Cominvent AS - Enterprise search consultants » Programming

Cominvent pioneers Solr Training in Scandinavia

janhoy — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:17:33 +0000

Cominvent is the first company in Scandinavia to offer professional classroom training for the Open Source search engine Apache Solr. Last week we conducted a training in Denmark, and we plan for a regular schedule in Oslo and on-demand elsewhere in Europe.

The training material, developed by Lucid Imagination, is recently updated to cover Solr 1.4, plus some additional contrib features like Carot2 clustering. The handout comprises more than 400 slides, but fear not – there are plenty of labs and room for Q&A and discussions, which makes the pace comfortable.

Soon to come is an advanced training class covering more complex issues such as performance tuning, scaling, plugin development etc. Stay tuned!

Read more at www.solrtraining.com and also follow us on Twitter.

Apache Solr has become grown-up

janhoy — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:13:43 +0000

The open source search server Solr from Apache Foundation has become a mature technology ready for prime-time.

The recent editions has added features which previously were only found in commercial offerings, such as

Automatic replication for large installations with distributed search
Java-API (SolrJ)
Conversion of Office-documents
Full faceted search
Advanced tokenization, highlighting and stemming

Apache Solr is being adopted more widely, and some companies even start replacing their expensive commercial engine with Solr with good results. In that way they can spend less on licenses and more on content quality and tuning.

Feeling ready to try Solr? Contact us for a talk, or download it yourself and try the tutorial. Here’s a short video introducing you to the basics:

I will soon write about how to obtain professional support for Apache Solr.

Norweigan search portal Sesam.no releases middleware as GPL

janhoy — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:04:38 +0000

In this blog post, Sesam annonces that their middleware architecture, Sesam Search Application Toolkit (SESAT) is released as open source software. This is the piece of software (written in Java) which sits between the portal (such as sesam.no) and the data sources (such as FAST ESP, Yahoo! or a database) and dispatches in parallel a single user query into multiple underlying requests and returns everything according to business rules. This is often referred to as federated search.

Here’s Sesam’s own description of the software:

“SESAT is search middleware and a search portal framework. SESAT enables a single user query to be dispatched to multiple information sources. The result is analysed, weighted and presented to the user according to configurable business rules.”

Congratulations with contributing to Open Source, Sesam! And good luck with creating a community around this important piece of middleware, we’ll see more and more demand for it in the future!

Now, go check it out on http://sesat.no/ if this is something that can be useful to you!

PS: Learn more about other federated search solutions at the federatedsearchblog.com