Elastic Enterprise Search Beta 2 released: Now with even greater connectivity and extensibility

Elastic Enterprise Search brings one elegant search experience to all of your purpose-built or cloud-based workplace tools. We’re pleased to announce the second beta release of Enterprise Search, which contains new features to connect your people to what they need — with speed and relevance at scale.

Teams collaborate better and execute more quickly when they can easily find everything that they need. The first beta release of Enterprise Search introduced core features: rich, organization-wide search that understands your natural language, an introductory set of application connectors, and flexible group management. Beta 2 reveals more of the exciting future of Enterprise Search, offering greater connectivity and extensibility.

“With the recent Elastic Enterprise Search announcement, we are excited to continue working closely with the Elastic team to deliver a comprehensive Enterprise Search Solution. We’re providing our joint customers the ability to search efficiently across every content source supported by BA Insight, which currently includes more than 70 enterprise systems.” –Massood Zarrabian, CEO of BA Insight

Custom API sources

Teams can connect popular cloud-based applications like Dropbox, Google Drive, GitHub, and Salesforce via easy-to-use connectors. But, as vital as those applications have become, your workplace isn’t made up of only third-party applications. Each organization will have many internal applications that solve problems as unique as its business goals.

Beta 2 expands the capabilities of the custom API source. Each custom API source can now have a custom schema. A custom schema means that each unique source can choose which data is important to display to searchers. You can wire in any of your internal systems and have them appear however you choose.

Enterprise Search supports ingestion of custom objects of all sorts, without the enforcement of a rigid schema. Any user can ingest documents and objects as they exist on your many platforms. Since not all documents and objects are created equal, developers can now focus on building connectors that map with the unique characteristics of their unique content platforms.

For instance, the data and metadata of a document found on a legal archiving platform will differ greatly from log events on a server or objects living in a CRM like Salesforce. For that reason, ingestion of any API source must be flexible.

You might use this to record unique log events from your legal archiving platform:

assigned: "lucy legal",
reviewer_activity: "discovery",
status: "open",
completion_date: date

Or, you can record unique log events from your servers:

urgency: "critical",
server: "sophisticated-samuel",
error: "Not enough energy :sad_face:",
created_at: date

Or even record sales leads:

lead_temperature: "hot",
account: "Searchies Inc.",
notes: "Needs help with accounting software. Loves sushi.",
point_person: "Jennifer",
updated_at: date

You can represent any type of application data that you’d like to make searchable.

A growing connector library

Custom API connectors provide great flexibility, and connectors are still the easiest way to get data flowing into Enterprise Search. Usually, a few applications are at the heart of a functional team. For example, your engineering department might be glued to one or two applications — such as JIRA and Confluence — to help manage issues and communication.

Engineering teams have a challenging task; they have to navigate the potential solutions ahead of themselves and identify the best outcome. And they need to leverage the knowledge of their organization and the many experts they have access to so they can take advantage of prior works and solutions.

At Elastic, we get engineering teams and we want other engineering organizations to know we can help with the multi-tool madness. We’ve released four new technically focused connectors: Jira, Jira Server, Confluence, and Confluence Server. Add as many connectors as needed; the more efficient and productive your engineering teams can become, the faster they can deliver solutions to your company.

“We’ve been using Elastic open source technology for many years to deliver enterprise search projects for our customers. We’re excited by the introduction of Elastic Enterprise Search because it really represents a leap forward in simplifying and streamlining implementations of these kinds of projects. It’s a fresh approach to the age old challenge of letting users find information anywhere in the organization. We look forward to seeing the new features as they get released with each new round of innovation.” –Michael Cizmar, Founder of MC+A

Polish, polish

Elastic Enterprise Search Beta 2 adds exciting new features and addresses some feedback from Beta 1. It’s an excellent time to try Enterprise Search. You’ll have the opportunity to see what’s new, provide feedback, and help us further refine the product. We’d love to hear from you.

Ready to get started?

Read on to join the beta or watch the getting started webinar to learn more.

Run, search

Elastic Enterprise Search requires…

• Java 8 or Java 11
• An Elasticsearch 7.2.x cluster
• A platinum Elasticsearch license 
  • You can generate a 30-day trial platinum license during the setup process.

First, download Enterprise Search. Then, decompress the package and enter the directory.

Adjust the configuration files of either Elastic Enterprise Search or Elasticsearch to permit automatic index creation. You can do that in one of two ways — choose whichever feels best:

1. Allow Enterprise Search to change Elasticsearch cluster settings: Add the following line to config/enterprise-search.yml:
   allow_es_settings_modification: true
2. Allow Elasticsearch to create new indexes automatically: Add the following line to either Elasticsearch cluster settings or within elasticsearch.yml:
   action.auto_create_index: “.ent-search-*-logs-*,-.ent-search-*,+*”

And then run the binary ~

bin/enterprise-search

Last step: access http://localhost:3002 and then weave together all of your organizational data. Add your team members, tune group relevance, and then watch your workflows transform through search.

Note: Elastic Enterprise Search Beta 2 is an early sneak peek. It’s unencrypted by default and not fit for production usage.

We’d love your beta feedback

We’ll need your help to make Elastic Enterprise Search the best product it can be. If you run into any bugs, or have any comments or questions, please reach us at: [email protected].