Book cover © Amazon & Wrox

Over due by several years, Wrox just published a book about Microsoft Enterprise Search, including the different FAST flavours. Bravo!

You can ask how all the users of FAST technology could have managed for so many years without some public source of learning the products. Up until now FAST/MS and their partners have been the sole source of learning FAST Search [1]. Now, we’re part of that eco-system and may have profited on the lack of material available, but that’s another story.

The book is written by Jeff Fried (Ex-FAST), Mark Bennett, Natalya Voskresenskaya and Miles Kehoe and covers the chapters

1. What is Enterprise Search
2. Developing a strategy – the business process of search
3. Overview of Microsoft Enterprise search products
4. Search within Sharepoint 2010
5. FAST Search within Sharepoint 2010
6. Customizing search with Sharepoint 2010
7. Introduction to FAST ESP
8. Customnization and deployment of FAST ESP 5.x
9. Advanced topics
10. Enterprise search is social search
11. Search and business intelligence
12. The future of search

I have not read the book yet – but I have bought it to my Kindle and will flip though it on my iPad if time allows. I could of course, humble as I am, have authored much of this book myself, but maybe I can learn a thing or two as well

Click the book cover to go to Amazon.com’s book page.

[1]: Except from http://www.fastforum.info/ (owner) and http://fastesphelp.com/ (by Anand Kumar Pandey)

The seminar is at Radisson Blu Plaza Hotel in Oslo, between 8-10am wednesday May 5th.

Join us for a discussion around these topics:

• What is open source and how does it affect search technology?
• How does Solr/Lucene really work?
• What alternatives are there within Solr/Lucene?

We’ll also present a few customer cases to highlight successful implementation of open source enterprise search.

See the attached invitation (PDF, Norwegian) for more.

Sign up now

Perhaps it’s time for a faster, bigger, more feature rich, more extensible or more affordable search engine? A migration requires good and structured planning and deep knowledge of the existing solution as well as the target technology.

With almost 10 years of full-time, hands-on consulting experience within all kinds of enterprise search solutions, Jan Høydahl at Cominvent has what it takes. See our new migration page for more info.

As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX.

This should not be a shock to anyone, and I hinted to this danger in my blog post about the acquisition:

Let us not hope that the Linux, AIX and Solaris versions will be discontinued. I don’t expect that to happen in the short term, as the press release clearly states that they will be supported…

I guessed back then that Linux support would continue for another five years, but it turned out to be less than two While it is an expected and understandable, I think we all hoped that the press release following the acquisition hinted for a new, more open policy from the software giant, but that turned out to be too optimistic. But existing customers are not left completely alone; Olstad continues:

We will support ESP 5.3—the cross-platform search core in the 2010 products—for 10 years as per our standard support policy (5 years mainstream support and 5 years extended support).  Non-Windows customers on ESP 5.3 can continue running their core on Linux and UNIX and add Windows-only innovations or cloud-based services by using a mixed-platform architecture.

Many search consultant with experience from FAST ESP have experienced that the product is more capable under Linux than under Windows when you start pushing the boundaries. ESP is also easier to manage on a Linux platform due to SSH and friends. But that is not the major selling point anyway.

What this will mean for the existing and potential future customers is hard to predict. Obviously some organizations, especially smaller ones, demand Linux only in their data centers – these will start looking for another vendor.  Some of the bigger companies already have mixed environments and will easily be able to migrate, and may be happy.

Last but not least, the hint of cloud-support from the blog post opens another opportunity for existing customers running on Linux: Outsource the whole search hosting to Microsoft and don’t worry about the servers or OS at all. This may be the best option for many? Expect to see more references to hosted search going forward!

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 1.4 has been released and is now available for
public download! http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/

Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search
platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include
powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search,
dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g.,
Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed
search and index replication, and it powers the search and
navigation features of many of the world’s largest internet sites.

Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search
server within a servlet container such as Tomcat. Solr uses the
Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and
search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it easy
to use from virtually any programming language. Solr’s powerful
external configuration allows it to be tailored to almost any type
of application without Java coding, and it has an extensive plugin
architecture when more advanced customization is required.

New Solr 1.4 features include
- Major performance enhancements in indexing, searching, and
  faceting
- Revamped all-Java index replication that’s simple to configure
  and can replicate config files
- Greatly improved database integration via the DataImportHandler
- Rich document processing (Word, PDF, HTML) via Apache Tika
- Dynamic search results clustering via Carrot2
- Multi-select faceting (support for multiple items in a single
  category to be selected)
- Many powerful query enhancements, including ranges over arbitrary
  functions, and nested queries of different syntaxes
- Many other plugins including Terms for auto-suggest, Statistics,
  TermVectors, Deduplication

Getting Started
---------------
New to Solr? Follow the steps below to get up and running ASAP.

1. Download Solr at http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/
2. Check out the tutorial at http://lucene.apache.org/solr/tutorial.html
3. Read the Solr wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/solr) to learn more
4. Join the community by subscribing to solr-user@lucene.apache.org
5. Give Back (Optional, but encouraged!)
   See http://wiki.apache.org/solr/HowToContribute

For more information on Apache Solr, see http://lucene.apache.org/solr

Release-declaration sourced from Grant Ingersoll’s blog.

Cominvent delivers training on Solr 1.4.

So you are thinking of adopting open source search Solr or Lucene, but are reluctant because of the lack of support fom the open source world?

Or perhaps you are already using Apache Solr or Lucene in your organization, and would like to have an expert partner to support you with your current solution and to help you refine your search solution to better fit your needs and to give better results and performance.

We at Cominvent AS are experts in search and experts in Apache Solr and Lucene. But being a small organization we have not offered support contracts until now. We are now pleased to announce that Cominvent AS, through our partnership with Lucid Imagination, can offer you commercial support, consulting and training. Lucid Imagination was the first commercial entity to offer professional paid support for the Apache Lucene and Solr products, and some of the most skilled coders and engineers are associated with them.

Please contact us for a talk about your needs.

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.

This is the first post in a series, where each new post will explore some new feature. We will simply follow the tutorial to get SOLR up and running locally.

We start by visiting the SOLR Tutorial for the first steps, and simply get the app running:

1. Check Java version, download SOLR (I chose this file), unpack it, and cd to apache-solr-1.2.0/example
2. java -jar start.jar
3. Visit http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/ to see the admin page with a simple test GUI
4. Try hit the search button, you get the XML response back with 0 results
5. Now try indexing some content. CD to example/exampledocs
6. java -jar post.jar solr.xml monitor.xml
7. Now try searching again and see that you get some hits!

For part two we will get SOLR running in a Tomcat instance, customize the schema a bit and present search results in a custom web page using the client API.