Dovetail Seeker Update
We will soon be releasing a new version of Dovetail Seeker our information retrieval tool for Dovetail/Clarify CRM. The big news in this release is that Seeker now includes a windows service for keeping your indexes in-sync with your database in near real-time. This release also adds the ability to wipe and re-index your search indexes after database purges.
Previous Seeker Posts
Seeker Introduced
Previous Release Post
Creating your own Seeker Client
Real-Time Indexing
Driver
Gary and I have been thinking about different scenarios where Seeker could be used. One of them was to use search to replace how users find different types of data. I’ll leave diving into that scenario in more detail to Gary. Think Find Caller using a single search box.
One of the requirements that came up was that the search index would need to in-sync with the database. Current versions of Seeker update the index via a console application. This works fine but there is a bit of overhead spinning up the Dovetail SDK for each indexing run.
How well does it work?
Running the indexer as a windows service makes the indexing process go extremely fast. Indexing passes do not take long because the application is running and ready to go.
I am seeing index updates for our default settings running as fast as 10ms. Of course your mileage may vary.
Another side effect of having the the index always being updated is that you will likely see this message in your Dovetail Agent search results.
We might need to revisit the utility of that notice when the index is this current.
Re-Indexing
We also added the ability to re-index your search index using a command line indexing utility called Seeker Console formerly called Seek. Re-indexing essentially wipes out your search index and starts over. This is important to do after you have purged data that is being indexed. For example, if you use Archive Manager to purge one million cases out of your database you don’t want those cases returned in search results.
