Enterprise Search

Chapter 9. Installation and Implementation

The way in which the installation and implementation of the search application is conducted will be very specific to a particular company. The milestones for an open-source project will also be somewhat different to those for a commercial application. In this chapter a distinction is made between installation and implementation. Installation covers the provisioning and testing of servers and networks, loading all the modules of the search application, checking that user authentication is being managed correctly and undertaking User Acceptance Tests (UAT) that confirm that the base performance criteria are being achieved on a test collection.

Implementation is the process of extending the application to work on live servers and content, and moving the acceptance testing to the search support team and a small group of testers. Overall this could take at least a month to achieve and may be longer with more complex federated search implementations.

Project Management

Installing and implementing an enterprise search application is a complex project with perhaps forty or fifty individual work packages. There will be little or no previous experience of installing enterprise search so this project calls for the best project manager the organization employs or hires. The availability of this project manager will decide when the project can begin, and of course the project will begin perhaps one or two months before the software arrives as the vendor ...