Federated Search provides access to external repositories without adding documents to the portal Knowledge Directory. Federated Search is especially useful for content that is updated frequently or is only accessed by a small number of portal users
When the portal requests a federated search service, the remote service accesses the content repository and sends information about each file to the portal. The returned information is displayed to users in search results. The results include a URL that opens the file from the back-end content repository.