Blogs – Page 4 – TNR Global

Living with Bad Enterprise Search: The Costs of Not Finding What Your Business Needs

Search technology is critical to the mission of any business. It facilitates cash flow, revenue, Business Intelligence (BI), productivity and employee satisfaction.

Do you remember TV Guide? There was a time when TV Guide sat on nearly every coffee table in every living room in America. If you didn’t have a subscription, you would grab it in the checkout line at the grocery store every week. If you wanted to plan out your evening in front of the tube, you would pick it up, thumb through it, read the synopsis of the show, and make an informed decision about watching Dallas or Falcon Crest that evening.

Then everything changed. Not overnight, but let’s fast forward to today. If you are 20, you don’t know what TV Guide is. Most cable packages have a guide built in so you can plan your viewing, record shows you will miss, or call up ones you want to watch, even from last season. Schedules for networks are posted online. And it’s a good thing, because back when TV Guide sat on our coffee tables, there were three networks. How many are there now? Imagine how thick that TV Guide would be.

The explosion of content is not exclusive to television. Businesses have had an estimated 60% growth in digital content per year, and it shows no signs of stopping. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses haven’t upgraded their cable box, so to speak. They are looking for crucial documents and data on a manual dial. The truth is, companies have been living with bad search for a long time. And they’ve been paying for it.

The IDC estimates that 2.5 hours a day per employee are wasted looking for information they need to perform their job, or recreating that information altogether. Additionally, making sound decisions depends strongly on having valid information to make those decisions. Without access to information, bad business decisions are made, and bad business decisions are deadly to the enterprise. Business intelligence efforts can fall short without the right search platform powering fast relevant results. Worst of all, if your customers cannot find the product or service they need on your system, they will go somewhere else for it.

Content Management Systems are gaining in popularity, but what’s powering the search? How well does it deal with unstructured content? Does it give results with the relevance you need to make the best decision? Can your employees find what to need to execute their tasks? Can customers find your products?

Search technology is critical to the mission of any business. It facilitates cash flow, revenue, Business Intelligence (BI), productivity and employee satisfaction. It has an immediate impact of the bottom line of the business. It is an essential ingredient to the successful enterprise on so many levels, to run a business with inadequate search technology is like using an old copy of TV Guide to try and find and decide what to watch.

If you are assessing your search platform and it’s bottom line impact on your business, contact us. We can analyze your systems and provide a free consultation on the best enterprise search solution for your company.

UMASS STEM Career Fair Report

TNR Global attended the UMASS Career Fair for Engineering, Natural Sciences, and Technology at the flagship campus in Amherst. The fair was extremely well attended, with undergraduates, graduate students, and recent grads present.

Career Services places STEM majors with employers.

“It was very well organized” said Managing Director Natasha Goncharova. “We spoke to a number of very well qualified students for software development positions.”

Students registering for the Career Fair, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

There were more than 80 companies recruiting at the fair in the fields of software development, manufacturing, and engineering. “We are extremely lucky to have such a highly rated University for Computer Science right in our backyard” said Karen Lynn, Director of Business Development. The Computer Science department is in the top 20 of Computer Science departments in the country according to US News and World Report. The TNR Global office is located in Hadley, less than 5 miles from campus.

TNR Global held an iPod Raffle while collecting resumes. Resumes will be collected throughout the weekend online, and two winners will be announced on Monday, October 3rd. Winners will be contacted directly. To participate in the iPod Raffle, applicants can submit resumes digitally by emailing them to jobs@tnrglobal.com.

TNR Global, LLC is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions for publishing companies, news sites, web directories, academia, enterprise, and SaaS companies.

iPod Giveaway at the UMASS Career Fair September 28

TNR Global will be attending the UMASS Career Fair on Wednesday, September 28, 2011. Drop off a copy of your physical resume and you will have a chance to win an iPod Shuffle. We will be at table #29 from 10:00AM-3:00PM.

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Email us a cover letter and resume and you will have a chance to win a second iPod Shuffle.

Stop by and chat with alumnus Managing Director Natasha Goncharova, ’03 or Director of Business Development Karen Lynn, ’92 about internships and an opportunity for a career in Enterprise Search Technology at TNR Global, LLC.

“The fine print….”

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@tnrglobal.com with the subject heading “UMASS Career Fair.” All entries will be entered into the raffle and chosen at random to win an iPod Shuffle 2GB, Please email resumes as simple text email or as web URLs.

ELIGIBILITY: VOID WHERE PROHIBITED OR RESTRICTED BY LAW. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. The Raffle is open to everyone worldwide who is at least 18 years of age. Employees, officers, directors, representatives, and immediate family members of TNR Global, LLC and their respective parent companies, affiliates and subsidiaries are not eligible to participate in this Raffle.

FAST ESP to Lucene Solr Presentation: Open Call for Questions

To pre-load the discussion on Michael’s Enterprise Search: FAST ESP to Lucene Solr talk, send your questions to: fast2solr@tnrglobal.com We want to hear from you!

TNR Global is excited to be participating in the Apache Lucene EuroCon conference in Barcelona. Our own Michael McIntosh is scheduled to present: “Enterprise Search: FAST ESP to Lucene Solr” Here is your chance to pre-load the discussion. Before Michael puts the final touches on his talk, he wants to know what issues or questions you may be have. In the following video, he touches on some of the highlights of his upcoming talk, and asks for your input.

Enterprise Search: FAST ESP to Lucene Solr pre-conferece video - Click to Watch — Enterprise Search: FAST ESP to Lucene Solr pre-conf video

To participate in advance, send you questions or comments to: fast2solr@tnrglobal.com. While Michael cannot promise he will include your question or commentary in his actual talk, he will work to address them in an upcoming White Paper, to be released after the conference in November 2011. We look forward to hearing from you!

Crawling Solr

“We are looking at creating a suitable enterprise crawler to replace the one provided by ESP to support customers doing a ESP to Solr migration.”

Recently there has been a lively discussion on Linked In’s Enterprise Search Engine Professionals Group started with this question:

“Is it an handicap for Solr to depend on third party solutions for crawling the Web like Nutch?

Our own Michael McIntosh felt compelled to respond. What follows is his post to this topic in it’s entirety.

“This topic makes me think of the saying “Write programs that do one thing and do it well.” The longer version of this philosophy, as expressed by Doug McIlroy, is this: “Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.” Solr stands very well on its own and, based upon my impression of the Solr community so far, more people currently use Solr for structured content vs unstructured like web documents. I think that Solr should have some ‘out of the box’ web crawler implementation available, but it should not be the core focus. It can serve to allow new users of Solr to focus more on the Solr/Lucene side of things and not have to worry about rolling their own crawler or figuring out which is the best third-party crawling solution to use. I suspect that many people who need to do crawling can get by with a fairly basic crawler. My impression of Nutch so far is that is more complicated than most Solr users need out of the starting gate. That said, if you have a business that deals with large amounts of crawled unstructured content, its very likely they will need something more robust than you can reasonably ship & support as part of the Solr project. For one of our clients, the size of our dataset has grown from needed just a couple boxes, to multiple clusters with many machines each. One of the newest developments is the growth of the amount of unstructured content has grown to a size where we now need a crawler CLUSTER. When we first started on this, it never occurred to us that we might need multiple machines for the crawling side of the equation, but it has happened. But I think our case its less common. All in all, I think Solr should have a bare-bones reference implementation of a crawler that can easily be expanded upon, but it is probably not an effective use of effort to Solr developers to focus on the crawling side. Let a third party focus on the issues of crawling, it is a deceptively complicated issue.”

After his post I caught him in the office and asked where he was going with this line of thinking. “We are looking at creating a suitable enterprise crawler to replace the one provided by ESP to support customers doing a ESP to Solr migration.” He revealed. Sounds like a very promising solution to a fairly big, and common problem for companies with vast amounts of metadata. And as for unstructured content? Well, it’s the proverbial elephant in the room, don’t you think?

To see the entire conversation, with contributions from experts in the field of search architecture, click here. To get in touch with Michael directly to discuss your architecture and crawling needs, contact us.

Building for Enterprise Search: A Systems View, Part 2

“It’s important to incorporate expected behaviors into modeling and monitoring on both applications and systems sides and how they interact with one another.”

When we left off, Michael Klatsky, VP of Systems Administration was telling me how important communication between the systems side and search side of is to developing an enterprise search solution. The process of building, testing, monitoring, adjusting, more testing, and more monitoring ensures systems function that way they are intended to function. Let’s resume our conversation where Michael discusses the tools he uses to ensure the system he’s building works the way the client wants it to. This is the second portion of a two part blog post.
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Tools for BDD: Part 2

Karen: It’s sounding like the Search Team and Sys Admin Team need to have a good relationship and communicate often to ensure the system will accommodate the work the search team does.

Michael: Yes, search sometimes has to construct their scripts to conforms to systems. Testing is run on both sides, but small changes can affect others down the line, so it’s important to incorporate expected behaviors into modeling and monitoring on both applications and systems sides and how they interact with one another.

Karen: How do you make sure that happens?

Michael: We’re exploring some tools to help us make sure the machine will act just as we expect it to, like cucumber and cucumber nagios We’re using certain tools to facilitate the systems behaves in the way that we expect it to. We’re exploring cucumber for basic modeling and for testing. Cucumber is cool for testing because it returns values to you in colors. Red, meaning it failed, yellow meaning there’s problem, and green meaning its good. According to their docs, they instruct you to “keep running it until it’s a cucumber.”

Karen: Ah, I get it.

Michael: Right. And what cucumber nagios does is it takes cucumber and allows you to create a nagios monitoring check script. So if you pass, great, if you god red, nagios will throw an alert to the systems administrator so we have an opportunity to fix it before more is built.

Karen: Sounds like it’s an attentive way to build a system.

Michael: The only way to scale is to have machines do things for themselves. That’s the way to do it.

Karen: To automate.

Michael: Yes. Automation. Not to just set things up to automatically do configuration management beforehand, but to test afterwards to determine that your machine is behaving just as you (and your client) envisioned it.

For more information on how you can plan your enterprise search in cooperation with your systems administration team, contact us for a free consultation.

Building for Enterprise Search: A Systems View, Part 1

We need to determine what right looks like, and have the system behave that way.

I sat down with our VP of Systems Administration, Michael Klatsky to discuss some of his thoughts on how Systems Administration needs to work in concert with the Search Team to implement search technologies for clients. This is the first portion of a two part blog post.

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Karen: You wanted to discuss how your approaching the systems side of search, and using a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) approach. Tell me about that.

Michael: Well, one of the problems we run into when systems brings up machines for enterprise search clusters is the search software (FAST ESP for example) is very particular about it’s environment- more so than many of the more common applications such as the Apache webserver. Properly configured DNS, specific environment variables, specific library versions have to be present. There are ownership and permissions that need to be in place, and performance metrics that must adhere to a given baseline. There can be slow disks can affect performance. There has to be the right amount of memory, and different classifications of systems roles. Currently, we have homegrown scripts that bring up systems, then we have other scripts we run to detect issues. These scripts will tell us if the system is ready for what we need it to do. We also monitor the systems for standard items such as diskspace, memory usage, as well as basic search functionality. For example we’ll run a quick search on say paper clips, and if comes back with results we know it’s running.

That’s what we’ve done historically. But now, we need to bring up larger numbers of machines,and have confidence that they will perform exactly as we expect. Additionally, we have a set of functional tasks that must be available without fail As we bring up clusters of larger numbers of machines, and as we need to be more nimble, how can we ensure that it will respond the way we expect it to?

Karen: This is where Behavior Driven Development comes in, right?

Michael: Right. There is a lot of discussion out there on Behavior Driven Development which would include behavior driven modelling, behavior driven monitoring, behavior driven architecture and infrastructure. So not only does a machine come up and is listening on these ports, but I can bring a machine up, I can go to that machine and I’m able to log in, install certain software, and peform tasks. I can go to another machine and perform a task. So, the question is, how do you model that? How do we ensure the system will behaves as it should?

Karen: So you’re looking at replicating the behavior of these systems so that every time we deploy something it will be the same way.

Michael: Right. And if a change is made, even a small change, we’ll see it right away because a system or service will fail and be able to fix it. Sometimes a service will fail silently. But we test and monitor constantly to ensure the system will do exactly what we expect it to do. It’s all a part of the build process.

Karen: Sounds like a smart approach.

Michael: Yes. And if we make a change, we’ll find out how that change will affect the rest of the system. For instance, we run tests and if something is wrong it should give you an error. For example if you change the location of your SSH keys. You may still be able to get into the machine by SSH, but one little change could make it impossible to SSH from one machine to another in the cluster. So rather than find that out after you begin your manual work on that, we make it part of the build process by constantly monitoring and testing the system as we build it.

Karen: It sounds like building a house and then realizing you have bricks out of place after it’s built.

Michael: Worse, it’s like building a house and realizing you forgot to build a door! At the very least while you are building, you can test, and let me know, “Hey! I don’t have a door to my house!” So that I can fix it before you move in.

There are certain things the search team needs to do to ensure their work will function in the system, like SSHing around the machines in the cluster–they need to be able to do that. There are certain ports that system need to be listening on, there are certain services that need to return a normal range of results. We need to define what a proper operation looks like. We can’t necessarily say that if we search for gold plated paperclips for example, that the search result should show 1000 results every time, that may or may not be the case–we don’t necessarily know if this is a proper result every time, but we should determine if the result returned is within a proper range of normal.

We’re defining what a proper operation looks like and ensure it functions that way. Part of the behavior driven model which is what I’m really interested in, we can set up a natural language looking config file. This config file should describe the actions or behaviors I expect. For example, when I go to ABC.com website and search for gold plated paperclips, I expect to see results. One result should be X. There should be more than Y results. When I return that result, I should be able to click on one result and go to that products feature list. Basically I’m describing how the customer will interact with the search, what I expect the customer to do, and design the system to respond with the customer’s actions in mind.

Karen: So your engineering it with the customer’s behaviors in mind.

Michael: That’s exactly what we’re doing. Then that if I look for a certain item, I get that result, describe the behavior of what the customer should do and make the system behave in cooperation with the customer behavior. We need to determine what right looks like, and have the system behave that way.

Karen: And what right looks like is really different for each client.

Micheal: Yes. You can write in somewhat natural English what that looks like. It’s not magic, but you still have to come up with specification of what right looks like. But you can do a lot of sophisticated things in this manner because you will know you’ll have a website that’s going to perform the way it’s suppose to perform. The bottom line is: Define what your systems should “look” like, deploy those systems using those definitions, and after deployment, test to ensure that those systems “look” like your definition.

For more information on how you can plan your enterprise search in cooperation with your systems administration team, contact us for a free consultation.

Open Source Search: Isn’t It Expensive?

You’ve heard the debate on open source search vs. proprietary search. One question that constantly comes up for prospective clients is “What’s all this going to cost me?”

In these times, it’s a good question. Because proprietary has neatly packaged, practically shrink wrapped plans, it’s much easier to discern how much you will spend on a solution. But how much will it cost? That’s an entirely different question.

I see you cocking your head sideways.

Proprietary search has hidden costs. What if the software doesn’t perform the way you need it to? Does the software understand the nuances of your business? How adaptable is it? How much will it cost to adapt that software to get it to perform the way my business needs it to? Questions like this need to be asked, and answered. Eventually you will ask yourself….why am I paying for all of this? And your developer will ask, “why can’t I access the source code?”

What I’m getting at is this: It is a reassuring feeling for a customer to see what a package costs, to understand what services you will get with a solution, and to anticipate what the licensing fee will cost on an annual basis. If it’s your job to research a solution and present findings to your executive team to make a decision, then proprietary search, on the surface, seems a more secure choice. But rarely, if ever, are these solutions a perfect fit for the customer. It’s like buying a Ferrari, with all the brand recognition and polish a Ferrari offers, and not ever driving it past second gear, or cutting the wheel more than 15 degrees, or getting a chance to have your trusted mechanic look under the hood. This is why open source is such a good solution for businesses who want their IT to move quickly.

We’re hearing more buzz about companies waking up to the agility of an open source solution. Most recently, with the acquisition of Autonomy by HP, the industry is telling stories of ex Autonomy customers migrating to Solr (open source search) with only the annual licencing budget to finance the migration. Without an annual expenditure of cash for licensing, and the freedom of not being under a licensing agreement, companies quickly recoup the initial expenditure of a migration.

What kind of car does your company drive?

If you are examining the different choices for implementing search technology in your organization, contact us. We’re happy to talk to you about the best solution for your business.

TNR Global to Attend UMASS Career Fair in September 2011

TNR Global has reserved space at UMASS/Amherst’s Career Fair for Engineering, Natural Sciences & Technology students. “The University of Massachusetts offers a comprehensive Computer Science program where students emerge as strong candidates for the kind of technical work required of TNR software developers,” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies for TNR. UMASS/Amherst’s Computer Science Major is ranked in the top 20 Universities for Computer Science by US News & World Report. The fair will take place on September 28th, 2011 from 10-3:00PM in the Campus Center Auditorium. Alumni Karen Lynn and Natasha Goncharova will be representing TNR Global. Stop by and say hello!

Migration Still Looms Large on the Horizon for FAST ESP Customers

“Designing a non-trivial search solution to fully meet your needs from scratch is hard enough on its own. If you are migrating an existing solution, it is very unlikely that you will find a one to one mapping of all of the features in a new search engine that you have come to depend upon with your existing implementation.” –Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies, TNR Global, LLC

Microsoft acquired FAST all the way back in 2008 and then in early 2010 disclosed it’s plans to stop updating the FAST product on a Linux operating system after 2010, making FAST ESP 5.3 the latest and greatest, and very last update Linux users will see involving any improvements to the proprietary search platform. It was clear to anyone on Linux that a migration would need to occur, and as content grows, depending upon the size of your organization, that migration should probably happen sooner than later.

Buzz about migration ensued–an inevitable certainty for many companies, especially ones with huge amounts of data. But how many companies have jumped in with both feet? I had the opportunity to speak with an open source search engine expert who, along with the industry, believed that the move from Microsoft was a windfall for anyone in the business of enterprise search design and implementation. However, she admitted “we haven’t seen as large a response as we expected.”

This isn’t exactly surprising to everyone. “It’s coming” says our VP of Search Technologies, Michael McIntosh. “Corporations have an enormous investment in FAST ESP and it makes sense that they would be reluctant to move to something new until they absolutely have to.” That means, when their licenses expire.

“They will likely weigh the performance and support, or lack thereof, for the FAST ESP technical team with the timing of renewing a license and wait until they absolutely have to change to something else,” says McIntosh.

The purchase of Autonomy and the shift of HP from hardware to software could signal a recognition from Goliath HP the kind of growth opportunity enterprise search software offers, and that the “great shift” from FAST ESP to another search platform is very much on the horizon.

But as the clock continues to tick, companies using FAST ESP should be strategizing for migration now. “It’s an enormous undertaking to migrate an entire search solution from FAST to another platform. Designing a non-trivial search solution to fully meet your needs from scratch is hard enough on its own. If you are migrating an existing solution, it is very unlikely that you will find a one to one mapping of all of the features in a new search engine that you have come to depend upon with your existing implementation. Solving challenging issues like that requires both creativity and expertise to address your needs.” says McIntosh. If a need for migration is eminent, there will be a real need for expertise in the field of enterprise search on both proprietary and open source platforms, depending upon several factors like size, in house talent, and growth expectations.

How is your company preparing for the discontinuation of support of FAST ESP? Need guidance? Contact us for pointers, analysis, or architecture for a full migration.