What's New

This chapter describes new features of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) 10g Release 1 (10.1.8.1) and Release 1 (10.1.8). It also provides pointers to additional information.

New Features in Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Release 10.1.8.1

This release fixes many bugs from 10.1.8 and it also includes the following new features:

Oracle SES includes three new business intelligence connectors: Cognos, MicroStrategy, and Business Objects.

See Also:
Chapter 5, "Configuring Access to Enterprise Content Sources"
Oracle SES includes a new Database connector built on JDBC, so you can crawl any JDBC-enabled database. This source type provides additional security on the row level.

See Also:
"Setting Up Database Sources" and "Tips for Using Table and Database Sources"
Oracle SES includes a new Oracle E-Business Suite 12 connector based on application data available as RSS feeds.

See Also:
"Setting Up Oracle E-Business Suite 12 Sources"
Oracle SES now provides identity plug-ins for OpenLDAP release 2.2 and 2.3 and Sun Java System Directory Server release 5.1 and 5.2.

See Also:
"Secure Search Options"
OracleAS Portal users can register the Oracle SES WSRP portlet (or, secure portlet) from their Portal pages. This requires OracleAS Portal 10.1.4.

See Also:
Appendix A, "Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Secure Portlet"
Oracle Content Database plug-in now supports Web services authentication when using Oracle Content Database release 10.1.3.

See Also:
"Required Steps with Oracle Content Database Release 10.1.3"
The new automatic character set detection feature enables the crawler to automatically detect character set information for HTML, plain text, and XML files. Character set detection allows the crawler to properly cache files during crawls, index text, and display files for queries. This is important when crawling multibyte files (such as files in Japanese or Chinese).

See Also:
"Character Set Detection"
Oracle SES provides a new parameter for the crawler configuration file (crawler.dat) that lets you include any multimedia file type you want to crawl, and the file name will be indexed as title.

See Also:
"Default Exclusion Rules"
Oracle SES is now certified on Internet Explorer 7.0

Note:

For release 10.1.8.1, Release Notes are posted only on Oracle Technology Network (OTN). They are not included in the documentation library on the DVD.

You must register online before using OTN; registration is free and can be done at

http://www.oracle.com/technology/membership/

If you already have a user name and password for OTN, then you can go directly to the documentation section of OTN at

http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation

New Features in Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Release 10.1.8

The main driver of growth in the enterprise search market: People want a single point of access to all their information.

Out-of-the-box, with no additional coding required, Oracle SES 10.1.8 provides more access than any other enterprise search engine. It can find and verify information in the following:
- Files in Microsoft NT File systems (NTFS)
- EMC Documentum Content Server DocBases
- IBM Lotus Notes databases
- FileNet Content Engine object stores
- FileNet Image Services libraries
- Open Text Livelink
- Microsoft Exchange
Oracle SES ships with plug-ins (a plug-in is a software module that adds features by Oracle SES) for all these applications. (Note: To use some of the new plug-ins, additional licensing is required.) Oracle SES controls access to private documents and restricts access to specific workgroups based on access control information obtained during the indexing and stored in its search engine index.

See Also:
Chapter 5, "Configuring Access to Enterprise Content Sources"
Oracle SES also searches across a number of Oracle sources: OracleAS Portal, Oracle Collaboration Suite Content Services and Calendar, Oracle Content Database, selected modules of Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle Siebel.

See Also:
Chapter 5, "Configuring Access to Enterprise Content Sources"
Oracle SES is now directly integrated with access control and identity management solutions. No synchronization with Oracle Internet Directory is necessary for Oracle SES to ensure access control. Oracle SES can directly access Active Directory (no extra coding required) through new identity plug-in and authorization APIs. Oracle SES ships plug-ins for Oracle Internet Directory and Microsoft Active Directory, among others.

See Also:
"Authorization and Authentication" and "Security APIs"
New suggested content feature lets you index and display real time content in the search results screen. A style sheet can be applied to the content before it is displayed in the search result list.

See Also:
"Adding Suggested Content"
In addition to the existing Query Web Service API, Oracle SES now includes an Admin Web Service API. This API lets you perform a subset of administrative actions, such as starting and stopping a crawler schedule or getting the index fragmentation level. The Admin Web service is located at the following URL: http://host:port/search/ws/admin/SearchAdmin.

See Also:

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Java API Reference

Appendix E, "WSDL Specifications"

The "Web Services Interface" section in the Oracle SES administration tutorial:

http://st-curriculum.oracle.com/tutorial/SESAdminTutorial/index.htm
Other improvements include a simplified method for configuring secure search with OracleAS Single Sign-On, a title fallback feature to override default document titles picked up during crawling with a more meaningful title later, a more simple configuration of federated sources, and case-insensitive relevancy boosting (documents with "Oracle" are boosted when you enter "oracle".)
See Also:
Upgrade from Oracle SES Release 1 (10.1.6) is supported.