THUNDERSTONE NEWS
Summer 2005 - Archive
CONTENTS
- User Conference August 8-10
- New Features
- Recent Thunderstone Product Reviews
- Subscription/Unsubscription and Contacts
User Conference, August 8-10
Details of the Summer User Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, have been posted on our web site, and the cut-off date for group rates at the hotel is July 8th, so book soon.
Thunderstone users and administrators are invited to learn more
about indexing content with the Search Appliance and Webinator, as well
as creating advanced web applications with Texis and Vortex.
Topics in brief are:
Day 1: Crawling for web/enterprise search and customizing output.
Day 2: Vortex scripting.
Day 3: Advanced Texis.
New Features
These are among the new capabilities recently added to Texis, the Search Appliance, Webinator, and/or Texis Web Script (Vortex).
- Data from Field.
- During a crawl, you can now perform automatic search and replace on data within documents before they are indexed. For example, if your documents don't have useful titles, you can extract a title from the meta data or body. Or extract dates to replace what a webserver sets if that is known to be wrong (a common problem - see discussion of "last-modified" dates in the Fall 2003 Thunderstone News). For finding the desired content, the search criteria may be any Metamorph query including regular expression (REX), providing versatile pattern matching abilities.
- Duplicate Check Fields.
- The Appliance/Webinator duplicate removal capability has some new options. You now can designate one or more fields to be compared. For example, you might want to designate documents as duplicates if they have identical body content, even if their titles are different, or vice versa. The available comparison fields are: Title, Description, Keywords, Meta, Body.
- Uploadable Thesaurus.
- The Search Appliance now has an easy way to load a custom thesaurus file from. You may designate a different thesaurus for each profile (index collection). The new feature appears on the Maintenance page.
- Email reports.
- The notification after a walk (crawl) can now deliver the walk logs automatically as email attachments.
- Script copyright notice turned off.
- New Vortex distributions no longer put a copyright comment at top of the HTML output source code. End-users won't see a difference, but this helps developers generate fully standards compliant web pages. The change possibly could affect web sites that use Vortex output as input into another presentation program. Existing customers who would like to have the comment turned off may request an update from Tech Support.
Recent Thunderstone Product Reviews
Thunderstone's Search Appliance is cited for "simplicity, low cost of ownership, and extensibility" in an independent analysis published by the Patricia Seybold Group. The new report is part of the Group's research series about search solutions for enterprises, e-commerce, and customer service.
The Search Appliance is "designed to eliminate nearly all installation and maintenance efforts, create a highly reliable and extensively tested environment (shared by hundreds of customers), and keep support pricing at an absolute minimum," wrote the report's author, Susan E. Aldrich, Senior Vice President and Senior Consultant of Patricia Seybold Group. "We're impressed with the approach, she added.
The 17-page report also looks at the Texis suite of developer tools for custom search applications. Search Appliance customers may optionally upgrade to Texis if and when their needs become more specialized. This upgrade path contributed to the report's praise for the Search Appliance's "extensibility."
The research was undertaken as part of Patricia Seybold Group's ongoing services for its clients who are technology buyers. Thunderstone Software did not sponsor or fund the project. However, we have obtained permission to distribute complimentary copies to our customers or prospective customers. Please request a copy via customer support.
Also IT Week Magazine performed a series of tests of the Thunderstone Search Appliance. The result was an "Editor Choice" award. The report appears in the May 30, 2005 issue, page 53.
Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome to 