Avoid the Cliff Planning your Google Search Appliance Transition ASSESSMENT GUIDE
Table of Contents Introduction
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So Long Google Search Appliance 4 Embrace the Inevitable Transition
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Company Assessment 5
Evaluate Goals 6
Plan for Future Needs 7
The Migration Process
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It’s a migration. It’s not a migration
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Provisioning of System.
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Side by side Comparison.
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Launch
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Operation and Performance Review
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Monitoring
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Administration
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Star Planning Your Migration
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Introduction The purpose of this guide is to help you migrate from the Google Search Appliance (GSA). The topics covered range from selecting a replacement to avoiding common pitfalls during the transition. Lorem Ipsum en esta sección tenemos que escribir más cosas porque es demasiado corta y el texto no puede ser más grande. No puede estar tan vacía.
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So Long Google Search Appliance In February of this year (2016) Google for Work announced the winding down of the sale of the Google Search Appliance. The GSA, when introduced in 2002, was the first enterprise product created by Google and for more than 10 years since it has simplified the enterprise search process for many companies. However, the end of 2016 is your last chance to buy a new GSA. You will only be able to purchase one year extensions for existing licenses starting in January 2017. No new sales orders will be taken. Finally, renewal extensions will cease in 2018, and all existing appliances will start to shut off.
Embrace the Inevitable Transition The forced change presents challenges to any business, but embracing the transition as an opportunity is the first recommendation. Now is a great time to start planning for what’s next. 1. How does your company select the right technology that will continue to meet your evolving requirements? 2. How is search strategic to your organization? 3. With the GSA going away what organizational units should be involved in the platform choice and when? 4. Finally, remember that many businesses are in a similar position and are looking for a valuable alternative. This guide outlines a few simple steps to guide you through this transition process.
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Company Assessment Go back to your first Google Search Appliance purchase. Compare your needs then and now.
• Where are they at? • Who is the current business owner of the GSA? • What resources are we currently allocating to maintaining the GSA’s? • Why did we purchase the GSA in the first place? • How are GSA’s being used? • Which part of the business owns the GSA’s? • What connectors/content sources are being indexed? • How are people authenticated to GSA if at all? • Deployment done with internal/external resources?
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Evaluate your goals Audit the GSA to determine how successful it was and if your goals have changed. This is a good time to define your new priorities.
• Assess accomplishments to original goal? • Do you want an OEM equivalent? • Identified gaps that should be resolved in any migration? • Do we have a recent user survey? • Are Analytics being tracked and reported? • What do our analytics suggest?
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Plan for Future Needs Evaluate if the market alternatives maintain the current GSA search functionalities and other capabilities that you enjoy right now. Consider the following criteria:
• Core Technology. • Open Source vs. Commercial. • Deployment Models. • Current Operational Capabilities. • Available Connectors. • Feature Mapping. • Data Preparation. • Relevancy and Query Functionality. • Security. • User Interface. • Project/Program Plan.
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Core Technology The following are some basic considerations to discuss with your IT team up-front. • • • • •
Base programming technology. Licensing costs. Skill sets needed. Scalability of the search engine. Out-of-the-box-features.
Open Source vs. Commercial There are a variety of options to choose from. The most boil down into four categories: Category
i.e.
Stand Alone Commercial System
Yippy Search Appliance
Open Source Tool
Solr or Elastic
CMS Integrated Solution
SharePoint
Cloud Hosted Commercial Solution
Google Springboard
Your assessment review should highlight some tools over the others. Most of our customers have already had an opportunity to use Open Source or a CMS integrated solution and decided against it. There is a general lack of innovation in these tools, we do not think that they are materially different compared to when you originally investigated them, which makes a commercial choice more obvious.
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Deployment Models Based on the type of technology you choose one of these options may not be available. • Self Hosted: you are responsible for sizing, installing and managing the system. • Cloud Hosted/Vendor Hosted: vendor will deploy the technology either in a multi-tenant facility or single tenant facility. The level of service will depend upon the company providing the service, but typically they will provide you with several endpoints and manage the reset of the system internally.
Available Connectors Pay special attention at the systems that you would like indexed. • Look at the systems that you would like indexed and how complicated has it been to bring the content into the existing search system? • Review the candidate solutions, are there available connectors to bring the content in?
Current Operational Capabilities Review how strategic is the operation of a search system to your core business. • Is this something that you could outsource, thus freeing up resources to focus on more core business aspects? • Does your organization desire to have a search competency or is it simply a service that is expected to operate? • How do you typically deploy technology? • Do you have any special regulation requirements? (i.e. HIPPA)
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Security Look for a solution that complies with your security standards. Some items to consider: • Groups and roles • Filtering results • Secure configuration for your connectors
User Interface Don’t forget front-end configuration is as important. Features to keep in mind: • • • • • •
Is it User-centric? User friendly Is it Intuitive? Easy to use. Familiar Check requirements for administrative dashboard Alerting configurations UI templates: pre-built or from scratch? Flexibility of customization
Project/Program Plan Peal the onion. Enterprise search system should be deployed per content system or user persona. That is to say iteratively with limited scope based on a set of content or a user community. The smaller the iteration, the better.
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The Migration Process It’s a migration. It’s not a migration. Google Springboard and Yippy Search Appliance will reuse much of your existing infrastructure, but going with a different vendor means that you are essentially standing up completely new infrastructure and pulling the content to index directly from the source system and not from the Google Search Appliance index. A couple things to keep in mind: • Depending on the connector, it may be able to be reused for a new system based on Google's Springboard or the Yippy Search Appliance. • Since it's a new system, can you enable some additional features that were not in the existing system or are available only in the new system? Provisioning of system. Create your environment. Provision the set of services of servers that will be required. Search is generally very I/O and CPU intensive. Setup the connectors, ingest the content and begin to serve results. Side by side comparison. While both systems are operating, take a random sampling of top queries and see how they perform. Is the new system similar? Judge the relevancy and tune. Launch • Prepare to switchover the system. • Keep the GSA operating as a back up. • After 30-60 days, begin to deprovision the GSA.
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Operation and Performance Review Monitoring Search systems have to be monitored a couple of ways: • Do the services respond to http requests with the expected http status? • Can you test to see an expected document indexed? • Can you test to see if a set of documents is returned? Administration Follow the administrator's guide for the solution that you decide. Even with fully hosted or managed services solutions, you'll still need to spend some time reviewing the performance of the system.
Start Planning Your Migration If you’re happy with your GSA experience, don’t settle for anything less. Plan your migration in advance and explore your options before your time with the GSA runs out. Don’t just replace your appliance, get the right technology, deployed by enterprise search experts, customized for you. Let MC+A help you plan out this transition. Our expertise is based in hundreds of GSA implementations and other system integrations in enterprise search. Get in touch. We are confident that we can provide guidance to the right solution that suits your needs.
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About Us Founded 2002, MC+A is a charter Google Enterprise Partner focused on connecting business to their information assets utilizing enterprise search and collaborative technologies. MC+A - Connecting Business Intelligence Chicago | San Francisco | Santiago For more information visit: www.mcplusa.com
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