Mapping Portal Server Features to Your Business Needs
Chapter 3 Identifying and Evaluating Your Business and Technical Requirements 57
Search Engine
The Search Engine service is used in the following channels:
• Subscription channel to summarize the number of hits (relevant information)
that match each profile entry defined by the user for categorized documents
and discussions.
• Discussion channel to
individually search contents and rate the importance for
comments.
Table 3-3 shows the Search features and their benefits.
Rewriter Proxy Redirects HTTP requests to the Rewriter
Proxy instead of directly to the destination
host. The Rewriter Proxy in turn sends the
request to the destination server.
Using the Rewriter Proxy enables secure
HTTP traffic between the Gateway and
intranet computers and offers two
advantages:
• If a firewall exists between the Gateway
and server, the firewall needs to open
only two ports—one between the
Gateway and the Rewriter Proxy, and
another between the Gateway and the
Portal Server.
• HTTP traffic is now secure between the
Gateway and the intranet even if the
destination server only supports HTTP
protocol (no HTTPS).
Table 3-3 Search Features and Benefits
Feature Description Benefit
Search Engine Enables the retrieval of documents based on
criteria specified by the end user.
Saves users time by providing access to
content.
Categorization Organizes documents into a hierarchy. This
categorization is often referred to as
taxonomy.
Provides a different view of documents that
enables browsing and retrieval.
Robot The Search Engine robot is an agent that
crawls and indexes information across your
intranet or the Internet.
Automatically searches and extracts links to
resources, describes those resources, and
puts the descriptions in the Search database
(also called generation or indexing).
Discussions A forum for multiple threaded discussions. Contents are individually searchable and
importance rating are given for of all
comments
Feature Description Benefit