Alfresco Search Services & Analytics Roadmap Update AW2017

[harry_peek]

I’m the Product Manager for search and analytics at Alfresco and I often get asked about what we’re working on around search and analytics so I thought it was time to log our current thoughts. 

I’ll try and post regular updates and I would always encourage you get in touch if there is something you are particularly waiting on. That feedback can also influence the direction of the roadmap so it’s always worth participating.

We are focussed around 4 key themes:

1. Digital Business Platform Search

We want to provide a single component for highly scalable search across content and process services with a full set of REST APIs


We launched Search Services with Solr 6 with 5.2 earlier in the year, since then we have been expanding the REST APIs and adding additional sharding methods for scaling


Our next major milestone is to extend Search Services to also cover Process Services. This is a goal for mid 2018


2. Reporting across the Digital Business Platform

The recent additions to the REST API for search added the first steps of additional reporting functionality and is available to all via Search Services.

Next, we want to provide easy ways to report on core & custom metrics across content, process and governance with extended functionality for Enterprise customers
.

To do that we are building on the work with Search Services and are creating a new proprietary product to deliver additional enterprise analytics using Solr 6.

Over a number of releases starting in H1 2018 that product will deliver the following:

1. SQL interface to Solr to support reporting via SQL queries
2. A GUI tool to allow users to build charts, reports and dashboards
3. Integrations with popular BI tools such as Tableau
4. Reporting of process, RM and ‘audit’ style usage data (e.g. views & downloads)

3. ADF components

We’re currently working to enable developers to build apps with advanced search & analytics experiences

First priorities are below and should start to appear from Q1 2018:

1. Faceted search
2. Support for the AFTS query syntax
3. Advanced search / query builder
4. Charts and visualisations

4. AI driven Intelligence

As part of the new analytics product we are looking to drive automation, enrichment and insight extraction with AI.  

This would be embedded in the product, via integrations and also though enabling partner solutions.

Initial use cases we are looking at are around metadata enrichment with image tagging and entity extraction. For the latter, we have been working with Emory University to explore analysis of documents using NLP4J and Tensorflow.

I hope that gives you some idea of direction. If you’d like more detail or would like to provide input into any of these activities then please get in touch, it would be great to chat.

Harry Peek
Senior Product Manager, Analytics & Search
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarryAPeek
Skype: harry_peek

Email: harry.peek@alfresco.com

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