Enterprise Search Summit Fall 2012

schedule some time to talk with us one on one with a search problem you might be having, at #ESS12

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We are pleased to announce that we will be attending the Enterprise Search Summit in Washington, DC on October 17-19, 2012.  The conference will be held at the Renaissance Washington, DC Hotel.  The theme for the conference is “Strategies to Hit Your Moving Targets” and discusses ‘ issues of findability, open source, cloud search, best practices, and other topics of concern to search practitioners.’  From TNR, Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technology will be attending, along with Director of Business Development Karen Lynn.

Additionally, we will be attending the inaugural DC Search Meetup Group on Wednesday, Oct 17 from 6:30-8.  The topic for the Meetup is “What’s Your Search Story.”  We’re looking forward to meeting new friends and colleagues during both events.

If you’d like to schedule some time to talk with us one on one with a search problem you might be having, simple email us at Karen@tnrglobal.com or DM us via Twitter @TNRGlobal .  We’ll also be tweeting live from the conference using hashtag #ESS12.

Introduce yourself if you happen to make the conference, we’re happy to meet you!

TNR Global Software Engineer Completes LucidWorks Solr Training

A Hands-On Workshop for Building Killer Search Apps–best practices to develop scalable, high availability and high performance search applications.

TNR Global announces the completion of LucidWorks “Solr Unleashed– A Hands-On Workshop for Building Killer Search Apps” training course.  The course was attended by senior software engineer Chaim “Jeff” Peck.

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From LucidWorks: A Hands-On Workshop for Building Killer Search Apps “This three-day class is designed to offer students in-depth information to implement Solr search engine technologies. Through a combination of lectures, hands-on lab exercises and tutorials, students will learn to apply best practices to develop scalable, high availability and high performance search applications. At the end of the course, students will understand how to set up and use Solr to index and search, how to analyze and solve common problems, and how to use optional Solr modules.”

“Jeff completed the course this summer with flying colors, and his attendance there rounds out our search team’s Solr skills wonderfully,”  said Karen Lynn, Director of Business Development.  “Our search team has been working with Solr for a couple of years now but Jeff’s focus was committed to a commercial search product that we also work with.  We like our team to be well balanced and cross trained in several search applications, so Jeff completing this course was really the final piece of the puzzle in our Solr background.”

TNR Global is an authorized integration partner for LucidWorks Enterprise search products.

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

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’s New Relationship with Lucid Imagination Adds Value for Clients

“Lucid’s products expand upon open source tools to offer many additional features and extensive support on their product line” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies for TNR

Late last April 2012, TNR Global entered into a strategic relationship with California’s Lucid Imagination. One of the many benefits to this alliance is that in addition to the integration services TNR has historically offered, clients now can obtain enterprise class search platforms designed by Lucid Imagination and integrated by TNR Global’s search team. “Lucid’s products expand upon open source tools to offer many additional features and extensive support on their product line” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies for TNR.  “Lucid’s product offerings are solid and they have a range of options that we can now offer by way of our relationship with them. They round out our services and solutions very nicely.”  Details on Lucid Imagination’s enterprise class search platform can be viewed at Lucid Imagination’s website.
TNR still provides customized integration for search including Lucene Solr as well as other open source and commercial products. “When a client approaches us with a problem they need solved, we always look at what they need most out of a solution. During our evaluation period, we look at a number of factors. One solution doesn’t always do the trick–we always suggest what is best for the client based on their particular circumstance.”  This strategy allows TNR to offer a range of solutions, including support.  “Now that we are in a relationship with Lucid, we have even more options–and having choices is good for our clients.” said Karen Lynn, Director of Business Development.
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
Late last April 2012, TNR Global entered into a strategic relationship with California’s Lucid Imagination. One of the many benefits to this alliance is that in addition to the integration services TNR has historically offered, clients now can obtain enterprise class search platforms designed by Lucid Imagination and integrated by TNR Global’s search team. “Lucid’s products expand upon open source tools to offer many additional features and extensive support on their product line” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies for TNR.  “Lucid’s product offerings are solid and they have a range of options that we can now offer by way of our relationship with them. They round out our services and solutions very nicely.”  Details on Lucid Imagination’s enterprise class search platform can be viewed at Lucid Imagination’s website.
TNR still provides customized integration for search including Lucene Solr as well as other open source and commercial products. “When a client approaches us with a problem they need solved, we always look at what they need most out of a solution. During our evaluation period, we look at a number of factors. One solution doesn’t always do the trick–we always suggest what is best for the client based on their particular circumstance.”  This strategy allows TNR to offer a range of solutions, including support.  “Now that we are in a relationship with Lucid, we have even more options–and having choices is good for our clients.” said Karen Lynn, Director of Business Development.
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

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

lucid imagination logo

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

White Papers

Research is essential to choosing the right search technology for your organization. With new and complex technologies emerging every day, it can be difficult to navigate the path that will lead you to the right solution. Staying abreast of new tools and technology is a top priority for our team of software developers. We have reported on many tools and search technologies, their components and applications in a series of White Papers. Our papers are geared for the technology professional but often have enough business cases that illustrate how improving search can be of value to the needs of the business like analyzing large sets of data, better site performance, higher customer satisfaction and an overall healthy bottom line.

To indicate your interest in receiving our White Papers on the following subjects, click the headings below to enter your email.  From time to time we may update the paper or send relevant information on the subject, but by no means will we inundate you with email. Our White Papers are free when you sign up. 

Thank you for your interest in our work.  Please feel free to contact us to discuss your specific needs. We’re happy to discuss your options.

White Papers Published 2012:

Elasticsearch Evaluation

Reporting on Large Data Sets with Elasticsearch

Bridging the Gap: A Migration Path from Fast ESP to Lucene Solr

Museum Collection Search

And if you are just getting started or learning about Enterprise Search on a smaller scale, you can view these White Papers as well, no email necessary.

White Papers Published 2010-2011:

TNR Global to be Gold Sponsors of Lucene Revolution 2012 Boston

“We are thrilled to be Gold Sponsors at Lucene Revolution.” said Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development. “TNR Global has been a supporter of Apache Lucene/Solr for three years now and we are excited to be a part of the Solr community.”

Hadley, MA–March 26, 2012 TNR Global announced today that they will be sponsoring the Lucene Revolution Boston this year held at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA.

“We are thrilled to be Gold Sponsors at Lucene Revolution.” said Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development.  “TNR Global has been supporters of Apache Lucene/Solr for three years now and we are excited to be a part of the Solr community.”

The conference, which is the largest conference dedicated to Apache Lucene/Solr open-source search technology community, is in it’s 3rd year.  TNR has sponsored the conference beginning in 2010.  The conference will attract 400+ attendees and will offer training, presentations, trade show, and opportunities to socialize with the vibrant Lucene Solr community.

The conference will be held May 7-10, 2012

TNR invites all attendees to stop by the conference table to sign up for the free White Paper on one of our primary focuses:  Migrating from Fast ESP to Apache Lucene Solr.  Meet one of the authors of the paper and discuss the ways Lucene Solr can power search in the organization.  Representatives from TNR will be on hand to meet, chat, and discuss the many advantages of Solr for search.

“We’re looking forward to meeting others in the Solr community.  We expect the conference to be one of the high points of our year.” said Lynn.

Fast to Lucene Solr: Choosing a Document Processing Pipeline for Solr

If we want to leverage the power that Solr offers, but we need support for a more robust document processing framework, what are our options?

One of the most powerful features of FAST ESP is its flexible document processing engine. The engine that ships with FAST ESP supports multiple document processing pipelines that comprise of multiple document processing stages. A document processing stage performs a document processing task and can add, modify or remove elements from a document before it is passed to the next stage in the pipeline. A simple example of processing stage would be one that processes a document’s URL element, ESP ships with many processing stages and several processing pipelines out of the box for handling both structured and unstructured documents. FAST ESP document processing engine also provides a Python plugin API to allow customers to create custom processing stages of their own, which is a feature we use heavily for our customer ESP installations.

Unfortunately, Solr does not offer the same robust support for document processing pipelines that ESP does. The ESP processing pipeline is document-centric while the Lucene Solr platform is field-centric. When a document is fed to ESP for processing, it is routed to processing stages in a processing pipeline that can access document elements generated by previous processing stages. This allows for complex and optimal operations that can leverage previous processing, such as reuse of a previously generated HTML DOM tree structures. When a document is passed to a Solr update handler, the document is broken up into a set of individual fields. Each field can have a set of processors known as Solr Analysis Filter that can be chained together for field processing before indexing occurs. While this is fine for content that has been heavily processed before being sent to Solr, individual filters lack the same level of access to other documents elements to easily support more complex processing behaviors.

Another difference between ESP and Solr platforms is that ESP’s document processing architecture allows it to be scaled independently from its indexing architecture. ESP’s document processing architecture is fully decoupled from its indexing architecture and is designed out-of-the-box to take advantage of multiple processor cores per machine and multiple document processor machines per cluster. Solr’s out-of-the-box document processing architecture is tightly coupled with its indexing architecture, making it difficult to independently scale Solr’s content processing capacity without adding the complexity and overhead of additional Solr services and Lucene indexes. When we work with multiple terabyte document sets, we find content processing tends to be the biggest bottleneck, so being able to scale content processing ability separately from indexing is mission critical.

If we want to leverage the power that Solr offers, but we need support for a more robust document processing framework, what are our options? There are quite a number of content processing frameworks we can chose from that we discovered during the course of our research. Some of the options currently available include, but are not limited to OpenPipeline OpenPipe, Pypes, UIMA, SMILA , Apache Commons Pipeline, Piped, Behemoth, and Cascading.

Most of these frameworks are written in Java which gives them access to an incredibly broad and diverse spectrum of Java libraries. Since Solr and Lucene are also written in Java, it might make a lot of sense to favor a Java processing framework from scratch, especially if you are more comfortable with Java as a programming language.

Since our clients tend to have highly customized document processing pipelines with many custom FAST ESP Python processing stages, we are heavily biased towards choosing a framework that minimizes the amount of code that would need to be migrated. Many of the available processing frameworks are written in Java, which would be fine if you prefer using Java and don’t have a large amount of currently working Python code to migrate. For our use cases, the decision of which framework to chose was incredibly simple given the option, so we chose Pypes for our migration solution.

For a full report on how we use Pypes for a Document Processing Engine including sample code, sign up for our free FAST to Lucene Solr White Paper here.

For Many Companies, Migration to a New Search Engine is Inevitable

HADLEY, MA– March 12, 2012

In the world of Enterprise Search, everything is changing.  Companies who have been using Microsoft’s internal search engine, FAST Enterprise Search Platform, will be forced to make a change as Microsoft discontinues support for the search platform for companies using Linux as their operating system.  Anticipating the need for a solution, local technology consultants TNR Global is pleased to announce the release of a White Paper for migrating off FAST ESP to a new search engine, Solr.  The paper is titled Bridging the Gap: A Migration Path from Fast ESP to Apache Solr.

This effort began last October when TNR Global presented on the subject of migration from FAST to Solr at the open source conference, Apache Lucene Eurocon in Barcelona, Spain. The paper contains a case study with architecture overview, loading millions of documents into Solr indexes, evaluation and recommendation of tools to bridge the feature gap, migrating custom pipeline code, and the vastly improved ROI after implementation.  “It’s basically a road map for companies looking at options for migration, and we outline Solr as a very good option” said Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development.

“We have spent over 9 years working with the FAST ESP product and we understand the nuances of what customers have come to expect from the technology. We’ve identified Solr as a top choice for migrating off FAST as support for the product drops off” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies and lead author of the paper. “Solr is an open source technology that has matured and is certainly stable enough for commercial use” said Chris Miles, Senior Software Engineer and contributor to the paper. “We’re excited about this migration option for our customers, and we believe over the long run, it will save them a lot of money and give them greater control over their search engine.”

This heavily anticipated paper will assist companies and organizations in planning their own FAST ESP to Apache Solr migrations and alert them to tools and techniques that can help them achieve a relatively painless process.  Several large blue chip companies have expressed interest in the paper.  “We’ve had a healthy response to the paper” said Lynn.

Internal search engines differ from public search engines like Google or Bing, in that an internal search engine only searches for content inside the company’s firewall.  Google cannot access internal content, therefore companies use search technology to make their content ‘findable.’ “Companies want to keep internal information safe and private.  But they still need to find it” explained Lynn.  “That’s why they need search technology integrated into their organization’s system.”

For more information on search engines, product search, web portals and search engine migration, visit TNR’s main website.  To receive a free copy of the white paper, click here.

TNR Global www.tnrglobal.com, 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. TNR’s past clients include the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Mass Art & Culture, InterNano, Innovara, and the Allegis Group. TNR Global is located at 245 Russell Street, Suite 10 in Hadley, Massachusetts. TNR Global serves clients throughout New England, nationally, and world-wide. Its offices are in Hadley and Greenfield, Massachusetts.