Why we like GSA release 5.2: Google Apps integration

A few weeks ago Google Enterprise issued Release 5.2, the latest software update for model GB-1001, the one we are using on this project.

There are a slew of new features in Release 5.2, but there are a couple that are making for some serious happy on this project. The most significant is that, with the update, the GSA now integrates with Google Apps. For those interested, the Google Code site has a detailed explanation of how that works.

For us this is huge. Our modest non-profit organization two years ago adopted Google Apps as a basic building block for a functional, practical, web-based enterprise environment, something we never really had before. (Hey, there are intranets and then there are intranets.) The Google Sites and Google Docs pieces of the no-cost non-profit Google Apps service are a big part of that. And as part of this project, we have moved pretty much all of our existing intranet content over to Google Sites, and use of shared Google Docs throughout the organization is increasing steadily. (Use of the forms features in Google Docs is especially popular among our office managers.)

Before the Release 5.2 update, we had made valiant stabs at getting the GSA to index our Google Sites content, but with muddled success; and with uploaded files, at best it would only return results with keywords that showed up in uploaded files names, not the file content. Now the GSA integrates directly and we can target any “public” Google Sites or Google Docs content we share with others within our domain. (There is some ambiguity in how Google describes GSA integration about so-called “public Google Sites and Google Docs.” To clarify the point, in this context “public” is a Google term-of-art. If you create a Google Site or Google Docs within your domain’s Google Apps and share it with everyone within your domain, then it is “public.” It is not necessary to make that content public to the world.)

The other Release 5.2 feature we are especially excited about is its enhanced advanced search reporting. Now we have a built-in tool that enables us to analyze user search behavior, with reports that “list every query and click made by every user,” plus whether users are finding what they search for within three clicks, or not at all, and which part of the search interface the users, uh, actually use. Aces!

One caveat we are aware of from GSA groups discussions: Release 5.2 is a significant update with features that may warrant a serious review of one’s existing XSLT modifications, to exploit new GSA feature sets. And we have been advised to do a complete crawl refresh. We’ll report back here how it all goes.