Advanced Connectivity

Search applications are often integrated into large software applications or complex information systems. Two typical integration scenarios are: an authoring or management application, such as a document management system, where stored content must be searchable; and a workflow and investigation tool specific to an industry (for example, for law firms or for compliance in the financial services sector), where many external data sources are processed. Successful integration and connectivity will translate into a seamlessly improved search experience within a familiar and well-liked product without compromising the product’s security, scalability or other key features.

FAST ESP can retrieve content from data sources in two ways. The content pull approach leverages content connectors to retrieve the information via standard APIs or interfaces that are provided by the source content repositories. The content connectors do not require integration programming toward the target data repositories.

The content push approach requires that the data repositories, applications or messaging middleware send the data directly to FAST ESP via the ESP Content API. This omits the latency of crawling, but it requires a closer relationship between the content application and the search engine.

A traditional search approach typically implies long latency from the time the data is modified until the modification is reflected in the searchable index. This means that the search engine does not handle dynamic data and may not be sufficient for processing real time information. FAST ESP removes this limitation by ensuring the information is made searchable in seconds. It takes this functionality further by integrating the real-time FAST Filter Engine that matches information against pre-defined queries as the content becomes available.

Source: FAST ESP Brochure 2007