Blue Coat enriches support portal and search infrastructure

To improve its search experience and its customer, partner and employee support portal, Blue Coat Systems, an enterprise security company, has enlisted the help of the Google Search Appliance (GSA), and Search Technologies.

Blue Coat was migrating to Salesforce to centralize multiple business needs including housing the knowledgebase. As part of the project, the company decided to update the support portal and needed a solution that would replicate and enhance the existing search functionality. The new search experience would integrate a variety of resources including product documentation, knowledgebase articles, security advisories, technical briefs, WebGuides, training material and customer forum threads, many of which resided in unique content stores. In addition, Blue Coat wanted to manage access to content based on unique groups, improve search relevancy to enable customers and partners to help themselves and increase the productivity of internal staff.

Blue Coat decided to replace its support portal and implement the Google Search Appliance to drive the search infrastructure. Search Technologies was chosen to architect and integrate the GSA based on the company’s expertise in search engines. As part of the implementation, Search Technologies connected the GSA to multiple content repositories to provide backend query processing, making the appliance transparent to the user.

Steve Desaulnier, knowledge management specialist for Blue Coat, says, “Integrating the Google Search Appliance into our customer support portal not only offers a rich, unified search experience, but also provides us the administrative functionality to continually tune this experience to meet the evolving needs of our customers.”

Blue Coat’s implementation of the GSA went into production in October 2014. Search Technologies grouped content into a variety of collections thereby allowing the front end to manage the content by role and relevancy including access level and other product specific collections. As a result of the GSA implementation, content is no longer siloed, and a single unified search experience is available directly from the support Web site, greatly improving access and the user experience, Search Technologies reports. (Image courtesy of ShutterStock.com)