Google Search, Documentum and Alfresco Repositories - Help!

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farhadkhalafi

These are questions that we were asked from a potential Alfresco customer:

Is it possible to direct Google Desktop to index documents within Alfresco repositories? Some managers are used to Google Search and don't want to change. I tried to sell OpenSearch as an alternative, but still have to get back to them.

Some agencies within the organization (government) have Documentum. In this particular case we are up against Documentum. The IT director seems to like open source and there is a good chance to start them off with Alfresco. Another question I was asked was whether there is a way to search both Documentum and Alfresco in a federated way. I am not sure whether Document supports OpenSearch. One idea was to custom develop a search interface that connects to all repositories using Web Services. Does anyone have better ideas?

rwhiteside

Hi, I think  you need to distinguish between Google Desktop and the Google Search Appliance in this context.  Google Desktop is aimed at indexing your personal information for your needs, the role of the Google Search Appliance is to create a single index of Enterprise content that can be searched by users across your organisation.

There is specific connectivity between the GSA and Documentum that respects all of the Documentum security setup and provides great relevancy, something which is not the case with the inbuild search.  You also have the ability to add other content into the index from other sources such as Alfresco, file servers, webservers etc to provide true enterprise search. 

Federating search queries will kill the relevancy and is not recommended.  For great serch quality you need to get all of the data in a single index.

Documentum is a good Document Management System but if the requirement is for good search then Documentum dont have their own search engine.  they embed a third party solution in their product but it wont help if you need to search across other repositories.

I hope this is useful.