We held a talk at the Open Source Conference GoOpen 2011 in Oslo today, together with our customer NHST, represented by Hans Jørgen Hoel. The talk was about the process of migrating from FAST ESP to Apache Solr for all of NHST’s news publications and other data sources.

The presentation is in Norwegian.

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Cominvent has been delivering professional training within enterprise search for more than 7 years. First on the FAST platform, and then on Solr/Lucene. We were the first to introduce Solr training in Europe.

We have now expanded our comprehensive training offering, as shown in the training modules illustration, covering the whole range from short half-day introduction for anyone to full certification track for developers.

Go visit our training site www.solrtraining.com and sign up for the training which fits you best.

Ever needed an urgent answer to some Solr/Lucene question? Haven’t got a support contract and someone to call yet?

I assume you’re already on the mailing lists and know about that channel. But wiat many people do not know is that the Solr/Lucene community also hosts a live chat where you can get help real quickly, as professionals from around the globe participate. The magic is made possible by an old technology called IRC (but IRC was not dead), and the server is irc.freenode.net and channels are #solr and #lucene.

There are multiple IRC clients available, which is probably the best option if you’re going to be very active. But to get started here and now, Cominvent as set up a web-based IRC chat page which opens the channels #solr and #lucene for you automatically:

Go directly to the Solr Chat by clicking the link or the thumbnail.

Open Source Search is gaining more and more traction. First you had Lucene (2001), giving great search for programmers. Then we got Solr (2006) making search accessible for non programmers, but a certain level of expertise is still needed. And then came Constellio, an open source (GPL) enterprise search distribution (distro) built on Solr, adding a slick GUI, connector and crawling support and more.

Say again. A Solr distro?

I call it “distro” because I like to compare the evolution to what we have seen in GNU/Linux. First there was the Linux core. Then there was the GNU tools that made Linux so much more usable but still only for engineers comfortable with the command line. And last, companies like RedHat and Suse built complete distros including modern GUI, ready-to use tools such as OpenOffice, Thunderbird and more. Without these distros, Linux would just have been a “core” leaving to the user to add the extra sugar. (more…)

A considerable part of Cominvent’s projects the last years have been migrations from FAST ESP to Solr. Some customers have a cost saving focus while others need a search engine on Linux. Anyhow, with more than 10 years of FAST experience, Cominvent is an authority in this field, securing a smooth transition.

As an example, we recently migrated the Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Næringsliv and several other online newspapers from FAST to Solr, including Norwegian linguistics and Escenic integration.

Our friends in Lucid Imagination will host a free webinar on this topic on November 18th, don’t miss it if you want to hear more success stories.

Also see our migration slides.