Moving Open Text Delivery Server to Common Search

As part of the small team behind the Solution Exchange, I was somewhat dreading the day when I had to change the internal search engine over to Open Text Common Search on the Web Site Management Delivery Server.

However, in absolute honesty, this was not the issue of complex configuration that I was expecting and I will explain the steps I took.

The Delivery Server Common Search Connector

1. The first step is to install the Open Text Common Search product.  I was fortunate enough to have this already in our infrastructure so didn’t need to do this step.
2. Assuming the Common Search is installed, you can log into Delivery Server, navigate to connectors > Search Engines > Administer and click the import button.  Version 10.1 of Delivery Server has a pre-configured connector that you can use.  Click the OTCommonSearch link to import the connector.
3. Change the URL of the Common Search Server to the IP of your Common Search machine.
4. Change the “Incoming directory of indexing jobs” to a shared folder.  This is a path as seen by the Delivery Server.  I’ve chosen to place this on the local machine of the Delivery Server and share that with the Common Search machine.
5. Change the “Incoming directory of Common Search server” to point to the same directory as above but from the perspective of the Common Search machine.  I initially had problems here as the Delivery Server and Common Search were on different Domains.  We changed this anyhow to reflect better practice in our setup.
6. Create the shared folder if you haven’t already and make sure both the Delivery Server and Common Search have read/write access.
7. You’re done!

It was really that easy! (well, if I discount the delays due to not being able to share directories effectively across Windows Domains at first).

Finally, it is worth pointing out the tweaks I made to my queries for the new Search Engine.

When searching specific groups, you can now use the syntax:

group:<ds_group_name>

and

attributeName:'[#request:attributeExample#]'

for attributes.

Admittedly, I didn’t need to do anything more complex than this so there were not a lot of queries to change.

There may be more complex example out there but the key message is to start planning your changeover now as it might just be easier than you think!

As always, please leave your questions or comments.

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