Crawling the Cireson Knowledge Base

Michael_Baldry

Hi all,

We're currently in the process of planning out how to consolidate and maintain all of the knowledge that people have built up over the years. We're planning on using two different things:

1. SharePoint - for detailed reference documents
2. The Cireson KB - for quick fixes to common incidents, or information on common requests.

Our SharePoint team has asked me to find some recommendations from all of you on crawling the KB from SharePoint, so that we can have one single place for people to search.

Has anyone tried doing something similar before? Any success stories? Failure stories? Recommendations on how to set it all up?

Thanks!

Dakota_Green

Hey Micheal,

Right now there are not any built-in features in the Portal that will query SharePoint for Knowledge Base articles, or vice versa.

It is interesting to see that requests for SharePoint to Portal integration has been picking up steam as of late. You might be able to reply to the aforementioned thread or just watch this thread, to see if someone has been able to pull it off.

Dakota_Green

Hey Micheal,

This has been brought up in the past. Brett from our team has a really good response when it comes to potential compatibility and solutions:

https://community.cireson.com/discussion/comment/2473#Comment_2473

Brett_Moffett said:

I've heard this sort of request before and I've never seen a good answer to it.

The issue I see is with your statement of "I don't want to abandon the Cireson KB potentials!"
It would be possible to just show the SP site in an iFrame or View within the Cireson portal, however you lose the functions that you want to keep such as the ability to link KB articles to Work Items.

Being in Word format is a tricky one as even if you automated the updating process and somehow got Word to convert the document to HTML, the Word HTML code is "nasty" to say the least and the KB articles would be very slow to load due to being so large.

Having the Cireson search engine reach out in to other databases such as SP sites, may be able to be achieved with some custom code, however, this would still lose the ability to link these with Work Items.

A solution I can envision is a "TAG" of some description in a KB article that would be recognized by some custom Java script that would then load the SP result in the KB window. This way the KB name and indexing would be in the Cireson DB but the content would be in SP. The one draw back here would be the inability to index search the content of the Word document which would severely limit the search functionality.

Final idea would be to get a better Word to HTML converter and automate it in PowerShell or Orchestrator.

Good luck

Michael_Baldry

Hi Dakota. I read through that thread, and think I'm asking the opposite of what's mentioned there -- they're trying to search SharePoint from the Cireson search; I'm asking about searching Cireson stuff from SharePoint.

Essentially, they want people to be able to search from SharePoint, and bring back any relevant Knowledge Base articles or Request Offerings from our Cireson portal. I can see some issues there, with people potentially getting results that they don't have access to (since the portal scopes by user roles, which the SharePoint account won't be aware of). Has anyone done anything similar to that?

Dakota_Green

Hey Micheal,

Right now there are not any built-in features in the Portal that will query SharePoint for Knowledge Base articles, or vice versa.

It is interesting to see that requests for SharePoint to Portal integration has been picking up steam as of late. You might be able to reply to the aforementioned thread or just watch this thread, to see if someone has been able to pull it off.