Secure Enterprise Search - A decent solution at last?

For many years Oracle has been trying to play in the enterprise search space - but lets be honest, it has never really had a product as open as customers would have liked. Ultrasearch was its previous incarnation and if you had content in an oracle database or a website it could index then you were ok - if you did not then, to be honest, it was not really a great deal of use.

However, all that may be changing. Oracle has used its 15+ years of technologies such as Oracle Text, Intermedia, Ultrasearch, Collaboration suite and has now developed Secure Enterprise Search 10g, which they believe is a product that can search pretty much ALL of your content - file systems, emails, content management systems. And if an interface does not exist - you can build it and plug it in. Result!

Oracle are playing on the need for governance of data within an organisation and the explosion of content - both structure and un-structured that an enterprise needs to deal with these days.

There is a fair amount of information available from Oracle OTN but here is a summary

There are 5 key components:

• A crawler - A time initiated Java process
• A database - to store the results (come on it is Oracle after all!) from the crawler and index using Oracle Text.
• A search UI and API - a web service based approach for integration and customisation
• Admin Tool - Web based administration of crawler schedules, server config, reporting etc
• Federator - This is one of the key changes as this allows the engine to federate queries to other engines to implement their own search - such as email servers (or indeed other SES engines).

The application runs in Oracle's J2EE engine, OC4J.

Architecturally there are some issues with this current release. Oracle will only support the configuration where the web server and SES database are on the same machine. Not very flexible or scalable. In principle they agree that they can be seperated but Oracle support will not give you support if you do. I doubt that position will last long - it cant if organisations are going to put Secure Oracle Search as a critical part of their technology fabric as it will not be easily deployed into a standard Oracle HA and DR infrastructure. However, there are work arounds for all these things (as ever) and the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

Secure access to information is handled by a single-sign on infrastructure where it is available and application specific where not - this was, and still will be I suspect a major issue when getting access to systems. From experience do not underestimate what is required to get a robust architecture in place to deal with secure searching.

As per most Oracle technology - SES uses Oracle Internet Directory for its Single Sign On (SSO) infrastructure. This can then synchronise with the likes of Active Directory to provide Single sign on across the enterprise. Until Oracle get the Oblix and Thor products they acquited last year or so fully integrated then this will still remain clunky. Also be warned that the SSO approach using Oracle Internet Directory and even Oracle's other products, such as the eBusiness Suite, can still be bug ridden and subject to the great Oracle patching cycle. This is a relatively new product (its been beta tested within Oracle for while) that is being let loose on a heterogeneous world - patching will be a way of life.

There are lots of connector available for SES including some of the Oracle ones you would expect, but the real power starts to come out with its integration to the Suits (eBusinessSuite and Seibel) and to 3rd party Content Management Systems. Some of the connectors available are (to quote Oracle):

• Portals - SES connectors can crawl OracleAS Portal instances, Documentum eRoom and Microsoft Sharepoint Server.
• Content Management Systems . SES connectors are also available to crawl and search EMC Documentum Content Engine, Opentext Livelink, Hummingbird DM, Filenet, IBM DB2 Content Manager.
• Applications . SES can connect to an Application, crawl its business objects and make them searchable. Application specific authorization models are supported via plug-ins. SES provides connectors to certain specific modules of Oracle.s EBusiness Suite and Siebel CRM.

So has Oracle got a good solution? Well time will tell. All I know is that Oracle's strategy of opening up its toolsets and accepting that they operate in a world where there is more than Oracle implemented is leading to some interesting new products. Personally I think this is a great move but one that could be damaged before it takes off..... why? Cost!

Oracle SES is $30K per processor (although it can be licenced per individual also subject to minimums) which is not too bad (in an Oracle pricing sense!). However the connector pricing is also $30K PER CONNECTOR!!!! Including the eBusinessSuite Connector! Suddenly the solutions could become very expensive and as a solution architect I need to take this into account when designing solutions for my customers.

I have worked with Oracle for many years and they have some of the best products on the market (CDH for example) - however the pricing models they use still manages to suprise me, the customers and the marketplace. Such a potentially great piece of technology could be killed by price (not for the first time at Oracle!).

As ever, Oracle list prices do need to be taken with a pinch of salt. A sales cycle would not be the same without some negotiation - and Oracle Q4 is just around the corner - so if you are interested in SES the next few months may be a good time to buy!