MC+A

Google Apps Administrative Tip 1

Remember that when you delete an account, you also delete all of the documents that that user was an owner of.  If you are forced to terminate someone, simply change their password until you have time to reassign ownership of their documents.

https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=112069

Recently, while working on a Google Search Appliance implementation involving a custom SAML interface users were being returned documents in some cases which they did not have access to. In reviewing the logs, we found that SharePoint was responding with an HTTP status of 200.

The GSA resolves late binding by performing a head request. Our case involved a user being granted access to a document by the GSA that they shouldn’t have. For reasons unknown, when one user accessed a page, they got a 401 (unauthorized) and when another use accessed the page, they got an error. Both users were not able to access the document.

The head request was something similar to:

This appears to be a standard 200 response, but it contains something interesting. There is an additional header called SharePointError. In digging around MSDN, I found this article . The SAML bridge had to be modified to check for this head in addition to the response. The existence of this header does not indicate a failure, only that it needs to be future examined to see if the user has access.

gsa-faceted-search helps you build a faceted search experience.  The filters are static but provide a very rich ability to filter without a hole lot of XSLT modifications.  There is a simple 3 step process documented here on adding it to your search interface.

Earlier this week, Google release version 2.4.  This is the first public accessible version of the connectors.  Connections as part of this release are:

• SharePoint
• Documentum
• LiveLink
• FileNet
• File Systems – new (aka beta)
• Databases – new (aka beta)

Upon first view of them, it looks like they incorporate many of the suggestions we have posted on this blog over the past few months.  (i.e. use javascript to produce the results [Thanks Jon Doctor!]).  We’ll be posting a how to get the best search out of SharePoint with a Google Search Appliance shortly.

Customers interested in assistance with deployment of the connectors please contact us.

I spent the last hour trying to find a regular expression to parse a url that was url-encoded or to match between two words.  Java was having a difficult time retrieving the url since it was parameter=something& but rather proxystylesheet%3Ddefault_frontend%26.  The expression is:

(?<=proxystylesheet%3D).*?(?=%26)

Where proxystylesheet is the parameter you are looking for.  This won’t find the value if it is at the end of the line but in my case, that is unnecessary.

MC+A will be sponsoring the directIT Chicago event tonight at the Elysian hotel.  Drop a comment if you are going to be there.

Today, Microsoft released the new Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 public beta.  This is is the first public beta of the new technology.

It’s been 3 years since the previous release of the Office.  Much has changed in the economy and the enterprise landscape.  We just download the versions and will begin to test them and report back.

OpenPipline is an open source software project for crawling, parsing, analyzing and routing documents.  I joined the board of advisors a while back and I’m happy to say that I’ve finally got around some time to put effort into really contributing.  The goal is to develop a standard framework for developing enterprise search applications.  Enterprise search products have similar architectures yet they are typically incompatible with one and another.  Something developed for one…can not be processed by another.

We’ve started out building on a commercial release of the pipeline processor and have begun to integrate it with some of our Google Search Appliance customers.  For them, this tool provides the ability to convert document types that are not support by the GSA or other extraction techniques.  It really depends on the requirements.

Our first contribution to the project is a commercial release of a stage that publishes the item from OpenPipeline to a Google Search Appliance.  By combining the technologies, you get an open text processing framework along with Google’s powerful algorithm.

Stay tuned for some interesting updates!

Google Business published a video detailing some of the new version of the Appliance(see below).  The new version of the Google Search Appliance has improved and new features in the following areas:

Access Control

• Universal Login
• SAML Identity SPI
• Multiple Cookie Domains

High Availability

• GSA Mirroring

Administration

• Real-Time Diagnostics

Connectivity

• Native Integration with SharePoint
• Faster ECM Connectivity
• Connectivity to Lotus Notes
• Expanded Support for File Shares and Databases

Search Quality

• Automated Self-Learning Scorer
• Composite Collections
• Advanced Language Phrase Segmenting

If you are an early adopter of Windows 7 and you own a Google Search Appliance, be sure to set the following local policy so that Kerberos will be enabled:

• Local Security Policy
  • Local Policies
    • Security Options
      • Network Security: Configure encryption types allowed for Kerberos

Enabling all options under Network Security: Configure encryption types allowed for Kerberos