High-End Software

Like I mentioned a few months ago, I'm currently working on an Enterprise Search project. Since then I discovered a few other annoying things about FAST ESP and other high-end search solutions.

I've tested two main types of search solutions:

1. Entry level solutions - by companies that have another core business except search.

2. High-end solutions - by companies whose core business is search.

Obviously, there a lot of products somewhere in between, but that's always true. Actually, FAST has been lately acquired by Microsoft, but for the purpose of this post it is still under the second category.

Being a newcomer to this field of Enterprise Search I was quite innocent and thought that entry level solutions will be simple, basic and easy to use - no disappointment here, but I also expected high-end solutions to be a complete search suite that can do great and cool stuff.

Well, products I've examined can do great and cool stuff, I'll even exaggerate and say that it feels like everything is possible if you know your way around the product, but in no way these products I've examined are a suite. It almost seems (it's actually sounds like a swell business model) that the products are intentionally designed to make you grate your teeth at every step so they can provide their business partners with work for their consultants. It seems like they try to make the product as naked as possible, leaving only the basics of indexing efficiently, providing customizing tools and a few other abilities. As always, a whining is not complete without a few examples. I'll rely mostly on FAST ESP examples, but not only, I just know it the best:

1. I would expect a high-end solution to include some security enforcement. Say I want to index a file system(obviously there are other examples as well) content source, to the entry level products it's obvious that I want to index the ACLs as well, not so much to the high-end stuff. High-end software will require installing an additional module that I'll have to carefully configure. And that leads me straight to the next point...

2. To configure the security model for FAST ESP to enforce file system security I have to follow the documentation which, put in one simple word, sucks.

Fact: surprisingly the FAST guys realized I might want to index Windows based file systems.

What I'd expect to see in the documentation: a simple to-do list containing every step I should do in order to configure the whole thing.

What I actually got: every piece of the puzzle is in a different part of the documentation so before each of the following revelations I had to wonder why nothing works and why nothing is written (or at least not where I expect to find it):

• When the module is initially installed no indexed items are searchable, there are a few ways to work around it and they're written at the end of the documentation.
• There's no built in authentication module (a pity) but at least there are a few ways to work around it as well.
• To index securely you have to modify the processing pipeline (or the whatever the term the product uses), next point here I come.

3. The products I've examined have far too much of encoding related (Hebrew and computers should not co-exist) issues, some of them I've been able to overcome but still, for now I can't index securely paths with Hebrew in FAST ESP.

I have lots of other examples and I'll probably have a lot more as I go along, but I think I made my point. Totally high-end...