A lot of people use Lotus Notes. And now users can access and search more of their Notes content directly from the Google Search Appliance. Persistent Systems, a recently announced Google Enterprise Professional partner, has just released their new IBM Lotus Notes Connector. This connector, when combined with the Google Search Appliance, allows users to search pretty much all of their Lotus Notes content.

The new connector provides the ability to browse through a configured Lotus Notes content hierarchy of servers, databases and documents. This enhances the reading of structured and unstructured documents in Lotus Notes, plus passes them to the Google Search Appliance for indexing purposes. The connector also includes the ability to fetch attachments, detect changes, and handle authenticated search, which fits well with our paradigm of secure, efficient search.

To learn more about the Persistent IBM Lotus Notes Connector and how it can help complete the universal search picture for your business, check out:
http://www.persistentsys.com/products/enterprisecontentsearch/enterprisecontentsearch_google.htm

Traditionally finding information embedded in Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) sites has not been that easy. SharePoint search uses SQL Server full text search internally. If a WSS site uses SQL Server as a content database, then it's available for search. However, if a site uses SQL Desktop Engine (the free, included one) it's out of luck.

Can Google Search Appliance help? You bet. The Appliance can crawl SharePoint directly, whether it uses SQL Desktop Engine or not. However, depending on the design of a SharePoint site, Google Search Appliance could face some difficulties. For example, sites buried under other sites might be "hidden" due to lack of direct links to them. That's why we have developed a little tool that will solve these challenges and enable thorough document discovery. This sample connector also pushes embedded meta data into the search index, allowing for advanced querying and fielded search. For example, a site designer defined several important attributes for a document library. By using the connector, these attributes will be treated as meta data of these documents.

This SharePoint connector is written in Java, and uses SharePoint's web services. It's not intrusive - you don't have to install anything on your SharePoint server or sites. You can run it from a single machine and retrieve any SharePoint site in the enterprise. The connector works with both SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services. If WSS sites are created by a SPS site or linked to it, the connector can discover them. If not, you can always tell the connector to point to them. It can enable indexing of all the personal sites inside SPS, both public and private content. It can access Google Search Appliance and SharePoint Server sites through separately configured proxy servers. It supports both basic and NTLM authentication for secured search, as does the appliance.

To give it a try or to get more details on this connector, including the source code, check out the SharePoint Connector Code Sample download on the Google Enterprise developer community.

After his keynote at the MIT CIO Symposium this week, our very own Dave Girouard (VP & GM of Enterprise) sat down with the editor-in-chief of eWeek to talk about the growing importance of search in business, Google's plans for the enterprise, and even a bit about the Boston Red Sox. Go here to listen to the podcast.

G'day Mates! We're excited to announce that we just launched our search appliances in Australia and New Zealand. Ever since we announced the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini we've gotten constant inquiries from customers down under who wanted to provide Google-quality search across their corporate networks and websites.

Google's approach of providing a complete enterprise search solution - in an appliance - rather than selling just the software means that customers can be up and runnin' and searchin' in little time after unpacking the box. But it also means that we as a company have to go through demanding tests and government processes for importing hardware into a new market. Anyway, we cleared all that and we're happy that now we can answer all those "I want my Google Mini!" demands!

Our customers elsewhere might be asking, "when can I get my hands on the Google Search Appliance?" Well, the answer is: soon! We're working hard to make sure ALL of you can enjoy great enterprise search just as you enjoy Google's web search.

Rodrigo Vaca

For almost a year, the Google Maps API has been available for free, public-facing sites. A remarkable variety of websites (over 30,000 in number) have already integrated Google’s mapping technology using this API. Including our own. Check out the Google Mini Map here. These sites and organizations know the value of adding geographic context to data. But we’ve heard from many organizations that want to use Google mapping technology behind the firewall or for web-based enterprise applications.

Today, as part of Geo Developer Day at Google, we launched Google Maps for Enterprise. Now companies and government agencies can use Google Maps to help their business go geo. Now you can provide all the Google Maps features that users love -- such as the ability to drag maps in the browser and view satellite imagery. That means whether you’re displaying customer data on a map, managing assets in the field, or delivering a location-finder to your customers or partners, Google Maps integrates with your data to provide a truly compelling user experience.

We at Google have teamed up with Inxight Software, one of our Google Enterprise Professional partners, to make it even easier to find documents, discover trends and find information within documents in the enterprise. To complement Google enterprise search capabilities, Inxight has created the Inxight Search Extender, an easy-to-install application that integrates with both the Google Search Appliance and Google Desktop for Enterprise. As our customers have experienced, the Google Search Appliance provides Google-quality search across your web servers, file systems, portals, content management systems and relational databases. Now, the Inxight Search Extender for Google integrates with the Google Search Appliance to enable users to filter search results sets and more easily navigate through documents, seeing at-a-glance automatically extracted people, companies, places, and other information. The result is that you can get more value from your information.

To help explain this powerful combination of technologies, we're jointly hosting a free webinar next week.