IBM Connections is a leading business social network platform. Connections empowers people to confidently share knowledge beyond traditional organizational boundaries, allowing organizations to engage the right people, accelerate innovation, and deliver results.

Our IBM Connections Connector was specifically developed for IBM Connections, establishing a secure connection to the Connections application and mapping the content including metadata and attachments from the Connections schema to the search engine schema. It then extracts content and feeds it to the search engine in a process called ingestion.  It supports multiple search engines, including Elasticsearch, Elastic Cloud, and Elastic Cloud Enterprise.

IBM indexing connector for elasticsearch

This connector supports both full and incremental ingestion, which extracts only content which has changed.

Our Connections Connector addresses key requirements that are challenging to implement through custom solutions:

  • Works with all content in Connections, including discussions and participation in social networks as well as large documents and attachments.
  • Indexes every desired item with a very high throughput. Given the nature of Connections as a social platform, millions of items or even hundreds of millions are available. Just 1 million items indexed at 1 item /second would take over 11 days to fully ingest!
  • Minimizing the impact on the source system is critical to the success of the connector. Our connector does the job without impacting the performance of Connections.
  • Only surfaces the content that users are permitted to see.
  • Connections retains the master information and the search results are surfaced in Elasticsearch. When users click on the results they will be working on the original item or document.

Future-proof Your IBM Connections Investment

As new versions of Elasticsearch, Elastic Cloud, and Elastic Cloud Enterprise are released, new features and functionality are introduced, and the same is true of new releases of Connections. BA Insight takes on the burden of keeping the connector up to date for both Connections and the respective search engines. The upgrades are easy to do and can be done by your IT organization. It is simply a matter of accessing the BA Insight customer portal, downloading the latest release, and installing and configuring it. If desired, our professional services team can handle the upgrades.

Drive Productivity

By connecting IBM Connections to your preferred Elastic engine, you increase adoption of your intranet, improving organizational efficiency and productivity.

Contact us today to learn more.