SharePoint Search

Provide Cognitive and AI-Powered Search through SharePoint

An enterprise-class intranet or portal requires connectivity to content and systems outside of SharePoint

Search provides a great mechanism for this. Using Connectors, SharePoint can crawl and index external repositories, leaving the content in the system of record but creating a single index that points to all content. Users then see a single, unified view across all the systems crawled.  When they click through, they are then directly working in the system of record.

SharePoint comes with OOTB connectors for SharePoint content and sites, SharePoint people profiles, file shares, web sites, Exchange public folders, and Lotus Notes databases. Beyond this, you can create custom connectors – which is a costly and difficult task requiring specialized expertise, adding significant ongoing maintenance costs and making upgrades difficult.

BA Insight provides indexing connectors to 90+ enterprise sources.

By using standard connectors, you eliminate the cost, time, and risk of creating custom connectors. All the connectors use a common Connector Framework which integrates seamlessly with SharePoint.

BA Insight adds many important capabilities beyond SharePoint’s OOTB crawling features:

  • Smart Metadata Mapping and Smart Security Mapping to bring heterogeneous systems onto a common footing
  • Advanced configuration options to solve the most difficult problems
  • Targets to deliver content to locations beyond search
  • Integrated testbench that speeds configuration, deployment, and troubleshooting
  • Many features that ease administration

BA Insight’s Connectivity Software is described here

Even if you have a custom system, BA Insight’s Connectivity software helps reduce the problems of custom code

We provide a universal SQL connector toolkit for systems that are SQL-based, and a Web Services API for systems that are not.  You can use these to create your own connectors or have BA Insight do it for you.  Either way, these connectors are built on the same framework as our pre-built connectors, so administration is familiar, all the powerful features of the connector framework are included, and development is much simpler.