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What Desktop Search Engine For a Shared Volume?

Posted by timothy on from the which-side-of-the-firewall dept.

kriston writes 'Searching data on a shared volume is tedious. If I try to use a Windows desktop search engine on a volume with hundreds of gigabytes the indexing process takes days and the search results are slow and unsatisfying. I'm thinking of an agent that runs on the server that regularly indexes and talks to the desktop machines running the search interface. How do you integrate your desktop search application with your remote file server without forcing each desktop to index the hundred gigabyte volume on its own?'

2 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Federated Search by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    MS does have a solution, it's called Windows Federated Search. Windows 7 with 2008R2 has it .. there might be a way to do with Windows Desktop Search 4.0. Here's some info on it - http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2009/05/14/windows-7-federated-search.aspx

  2. Enterprise Content Management with Alfresco by RicRoc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, Google's Search Appliance (GSA) could be used, I have seen it used with limited success. The main problem was how to respect access control on documents: either you index them or you don't, and if you index them with GSA, sensitive data may show up in search results. Also, we had a lot of trouble "taming" GSA: it would regularly take down servers that were dimensioned for light loads.

    I would suggest using Alfresco http://www.alfresco.com/ as a CIFS (Common Internet File System) or WebDav store for all those documents. This would give you the simplicity of a shared folder and the opportunity to enrich the documents with searchable metadata such as tags, etc. Each folder (or any item, in fact) could have the correct access control that would be respected by the search engine, Lucene. http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/

    Alfresco comes in both Enterprise and Community Edition, it's very easy to try out -- even our non-techie project manager could install it on his PC within 10 minutes. Try that with Documentum, FileNet or IBM DB2 Content Manager!

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