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 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!

Chris Miles Joins TNR Global as Senior Software Engineer

HADLEY, MA–July 18, 2011—TNR Global is pleased to welcome Chris Miles in the role of Senior Software Engineer on TNR’s Search Team. Miles will be responsible for designing and implementing custom enterprise search software for TNR’s clients. Among other projects, Chris will also develop solutions for one of TNR’s largest clients, a publisher of manufacturing parts and vendors. He is proficient in software languages Java, C++, C, Ruby, PHP, and CSS.

Prior to joining TNR Global, Miles was a Senior Systems Analyst at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. He has held consulting roles for CarePaths Inc., and was a Senior Developer for Miller Samuel Inc.

“We’re excited about the addition of Chris to TNR. He brings a wealth software development expertise to our team” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies of TNR Global, LLC.

Join us as we extend Chris a warm welcome to the TNR team!

Continuous Integration for Large Search Solutions

Managing large projects takes a smart approach and some intuitive thinking. One project we are currently engaged in is with large publisher of manufacturing parts. This has been an extraordinary project due to its scale and ever changing scope. I spoke with our VP of Enterprise Search Technologies, Michael McIntosh about how TNR Global handles complex projects.

Karen: This project is a big one. Tell me more about the site’s function. What is the focus?

Michael: Product search is the focus. The site contains tens of millions of documents, both structured and unstructured content. They also have a huge amount of data provided by the advertisers and the companies themselves on products that they sell. One of the advantages we have over a search engine like Google is access to a vast amount of propriety data provided by the vendors themselves.

Karen: Tell me about how you are managing the project.  What are some of the variables you work with?

Michael: With this particular project, we are dealing with many different data feeds. There are many different intermediary metadata stages we have to generate to support the final searchable content.  The client also changes their business logic frequently enough that if it takes a month or more between data builds its likely something has changed. For instance, they might have changed an XML format or added an attribute to an element in the data feed that will break something else down the line. The problem is there are so many moving parts, it’s almost impossible to do it manually and always do it correctly.

Karen: What other kinds of business logic changes are you dealing with in top of the massive amounts of raw data?

Michael: Most of the business logic changes are when they need to modify how something behaves based on new data that’s available, or when they need to start treating the data in a different way.  Sometimes there is a change in the way they want the overall system to behave. They sometimes have some classification rules for content they like to tweak occasionally.

Another thing we consider is the client’s relevancy scoring and query pre-processing rules. So you need to consider if you issue a query and it fails, what happens then? What kind of fallback query do you use?  All these things are part of the business logic that is independent of the raw data. In summary, we have the raw data and we can do a number of things with it. They often want us to change exactly what we’re doing with it, how we’re conditioning it, and how we’re transforming it. We either tweak what exists or take advantage of new data that they’ve started including in their data feeds. The challenge is all these elements can change frequently.

Karen: This site is more of a portal than strictly an enterprise search project, isn’t it?

Michael: Yes. Enterprise search usually refers to searching for documents within an organization. This client is a public facing search engine that allows the public to perform product search across a very large number of vendors and service providers.

Changes come from their advertisers and data they provide. Advertisers come and go. People pay for placement within certain industrial categories. It’s not like we get a static list of sites to crawl and that’s that. It changes weekly, sometimes daily. This list of sites we crawl is on a weekly or daily basis. Also things need to be purged from the index. Say an advertiser’s contract ends and suddenly we need to stop crawling a site with thousands documents; that data needs to be purged from the index promptly. Not only do we have to crawl new sites but purge old ones as well. This is a project that is so massive that it’s not cut and dried. A lot of software development projects focus on a clear cut problem, come up with plan, tackle it, release it, and then maintain it. We’re constantly getting new information and learn new things about people hitting the site.

Karen: So this sounds like this project is always in a state of ongoing development.

Michael: We are building something that’s never been built before. One of the goals is to make this site remarkable. And we’re very excited to be a part of that. The scale of the project is quite big though, which is why we started using Continuous Integration.

The way our cycles work is we perform big data updates, but by using CI, we can continuously update and integrate new data. We’re moving to a place, by using the practice of CI, we can perform a daily builds which gives us the time we need to fix problems before we absolutely need it to be live.

Karen: How do you implement CI into your day to day management of the project?

Michael: There are some pretty great open source tools that we’re using to implement CI. We use Jenkins to help us do Continuous Integration for frequent data builds, which is an intensive process for this particular client.

We field questions from the client about the status of different data builds. We hope to use Jenkins in conjunction with other tools to automatically build data and have event-based data builds. We’re looking at a way to have it triggered by some other event and have Jenkins automatically generate reports as the data is being built. Each time we run a build script, if the output differs from the previous build, Jenkins makes it easy for you to see that something is different. There is a way to modify your output that Jenkins can understand.  One of the cool things about Jenkins is they have graphs that illustrate differences to help us identify issues that could pose a potential problem and let us fix it before we need to go live with the data.

Karen: Any other tools?

Michael: For multi-node search clusters, we’re using a tool called fabric3 that uses SSH to copy data and execute scripts across multiple nodes of a cluster based upon roles. We have a clever set up where we’re able to inform fabric3 what services are running on each node in our cluster and have actions or commands linked to certain tasks, like building metadata.  By linking them, they automatically know which nodes to deploy data to.

Using open source tools like Jenkins and fabric3 make it a lot more manageable considering the large number of moving parts. It’s allowed us to be successful in building this incredible site and making the search function relevant, accurate and up to date.

From Microsoft FAST to Lucene/Solr – Barcelona

Fast_ESP_to_Lucene_SolrTNR Global presented at the Apache Lucene Eurocon in Barcelona, Spain. Michael McIntosh, VP of Enterprise Search Technologies, spoke on the migration from Microsoft FAST ESP to Lucene/Solr open source search.

View the presentation
Migration from Microsoft FAST to Apache Lucene Solr
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Our White Paper on Microsoft FAST ESP to Lucene/Solr will be released in January, 2012.  To receive your free White Paper, email contact information to fast2solr@tnrglobal.com or subscribe here to receive the White Paper and our newsletter on FAST to Lucene Solr Migration.