together their messaging on why their product was the perfect replacement for the GSA. They espoused their cognitive search, machine learning, 360-degree view UIs, etc.

The competitive landscape has focused on the large enterprise search customers indexing dozens of information sources with complex security models and millions of documents.  They have their “why me” pitches down to an art. They focus on how much more relevant the results will be due to their sophisticated analytics and how the owners of search will have beautiful dashboards showing query response times, relevancy success, the effectiveness of related searches helping users find what they want, all available with one click. But, I have been on countless demos with every vendor in the space hoping to grab their share of the GSA replacement pie, and failed to see any of them address one of largest use cases of the GSA install base – low maintenance public website search at a price point comparable with the GSA.

The reality is over 70% of the GSA install base has the smallest available license allowing for a 500K document index.  And that index was almost always massively underutilized.  Why? Over 50% of the customers use their GSAs as a public website search tool, which is traditionally a low index/high query volume use case. So why did these customers opt for the GSA in the first place?

1. Low ongoing maintenance: Marketing departments owned the solution. IT departments loved it, they could point the GSA to crawl all corporate web domains, set-up OOTB functionality similar to search results on Google.com and the Google algorithms kicked in and did the rest. Marketing loved it because they were not dependent on IT. They could do simple things such as add synonyms and key matches themselves.  It was a win-win for everyone.
2. Costs: Most customers went for the Prod, Hot Back-up, Development configuration which cost approximately $44K per annum, based on a 3-year deal. The GSA was a great value.
3. Functionality: Google was smart. They always ensured GSA OOTB functionality pretty much mirrored the look and feel of results on Google.com. The comment we always hear from customers when evaluating a public website search tool is that they want search results to look like Google.com.

It is this segment of the GSA customer base that is struggling most finding a next generation replacement.  The top tier of potential replacement platforms are too feature-rich and cost prohibitive for those looking for a traditional website search similar to Google.com.  At the other end of the spectrum, the open source options require IT resources to provide ongoing tuning to keep the relevancy fresh, thus taking day to day administration away from the marketing department.

The Search team at Perficient has heard this feedback from numerous customers. The gap in the market is clear, and based on conversations we have had with other search partners, none of them has a like for like replacement in their roadmap. With this in mind, we set out to develop a viable alternative for our customers needing a replacement.  With the blessing of Google, Perficient has developed Nero, a search solution leveraging the GSA connector framework built on Elasticsearch and other open source software. Nero is available as both an on-prem and cloud solution (Google Cloud, of course). The Admin panel has been developed with the business owner in mind, allowing for minimal support from corporate IT.  Pricing is based on an annual subscription, including support for approximately the same price as the GSA.

Still trying to find your GSA replacement for public website search? Perficient will be hosting a public webinar on Feb 20^th at 1:00 CST that will include a demo of Nero. To register, please complete the form below or visit http://www2.perficient.com/webinar/What-is-Next-After-the-Google-Search-Appliance.

Last month I wrote a blog, “7 Tips to Prep for a GSA Sunset”. I had several people reach out and suggest the need for a follow-up article covering areas of focus during an enterprise search migration. After giving it some thought, I came up with a list of less obvious considerations that can make the difference between a “good” and “great” enterprise search implementation:

1. If you are indexing your content via connectors, look at repurposing the connectors already in-place instead of developing or configuring new ones. The connectors currently in use will be fully, and hopefully successfully, integrated into your existing information sources. Explore the feasibility of just ripping and replacing the integration into the new search platform. This can lead to genuine cost and time savings when it comes to less popular information sources which do not have OOTB connectors available.
2. If your nexgen search platform involves a complete refresh, as opposed to a “rip and replace” strategy, include change management. In most corporations, enterprise search is accessed via the corporate intranet. Employees use search every day, and most perform a small number of the same searches again and again. The search result is like a comfortable pair of shoes. They know what they are getting before the results page is rendered. Then one day without warning it changes. Worse yet, not only has the look and feel changed, the expected result is no longer there. Imagine the panic and uncertainty. Such changes need to be messaged properly and well in advance
3. Key match! Key match! Key match! One of the last things you should do with the old legacy search platform is run a report of top search queries. Search is the classic 80/20 scenario,  where there will be a small number of popular search terms which constitute most of the queries, and generally those queries will consist of synonyms of the same query. Example: Jobs, Careers and Employment. As a start, take the top 25 most searched terms and implement a “key match” result. Showing the right result first not only increases efficiencies, it drives user acceptance of the new platform
4. People Search. Gone are the days when name, email and phone number are good enough. Employees are using search to find subject matter experts, others who have worked on the same project or client, etc. Create a profile template, which is relevant to your organization’s needs and make completion mandatory. Some areas to consider:
   • Contact details, including picture
   • Areas of expertise
   • Documents created by the individual
   • “Ask me about….”
   • Client and/or projects
   • Personal interests
   • Org chart
5. When the search implementation is complete, invite feedback in the form of a simple survey. There is only one question that needs to be asked: “Did you find what you are looking for?” If not, please describe what you were looking for. For all the missing content, it will be down to the project owners to determine if it is a relevancy or an indexing issue and adjust accordingly.

Due to the end of life of the Google Search Appliance, 2018 will be a big year for enterprise search platform migrations. The question remains as to what companies will do – either drive increased efficiencies and collaboration via an enhanced search experience, or will it be a missed opportunity of “rip and replace” and conversations of what might have been?

Peficient has a team of advisors dedicated to enterprise search. If you need help with nexgen options, please send me an email (amy.shavor@perficient.com) for an in-depth discussion.

After much back and forth, it seems like the end-of-life for the Google Search Appliance (GSA) will be the end of 2018. Most GSA users have adopted a “plug, play and walk-away” approach for far too long. The GSA will not continue functioning as an unsupported appliance. It will turn off like a light switch exactly 30 days after license expiration.

Here are 7 tips for current GSA users preparing for this mandatory move:

1. Check when your current GSA license expires. Are you in a position to go-live with a new platform approximately 60 days before the license expiration date?  If not, Google will allow current customers an incremental monthly license upgrade to take your GSA to the end of December 2018. For example, if your current GSA license expires in June 2018, you will have access to a 6-month renewal term. These extensions are only available for purchase through the end of 2017, so you must act quickly.
2. It sounds obvious, but make ensure your organization has proper budget for search platform replacement. In most cases the GSA was extremely inexpensive. Those who have requested a like-for-like replacement budget, may be in for a shock.
3. Determine if your organization would prefer an on-prem, cloud, or hybrid solution. I also suggest making a list of the content sources to be indexed and indicating if they are cloud or on-prem repositories and databases. If the content is heavily weighted to on-prem, it’s important to let potential vendors know early in the discussion. Some cloud search tools perform best when indexing cloud content.
4. IT and business users need to work together to revalidate current business requirements. Most GSA users have relied on Google’s embedded learning algorithms to keep content fresh and assumed the GSA was serving up the best results. Because of this hands-off approach, many companies are faced with outdated search strategies, business uses cases, and old-fashioned user interfaces.  Search has significantly evolved in the 5 years. A list view of content pushed to end-users is no longer good enough. With a modern search solution, people expect contextually relevant information to be presented through an intuitive UI. Conduct workshops with key stakeholders to review search strategy, content sources, security models, search results UI and ongoing support.
5. Most of the leading search platforms on the market will require more care and feeding than the GSA. Do you have the bandwidth and skill set to support search internally? If not, will you hire for those skills or outsource support to an implementation partner?
6. Work with a technology partner to create a realistic implementation timeline. I suggest targeting the completion of migration and testing of the new search platform prior to Oct 31, 2018. This approach will provide adequate time to address any unforeseen problems you may encounter. Don’t get caught in the sea of companies doing last minute Q4 migrations. Good search implementation partners will be very busy, and ad-hoc or last-minute projects will be hard to accommodate.
7. Look beyond a like-for-like replacement, there have been a lot of innovations in search over the past few years. Functionality like predictive analytics, natural language processing, and machine learning are now part of most leading search platforms. Understand what these tools can do and how they can benefit your business.

Not long ago, our team published a guide on Google Search for Life Sciences because the Google Search Appliance (GSA) can work wonders for companies in our industry. But we just learned that Google has decided to put that powerful yellow box, designed to sit on-premises, to bed.

Let me say that again: Google will no longer offer the on-premises version of GSA. The good news? You’ll still be able to leverage Google Search for Work in the cloud. 

You won’t find much information online about Google’s decision to stop selling the legacy GSA, which debuted in 2002, but since we’re one of the company’s strategic partners, we were one of the first to know and wanted to pass the news along to you.

Earlier this month, Perficient’s enterprise search expert, Chad Johnson, wrote a blog post indicating that Google has decided to “focus their engineering efforts on cloud-based solutions.” While the current version of GSA will no longer be offered, it will continue to be supported for the next three years.

With this news, organizations who already have GSA or who are in the market for an enterprise search solution, will have to make some critical decisions. For GSA customers, do they migrate to the cloud? And, if you’re not currently leveraging GSA, but are looking to implement a solution, do you go for Google’s new cloud solution or a product from a different vendor? In a post written on February 11, 2016, Chad highlighted some options on how to move ahead.

It has been exactly one week since Google announced that it would be sunsetting the Google Search Appliance over the next three years. And what a week it has been. I have had the opportunity to speak with media representatives at Fortune and CIODive, I have spoken with several current and prospective customers of the Google Search Appliance, I have spoken with numerous other search companies, and I have chatted informally with our consulting team and friends in the enterprise search ecosystem.
I would like to share some of my initial thoughts to the news, and the rollercoaster of reactions that I, and others, have had.

Did the news surprise me?

The most common question I have been asked is if the news surprised me. Was I surprised that Google would focus more energy on a cloud-based service than a physical yellow box? Not at all. It makes good sense for Google to develop a technology that does not require shipping GSAs around the world and installing them in data centers. I have been a partner with Google for 7 years and I have come to expect periodic hard-left turns from them. They usually turn out to change an industry in retrospect.

Is the Cloud a good place for enterprise search?

Cloud-based enterprise search is a divisive idea. We have had some customers that were already begging for a search solution in the cloud. They were appalled that they still had to rack-mount a GSA in a data center. In some cases, the GSA was the only physical hardware they still managed on-premise. However, we have other customers that would not consider a cloud-based search engine under any circumstances. I am sure you can image the variety of clients we deal with. Each company has their own level of tolerance for off-premise services, particularly with their most sensitive documents and data. I believe that this is a topic where corporate opinions are changing rapidly, so I am not overly concerned with customers that do not want to migrate to cloud search at this time. I suspect that each year, more and more companies will become comfortable with this idea.

So what do I do now?

It all depends on how you define “now”. Google has not made any announcements about any future product. I have absolutely no inside knowledge, so what follows is purely my own opinion. A cloud-based enterprise search product from Google could end up being radically different from a virtualized version of the GSA. We should not make any assumptions until we know more. I have had some customers asking me how much the GSA replacement will cost, or what the network or latency considerations might be, or if they can import their GSA configuration files into the new Cloud-based version. It is premature to assume that these types of questions are even applicable. At this time (February 11th, 2016), we have no information about what form Google’s new product might take. We don’t know what features it will or will not have. We don’t know how similar or different it will be from the GSA. And we don’t have a timeline for when it will be available.
Therefore, “what do I do now” could be different depending on the timeline and horizon of your enterprise search needs. First, we have three full years to wind down the GSA. If you have already deployed a solution on the GSA, and it is stable and you do not need to make any radical changes or enhancements to it this year, I would suggest taking a wait-and-see attribute for at least 6 months. Wait to see what Google announces and what form the new product might take. If it sounds appealing, start to plan a migration strategy given the roadmap Google reveals to us. If it does not sound appealing or will not work for your company, you will still have plenty of time to make other plans.
On the other hand, if you have immediate enterprise search needs in 2016, waiting for Google’s new product seems unrealistic. I see two logical choices: A) go ahead and implement the improvements on the GSA now and deal with the migration to another tool at some point in the future over the next three years, or B) start researching other search options in the marketplace now and implement the new solution on a new tool. I am currently evaluating the other search engines available in the marketplace to help our customers identify the most comparable tools for their particular needs. There is no one-size-fits-all replacement for the GSA. My analysis will help customers evaluate other search options based on a comparison of features, but also on aspects like ease of use and performance.  Additionally, I do not expect Google to make any more major changes to the GSA, so the appeal of other products could become greater as time goes on.  Customers will need to consider all of these factors when deciding what to do over the coming months and years.
To be clear, I am not advocating a mass exodus from Google Search (present or future). It is a reality, though, that some customers are left in limbo by this announcement, and each customer will need to decide their own tolerance for wait-and-see vs. find a replacement now. Perficient is prepared to assist people on both sides of this fence. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at GooglePractice@perficient.com.

Google is a visionary and a cloud-first organization. In an announcement today, Google has decided to sunset the hardware-based Google Search Appliance (GSA) and focus their engineering efforts on cloud-based solutions. The GSA will remain supported for the next three years, giving you plenty of time to evaluate the future of your enterprise search investment and continue to deliver value to your business.
Perficient is uniquely qualified to help you chart a course through this change. We have over 60 collective years of enterprise search experience, over 250 enterprise search engagements, and a wide variety of technology partnerships. Perficient is your trusted partner. With this change, comes opportunity — it’s a great time to look at technologies that can enhance your search solution like analytics, big data, and natural language processing.
Perficient’s team of experienced Enterprise Search and Knowledge Discovery consultants can assist with:

• Support Services – Perficient will continue to support the GSA for current clients during the life of the product and help you get the most value out of your current investment.
• Product Selections – Perficient can help identify search technologies that meet or exceed the capabilities of your current solution.
• Migration Roadmaps – Perficient can develop a transition plan to your new search technology, including implementation timelines, information about new features and capabilities, and estimated costs.
• Optimization Assessments – Perficient can review your enterprise search implementation and recommend new solutions to increase value to your business. Discover the latest advances in Enterprise Search and Knowledge Discovery — the combination of search, big data and analytics.

To learn more, subscribe to our Digital Tech blog using the form below. We will deliver a weekly digest of information that can keep you posted on this transition and the evolution of enterprise search and knowledge discovery. 
Together we will make this transition as seamless as possible! 

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 launched to over 100,000 employees in less than 6 weeks, start to finish.  Chris spoke with me recently about his experience as GSA Technical Architect at Perficient.

How long have you been working with the Google Search Appliance? Do you remember your first project? What was it?

I started working with the GSA about 7 ½ years ago in March of 2008. Version 5.0 was hot off the presses.                                                                                  

How can I ever forget my first project! Fresh out of GSA training, I was sent to install and setup a single GSA at an investment management firm in Boston. I was excited. After all, I was armed with all my training materials and a head full of fresh memories of the multi-day class. What could possibly go wrong???

Upon arrival at the client, I was escorted into a large conference room where I was able to unpack my laptop and get setup for the day. After a few minutes, the door opened and in walked about a dozen people (many were company execs) who all sat down and prepared for a meeting where, unbeknownst to me, I was the guest of honor. The questions came fast and furious, but only a few of them were softballs. Most were the kinds of questions that could only be answered by someone who had done this a few times before. By the end of the meeting it was clear to everyone in the room that I was a bit “green” when it came to the yellow search box.

Gathering my notes from the meeting (feeling somewhat overwhelmed) I remembered that although I was new at this, I still had the benefit of GSA training plus there was a team of support resources at my disposal that can provide guidance in performing a successful deployment.

It became clear to me that enterprise search is like an ocean and the GSA is like a ship. It will keep you afloat easily enough, but you really need to know how to navigate the waters in order to find the destination without getting lost at sea.

Can you tell us about your current project? What kind of application are you building, and what technologies are involved?

My current project is with a well-known Insurance company. We developed proxy applications to interface with the GSA for search queries, serve suggestions and authorize users from the cloud. Now search developers can easily integrate search into their site or application. They only need to learn a small sub-set of the GSA search protocol. The GSA admin can control the default behavior for each search client application to provide the desired search experience. 

We installed connectors that Perficient build for IBM Connections and Salesforce. In addition, we developed a custom search connector for OrchestraCMS based on our own very popular Salesforce connector.

In this deployment, the GSA is not directly exposed to users, the search applications are deployed in the Salesforce cloud and call back to the GSA at the client’s data center through a series of load balancers and proxy servers. The GSA is simply used as a web service and returns JSON in response to search queries.

What skills or experience, other than the GSA, have you found useful when implementing Enterprise Search projects?

Almost everything! Implementing a GSA from start to finish involves several interactions with many types of people at every level in the business. Starting as an SE, I use my skills and experience from past implementations and GSA training to field technical questions about the GSA. I use my verbal skills to speak clearly and succinctly so I can be understood by all in the audience. I must tune my answers to the level of understanding of the person asking the question. For example, a content owner in the business may not want to know the technical details of how the connector works at a low level, but the network and security admins will want them all. I use writing skills to communicate through emails and produce deployment plans, documentation and user guides. I use my skills and experience with various software programs for creating documents, spreadsheets and architecture diagrams. I use my experience as a systems and network administrator to architect complex deployment diagrams involving failover, disaster recovery planning, firewalls, load balancers, etc.

Do you have advice you would give to someone about to implement an Enterprise Search project with the GSA?

Don’t panic! There are very few situations in which you can’t recover. If you have a problem, chances are someone else has seen it too and can offer some advice on how to resolve. Remember there are plenty of resources online and Google support is always there if you get stuck.

Also, plan your installation carefully. Create a diagram of the entire search architecture and identify all the communications between systems, port numbers, etc. It doesn’t have to be fancy, just boxes and lines to visualize and easily see if anything is missing. Know what resources you will need ahead of time and plan accordingly. Often there is a lead time to procure network resources such as IP addresses and firewall changes, virtual machines, extra memory, CPU or disk. Know how many, how much and how often for everything in your deployment because you will be asked.

Thanks, Chris!  It’s a pleasure to have you on our team!  -Chad

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 to implement.
The Problem: In 2015, several Perficient clients came to us demanding more from People Search.  We realized that these companies did not have just a single source for information about people, and that by investing in additional data aggregation and pre-processing, we could deliver more sophisticated and useful people search results.  
The Solution: Instead of indexing only first-order fields about people (name, title, location, etc.), we started adding data like skills, project experience, previous jobs, and recently authored content.  This expanded the number of ways that a person can be found, and it also increased the number of ways that the results can be sorted, ranked or biased.  You can now search for people with similar skills, or who worked together on past projects, or who recently collaborated on a document about a certain topic.
The Results: This modern approach to people search has yielded very positive results, as well as some unanticipated consequences.  On the positive side, colleagues can now be found using a much wider set of criteria – the net can be cast wider, so to speak.  On the negative side, ranking the results in a logical order is more complex, and it can be more difficult for users to understand why a certain person is coming back in the search results.  Perficient is working with our clients to more tightly define the expectations for selecting and ranking people results when all of this additional information is available.  
For example, some customers prefer to prioritize title or tenure in the ranking of people results, whereas others prioritize skill or location (proximity) matches.  When several different criteria are deemed important, the implementation can get very complex.  Perficient is helping our clients through these challenges by implementing best-practice user experience and technology solutions, including advanced filtering and segmentation of the results, natural language processing to better understand the intent of the query, and search analytics to monitor usage patterns and improve the results over time.  We are also improving the relevancy of people search results by implementing more sophisticated data aggregations and enrichment techniques, such as integrating data from social media profiles or using entity recognition to build relationship graphs between people and other important content.
Perficient is excited to be working with our clients on the frontier of people search.  Different companies have different search challenges, but people search is nearly universal.  Our research and work in this area is already paying dividends with new clients and new opportunities.  Please contact us at GooglePractice@perficient.com if you would like more information about our people search work, or any other enterprise search topic.

photo by apardavila on flickr

• Real estate contracts for retail stores
• Purchase orders and invoices for a beverage manufacturer
• Standard operating procedures for a pet food manufacturer
• Customer support case notes for a high-tech software company
• Academic course catalogs for an ivy league university
• Circuit board schematics for a silicon chip manufacturer
• Corporate training videos for a credit card company
• Sales literature for a luxury car maker
• Oil well test logs for a petrochemical producer
• Item inventories and aisle locations for a grocery store chain
• TV and movie listings for a premium cable network

And the list goes on and on and on. I continue to be amazed at the seemingly infinite number of ways the Google Search Appliance can be used.  Our implementation team never has a dull moment. The Powerball money would have been nice, but this job is a pretty great runner-up.
 
To learn more about the Google Search, download our most recent guide which highlights market trends, how to optimize your use of search, and how to find the the most value and bang for your buck with search.

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 making changes to the GSA.

Eight | What is the Timeline for a Typical GSA Implementation?

Averages and trends in a GSA implementation.

Seven | The Evolving Digital Landscape Recap: Adobe Symposium Minneapolis

A must read for anyone interested in gaining expert insights into digital marketing.

Six | Adobe Experience Manager and Campaign Working Well Together

A rundown of the benefits of integrating these products.

Five | Ascending the Enterprise Search Value Map

All work has value, but not all work has the same value. A value map help you rank what’s most important.

Four | Adobe Summit 2015: Adobe Campaign 101: Cross-Channel Marketing

How to use Adobe Campaign.

Three | Adobe Summit: Content Optimization and Personalization

Best practices in content optimization with Adobe Experience Manager.

Two | Liferay Make Native Mobile Development Easier

Digging deep into the Liferay portal.

One | Google Releases GSA software version 7.4

A breakdown of the new features in GSA version 7.4.
 
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The end of 2015 is fast approaching, with December looming just a week away. For most people, December is packed with the hustle and bustle of last-minute gift shopping, or end-of-year projections and budgets for 2016. Often in the sway of all this activity, many are so focused on the approaching New Year that they abandon the current year without even a backwards glance, flipping the page in their agenda or tossing the current calendar before the days of December have completely passed. So, regardless of what December holds out for you, why not take a moment to reflect on some of your accomplishments from 2015 before it is time to usher in any new resolutions for 2016?

In keeping with my own suggestions, here is what I assessed when I looked back over 2015 – time well spent.

The first thing I have to acknowledge is that 2015 has been a very busy and very productive year for me and my team.

Secondly, I am pleased to see that 2015 presented many opportunities to work with an assortment of technologies, like:

• Alteryx – including Alteryx Visual Analytics Kit for Qlik, and for Tableau
• Hadoop ecosystem projects, such as HBase, Hive, Pig, Spark, etc.
• NoSQL technologies, such as MongoDB and Cassandra, along with HBase (of course)
• JethroData
• Tableau
• SAP Business Objects, Crystal Reports, etc.
• Qlik Sense and QlikView
• Oracle Endeca Information Discovery
• Microsoft SSIS, SSAS and SSRS… along with Azure HDInsight
• Cache’ ObjectScripts and MUMPS
• SAS and R – especially in the implementation of Data Science algorithms
• Google BigQuery Analytics, along with other Google technologies, such as GSA (Google Search Appliance)
• TIBCO Spotfire
• IBM Netezza
• Embarcadero

While this list is not exhaustive, it makes me realize that I enjoy working with multiple technologies and want to do so in the future. It also helps me see that even though there are a ton of technologies I would love to work with, I want to focus most specifically on Big Data, Data Sciences and Advanced Analytics.

Thirdly, as I reflect on 2015 I am pleased to see that another year of experience has culminated in increased exposure to clients in the healthcare, insurance, risk adjustment and even multi-level marketing fields. Most importantly, as I looked back on the projects of 2015, it occurred to me that this year provided a ton of opportunities to participate on every aspect of full cycle implementations, from project management to pure development and environment setup. I also worked on strategy and governance engagements, pre-sales and thought leadership.

After taking some time to assess 2015 up to this point, I appreciate that through all the highs and lows that come with any professional career; 2015 was really a professionally fulfilling year. By taking the time to dwell on the year as a whole, I was able to gather a better understanding of my current strengths, and determine opportunities that remain for 2015 during the month of December. Best of all, having a fuller view of 2015 makes me excited to think about what is in store for 2016 – I can honestly say I am looking forward to it! More on that in a future post…

I shared my 2015 with you – not to impress you – but to impress upon you that preparing for the future sometimes means a visit to the past. So take a moment to reflect over your 2015. How has it been until now? With that in mind, what does December have in store for you? How about 2016? I look forward to your comments about your accomplishments and reflections on 2015 until this point, and on what comes next for you.

Although this was one of my more reflective posts, be ready to talk tech again in my next blog post when I discuss how TIBCO Spotfire is integrating with big data technologies efficiently and effectively – which I think is the right move for TIBCO and their customers.

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 as a GSA Technical Architect. 

How long have you been working with the Google Search Appliance? Do you remember your first project? What was it?

I have been working on Google search projects for about 7 years. My first hands-on experience with the GSA was indexing the product’s content from a portal site. When the customer logins to the portal, they only see the products they have purchased and any related documentation. It was simple but an interesting project as it required some brainstorming to ensure the GSA could crawl all the products in the portal using the additional HTTP header, and get only search results specific to the products they own (using inmeta searches). I wonder if I will use additional HTTP headers with the web crawler ever again ;-).  We built the custom UI by consuming the XML as the client’s policy was not to expose the GSA directly to public users.

At Perficient, my first project was to index data coming from SAP CRM into the GSA using a web service SOAP-based connector that listens for SOAP requests and interprets them as update or delete event. All content was given a single, service-account-type ACL to prevent other applications from accidentally fetching the application data. New metadata fields were added to the content to indicate roles or entitlement and depending on what type of user is making the request, appropriate filters were appended to the queries, thereby limiting which results are returned. We also used a cookie cracker (Cookie SSO integration) to pass in a secret token that identified the queries from the application and permitted access to the items.

Can you tell us about your current project? What kind of application are you building, and what technologies are involved?

My current client’s intranet search is hosted on SharePoint portal and using IWA/Kerberos for silent authentication and NTLM as fallback mechanism. The client is building a new platform for the intranet search (AEM) that will host a unified search experience using Google search. We are indexing content from different sources including multiple SharePoint web applications, AEM User Profiles, Confluence Wikis, Video repositories, Documentum, File Shares, Chatter, and other related databases through the use of either Google or Perficient developed connector software. There are also a couple of web sites that will be web crawled and will be protected using policy ACLs. The Google SAML Bridge will be used for silent authentication that will support both Kerberos and NTLM as a fallback mechanism. 

We are upgrading the GSA appliances to version 7.4 to utilize on-board group resolution. User and groups information will be fed to the GSA using AD groups connector 4.x. Google 4.x based connectors are being used where possible as the document counts in some of the content sources like SharePoint are quite high (~ 5 million). All the connectors will be hosted on Linux based VMs. Custom tags to support dynamic navigation will be injected using metadata transformation classes (the same concept as document filters in 3.x). Search results and expert search will be hosted on the GSA User Interface(s) and built to the client’s specifications based on responsive design that will support desktops, tablets and mobile platforms. Load balancers will be used to support active-active serving (2 production GSAs) and high availability of 4.x based connectors. GSA mirroring will be configured between the production appliances.

What skills or experience, other than the GSA, have you found useful when implementing Enterprise Search projects?

Java development for writing connectors or feed clients, experience with Windows and Unix flavors, and debugging skills are really useful. Knowledge about SSL, LDAP/AD, NTLM or Kerberos etc. also helped while dealing with security.

Do you have advice you would give to someone about to implement an Enterprise Search project with the GSA?

I’ve learned that every successful search implementation makes a significant difference in the lives of the users. Everyone uses search in one way or another in daily lives whether to look for information on the Internet or within an organization using enterprise search. And when you find things easily that you are looking for, it really helps and saves lot of time. So, please put all your efforts and energy into understand the client’s search requirements, and make sure these search projects are successful.

Thanks, Alok!  Keep up the good work!  -Chad