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January 25, 2017

Lucidworks 3 Released!

Today Lucidworks announced the release Fusion 3, packed with some very powerful capabilities that, in many ways, sets a new standard in functionality and usability for enterprise search.

Fusion is tightly integrated Solr 6, the newest version of the popular, powerful and well-respected open source search platform. But the capabilities that really set Fusion 3 apart are the tools provided by Lucidworks on top of Solr to reduce the time-to-productivity.

It all starts at installation, which features a guided setup to allow staff, who may be not be familiar with enterprise search, to get started quickly and to built quality, full-featured search applications.

Earlier versions of Fusion provided very powerful ‘pipelines’ that allowed users to define a series of custom steps or 'stages' during both indexing and searching. These pipelines allowed users to add custom capabilities, but they generally required some programming and a deep understanding of search.

That knowledge still helps, but Fusion 3 comes with what Lucidworks calls the “Index Workbench” and the “Query Workbench”. These two GUI-driven applications let mere mortals set up capabilities that used to require a developer, and enables developers to create powerful pipelines in much less time.

What can a pipeline do? Let's look at two cases.

On a recent project, our client had a deep, well developed taxonomy, and they wanted to tag each document with the appropriate taxonomy terms. In the Fusion 2.x Index Pipeline, we wrote code to evaluate each document to determine relevant taxonomy terms; and then to insert the appropriate taxonomy terms into the actual document. This meant that at query time, no special effort was required to use the taxonomy terms in the query: they were part of the document.

Another common index time task is to identify and extract key terms, perhaps names and account numbers, to be used as facets.

The Index Workbench in Fusion 3 provides a powerful front-end to these capabilities that have long been part of Fusion; but which are now much easier for mere mortals to use.

The Query Workbench is similar, except that it operates at query time, making it easy to do what we’ve long called “query tuning”. Consider this: not every term a user enters for search is of equal important. The Query Workbench lets a non-programmer tweak relevance using a point-and-click interface. In previous visions of Fusion, and in most search platforms, a developer needed to write code to do the same task.

Another capability in Fusion 3 addresses a problem everyone who has ever installed a search technology has faced: how to insure that the production environment exactly mirrors the dev and QA servers. Doing so was a very detailed and tedious task; and any differences between QA and production could break something.

Fusion 3 has what Lucidworks calls Object Import/Export. This unique capability provides a way to export collection configurations, dashboards, and even pipeline stages and aggregations from a test or QA system; and reliably import those objects to a new production server. This makes it much easier to clone test systems; and more importantly, move search from Dev to QA and into production with high confidence that production exactly matches the test environment.

Fusion 3 also extends the Graphical Administrative User Interface to manage pretty much everything your operations department will need to do with Fusion. Admin UIs are not new; but the Fusion 3 tool sets a new high bar in functionality.

There is one other capability in Fusion 3 enabled by a relatively new capability in Solr: SQL.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why do I want SQL in a full-text application?”

Shift your focus to the other end.

Have you ever wanted to generate a report that shows information about inventory or other content in the search index? Let’s say on your business team needs inventory and product reports on content in your search-driven eCommerce data. The business team has tools they know and love for creating their own reports; but those tools operate on SQL databases.

This kind of reporting has always been tough in search, and typically required some customer programming to create the reports. With the SQL querying capabilities in Solr 6, and security provided by Fusion 3, you may simply need to point your business team at the search index, verify their credentials, and connect via OBDC/JDBC, and their existing tools will work.

What Else?

Fusion 3 is an upgrade from earlier versions, so it includes Spark, an Apache took with built-in modules for streaming, SQL, machine learning and graph processing. It works fine on Solr Cloud, which enables massive indices and query load; noit to mentin failover in the even of hardware problems. 

I expect that Fusion 3 documentation, and the ability to download and evaluate the product, will be on the Lucidworks site today at www.lucidworks.com. “Try it, you’ll like it”.

While we here at New Idea Engineering, a Lucidworks partner, can help you evaluate and implement Fusion 3, I’d also point out that our friends at MC+A, also Lucidworks partners, are hosting a webinar Thursday, January 26th. The link this link to register and attend the webinar: http://bit.ly/2joopQK.

 

Lucidworks CTO Grant Ingersol will be hosting a webinar on Friday, February 1st. Read about it here.

 

/s/ Miles

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