The purpose of this blog is the discussion about the search engine provided for SRM UI5. Not to forget, a search engine is the heart of a Web Shop architecture and one of the key success factors for a user friendly shopping experience, also in SAP. By default, SRM UI5 is delivered with SAP Trex serving as a search engine. This means, Catalog Content has to be loaded from a Catalog Management System into so called Staging Tables on SAP NetWeaver (SRM). From there, catalogs are indexed into SAP Trex.
Comparing other Web Shops and internet sites with huge amount of catalog data, Apache SOLR turned up to be one of the most popular and most powerful Open Source search engines in the internet. What if you consider a Catalog Management system which operates directly on Apache SOLR without the need for catalog replication? In fact this will make your catalog process very fast and efficient. Catalogs can be loaded by buyers and suppliers and they are becoming active directly after approval. See below Screencast for the powerful search capabilities supporting real-time boosting of search results, facetted search, multi language catalogs, real-time catalog view assignment and real-time catalog view filters.
Further information on SOLR can be found here:
WIKI: Apache Solr - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Apache SOLR Homepage: Apache Solr
Catalog Cloud Services: Catalog Cloud Services
When looking into above solutions, consider the following KPIs which have been addressed by many customers:
- increase usability for end users
- keep the IT simple and costs low
- leverage the already existing and powerful tools
Your comments, questions, concerns and any further ideas and proposals are welcome.