TNR Global to Attend Enterprise Search Summit Fall 2012 in Washington, DC

We always find these conference are a great way to network with other search professionals facing the same challenges.

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Hadley, MA  August 15, 2012 TNR Global announced today that they plan to attend the Enterprise Search Summit this fall in Washington, DC. The conference is being held at the Marriott Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel October 17-19th, 2012.

At the conference representatives from TNR are looking forward to networking with peers and learning the latest trends in the realm of Enterprise Search and big data. The conference’s theme “Strategies to hit your moving targets” will feature talks on findability, open source, cloud search, best practices, and other topics. Attending the conference will be Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technology and Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development.

“We always find these conference are a great way to network with other search professionals facing the same challenges.  It’s a great way to exchange valuable information and build relationships with peers and potential clients.” said Lynn.  We’re especially interested in learning how the market is evolving in terms of emerging technologies and current solutions.  We are currently focused on migration from commercial to open source search, managing large data sets or “big data,” as well as learning more about what users need in their search solution.”

Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel
999 Ninth Street NW
Washington, District Of Columbia 20001

TNR Global Launches Search Application for Museum Collections

We use open source search technology that works with most museum software systems and databases including the popular museum software product PastPerfect.

TNR Global Launches Search Application for Museum Collections

TNR Global is launching the alpha version of a search application designed specifically for museum collections. Museum Collections Search is any application for digitally searching a museum’s collection. This can be made available to the public or used by only the internal staff for curation, and can be made available to a selected professional or research audience. Our White Paper explains the application in more detail.

Collections Search adds tremendous value to the research community and is often in line with the educational mission of many museums. A search feature is a resource for students and researchers, and can expand the overall audience by reaching people separated by distance or with limited physical mobility. When the public finds items in your collection like historic letters, photographs of items, and other catalog items through you search function, it can increase interest and traffic to the museum’s site and physical collection.

While the ability to search a museum collection for is a way to bring immense value to the museum and the community that supports it, intellectual property is an ongoing concern for curators within the museum community. TNR Global recognizes this and has technologies to address access to material. When setting up a search, ease of use or understanding and responsiveness are addressed, also issues of ownership or privacy all combine to determine the search technology chosen and how it is applied. The search realm and results can be tailored based on the user. By defining the audience (or audiences) for the collection and the search, we can structure the presentation of the results. The public view can be a more restricted display, while protected view and can be more expansive and detailed.

We use open source search technology that works with most museum software systems and databases including the popular museum software product PastPerfect. We customize our search solution specifically for your collection and optimize search results for the most relevant results to queries.

TNR Global has a long history with the museum community. Our CEO is Principal of the organization We Love Museums and is a member of dozens of museums worldwide. He is involved with a number of archival and curatorial indexing projects. He has merged his lifelong career in database and web technology with his passion for art, education, and history with creating a search solution to benefit museums and their patrons. To get started, contact us for an evaluation of your Museum Collection Search Project today!

The Future of Search Doesn’t Come in a Box: The Google Mini Says Goodbye

The future of search doesn’t come in a box.

Last week while many were on vacation, Google abandoned the smallest member of its’ Search Appliance family, the Google Mini. The small blue piece of external hardware was used for smaller data sets with a stable, some might say stagnant, data with slow and steady query rates. If you were a smaller business with search demands that weren’t, well–too demanding, then this piece of hardware could help you for a reasonable price tag.

Search evolves like all technologies do. Developers incorporate emerging technologies into their skill sets, and open source technologies like Lucene Solr have matured into a competitive option for companies of all sizes. IT managers are finally ready to move away from the confines of a Search Appliance in a box and move to a more agile solution that can offer room for growth, a lightweight application, and a healthy and growing community. Without the hefty annual licensing fees of a commercial product, Solr can save small to mid sized companies and startups valuable cash resources to invest in other areas of their respective businesses.

Open source technologies aside, many are speculating if Google will retire some of its other pieces of hardware like the well know GSA (Google Search Appliance). Although Google has a newly released version 6.14 with an updated website to easily explain features. Google continues evolving its enterprise search offerings to include a hosted search solution for e-tailers called Google Commerce Search, along with their standard Google Site Search. Neither of these products come in a physical blue or yellow box, and I wouldn’t expect Google’s next innovation to either.

There’s plenty lively discussion about this in the Enterprise Search Professionals discussion board on LinkedIn.

TNR Global of Hadley, MA Forms Strategic Relationship with California-based Lucid Imagination

“This relationship indicates our commitment to Apache Lucene/Solr open source search and other related embedded search applications,” said Michael McIntosh

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Hadley, MA–May 29, 2012— TNR Global announced they are entering into a relationship with California based Lucid Imagination, to help businesses and organizations improve search technology and functionality within their digital infrastructure. As part of the agreement, TNR Global will provide the option of Lucid’s products, training, and support services to their clients.

Partners are selected for their deep technology expertise in web and search application development, and experience in market focus areas.

While TNR will still remain search vendor “neutral” to provide a wide variety of technologies–both open source and commercial—to their clients, the relationship is a bold move in support of open source search.ce in market focus areas.  “This relationship indicates our commitment to Apache Lucene/Solr open source search and other related embedded search applications,” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search technologies for TNR Global. “We’re excited to have direct access to the core development team for Apache/Solr,” he continued.  “Lucene/Solr has become a mature product and we’re confident in its performance for many applications, large and small.

Lucid’s selection process for this level of relationship is based upon technology focus and expertise.  “Our partners deliver complementary products and services and apply their proven expertise in a variety of industries and technology disciplines to solve even the toughest search application challenges and to implement successful Lucene/Solr projects.”

TNR Global’s executive team attended the Partner Summit at the Lucene Revolution Conference, a technology conference dedicated to the open source search technology built on Apache/Lucene Solr held in Cambridge, Massachusetts to learn about the latest LucidWorks Platform release and to meet the new CEO of Lucid Imagination, Paul Doscher.

“We’ve attended Lucene Revolution conference in May as Gold Sponsors just after solidifying our relationship with Lucid. Further, we have recently published a definitive white paper on the topic of migrating from a commercial search engine to Lucene/Solr. We feel very confident, well positioned, and supported in the marketplace to handle projects of any scope,” said Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development for TNR Global.

TNR Global (TNR) is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions. TNR develops scalable web-based search solutions focusing on companies and organizations in the following industries: News Sites, Publishing, Web Directories, Information Portals, Web Catalogs, Education, Manufacturing and Distribution, Customer Service, and Life Sciences. For more information, please visit: www.tnrglobal.com

About Lucid Imagination

Lucid Imagination is the only company that delivers an enterprise-grade search development platform built on the power of Apache Lucene/Solr open source search. Out of the 35 Core Committers to the Apache Lucene/Solr project, 9 individuals work for Lucid Imagination, making the company the largest supporter of open source search in the industry. Customers include AT&T, Sears, Ford, Verizon, Cisco, Zappos, Raytheon, The Guardian, The Smithsonian Institution, Salesforce.com, The Motley Fool, Qualcomm, Taser, eHarmony and many other household names around the world. Lucid Imagination investors include Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, Walden International, and In-Q-Tel. Learn more about the company at www.lucidimagination.com

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For more information on this topic or to schedule an interview, please contact Karen E. Lynn at 413-425-1499 or email at Karen@tnrglobal.com

Museum Collections

What is a Collections Search?

Museum Collections Search is any application for digitally searching a museum’s collection. This can be made available to the public or used by only the internal staff for curation, and can be made available to a selected professional or research audience. Collections Search adds tremendous value to the research community and is often in line with the educational mission of many museums.

Benefits of Collections Search

Enhancing your museum’s digital experience can have many benefits for the museum and the community it serves, like:

  • Expand your audience–reach people separated by distance or with limited physical mobility.
  • Enhance the experience of your existing audience.  
  • Increase interest and traffic to the museum’s site and physical collection.
  • Increase your museum’s value to the academic research community

Control of Access to Search

While the ability to search a museum collection for historic letters, photographs of items, and other catalog items is a way to bring immense value to the museum and the community that supports it, still intellectual property is an ongoing concern for curators within the museum community.  TNR Global recognizes this and has technologies to address access to material.   When setting up a search, ease of use or understanding and responsiveness are addressed, also issues of ownership or privacy all combine to determine the search technology chosen and how it is applied. The search realm and results can be tailored based on the user. By defining the audience (or audiences) for the collection and the search, we can structure the presentation of the results. The public view can be a more restricted display, while protected view and can be more expansive and detailed.

Our Technology

TNR Global uses open source search technology that works with most museum software systems and databases including the popular museum software product PastPerfect. We customize our search solution specifically for your collection and optimize search results for the most relevant results to queries.  

Why Choose Us?

TNR Global has a long history with the museum community.  Our CEO is Principal of the organization We Love Museums and is a member of dozens of museums worldwide.  He is involved with a number of archival and curatorial indexing projects.  He has merged his lifelong career in database and web technology with his passion for art, education, and history with creating a search solution to benefit museums and their patrons.  Contact us for an evaluation of your Museum Collection Search project today, or download out White Paper explaining more about the process.

Elasticsearch Evaluation White Paper Released: Promising for Big Data

We believe that Elasticsearch is a product that everyone working in the field of big data will want to take a look at.

There are many new technologies emerging around search, and we’ve been investigating several of them for our clients. Search has never been “easy” but Elasticsearch attempts to make it at least easier. Elasticsearch is billed to be “built for the cloud,” and with so many companies moving into the cloud, it seems like a natural that search would move there too.  This paper is designed to show you just how Elasticsearch works by setting up a cluster and feeding it data.  We also let you know what tools we use so you can test out the technology and we include a rough sketch of code as well. Finally, we make conclusions about how Elasticsearch can help with problems like Big Data and other search related uses.

Elasticsearch is an open source technology developed by one developer, Shay Bannon. This paper is simply a first look at elasticsearch and is not associated with an additonal product or variation of elaticsearch. The appeal for big data is due to elasticsearch’s wonderful ability to scale with growing content, which has largely been associated with the “big data problem” we all keep hearing about. It’s very easy to add new nodes and it handles the balancing of your data across the available nodes. It handles the failure of nodes in a graceful way that is important in a cloud environment. And lastly, we simply evaluate and test the technology. We really don’t believe there is a one size fits all technology in the realm of enterprise search, it is really highly dependent upon your systems, how many documents you have, how much unstructured data you have, and how you want your site to function. But that said– in terms of storing big data, it is as capable as any Lucene based product; it can handle a much larger load that the current Solr release as the notion of breaking the index up into smaller chunks is “baked in” to the product.

Here is an except from the paper:

“Products like Elasticsearch that lack a document processing component entirely become more attractive. In fact, most projects that involve a data set large enough to qualify as “big data”³² are building their own document processing stages anyway as part of their ETL cycle.”

If you are interested in downloading this free White Paper, sign up with us here.

If you would like help using Elasticsearch with your search project, contact us.

UK Software Company TwigKit Partners with TNR Global to Deliver Search Solutions for FAST and Solr

“TNR’s focus on implementing and servicing enterprise search solutions across a number of platforms is an excellent fit for TwigKit,” says Stefan Olafsson, TwigKit’s co-founder and chief architect.

Hadley, MA–November 28, 2011–TNR Global announced today that they have entered into a strategic partnership with London, UK software company TwigKit.

“Our companies have a number of qualities in common that allow us to combine forces and service clients with a very complete solution” says Karen Lynn, TNR Global’s Director of Business Development. “TwigKit has a very appealing user interface for users across several platforms, and TNR’s strength is on creating a powerful back end search application. Combined, it’s a powerful solution for companies needing a strong search function with an easy to use interface.”

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Representatives from the two companies have been in friendly talks for over a year now, meeting periodically at industry conferences. Both companies were in attendance at the Apache Lucene EuroCon conference in Barcelona last October, where the partnership was formalized.  Both presentations from TwigKit and TNR can be viewed here.

“TNR’s focus on implementing and servicing enterprise search solutions across a number of platforms is an excellent fit for TwigKit,” says Stefan Olafsson, TwigKit’s co-founder and chief architect. “Our software enables polished user interfaces for search-based applications, provides a rapid development framework, and works across a number of enterprise search platforms including Microsoft FAST and Apache Solr. We’re excited about working with TNR to produce search solutions that boast both a superb user experience and an outstanding technical implementation.”

TwigKit powers enterprise search applications in government and blue-chip organizations. Encapsulating search best practices into configurable components, TwigKit establishes a platform-independent standard compatible with most search technologies including Microsoft FAST, Google Search Appliance, and Apache Solr. Started in London in 2009, TwigKit’s founders organize the 350-member Enterprise Search London meetup, regularly speak at conferences, and write about search and user experience for publications including A List Apart, Boxes & Arrows, and UX Magazine.

TNR LOGO

TNR Global (TNR) is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions. TNR develops scalable web-based search solutions built on the open source LAMP stack. TNR has over 10 years of hands-on experience in web systems and enterprise search implementations, both proprietary and open source search technologies, specializing in FAST and Lucene Solr search applications. Specifically TNR works with content intensive websites for companies and organizations in the following industries: News Sites, Publishing, Web Directories, Information Portals, Web Catalogs, Education, Manufacturing and Distribution, Customer Service, and Life Sciences. TNR Global has offices in western Massachusetts.

Selling Search Internally–Part 2–How to get buy in from the staff

“The truth is that if your end user of the solution doesn’t like the solution, they won’t use it.”

You’ve convinced the powers that be that a search solution is a necessary strategy for success and competitive advantage. Congratulations! Nice work. Think your job is done? Not by a long shot.


Ask your staff–what would a good solution look like to them? After you’ve decided to move forward with a search solution, it’s important, no–it’s crucial that you consider strongly the end user. If you have a web portal that you manage, it’s worth polling your typical customer to gather vital data on how they want their experience to be. If you are looking at an enterprise search solution, you need to spend time exploring what your staff wants and needs out of a solution, and ensure your search solution addresses design for them….not a boilerplate solution that only meets some of your needs. Search is an expensive endeavor, if you’re spending the money, you might as well get exactly what you want.


The truth is that if your end user of the solution doesn’t like the solution, they won’t use it. So getting the end user involved in the planning stage of the search project is vital to it’s overall success. If they have input to it’s overall features and design, they will be more invested in using it. Involving users manufactures all kinds of good-will collateral that can help develop better morale and a positive workplace. Doing this early in the process also introduces change more slowly to users–and people rarely react well to lots of radical change.  Making them a part of the process and doing it early with lots of prepping for change can affect overall satisfaction rates with the search implementation after it’s complete.


Once the implementation actually goes live, you’ll need to ensure a training plan is in place and executed to ensure ongoing success.  A successful search solution isn’t just done once it’s implemented.  You need to work to include your whole team in the training process, and allow them to see for themselves how the solution is going to help them in their day to day tasks. If you included your staff in the planning of the design from the beginning, you’ll be much more successful once the solution is deployed, because they were part of the solution all along.

Search and Steel Girders

“Search by itself may look like a simple box, but behind the box is a foundry of girders, cross beams, and structural support that allows you to find what you need.”

“Search ties people together…”

This was one of the many themes at the Enterprise Search Summit in Washington, DC last week. It seems like a fairly obvious statement, but it quickly becomes part of the landscape, taken for granted even though the landscape couldn’t function without it. I have compared search function to the steel girders of a skyscraper. When you walk into the building, you aren’t thinking about the beams holding the building up or connecting floors, but without them, you wouldn’t have a building at all (you couldn’t even find the lobby). Other metaphors overheard include oxygen (invisible yet essential), sunlight (lest we remain in the dark) and electricity (everything stops without it).

Attendees of the conference know how important search is to companies, but increasingly, companies are taking search for granted. There is a fundamental gap in communicating the importance and difficulty of implementing a good search platform.

Companies who need search to run on their website or intranet, expect search to work as it does on the Internet, but this is an apples and oranges scenario.

Here are the main disconnects:

  1. Search is easy
  2. Search is cheap
  3. It never has to be touched again

People expect search inside the firewall to function much like Google does outside the firewall. Google exists for end users and is really, really incredible. It Geo-locates, it auto-completes. It uses your browsing history to provide more relevant results. And you had no financial investment in using this really lovely, elegant, useful tool that doesn’t just assist your Internet experience, but facilitates it. But behind the firewall, things are different. Let me explain.

  • Your business content isn’t publicly available or known. I mean, that would be bad, right? It’s behind the firewall for a reason. So keeping it there yet allowing your staff to access certain levels of information takes some architecture and planning.
  • Google has thousands of developers working on this beautiful, incredible technology every day. They finance this by ad content. How many people do you have on your search team? And how much of their day do they really spend on search? What department is being billed for it? Business leaders need to embrace this as a necessary cost of doing business and budget accordingly, or face the crippling result of staff and customers not being able to find the information they need.

  • 80% of your content is unstructured. Meaning, search engines can’t really read it until some love and care is put into cleaning the data. This is a vital, yet time intense process. Our VP of Search Technologies Michael McIntosh says “We spend about 90% of our time on the document processing pipeline, conditioning data to be fed into the engine.” Moreover, unstructured data isn’t a set number. It’s being creating faster than you can blink by your entire enterprise. Processing it is never a done deal.


So if search connects us, hopefully this finds you thinking about search in more realistic terms. Search by itself may look like a simple box, but behind the box is a foundry of girders, cross beams, and structural support that allows you to find what you need to “make money outside the firewall or save money inside the firewall.”

TNR Global Attends KMWorld’s Enterprise Search Summit Fall 2011

A proof of concept and rapid integration are essential for search customers–they cannot visualize what a search solution will look like without some help from the search professional.

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Last week TNR Global attended the Enterprise Search Summit organized by KMWorld in Washington, DC.  VP of Search Technologies Michael McIntosh and Director of Business Development Karen E. Lynn attended the three day conference and Enterprise Solutions Showcase at the Marriott Wardman Park.  Several companies were in attendance, and some common themes emerged.  Among these were designing for users, dealing with unstrcutured content, the need for better search and content analytics to facilitate better search results, as well as tagging content as part of a best practice in workflow.  Also discussed was the need for search vendors to demonstrate to search customers was “right looks like” in a search solution.  A proof of concept and rapid integration are essential for search customers–they cannot visualize what a search solution will look like without some help from the search professional.

An unexpected surprise came when the speaker on open source search was unable to attend at the last moment, our own Michael McIntosh was asked to step in and present on the subject.  Fortunately, he was fresh from his presentation at Apache Lucene EuroCon and already had his presentation loaded on his machine.  Michael discussed Solr and made general points on migrating from a commercial search engine like FAST ESP to a open source platform like Lucene Solr.

Overall it was a great conference with lots of informative talks and friendly search professionals.  We’re looking forward to the next Enterprise Search Summit in Spring, 2012.