Slide deck to accompany Alfresco webinar on Apache Solr with Martin Bergljung from Ixxus and Jeff Potts and Andy Hind from Alfresco.

1. Thanks for joining today’s episode of
Tech Talk Live on
Solr
We will start just after
9am PST, 12pm EST, 5pm UK, 6pm CET.
Please use the dial in numbers or your PC (VoIP)
for the audio portion.
All lines will be on mute during the webinar.
Please use the chat box to submit questions.
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence

2. Speaker Bio
• Principal ECM Architect at Ixxus and has been working on Alfresco
solutions for the past 5 years.
• He is a frequent blogger about Alfresco and Solr and his blog is
published at ecmstuff.blogspot.com.
• He has also written a book about Alfresco called Alfresco 3 Business
Solutions
• Alfresco Certified Engineer
• At DevCon 2011 he presented a session about customizing the Upload
File(s) dialog in Alfresco Share
• Currently working on an Alfresco and Solr project for major London client
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 2

3. Agenda
• What’s Solr?
• How is it integrated with Alfresco?
• Why is Alfresco using it?
• What content is searchable when using Solr?
• When not to use Solr?
• Demo
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 3

4. What’s Solr?
• Apache Solr is an open source enterprise full-text search server
• Created by Yonik Seeley for CNET
• Contributed to Apache Jan 2006
• Version 1.4 released Nov 2009
• Uses Apache Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and
search
• Runs within a Servlet container such as Apache Tomcat
• It supports any programming language since it has REST-like HTTP/XML and
JSON APIs
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 4

5. What’s Solr continued?
• Written in Java and provides plug-in interfaces for building extensions
to the search server, such as:
• Faceted searches and navigation
• "Did you mean" spell checking on queries
• Query completion
• Finding documents that are "More like this"
• Results highlighting
• Geospatial search for filtering and sorting by distance
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 5

6. What’s Solr continued?
• Conceptually, Solr can be broken down into four main areas:
• Schema (schema.xml)
• Field types and fields (including dynamic fields)
• Configuration (solrconfig.xml)
• Lucene index parameters
• Request handler mappings
• Cache settings
• Plug-ins
• Indexing
• Searching
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 6

7. What’s Solr continued?
• Security?
• Relies on server or container security
• Totally open by default, you need to secure it!
• No standard document level security model
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 7

8. What’s a Solr Core?
• A Solr core holds one Lucene index and the supporting Solr configuration for
that index
• Sometimes the word "core" is used synonymously with "index“
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 8

9. How is Solr integrated with Alfresco
• Alfresco uses a patched Apache Solr 1.4 version
• Custom Schema
• 2 cores:
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 9

10. Why is Alfresco using Solr?
• The following are some of the reasons why Alfresco decided to
move from an embedded Lucene search engine to the stand-
alone Solr search server:
• Scale content search independently
• Make clustering easier
• Improve performance
• Support cross-locale ordering
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 10

11. What Alfresco Repo content is searchable?
• What content in the Alfresco repository is searchable via Solr?
• All content in the Workspace store (the main store used for most of
the live content)
• All content in the Archive store (content that has been soft deleted)
• What’s not searchable?
• Content in other stores such as AVM (deprecated and being phased
out) is not supported
• Multi-tenant searches are not supported in version 4.0.0 (supposed
to be supported in later versions 4.c)
• Records Management (RM 2.0 will support Solr)
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 11

12. When not to use Solr?
• If you are not running in Tomcat
• Want to use Records Management Module
• Require in-transaction indexing
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 12

13. Demo
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 13

14. Cluster Configuration
• Example of cluster configuration:
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 14

15. Additional Resources
• http://docs.alfresco.com/4.0/index.jsp?topic=
%2Fcom.alfresco.enterprise.doc%2Fconcepts%2Fsolr-intro.html
• http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_And_SOLR
• http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
• http://ecmstuff.blogspot.se/2012/05/getting-going-with-solr-in-
alfresco-4.html
© Copyright 2012 Ixxus Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 15