Funnelback 6.0.0 release notes

Released: 31 Oct 2006

New features

  • Completely rewritten administration interface, including the ability to create multiple users, and delegate permissions for specific tasks and collections.

  • New crawler for TRIM Context repositories. (http://www.towersoft.com/global/Product/TRIM+Context+6+)

  • Per-document security support over TRIM and file-copy (NTFS only) collections.

  • Higher performance search query reporting system with many new reports and plug-in architecture.

  • Inbuilt support for incorporating end-user click data to improve search result ranking.

  • Internal indexing and query processing rewritten to work internally in UTF-8 for better foreign character set support.

  • Thesaurus / query expansion.

  • Ability to eliminate words known to be misspelled in the corpus from the corpus dictionary.

  • Direct access to search results with spelling suggestions via xml.cgi REST web service.

  • General scoping mechanism for setting and querying bits on specific documents.

  • Sorting options expanded to cover all metadata fields.

  • padre-fl tool for removing documents from search indexes is now included by default

Other changes

Required environment changes

  • Perl 5.8+ is now required (up from 5.6)

  • Java 1.5+ is now required (up from 1.4.2)

  • libiconv is now required

  • Windows 2000 is no longer supported

  • Under Linux, glibc 2.3.3+ is now required (up from 2.2.5)

Functional changes

  • System name changed from Panoptic to Funnelback. Includes changes to default forms and license key location.

  • Under windows, the default administrator user is now named funadmin rather than panadmin.

  • Default search forms now include CSS styles in-line for easier customization.

  • Default search forms no longer provide a link to user help documentation. Sample user documentation is still available within the administration documentation.

  • Default search results per page changed from twenty to ten.

  • Spelling suggestions are now provided by default for the following CGI parameters: query, query_and, query_or, query_phrase and query_sand. Customization is available via the query_parameters attribute of the CheckSpelling tag.

  • refine.cgi now processes all query_* CGI parameters except query_not. Previously, only the query was processed.

  • Featured pages are now matched against the search query prior to canonicalization, rather than after.

  • When configuring Apache, Funnelback now binds to all IP addresses (*) rather than the old behaviour of choosing the first IP address of the first interface.

  • During installation, addition of the web server user to the search group is now optional.

Bug fixes

  • Crawler check-pointing previously failed under Windows

  • Crawled document URLs are now canonicalized more effectively.

  • Dates in the future can now be indexed, where as previously they were ignored.

  • Fixed default page matching in external_metadata.cfg

  • Installer no longer assumes that web server user and group are the same.

  • analyse-size.pl previously displayed warnings when run in empty directories.

  • crawl.pl previously produced warnings if log, idx or data directory was already empty.

Upgrade issues

  • When upgrading an Apache configuration, the old httpd-panoptic.conf configuration file will be removed from Apache’s httpd.conf, and replaced by a new httpd-funnelback.conf configuration file. Any environment specific customization in the httpd-panoptic.conf file should be manually transferred to the new configuration file during the upgrade.

  • Under Windows, the default installation root has changed from C:\Panoptic to C:\Funnelback. While the C:\Panoptic location remains supported, we encourage you to move your installation to C:\Funnelback if possible for consistency.