Source Types

A collection of information is called a source. Each source has a type that identifies where the information is stored, such as on a Web site or in a database table. Oracle SES provides several built-in source types and an architecture for adding new, custom types.

Additionally, Oracle SES provides access to more third-party data repositories than any other enterprise search engine, without requiring you to generate any additional coding. While these data sources are classified as user-defined source types, they are available the same as the built-in source types.

This guide organizes these user-defined source types into content management sources, collaboration sources, and applications sources. For information that is not stored in one of these predefined sources, you can use the Oracle SES extendable architecture to define a new data type.

Oracle SES also provides authorization cache sources for facilitating access to secure data.

Built-in Sources

Web: Represents the content on a specific Web site. Web sources facilitate maintenance crawling of specific Web sites.
Table: Represents content in a table or view in Oracle Database.
File: The set of documents that can be accessed through the file system protocol.
E-mail: Derives content from e-mails sent to a specific e-mail address. When Oracle SES crawls an e-mail source, it collects e-mail from all folders set up in the e-mail account, including Drafts, Sent Items, and Trash e-mails.
Mailing list: Derives its content from e-mails sent to a specific mailing list.
OracleAS Portal: Lets you search across multiple OracleAS Portal repositories, such as Web pages, files on disk, and pages on other OracleAS Portal instances.
Federated Sources: Enable you to share content across multiple Oracle SES instances.

Content Management Sources

EMC Documentum Content Server
FileNet Content Engine
FileNet Image Services
Hummingbird Document Management
IBM DB2 Content Manager
Microsoft SharePoint
Open Text Livelink
Oracle Content Database
Oracle Content Server (formerly Stellent Content Server)

You may need to install client libraries and obtain a license from the vendor for some content sources to work. For example, EMC Documentum requires installation of a compatible version of Documentum Foundation Classes (DFC), which is a Java library, on the computer running Oracle SES. Oracle SES does not ship with DFC.

Collaboration Sources

EMC Documentum eRoom
IBM Lotus Notes
Microsoft Exchange
Files in Microsoft NT file systems (NTFS)
Oracle Calendar
IMAP for OCS E-Mail Server

Oracle Applications Sources

Database
Oracle E-Business Suite
Siebel 7.8
Siebel 8

Authorization Sources

User Authorization Cache (UAC)
Federated UAC