Our company uses several different platforms for managing various types of content and data. Each system has its own database and search functionality. We have Confluence, SharePoint, JIRA, WordPress, Moodle, and Microsoft Dynamics.
The main issue is that our employees have to log into each platform separately to find information. This makes searching really time consuming and inefficient.
We need a solution that can work as a single search interface. The ideal tool would take a search query, translate it for each individual system, collect the results, and show everything in one place. We don’t want to migrate all our data into one big system. Instead we want something that can communicate with our existing tools and pull search results from each one.
Has anyone implemented something similar? What tools or approaches would work best for this kind of federated search setup?
that’s a solid mix of systems! what’s your budget looking like? and how are you handling user permissions across all those different sources? security can get tricky when you’re pulling data from everywhere. microsoft search or google cloud search might be worth checking out - they can be expensive but could work well with your setup.
apache solr is a decent pick, but the setup can be a headache. we attempted to create our own federated search and it turned into a total mess. every platform has its quirks. we eventually opted for a third-party tool that automates api calls, which saved loads of time.
We faced a similar challenge when our organization was juggling outdated systems alongside newer ones. Our solution was to implement Elasticsearch combined with custom connectors tailored for each platform we used. Though we had to develop the API integrations ourselves, the effort proved beneficial. Our IT team devised lightweight crawlers to extract metadata and content while ensuring permissions were preserved. This setup allows users to perform a single search and receive consolidated results across all platforms. The key was in mapping consistent fields and establishing a unified taxonomy, which took about four months with a couple of developers, but the return on investment was evident within a year due to increased productivity.