What is SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search?

SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search is a productized search solution providing unified, comprehensive and secure real-time access to enterprise data and information. The search returns both structured data (business objects) and unstructured data (HTML files, presentations, documents) out of SAP Systems and other search providers, and allows direct access to the associated applications and actions. It also lets users navigate to related information across system and application boundaries.

Its main focus is the easy, secure, search-driven access to information residing in SAP Business Suite systems.

See SDN homepage of SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search

How and where can I get SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search?

SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search is separately licensed product. Please contact your SAP sales representative.

Regarding pricing and licensing the product SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search should not be confused with the TREX engine or the services in the SAP Application Server that provide application-specific search functionalities to SAP solutions. These are included in your SAP NetWeaver license.

This sounds interesting, where can I find more information?

In a previous blog that I have now updated, you can find a compilation of different information levels on SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search.

SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search - Looking for Info?

Feedback?

We shall be glad to receive your feedback on the product SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search and/or any information materials provided about it. For anything except for support messages, please use the Search forum here on SDN.

Enterprise Search

SDN has grown to be a very comprehensive developer information platform. It seems the time has come for some "meta-blogs". This is one of those. There will be no genuinely new information contained. Instead it offers a collection of existing materials on its subject KM properties

Let's start with a quick overview...
There are four types of properties used in Knowledge Management:

• System Properties (e.g. Created, Size)
• Application Properties (e.g. Rating level, Subscription info)
• Predefined Properties (defined by Content Managers)
• Custom Properties (created by users on the fly as free text)

Properties are used to:

• maintain and display metadata
• refine a search
• create queries for query-based taxonomies

There are two services available for property configuration:

• Property Metadata Service
• Property Structure Service
• And these two services you will find documented in the SAP Help Portal here:
  SAP NetWeaver 2004s - Property Metadata
  SAP NetWeaver 2004s - Property Structures
  SAP NetWeaver 2004 - Property Metadata
  SAP NetWeaver 2004 - Property Structures
  
  

A valuable source for developers is of course the SAP NetWeaver Developers Guide for Knowledge Management, which contains many relevant topics about KM's global and repository services, property filters, and includes some of the documents that I am giving individual links to below.

And of course SDN has produced tons of more material beyond the SAP documentation and developers guide. When you have a task involving KM properties to solve, take a look at the following articles, blogs, and discussions:

How to Configure Predefined Properties with Dependent Values
Shows, how to proceed if you want to integrate a new tab listing properties that depend on each other in their allowed values such as Country and City.
Introduction to the Application Properties Service of KM
Describes the application properties service to persist properties of resources in the KM database independent of a specific repository.
Writing Custom Renderers for KM Property Groups
A step by step example of writing custom renderers for property groups within the KM details properties dialog. These groups are part of the property structure concept, which allows you to structure the available properties for documents and folders into groups and subgroups.
KM Property Maintenance Using Excel
Shows how MS Excel can be used as a tool for mass property maintenance of KM properties.
Implementing a Metadata Extension for KMC Properties
Describes a metadata extension to provide dynamic metadata values for KM properties that are delivered by external sources, including validity check.
How to Extract DC Metadata from Office Documents for Indexing and Searching
Describes how you can extract Dublin Core (DC) metadata (attributes) from HTML and MS-Office files using TREX functions. You can then use the KM search interface to search for these DC attributes.
/thread/119101 [original link is broken]
A short discussion solving the very first question: Where do I even find the list of available properties?.
/thread/50699 [original link is broken]
A discussion that quickly solves the issue of a property added to the advanced search dialog that does not show up.
/thread/193166 [original link is broken]
A discussion that gives some clues, how to correctly label your predefined properties.
/thread/152894 [original link is broken]
A short discussion solving the question how to make search in properties case-insensitive.
Creating Contact Lists Juggling with UME Attributes and KM Properties
A Weblog demonstrating a specific development involving KM properties and UME attributes.

Quite a bit of material out there, right? Quite a bit of shared intellectual property on properties, which is, by the way, not my property - I only went through the effort of collecting. And I've most probably still missed quite a bit in this collection...

Cheers, Karsten