Peter,

I am curious if you've had any experinece with Google Mini or Google Search Appliance and DMX.  It would appear that I am being forced into making a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance (GSA) box work within our enviornment.  Do you know if the either of these two devices will work and keep document security in place?  I know the Lucene search provider that comes with DMX will and haven't had much time to play with the other search providers that come with DMX.  Basically what I need to know is if I have access to a secured document within DMX will the Google Mini or GSA be able to return the proper results?  I did see where unprotected documents can be searched by google but it's the protected ones we need to ensure are working.  

Thanks in advance,

Arick

Hi Arick,

I have no experience with that but I can elaborate on "external search" in general. AFAIK these tools are all based on "crawling", meaning they open your site and just follow every link they find. This is because any other approach requires knowledge of how the web app stores its data. I've never been contacted by Google about this so I can safely assume it just crawls.

Crawling depends on the exposed links. DMX is pretty careful in not exposing links to content that is not available to the viewer. Since a crawler is not logged in, the visible links are only to folders/files that are visible to "All Users". This, of course, is a big handicap but inherent in these types of systems. That is, unless you find a way to get the crawler to log in to DNN. This also requires specific knowledge by the crawler, in this case of DNN. I find it hard to believe that this has been implemented. AFAIK there is no way an external 3rd party indexer can index protected content in a DNN site for this reason.

Peter

Peter,

Thank you for the explanation. I believe in my findings that I can get Google to log into the DNN instance providing the server with a username/login for my DNN install. If this is the case then any DMX document available to that user should be available to the crawler?

Thank you again,
Arick

Yes. Note you have an information leak in that case as anything indexed could potentially be visible to a user even though they're not logged in. Until they click the link that is ...

Peter,

Just wanted to follow up with you that I was able to get the Google Mini working within my environment. There were a few things with the app_browser folders and cookie settings, but by using the Template View on a hidden page the Mini is crawling and searching documents. Thanks again for such a great product.

-Arick