G-Cloud and open file formats, a cautionary tale

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Charlie Hull

We're lucky enough to have our services available on the G-Cloud, a new initiative by the UK Government's Cabinet Office with the aim of breaking the sometimes monopolistic practices of 'big IT' when supplying government clients. We've recently had a couple of contracts procured via the G-Cloud iii framework and one of the requirements is to report whenever a client is invoiced. This is done via a website called Management Information Systems Onli...Continue reading

The trouble with tabbing: editing rich text on the Web

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Charlie Hull

Matt Pearce, who joined the Flax team earlier this year, writes: A recent client wished to convert documents to and from Microsoft Office formats, using a web form as an intermediate step for editing the content. The documents were read in, imported to a Solr search engine, and could then be searched over, cloned, edited and transformed in batches, before being exported to Office once more. The cont...Continue reading

Open source intranet search over millions of documents with full security

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Charlie Hull

Last year my colleague Tom Mortimer talked about indexing security information within an open source enterprise search application, and we're happy to announce more details of the project. Our client is an international radio supplier, who had considered both closed source products and search appliances, but chose open source for greater flexibility and the much lower cost of scaling...Continue reading

Some new open source file filters & previewers

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Charlie Hull

We've just released an early version of Flax Filters, which allow basic conversion of various proprietary formats to plain text ready for indexing. Currently the filters support Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, the Open Office equivalent formats, Adobe PDF, plain text and HTML, but we'll be adding more in the future (of course, we'd welcome contributions from third parties). We're already using these filte...Continue reading

Search requirements and asking the right questions

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Charlie Hull

When we're contacted by potential clients, we have to gather as much information as possible about how and why they need search technology. This either takes the form of a physical or telephone meeting and much scribbling in notebooks, or a long exchange of emails. In all cases there are some important questions that must be answered, and I thought it might be useful to list the most common ones here: How many items do you need to search? The number of items to search varies w...Continue reading

Open source data integration and file format translation

Posted on February 18, 2009 by Charlie Hull

One of the challenges we often come up against is indexing data held in other proprietary or open source systems, such as databases or content management systems. Talend is an open source data integration platform that lets you connect to a huge variety of these systems, from Salesforce to Oracle to SugarCRM. Talend is an offshoot of the Continue reading