“Search” is that the solution to all your problems?

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Basically if you are not aware Google has a new “appliance” that can be literally “plugged” in to your server rack and hey presto you have Google search in your organisation. New Zealand government departments have got a pretty sweet deal if they want to “plug” one of these appliances right in to their server racks. It looks pretty in yellow and blue I must admit.

The State Services Commission has made an agreement with BearingPoint which gives New Zealand Government Agencies the chance to get one these yellow boxes for 30% off list price. They haven’t stated what the “list price” is. But according to sources these start at about 50K. Or you could get the little brother aka: Google Mini which is “blue” for less.

http://www.e.govt.nz/resources/news/headlines/20070227.html

*“The ability to search and find government information is essential for accessible government. Agencies will be able to use these appliances for their intranets, extranets and public websites, enabling staff and the public to find and use the information they need.” * Laurence Millar, Deputy Commissioner Information and Communication Technologies.

Basically these yellow boxes will index your content from various sources and present results back to the user. It says that it does security context searching meaning users will see what they are entitled to. One issue I see in most agencies I visit is that some are do not even have a basic security infrastructure in place for existing file shares so would like to see how this will be handled.

Google OneBox and Mini has their own Googlised OS prebaked and come with 2 year support contract for the hardware side of things. AMD and Dell make up the hardware specs.

There is an API which allows technical people to customize the search results and what not as you would expect. There is also a SharePoint connector which will index SharePoint sites for you.

The following links have more info:

http://www.cmswatch.com/Search/Vendors/Google

http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/695-Not-tuning-the-Google-Search-Appliance

Google Mini: http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/ Cost USD 1995 for 50,000 docs. Or NZD 5654 from Eagle Technologies. http://google.eagle.co.nz/

Google OneBox: http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/index.html Cost starts at USD 30,000 for 500,000 docs. No actual costs are available for this one. 

Don’t know what happens when it indexes the 500,001 document would I need to pay another US 30K?

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