Google Search Appliance Integration / Use

[stevenhuey]

We're currently evaluating Alfresco for use in developing a corporate intranet. The WCM features on the Roadmap look particularly exciting, however we need to rely on our Google Search Appliance for indexing site content and providing search. We have the 1.4 Community Preview installed and it looks like search for the web client is handled via Lucene.

Will the WCM version be tied to Lucene as well, or will it be flexible enough to allow developed web content to be indexed and searched by a GSA?

Thanks,
Steven Huey

[rivetlogic]

Alfresco's CIFS interface should suffice for GSA to index at it normally would. CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocol is supported by the repository be default, and Alfresco appears like a regular Windows box on the network. Spaces within Alfresco can appear as Windows shares, and therefore various application, including GSA, can walk the content items (files) within the spaces and work with these files as they would on a regular file system.

Hope that helps.

–Sumer

[jbarmash]

The WCM content can be deployed on a different server, and since typically there are no security restrictions, GSA should have no problem picking it up.  It's just files at that point (we are talking FSR here).

If you care about security (talking about document management now), then you can create a GSA connector that will index alfresco (through CIFS probably still) then query Alfresco for whether a particular document is supposed to be visible by the current user.