Welcome to Kraft Kennedy

Last Friday, Autonomy released Service Pack 2 of their WorkSite Indexer 8.5 and iManage Universal Search (IUS) Server 8.5.  In addition to several resolved issues, Service Pack 2 introduces some much anticipated enhancements, including:

• The Autonomy Control Center - a web app intended to simplify management of the IDOL components, particularly in a multi-server environment
• Changes to the Active Content engine that improve query performance
• Improvements to the Deployment Tool that allow more granular control when deploying various IDOL components
• A shift of Eduction processing from the IndexTask component in IDOL to the WorkSite Ingestion Service
• Automatic restarting of the WorkSite Connector during the initial crawl if the service dies before the first crawl is complete

These, as well as a full list of resolved issues and enhancements, can be found in more detail in the “WorkSite Indexer Release Notes (8.5 SP2)” on Autonomy’s support website.  We’ve been excited to get our hands on the new releases and have been working on deploying them over the past few days.  The WorkSite Indexer has thus far been deploying without any trouble.

The Universal Search server, on the other hand, has proven to be a little more difficult.  We’ve discovered a bug (confirmed by Autonomy) with deploying multiple WorkSite content engines that causes the deployment process to stop with the message “null” followed by “Deployment process incomplete”, as shown below:

Short of attempting to deploy with 1 WorkSite content engine and creating the additional content engines manually, this brings the deployment of IUS 8.5 SP2 to a screeching halt.  Autonomy has identified this as a high priority issue and expects to have a resolution out in the very near future.  We’ll be keeping our eyes out for the updated release, and will provide a more in-depth review as we spend some time with the new features.  Stay tuned…

After running into a couple issues with the iManage IDOL 8.5 SP1 release in our production environment, I was able to complete the index build using the 8.5 SP1 P1 release that was released last week.   Our initial errors were found in our Content Engine logs referring to a lack of free disk space, even though we had successfully had our IDOL 8.5 (pre-SP1) index on the same volume earlier.  In any case, I added some space and then recrawled using 8.5 SP1 P1.  I’ve read some similar reports on user forums, so if you have a smaller volume for your IDOL indexer, just keep this in mind.
Continue reading…

For those of you interested in running the iManage 8.5 IDOL Indexer, Autonomy recently released a new revision of the WorkSite Indexer Administrator’s Guide (8.5).   It is available on the iManage support site, and includes an updated Chapter 6 on “WorkSite Indexer Maintenance.”    The document goes into explicit detail on how to properly back up and restore an 8.5 IDOL index.    (Note: you must exclude the entire WorkSite Index folder structure from normal backup agents, as this could corrupt the indices).

In summary, there are 3 types of items that need to be backed up, and then restored:

1. All WorkSite Indexer configuration files (*.cfg)
2. All WorkSite Connector files (*.db)
3. All WorkSite Content index backups (the actual indices themselves)

Continue reading…