Overview
The client is a Japanese company that opted to use Salesforce and faced the challenge of finding an easy way to expose their massive SharePoint database to their Salesforce users. JET BI helped to adapt Cadalys Concierge federated search solution to meet the needs of the customer.
Challenge
Concierge Federated Search solution allows customers to connect their externally stored and maintained knowledge bases to Salesforce and expose their content (files, presentations, documents) as knowledge articles in Concierge. The products provide an easy no-code solution to set up integrations. However when a customer like our client has a knowledge base represented by hundreds of SharePoint sites that contain diverse and multi-language content the challenge is to keep the same simplicity of the product while managing the data volume and keeping performance up to speed.
Solution
Concierge Federated Search solution allows customers to connect their externally stored and maintained knowledge bases to Salesforce and expose their content (files, presentations, documents) as knowledge articles in Concierge. The products provide an easy no-code solution to set up integrations. However when a customer like our client has a knowledge base represented by hundreds of SharePoint sites that contain diverse and multi-language content the challenge is to keep the same simplicity of the product while managing the data volume and keeping performance up to speed.
The original evaluation showed that the indexing would continue for a couple of weeks which threatened the project go-live. The solution was to optimize the existing java application to implement multi-threaded indexing. Luckily Heroku, which is in many cases the hosting platform for Concierge federated search, allows you to use multiple worker dynos with scalable performance power for your application. We have designed the possibility to manually distribute the application power between the target data sources to optimize the sync.
This project revealed the benefit of Heroku which allows to set up an optimal development infrastructure for easy development and deployment pipelines and use an add-on that takes on general functions like database management, logging, error handling.
Outcome
Quickly optimized core search solution resulted in the initial sync, taking just a couple of days instead of a couple of months. For millions of files of all types and sizes, this has turned out to be a proven success. The implementation provided the company’s employees with a single go-to place for knowledge regardless of its original storage and increased the return of investment into Salesforce licenses.
