MC+A

MC+A has been involved in leading the development of the The LSNC Google API Project. LSNC received a 2010 TIG award to overcome the lack of integration between LSNC’s domain-specific Google Apps platform and their case management system, Pika an open source PHP-based application. The objectives of the project are to create practical solutions for integrating select content elements of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Groups into Pika, utilizing open source design and coding techniques readily adaptable to other open source CMS applications.

Brian Lawlor of LSNC recently posted an article updating the progress. You can find the article: here.

Earlier today, we released the second release of the Pika Google Apps project sponsored by .  The LSNC Google API Project is a national demonstration project funded by the LSC Technology Initiative Grants Program. This project is maintained by Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC), a ten-office legal aid program serving low-income clients in 23 counties in the upper third of California.  The second release focuses on integration of Google Docs.

Now a Pika user can sync their case documents to Google Apps.  Additionally, we’ve resolved some bugs with the previous release.  We’ll document the project a bit more soon but go here to download the lastest files:

http://code.google.com/p/lsnc-google-api/downloads/list

Our customers are advised that Google Enterprise has released a patch to Google Search Appliance software 6.10.  This patch is labeled P4.  Google strongly recommends upgrading to this patch version if you are on the following versions:

• 6.10.4.G.22
• 6.10.4.G.22-P1

A list of the fixes included in this release can be found here.

MC+A supported customers should contact their account rep or MC+A support to schedule a time when the update can be applied.  There is a small outage equivalent to 20 seconds * the number of collections.

Having difficult finding things in Salesforce.com?  Frustrated to have to login to Salesforce.com to simply look up a contact?

Join MC+A for a webinar no how to better leverage your Salesforce content with a Google Search Appliance (GSA).

Salesforce is an excellent CRM. Business like yours trust an increasing amount of important sales data to Salesforce CRM. Finding relevant sales, lead and contact information quickly involves way too much effort. Search should be simple and just work. Integrating Google search Appliance with Salesforce you can provide a universal search experience with Salesforce results integrated into your portal or search results page.

Date: July 22, 2011
Time: 1pm CST
Cost: Free

You can register via this link.

Duplicate Documents Creates Noise and Consumes Your License

Duplicate links can produce duplicate search results which:

1. Can cost you more in licensing
2. Produce duplicate results thereby angering your user base.

In a recent engagement, a global company’s CMS was producing and accepting urls in both of these formats:

• http://www.mcplusa.com/company/about
• http://www.mcplusa.com/company/about.html

The Google Search Appliance will see both of these documents as separate urls.    I reviewed the clients requirements and all of the site content either produced a ‘/’ or a file type at the end.  This is fairly common among CMS and other SEO friendly publication system.

The Expression

The regular expression that I came up with was

regex:http://[put your site here]/.*/$|[put your site here]/.*\.([a-zA-Z]{3,9})$

Which [put your site here] contained the content source.

The Take Away

We tested it out and after applying the pattern we reduced the total number of documents by 20%.   This was especially benefical since the client was at about 480k documents on their current 500k license.  The change took them well below the license limit and cleaned up the search interface.

*Plug* – If you have had your Google Search Appliance for awhile, I would recommend considering our Health Check where we can review multiple configuration settings to see if your appliance is properly tuned.

Michael Cizmar
Managing Partner

http://www.twitter.com/michaelcizmar

The LSNC Google API Project is driven by a practical dilemma: The need to overcome the lack of integration between LSNC’s cloud-based case managment system and the core set of Google Apps they rely upon everyday to get work done.

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) April 26, 2011
Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) had a need to overcome the integration gap between their cloud-based case management system and the core set of Google Apps products they rely upon to get their work done. LSNC was awarded funding from the LSC Technology Initiative Grants Program to develop a solution that would solve some common integration issues facing many legal service groups.

The LSNC Google API Project is a national demonstration project, released under the GNU General Public License is being developed in partnership with MC+A. The project’s goal is to demonstrate how open source Google APIs can be used for practical integration of the Google Apps platform with open source case management systems used by legal service programs. Once development is complete the project will be maintained by LSNC.

As part of an iterative approach MC+A developed a release schedule that address LSNC issues by priority. The first priority for the project was integration of the case management system with Google Apps Calendar

“Integration of Google Calendar with our CMS illustrates what we need to accomplish,” says Brian Lawlor, Regional Counsel at LSNC. “Instead of the two platforms having separate, essentially duplicate calendaring systems, we are replacing the calendaring system native to the CMS with the more flexible, powerful Google Calendar functions. Doing so, our users can create and edit one set, not two, of case-related calendar events, and can do so from either the Google Calendar or the CMS. One calendaring system to rule them all!”

MC+A will be developing three addition integration components (Gmail, Google Docs and Google Groups) for the API project with additional iterations scheduled for release before the end of Q2.
“This is a great first step toward integrating these two systems,” Michael Cizmar, MC+A’s Managing Partner stated when asked about the project. “It really shows just a small part of what can be done using the Google Apps API to integrate into an existing system. We are looking forward to the community’s involvement in the coming months.”
The project is licensed under the GNU General Public License and is maintained at:
http://code.google.com/p/lsnc-google-api/

About MC+A
MC+A is dedicated to solving business challenges by enabling organizations to derive maximum value from their business intelligence assets. They provide solutions focused on managing business intelligence and help their clients build, find and share those assets securely. MC+A was the first Google Enterprise Partner and is also on the Board of Advisors to Open Pipeline.

http://www.mcplusa.com

About Legal Services of Northern California
LSNC, a ten-office legal aid program serving low-income clients in 23 counties in the upper third of California, has long been recognized as one of the finest and most effective legal services programs in the country.

http://www.lsnc.net/

Google announced on Tuesday the end of life schedule for software versions 5.2, 6.0 and 6.2.  The 5.2 software version is scheduled to be deprecated on April 30, 2011.  Once deprecated, a software version is no longer supported by Google. This means we may require you to update to a supported version, should you require technical support.

The schedule for 6.0 and 6.2 end of life is as follows:

6.0: August 30, 2011
6.2: March 31, 2012

The latest release of the GSA software is 6.8.

On December 13th, join MC+A’s founder and managing partner Michael Cizmar for a detailed debrief on the most recent update to the Google Search Appliance, version 6.8.

REGISTER TO ATTEND THIS FREE WEBINAR.

Monday, December 13, 2010

11:30PM PST | 2:30PM EST

THE GOOGLE SEARCH 6.8 WEBINAR WILL COVER:

• Cloud Connect – integrated search with Google Apps, Site Search and Twitter
• People Search – Search profile information about people in your organization
• Dynamic Navigation – filter search results with specific metadata attributes
• Active-Active – provide high availability by directing search traffic to multiple appliances
• Sharepoint 2010 – Search all content within Sharepoint 2010 out of the box

About Michael

Michael Cizmar is the founder and President of MC+A, one of the very first Google Enterprise Professional partners and has advised organizations such as Volkswagen, New York Post, Los Angeles Metro, and Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco on findablity in the enterprise. Michael also serves on the Advisory Board to Open Pipeline.

For more information about this and any upcoming events, please contact us.

Google released P2 to software release 6.8.  Google strongly recommends that you install the patch if you are running 6.8.0.G30 or 6.8.0.G30-P1.

The following fixes are included:

MC+A support customer should contact support to schedule an update time.  Others are required to login to Google’s support portal that is included in your Google Search Appliance welcome email.

Happy Thanksgiving!

MC+A Support

Openpipeline released version 0.9 last week.  The most notable feature in this release is a basic web crawler along with making the Connector an abstract class, and given the Stage more access to its environment.

http://www.openpipeline.org/2010/10/version-0-9-released/