MC+A

Last year we assisted our customer Legal Services of Northern California with our JumpStart service. It has been nearly a year and I am happy to see how much they’ve come along. They’ve recently launched a website showcasing their project.

Their Findability Project is the public face of a special technology search project undertaken by Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC), a legal services program assisting low-income clients in 23 counties in the upper third of California. Made possible by a grant from the LSC Technology Initiative Grant Program, the goal of the project is to implement a Google Enterprise Search Appliance as the principal building block of a modest but secure, well structured, fully web accessible knowledge-content system. If you have some time please read up on their initiative. If you are interested in how we can help you please contact us.

Many of our customers find it difficult to figure out which LDAP query to run in their Google Search Appliance (GSA) or Google Mini (Mini) LDAP setup wizard.  When configuring LDAP on the GSA, a common issue that the user may run into is finding the correct information for the “Distinguished Name” (DN) field.

Our solution to this problem is a handy command that can be executed on your server providing Active Directory.

In order to quickly find the DN, open a command prompt and enter the command “adsiedit.msc”.

After you execute this command navigate to the account in which you are seeking the distinguished name (This is typically your account).

Right-click on that account and select “properties”.

Then find the “Distinguished Name” category, double-click, and you will have the answer you seek.

We just found out that there is a new release for the Google Search Appliance.  It includes many of the rumored features that we’ve been hearing were in the works.  The short list is listed below.  I have yet to actually take a look on it, but we’ll be reach out to our customers to tell them the details as we are updated.

<copied from Google>

End User Features

Personalized Search Experience Allow administrators to adjust search results for different user groups, based on department or function.

Alerts Employees can subscribe to email alerts for topics and documents of interest, choosing an hourly, daily, or weekly schedule.

Spellchecker in Six New Languages French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch.

Enterprise Content

Languages Restrict search results to any of 27 auto-detected languages including administrative functions in five new languages (Czech, English-UK, Portuguese-Portugal, Turkish, Vietnamese); contextual spell checking for all end users in Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch; and query expansion for all end users in Dutch.

Security and Access Control

Kerberos Support Provide native support for Kerberos, enabling a silent authentication experience for end-users.

Metadata Biasing Administrators can bias results based on metadata (in addition to biasing based on source, URL or date).

Advanced Reporting View and export daily and hourly result sets, top queries, special feature usage, and more. Report for every query, including reports on which queries receive no clicks by a user and how often users are clicking on sponsored links in comparison to organic search results or OneBox modules.

Administration and Customization

Localized Administration Administer your Google Search Appliance around the globe in 27 different languages. Full administration is now supported in Basque, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US), English (UK), Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

In a recent Tech Target interview, MC+A’s president, Michael Cizmar, outlined his opinions on the growing popularity of cloud computing and how it will affect both IT solutions companies and enterprise end-users. 

 While a strong advocate for innovation, Michael believes that even in a “cloudy” world, there will still be a great need for solution companies who can add value by efficiently implementing new technologies across the enterprise.

According to Michael, those who prove their expertise by developing applications that make the cloud more efficient and productive, will continue to play a vital role in the technology world.  In addition, enterprise users win as talented developers are incented to showcase their abilities to an otherwise difficult to reach audience.   

As Michael notes, “If you have an application, and put it on the Google marketplace, you’re immediately exposed to 500,000 customers.”  With this type of opportunity for developers, and the resulting benefits to enterprise users, cloud computing - and innovative companies like MC+A - may be in the process of creating the perfect storm. 

Read the full interview here: 

http://channelmarker.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/06/12/the-impending-cloud/

Google Enterprise has released the long awaited 5.0.4 release.  Most notably in this release is support Microsoft Office 2007 documents and the connector manager auth prompt bug fix.

Existing customers can goto:

https://support.google.com/enterprise/doc/gsa/00/update_index_page.html

to download the new system and software versions.  I’ll updated this thread with any discoveries that we find in our upgrades.  Please write your findings as well.

Update:

We’ve attempted to update two GSAs.  The first last week went fine.  The one we attempted today twice had a checksum error….

Downloading URL http://support.google.com/enterprise/updates/XXXXXXX

Percent completed: 100%
MD5 Checksum = 74f78e89c09d4be143c3b1d5ca1a4fb7

** Unpacking downloaded file **

ERROR: Downloaded file is not properly signed or corrupted. Please try again one more time.

Several weeks ago, we published a youtube video showing how you can use a Google Search Appliance along with your relational map based data to create a wonderful mash up.

How often users come to a web site and begin a search by click click clicking several drop downlists. Often I see these lists scroll past the bounds of the page. This combination allows you to decoup you database and your data architect from the user interface.

I am a user. I simply want to type in some information and get back highly relevant results. When you are displaying geolocations to the user, its very compelling to show them where these points are.

Recent we worked with our client on this exact technology. Its finally up and I think using the application on its own will speak volumns to what can be achieved.

Check out provider finder.

Last year, Google Enterprise published a custom Keymatch OneBox project written in Java. We ported it to C# for those .NET inclinded.

Check it out at:

http://www.codeplex.com/keymatch

Michael

We’ve received numerous requests over the past couple of months on using OneBox technology to pull data from SAP systems. We’ve created a solution offering for customers that employs our SAP OneBox Framework. We can use this framework to pull a variety of SAP data out of Netweaver. We’ve developed a sample using the classic flight data scenario.

Check out our PowerPoint presentation on our offering through this link:

Get Presentation Here!

An increasing number of our customers are discovering the undocument limitation in the SharePoint Web Service SiteData. While this API is sparsely documented to begin with, users are not aware that if there are over 1000 subsites within an Application (i.e. http://mysharepoint.company.com ) the GetSite method returns no subsites. As you would expect, having subsites is critical to any type of crawl functionality.

Until Microsoft fully discloses the bug, you can read Joel Oleson, and some commentors, discuss how its used as part of SharePoint. It’s really unknown how this bug impacts SharePoint functionlaity.

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2008/01/28/anatomy-of-indexing.aspx

Because of this limitation, MC+A pulled the vetern GSS Web Part out of the closet and developed the GSS into the SFGSA. The feeder provides the same basic functionality as the Google Enterprise Connector, but utlizes the SharePoint Object Model.

You can request a meeting with us about it by filling out the following online form:

Contact Us

Thanks to Adam Jenkin for reporting an issue with the GSALib. We now have released an update that moves the configuration from a seperate file to the appSettings of the configuration file.

There is also the simplest of demonstrations of how to use the library in an ASP.Net VB application.

Please goto: http://www.codeplex.com/GSALib to download the updates.