What's New

This chapter describes new features of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (Oracle SES) 11g Release 1 (11.1.2.0.0). It also provides pointers to additional information.

New Features in Release 11.1.2.0.0

A lot of enhancements have been made to the product architecture. In addition, new features have been added, some to be controlled by the administrator, and some that can be configured by the end users.

Architectural Enhancements

• The Oracle SES midtier has moved from OC4J to Oracle WebLogic Server. This entails changes to the steps involved in configuring Single Sign-On and SSL. See Chapter 11, "Security in Oracle Secure Enterprise Search" for more information on Single Sign-On and SSL configuration.

• Oracle Text index structure is enhanced to provide faster query response time.

  Changes to index structure improves the performance of Oracle Text significantly. This option is enabled by default in Oracle SES, and results in significant improvement in the response time of the query engine.

  Oracle SES index fragmentation level remains low even with active crawler activities.

  Note:

  If you are upgrading from a previous version of Oracle SES, then you must run a post-upgrade script for these changes to be reflected in your installation.

New Features for Administrators: 

• You can now use the Administrator API to manage multiple instances of Oracle SES from a central location. See Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Administration API Guide for more information.

• Oracle SES now supports parallel querying and index partitioning. See "Parallel Query Indexing". Also see "Parallel Querying and Index Partitioning".

  See Also:

  Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Administration API Guide for information on how to implement partitioning.

• Space management options have been implemented to enable administrators to set limits on disk space usage. See "Managing Disk Space Usage" for more information.

• The new Oracle File Change Detector (FCD) significantly reduces the duration of incremental crawls of NTFS sources. See "Setting Up NTFS Sources for UNIX" for more information.

• OAM based SSO authentication is now available. See "Configuring Secure Search with OAM Single Sign-On" for more information.

• Crawler cache storage in Oracle Database provides a secure, compressed repository for sensitive information. Caching can be enabled and disabled at the source level, rather than at the system level. See "Overview of the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Crawler" for more information.

  See Also:

  "Understanding the Crawling Process"

New Features for End Users: 

• It is now possible to customize the UI using template files and skins. See Chapter 10, "Customizing the Search User Interface" for more information.

• Attribute filter search option is now available directly from the UI. See "Configuring the Display Options on the Search Page" for more information.

• Any OracleAS Portal page can now contain a secure portlet for Oracle SES. The search box and search results can appear in the same portlet or in separate portlets. See "Providing Oracle SES Search in a Secure Portlet" for more information.

• Enhanced Siebel 7.8 connector crawls activities.

• Support for Activity business component for Siebel 7.8. See "Setting up Siebel 7.8 Sources" for more information.

• User authorization cache enhancements improve performance and reduce the run-time load on target systems. See "User Authorization Cache" for more information.

• Federated authorization cache further improves performance and reduces redundancy by providing a single cache for all federated systems that have an identically configured identity or authorization plug-in. See "Federated User Authorization Cache" for more information.

• Oracle SES now has a connector for SharePoint 2007 sources. See "Setting Up Microsoft SharePoint Sources" for more information.

• Oracle SES now has a connector for image files. Oracle SES indexes the metadata from image files. See "Configuring Support for Image Metadata" for more information.

• Oracle SES now supports Haansoft Hangul documents. See the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Release Notes for other changes in document support.

• Improved messages include displaying the last crawl time for data sources and a time-out message from federated sources.

• Japanese tokenization logic has changed to improve Japanese query performance.

• Connectors have been added to support Oracle Fusion and Oracle WebCenter. See Chapter 9, "Configuring Access to Applications Sources" for more information.

• You can now implement Windows native authentication for Oracle SES. See Chapter 11, "Security in Oracle Secure Enterprise Search" for more information.