Unified Search across different ECM systems

Posted by Max Ziff, Engineering Lead, Google Enterprise Team

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems are useful to manage and version control the information assets of the organization. But lets be honest, they don't necessarily have the most best search mechanism to retrieve the valuable information contained within. The default search capabilities provided by ECM systems create new silos where users must log-in to multiple applications to retrieve the information. Our mission at Google is to provide a unified search experience across all enterprise content sources. Due to technical differences in the interfaces and the different security mechanisms supported by ECM systems there is need to build specific connectors to these systems.

We just open-sourced an interesting project that will make it easy to build connectors to ECM systems. This new connector framework provides rich service provider interfaces (SPI) to write connectors to different content sources. It also provides a security infrastructure to securely index and serve documents stored in ECM systems. Finally it provides rich administrative capabilities to configure the connectors to different ECM systems in a centralized way. The connector framework is designed for building connectors to ECM systems as well as other content sources that may or may not have web-enabled content.

The open source project contains source for Connector Manager, Connector SPI interfaces, associated javadocs, sample code and test suites. This is an early technical preview of the connector manager project and is not (yet) an officially supported feature in the Google Search Appliance. We wanted to get the word out sooner and invite the broader developer and partner community to give us feedback. Check out the connector manager project and let us know your thoughts on it.