Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g gets overhaul

By Mark Brunelli, News Editor 05 Feb 2007 | SearchOracle.com

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The new Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g Release 10.1.8 (SES), the first major upgrade of Oracle's year-old SES product, features tighter integration with Oracle business applications, support for third-party directory servers, and a federated search feature.

Oracle says the software gives users a simple search-box interface that allows them to easily search for important business information across an organization while enforcing corporate security policies.

"This one standard search technology is going to be pervasive across all of Oracle's applications," Greg Crider, Oracle's senior director of product marketing, said in an interview.

More on enterprise search: Solix unveils Google enterprise search for Oracle E-Business suite Enterprise search software enables AMR's analysis

Analyze this

Oracle is one of many large vendors -- Microsoft, IBM, SAP AG -- currently trying to take advantage of the growing interest in enterprise search. The market for enterprise search software, once dominated by smaller players such as Fast Search & Transfer ASA, Autonomy Inc., and Endeca Technologies Inc., is expected to grow by about 30% to 40% in 2007, according to Sue Feldman, an analyst with Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corporation.

Oracle's attention to security and innovative search architecture may help set the company apart from other enterprise search vendors as the market matures, Feldman said.

"Oracle is very meta-data driven, and they have sort of a two-stage search that gives them the top most relevant stuff and then defaults to a full text search if that doesn't work," the analyst explained. "That's a little bit different architecture than some of the others."

Companies in the market for enterprise search software need to remember that they're looking for a complete platform, she said, not simply a search box-and-crawler combo.

Before approaching potential enterprise search vendors, companies should get a strong handle on exactly how much data they're going to be searching, who will be doing the searching, and how much daily uptime the search platform will need. Those tasks may sound simple, but companies oftentimes find that they are not.

"Most companies have no idea how much information they have until they start looking," Feldman said.

It's important that companies make their "shopping list first," she said, otherwise they risk being oversold or, perhaps more commonly, undersold on an enterprise search offering.

"Companies are told that all search engines are the same," Feldman said, "and that is a real mistake because there is more to a search platform than just a search engine."

In addition to a search engine and a crawler, most companies will need at the very minimum a system that helps categorize information efficiently so that they can then provide browsing access to the right people.

"I would be looking for a search engine that can provide a flexible platform and access to an enormous variety of sources and repositories," she said.

New stuff

With its initial release, SES provided support for searching Oracle data sources such as Oracle Database, Oracle Portal, Oracle Content Database and Oracle business applications. The new version adds the ability to search non-Oracle data sources, including EMC Documentum, FileNet Content Engine object stores, IBM Lotus Notes databases, Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint, and Open Text Livelink.

Oracle says it has also launched a new partner program, the Oracle Secure Search Initiative, through which independent software vendors and systems integrators will deliver connectors that enable SES to support more non-Oracle data sources, such as user desktops and BI repositories.

New Oracle business applications, such as the just-released Siebel 8.0 customer relationship management suite, are now integrating and embedding Oracle SES to enable users to search across the applications' business objects, according to the company.

For security, the new release introduces an extensible authentication, identity management, and authorization framework that lets SES support third-party identity management directories such as Microsoft Active Directory, Novell eDirectory, OpenLDAP, and Sun Java System Directory Server.

The federated search feature found in SES lets users send search requests from one instance of SES within an organization to another, while maintaining security protocols.

The production version of SES is available now for Linux, Microsoft, Windows and Unix platforms. Interested parties can download a free trial version from Oracle's Web site.

Tags: Siebel and Oracle CRM (customer relationship management),  Oracle E-Business Suite,  Implementing and upgrading Oracle applications,  JD Edwards (JDE),  PeopleSoft,  VIEW ALL TAGS

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