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

• 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.

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 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 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.

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

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

Google released a patch for appliance software release 6.4.  Release notes can be found here (goes to Google support page).

MC+A support will be contacting MC+A support customers about scheduling a time for the update.

The feature is described in detail at http://www.google.com/instant/  It’s a significant overhaul from the current search infrastructure requiring additional capacity from Google infrastructure to support the additional queries.

Key features:

• Dynamic Results – In addition to autocomplete/search as you type searches are performed and returned while you type.
• Predictions – the autocomplete attempts to predict and display your full query.
• Scroll to Search – You can scroll through predictions instantly with an arrow down.

Zeta byte

In case you didn’t know what a zeta byte is: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_gigabytes_are_in_a_zeta_byte

Availability

Google instant is available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8 (we are not sure about Opera) in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the UK. 

Header requests is the default method for how the Google Search Appliance (GSA) performs authorization on a document level (also known as late binding) for web based content (See The Header Requester).  There are numerous advantages and disadvantages.  One of the minuses, is that it relies on the content source to adhere to HTTP protocols.

We’ve experienced numerous content systems that don’t fully support the correct HTTP response for this to work.  In many cases of Lotus Domino or Microsoft SharePoint, a friendly message is return or their is an embedded header.  This causes the to misinterpret the response from the server and think the user has access to the document.

The common method pre 6.4 was to implement a SAML interface and develop custom code to handle the logic for the variety of content sources.  Google released several Open Source projects to jump start your efforts.  Most notably they are:

• Google Value Security Framework
• Google SAML Bridge for Windows

The Solution: Header Request Deny Rules

Those tended to be difficult for our clients to implement and another piece of infrastructure to deploy and manage.  In version 6.4, Google has added additional rule validation on the appliance.  You now can check the most common sets on the appliance with simple configuration:

Screen shot of the Header Request Deny Rule Form

This virtually eliminates many of the customizations that we’ve made for the wrong response.  How Neat!!!