In today’s post, we’re reviewing how we’ve integrated Google Cloud Search with Oracle WebCenter. As a long-time Google and Oracle partner, these integrations are one of our specialties.
What is Google Cloud Search?
Cloud Search combines the search expertise of Google.com with features customized for business. Cloud Search can index both Google Cloud content like Gmail and Drive as well as third-party data both on-premise and in the cloud. Cloud Search provides a unified search experience and respects the document-level permissions already in place in your repositories.
“[Cloud Search] is about giving employees access to all the information from across the enterprise, even if it’s traditionally siloed data, whether that’s in a database or a legacy productivity tool and make all of that available in a single index,” Google explained. “We are essentially taking all of Google expertise in search and are applying it to your enterprise content.”
Why Integrate with WebCenter
There are two primary reasons Oracle WebCenter customers may want to integrate with Google Cloud Search. The first, is to provide higher quality and more relevant search results for WebCenter content itself. The basic search functionality included with WebCenter Content offer little in terms of relevancy ranking, fuzzy matches, typo tolerance, or natural language understanding. By adding Google Cloud Search, documents become much easier to find without having to navigate a complicated sea of metadata fields, or know exactly how someone else checked something in.
The second, and possibly more powerful reason for integrating, is when Oracle WebCenter is as one of several enterprise data sources being pulled together into a single search experience as part of a wider enterprise search project. This may be as part of an intranet, a customer service portal, or a customer dashboard for sales or marketing.
How We Integrate: The WebCenter Content Connector
The Oracle WebCenter Content Connector for Google Cloud Search uses Google’s Cloud Search Connector SDK to feed items from Oracle WebCenter Content to Google Cloud Search for indexing. The Connector product includes two parts—the Oracle WebCenter Connector, a Java application typically installed on a server in the same data center where the Oracle WebCenter Content servers are located, and an Oracle WebCenter Content component installed on each Oracle WebCenter Content instance you wish to index. The WebCenter Connector enables comprehensive indexing of content and metadata by Google Cloud Search as well as a graphical tool for creating a Google Cloud Search schema based on your Oracle WebCenter Content metadata model. Currently available functionality includes:
- Support for searching or indexing multiple Oracle WebCenter Content instances
- Ability to index and search string, date, integer and decimal metadata fields
- Assignment of default security ACLs to items defined per connector instance
- Support for intelligently indexing Site Studio data file content included in websites
- Ability to limit items indexed per connector through definition of a where clause
- Support for indexing both internal and display values for WebCenter metadata fields
- Ability to create and upload Google Cloud Search schemas via schema creation tool
- Manage indexed content and re-index items from WebCenter Content
- Built-in Could Search interface for Oracle WebCenter Content (see next section)
Searching from WebCenter Content
The connector includes an optional built-in search interface (shown below) to allow users to perform searches against Google Cloud Search from within WebCenter Content. This interface does not replace or override the standard WebCenter interface, but exists in parallel enabling richer, more natural searches to be performed within directly WebCenter content.
Additional Search Interface Options
In addition to searching directly from the WebCenter Content interface as mentioned above, searches my be performed against the Cloud Search index from other locations. For WebCenter customers, this is often Oracle WebCenter Portal, but could also include non-Oracle applications such as custom support portals, custom dashboards, or the native web interface included with Google Cloud Search.
What’s next?
If you’d like to learn more about integrating Google Cloud Search with Oracle WebCenter or other third-party application, or discuss whether your search use case is a good fit, please get in touch.
Fishbowl Solutions is a Google Cloud Partner and authorized Cloud Search reseller.
