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Coveo Cloud Platform Search Engine

Coveo is among the top search engine from Gartner's list of best Enterprise Search Engine. Coveo Cloud Platform was procured to be the search engine for Salesforce platform on which Coveo works out-of-the-box.

Coveo provides a whole list of connectors and costs additional amount based on number and type of connectors. If you see the list of connector, it covers many of the modern Cloud and On-Premise applications. There is also a list of generic connector which would be used to connect the applications which are less-known or legacy in nature. These would be Database, Desktop, File, LDAP, etc. At a first glance it seemed like any source application could be crawled by Coveo. But there are limitation, just like any other product, around its technical capability and hopefully those would be resolve in  releases.



In this scenario applications are deployed in standard layers of firewall. Security and SSO is provisioned through OKTA. The problem occurred that none of the crawler of Coveo Cloud Platform was able to authenticate itself to any of the applications hosted in DMZ or LAN.  Basically crawler doesn't support any of the following technologies:

  1. SAML 2.0 Authentication
  2. VPN Tunneling
Whitelisting of IP is not permissible by Enterprise Security team.

On further analysis, it was found that the last resort was to:
  1. Create a sitemap with form-based-authentication against each application: This solution requires lot of patch-work and overhead maintenance headache. On top of that, if the application is bigger sitemap would hold many child sitemap recursively. We found that crawler had some limitation on number of URLs contained in a sitemap. The last but not the least, the solution looks crapy.
  2. Copy the Coveo crawled data to an external database: Security might not allow this.
  3. Copy the Coveo crawled data to another Cloud Application: In our scenario, it was copied to Salesforce. Again this is a patch-work, but we didn't have any option.

Recommendation & Take-aways:

Based on my experience, for any large organization with complex IT Landscape that has a mix of Cloud, On-Premise and hybrid applications, it is highly recommended that Coveo Hybrid Platform should be deployed. That means a combination of Cloud and On-Premise. Also, Coveo search should have a synching mechanism between Cloud and On-Premise. Other search engine might also fall into similar categories. These simple scenarios/technical capability needs to be incorporated. Also needs to support SAML 2.0 authentication and VPN Tunneling capabilities of its crawler because these are basic capabilities for any large organization with myriads of legacy application.




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