MC+A

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/

Google has just released 6.4 on the enterprise support site and has updated code.google.com’s documentation.  We have yet to install and verify.  But some of the big changes so far:

JavaScript Crawling

The search appliance now can detect links and content generated dynamically.  I wonder if this will help the forms authentication wizard?

Serve Time Authentication

You will no longer need to enable or disable security manager and legacy auth as in 6.2. The default behavior of the appliance is to now centralize authentication for:

• Cookies
• HTTP Basic and NTLM
• Kerberos
• SAML
• Connectors

Administrative Improvements

There are various administration improvements, most notably:

• LDAP Setup
  New options to use LDAP during serve-time and looking up a user’s group during authentication.
• Timeout for Auth Requests
  New option allows specification wait time for GSA before processing batch authorizations.
• Head Requestor Deny Rules
  Allows you to identify URLs where content servers deny users access with codes other than HTTP code 401. (Non web standard pages)

The full documentation is here.

Google announced  new details about improvements to Google Docs.  The main features of the release are:

• A new margin ruler
• Better numbering and bullets
• Better placement of images
• “Higher Fidelity” document import
• Faster JavaScript process
• Faster Collaboration

Check it out below

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

DNS Override

Often during our implementations we find that DNS is not set up properly for the DMZ or other vlan.  In these cases, it would be great if you could specify a hosts file on the appliance.  In version 6.0 of the appliance, you can.

The administration override for DNS can be found here:

http://yourappliance:8000/EnterpriseController?actionType=dns

Feed Files Awaiting Processing

If you are a developer of external feeds to the Google Search Appliance, you spend a lot of your time waiting for feed process to move from the “Feeds” page to update.  There is an new feature to view the remaining count of documents waiting to be processed.  This can be accessed by going to /getbacklogcount on the back of the feed service port 19900.  Try it out:

http://yourappliance:19900/getbacklogcount

LDAP Server Authentication

Prior to version 6.0, you could perform security trimming via LDAP authentication.  But you always had to maintain a custom list of user accounts.  Now with the release of 6.0.  You can use LDAP groups to list Administrators and Managers.

When enabled, you have to additional boxes to list a LDAP group for both the manager and administrator roles (see below).

Basic information regarding the set up can be found here.

An update was released last week for the Google Search Appliance. Version 5.2 has been updated and released for the GB-1001. It also contains some bug fixes from the previous version as well.

Below are a list of version 5.2 includes the following features (Copied from here).  A detail of the fixes in the release can be found here.

The latest Google Search Appliance gives users secure access to more content sources, with enhanced search quality and new user interface options.

End User Features

Personalized Search Experience
Allow administrators to adjust search results for different user groups, based on department or function.

Alerts
Employees can subscribe to email alerts for topics and documents of interest, choosing an hourly, daily, or weekly schedule.

Spellchecker in Six New Languages
French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch.

Enterprise Content

Languages
Restrict search results to any of 27 auto-detected languages including administrative functions in five new languages (Czech, English-UK, Portuguese-Portugal, Turkish, Vietnamese); contextual spell checking for all end users in Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch.

Security and Access Control

Kerberos Support
Provide native support for Kerberos, enabling a silent authentication experience for end-users.

Metadata Biasing
Administrators can bias results based on metadata (in addition to biasing based on source, URL or date).

Advanced Reporting
View and export daily and hourly result sets, top queries, special feature usage, and more. Report for every query, including reports on which queries receive no clicks by a user and how often users are clicking on sponsored links in comparison to organic search results or OneBox modules.

Administration and Customization

Localized Administration
Administer your Google Search Appliance around the globe in 27 different languages. Full administration is now supported in Basque, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US), English (UK), Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.