Well, hello everybody. This is Michael Coté with RedMonk. We've got an exciting demo of some Acquia stuff today that we're going to go over. And to that end, I'd like to introduce the guests that we have to show this to us. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Brian House. I'm the marketing director here at Acquia. Most people are familiar with what Drupal is, and people have probably heard about Acquia. But can you just give us a quick overview? Acquia is a commercial open source vendor. We provide commercial support for the Drupal social publishing system. Our company was founded in the middle of 2007 by Dries Bittart, who is the founder of the Drupal project. And so we provide essentially technical support and what we call network services via the Acquia network to Drupal site owners. And so we provide support for all of Drupal 6, the last major release of Drupal. So that's all community contributed modules, any custom code, any themes, and obviously Drupal core. So if people are running Drupal sites in their organization, be it one site or be hundreds of sites, they can call us as a sort of dedicated technical support organization. So we're to Drupal what Red Hat is to Linux or Canonical is to Ubuntu. I think the interesting part, in addition to being the sort of classic open source company, if you will, as you're alluding to, you actually have network services. There's actually, there's more than just support that you guys are providing. There's actually functionality via a service that you guys sell as well, which I think is sort of a new addition to the open source company model. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, you know, we think that's a really important piece of our puzzle. There's a few things we do. Some of it's on the site operation side. So it's as simple as doing heartbeat monitoring, and we can run remote Cron for site owners if they don't have access, shell access to run Cron themselves, or we can run in an automated fashion. But we also can extend sites. And we do this in a couple ways. One is we have an automated spam blocking technology that provides spam blocking
2:05on any user generated content. So it's not just comments, it's forms and any content types you might have on your site. And then what we're going to talk about today is Acquia Search, which is a hosted Apache Solar search service that can be plugged into any Drupal site. What I have here is this is a demo site. And the sort of concept behind this demo site, it's Velocity. It's a cycling community. And so this is a community-based site that would be as an adjunct to a traditional company product site. So in this community, it's cyclists. They come in and they interact with the product teams at an organization and with one another. And so the thing cyclists care about are bike rides, sharing bike rides, you know, sharing photos with them and sort of creating a place where they can do that. In the offline world, they do it at a bike shop. In the online world, they can do it in a community site like this. It's a, you know, typical blog format here, nothing particularly special in the design. But one of the things they have here are rides. And so these are all user generated rides that, you know, people can, you know, create. And so this is user generated content taking advantage of what Drupal does with what we call the content construction kit, which is the ability to create objects without any custom programming. But where the search comes in is Acquia search is a, as I said, is a, is a plug and play service. You drop a module into your Drupal site and you get, take advantage of advanced search capabilities on the site. So I'm going to come in here. It's integrated right into my search box on the site. And I'm going to come in here and I'm actually going to go and type in a search term. And you'll see, I actually spelled it incorrectly. So the first thing I did is I, not being a very efficient typer, typist, I spelled the word wrong. And so one of the things it gives you is it gives you, did you mean? It tells you, you know, does some analysis to say, did you actually mean something else? So it spells it right for me. So I can click on rides. And then what it does is it takes advantage of some of the power that Apache Solar provides to provide faceted, filtered search results. So the first thing I see, not surprisingly, is a big, long list of search results. And so
4:07I see that right in the middle. I have a couple pages. And this is obviously a site with not a ton of content in it. But here on the left is where I start to see what we call faceted navigation. So these are filters that help me as a site visitor come in and narrow down what it is I'm looking for. And so there's a bunch of things that we come ship out of the box with Acquia search that you can plug into your Drupal site. These are actually called blocks within a Drupal site. They're pre-configured and you can plug them, plug and play them very easily into a site. And I'll show you that in a minute. So as a user, I can see, okay, I can filter by content type. So do I want rides or do I want blogs about rides or polls in this case? I can also filter by user tags. So these are all different tags that content creators have used. And so I can see, you know, instead of having two pages of results and 20 or 30 responses, I can actually see I can get four road rides or five mountain rides. One of the things that I have in my rides that we saw on the other page was I have a field called difficulty. And so I can add that as a search term too. So I can say, you know what, I only want to look at challenging rides. And so that instead of getting two pages of results, I can go down to three. And so the whole point here is to help a user navigate quickly to the information they're looking for rather than have to page through lots and lots of search results. The other thing I wanted to show here is that it does, um, it supports branching. So you can see that this is rides plural, but I actually get a few different, uh, um, variations of rides in my search results. So I see, you know, the word ride over and over again, and that's just short for rides, but I also see riding, um, and a few other, uh, options here. So it's, it actually provides some intelligence in finding, um, content on the site and it's not specific to the word. So again, if you spill the spell the word wrong, you know, you're out of luck. You don't get the, uh, the sort of complexity, um, and variation of site results there. So that's part of what Apache solar does really benefits here for site owners. And this is one of the things that we've
6:09seen is that it also exposes a lot more content on the site because now suddenly as a visitor, I can see sort of the variety of content here. And I, people, you know, what we've seen, uh, preliminarily is that it actually, people are spending more time on their site and page views are going up because they're like, Hey, I didn't realize that there was a bike rides about beers and breweries in this instance, um, on a site about bike rides. So it allows people to, to, uh, to browse instead of just, uh, sort of searching for that needle in the haystack. They can look at all the other pieces of hay in the haystack. Exactly. Exactly. So then, and then what happens here? So I choose to narrow just at rides and then all my filters, as I go down, start to change a little bit. And let's say I want to do just downhill rides. So now I've got two facets. And so the facets change dynamically based on my choices. And I've down to, you know, three, three choices here on the left and a, and a much smaller range of facets. And I can also do sort by author or date or relevancy. So it narrows that down really quick. And so you can imagine a site, if you're a publisher or a site that has a lot of content, you know, this becomes a critical feature and sort of getting people where they want to go, but also exposing the content they have. The thing I wanted to show just on the, um, on the user experience around this is it also has content recommendations. So by clicking on this ride, I've actually enabled another block over here on the right, which tells me more like this. And so this is, um, taking advantage of the search technology and doing again, some configurations, some waiting to say, to provide related content to this. And so recommend other things. So this person liked downhill rides that were challenging. And so these are the other things that popped up and these are other rides in there. So again, it's a way to keep people on your site, um, and show them more content. Hopefully they can browse further. So just to be clear, like the sites this applies to, I assume they have to be like public websites, right? For you guys to be able to index over them or how does that work a public versus a private or
8:10behind the firewall thing? For any Drupal 6 site, the, really the, the only piece that connects that site to the Acquia network and facilitates the communications or what we call the Acquia network connector modules. So any site that, um, that, uh, has that installed and can broker communications out to the public internet, either through, you know, through a firewall, like, you know, putting a whole port, opening a port or in a public site can communicate with the Acquia network. I think that, you know, the, the other piece here is that the index for this is maintained in the cloud and on the Acquia network. And so, you know, we maintain that for you and that's how we can deliver search results down to the site. So the key question here is, is whether or not, you know, an organization in their, in their particular application is comfortable having that index out. Another piece of this is so, so all of this technology is built on the Apache solar modules for Drupal and our engineering team worked with the community module maintainers and has contributed all the code we've done, um, to make sure that these modules work and are performed in Drupal six, we've contributed back to the code. So for an organization that wanted faceted search and content recommendations and waiting, you know, they certainly have the ability to spin up their own Apache solar instance, um, and run that in an internal data center or, you know, wherever they might be, you know, the value of our services, you know, we can offload that and do all that for you. Just to make sure I, we understand correctly, essentially as long, if you can have an open port on, on your firewall, then the, essentially you can tunnel through doing this indexing and using this service for a website that you may not have exposed to the public. That's correct. Right. And, and then of course, if you're, uh, if, if you're super paranoid about things, you can just get the, the solar project yourself and run it behind the firewall instead of using the service and then, and then nothing escapes your firewall at all. That's correct. What's your sense for how much Drupal there is running behind the firewall that people might want to search over? You know, honestly, I think it's, um, we're constantly surprised at the number of people.
10:10I mean, you know, organizations like NASA and Pfizer have been pretty public about how they're running Drupal on their, their internet. Um, um, for internet deployments, we actually have a customer Florida hospital in central Florida who, um, are actually in the process of deploying, um, Drupal for about 70 team in departmental sites within their organization. And they're standardizing on Drupal, you know, essentially as a technology, both for their external properties and their internal properties. Um, so I think that there's a lot there. Certainly the other, the other challenge here is, is, you know, SharePoint is a pretty pervasive technology in the intranet and there's, you know, you're starting to hear more and more about concerns with SharePoint, both on a functionality and then sort of a compliance angle. And so there's, I think there's a lot of opportunity there for us to, uh, to, for, to, for Drupal to have a play and, and to, to increase its, um, presence in the intranet. And we think like technologies, complimentary technologies, like what Alfresco is doing on the content management side, sort of help mitigate the risk and control concerns, but also provide a centralized, uh, environment for collaboration and document management and those type things. Got the, uh, if, if it was the next thing you're queuing up, like check out the, the sort of admin interface that, that you were talking about. That's exactly where I was going. So, uh, so I logged in as the site administrator on this site and then I was going to pull up. So what happens here, so this is, um, what I see here is the administration menu. This is a module that's included in Acquia Drupal. Actually, the, everything I'm showing here is in Acquia Drupal, our package. And so to have a relationship with Acquia doesn't require Acquia Drupal, but, uh, um, it, you know, what we've done here is created a sort of a on rapid on ramp for people that are building Drupal sites. It extends the footprint of the site that gets upgraded, upgraded with each release of Acquia Drupal. Um, but also, uh, sort of gives sort of essential modules to help them get started. And one of the things we include in this is obviously Acquia search, which is displayed here in the site configuration menu as the Apache solar, um, option because these
12:13are the Apache solar modules. So from an administrator, I get a few things, um, to help sort of configure the results and, and, and, and tweak the experience that my site visitors will have when they come. So the first thing it does is it tells me where the, the, the, on the settings page, where it's coming from, how many items that indexes per cron run. So the way this works is, is content submitted to the site. And then on every cron run, um, a number of items are patched up to the index where they get indexed, they get put into the, our indexing servers in the cloud. And then obviously that, that content lives in your database on your site, wherever your site may be. It could be in your data center hosted on a third party host or hosted by Acquia. Then I can also configure how many results to show on a page. Um, I also can configure what happens when there, that there's a breakdown in that communication. So, you know, by default, it shows your core Drupal search results. So, you know, Drupal core search is still available on your site. Um, I can also show nothing or show an error message, but, you know, defaulting to the core results would probably be the best experience. Um, and then this enables me to turn on spell checking and suggestions, you know, the did you mean feature that we saw. Right, right. That that's, that's always critical for me because I'm, uh, I'm addicted to the red squiggly and, uh, if, if there it's, it's almost impossible for me to find anything if, uh, if there's not spell checking search, cause I can never figure out how to, uh, spell what I'm looking for. So we, we give you an idea of the search index. So, uh, the number of documents, and as I showed, this is a demo site, there's not a lot in there, the number of terms associated with this, how much of this content has been indexed and sent to the server, you know, number of fields. And that gives me some idea of what's popping up. So there's, you know, this is very machine language oriented, um, on this page right now, but you can see things like taxonomy terms. These are taxonomy vocabulary lists and fields like difficulty, which we saw that. Um, so you can get some idea of, you know, what terms are in the end. Where this gets really interesting though, is the sort of configuration right in the application, um, for a site
14:14owner. So we can control, these are all the blocks and I'll show you this on the blocks page, but you know, essentially what blocks are created by default. And so tags and images forums, you know, I can create these, um, and have those available. I can also set my biases and weighting. So I have result, um, biasing I can set here. And so what you see here is I have, you know, is I can, these are things that I can do in Drupal. I can promote something to the homepage. I can make it sticky at the top of the list. And then I can have, you know, have comments, then I can also control the bias things associated with that. So, you know, I've got a scale here from normal all the way up to 21 and I can, you know, do these, um, uh, set these as I want my things to fix and then bias, the comment bias changes. So I want more recent comments. That means it's an active topic, um, to be up. And then, you know, right under that, maybe eight have more comments that, you know, things that are active. I can do that, hit save. Suddenly now that's how my configuration will run. I can also do the same on weighting. So, um, I can decide to, you know, how to weight different content types. So there's blogs, there's our rides, our custom content type. And because of the type of community here, I have that weighted highest. Um, I can also exclude things from that index. So, you know, I may take out images. I don't want, you know, or a forum topic, something that might clutter that, uh, the index and the result page. So I can, uh, can do that as well here, right. And the interface, the takeaway being that you can, uh, you can, you can encourage your user to find your users to find more interesting types of content that you want them to see rather than just sort of having the system figure out what's interesting for them. Exactly. And, and, you know, as compared to Drupal search, um, you know, there's a lot more, uh, sort of granular controls here. And certainly, you know, if you spun up your own Apache solar instance, obviously you go to the next level of controls here, but this is, you know, what we've tried to do is balance, um, you know, ease of use for a site administrator with also some granularity that they can have, um, they can have real, um, control over in, in the interface.
16:18And then the same thing, um, on the things that are, uh, different fields for content types. So, you know, taxonomy names and different, you know, things like their paths and the name, the body, you know, what, where's the, where's the biasing? Where's the waiting, um, come in to control. How are these, uh, these, these sections determined? I mean, is that drawn from like the, uh, the, the HTML on the page or, or sort of tagging things or what, what are these different items? So these, these items are all, you know, these are all, um, the components of a content type, um, on the site and there's, they're common across that. So things like, uh, a title and body and name, you know, just come from all our crop and path alias are consistent across all content types. You get some HTML tags based on H1, H2. Um, and then we also have things like taxonomy. So, so if I have this weighting, the taxonomy names, so I'm applying a consistent weight across all my taxonomies. And this site, I have three. Um, and then down here, if I say, you know what, I, one of those taxonomies isn't relevant for search results, I can actually set this to omit and then come down here and say taxonomy one, you know, I want that to be 21 and taxonomy two to be, you know, something else like eight. The other thing I wanted to show in the administration interface was the more like this. So this is the content recommendations piece. So again, here, what I can do is, is very similar to the other ones. I can come in here. I have a more like this box. So I created on that. And then again, I can start to set some configuration here. So what fields to compare. So this is again, there's vocabulary two, vocabulary one, name and title, some basic stuff. Um, I can say, you know, I also can, can say, you know, does something have to happen a number of times before we recommend it as a content? So I can set some frequency, um, requirements or length requirements, um, at the, and the configuration side to see how those blocks are displayed and when they're created. In administrator, I come over to the blocks page. So this is sort of the, the, the under site building, we have the components that are in a site and it gives the administrator the way to, you know, the ability to lay out a site. And so what you see here is,
18:21is, um, a list of blocks. And then these yellow areas are all the different locations or regions that a block can be deployed in. And so what you see here is I've got, you know, all my different search blocks that are created out of the box. I don't need to do anything. These are all generated by, um, aqua search in our configuration here. So I can sort by content type, by user tags, difficulty author, you know, those are all things here. I can tweak how they're presented, you know, just by dragging these around. Um, I can control sort of where they go. I have it, my more recommendations. So these were all on sidebar first is on the left sidebar last was on the right. So I put more recommendations over here. So, you know, the, the point here is that, um, to simplify that, to sort of give the most common use cases for what people would use as filters on the site, um, and make that available out of the box when you install the module. So, um, getting this up and running is, is very simple. You just drop the module into your Drupal site. It creates the blocks on the fly. It gets, um, it creates the admin menus on the fly and really simplifies that process for someone looking to get started. So that's sort of a, a demo site in action. So what I thought I'd do is, is so a real site. Um, so in a prior life, before I got involved in technology and Acquia, I used to brew beer for living. So I, uh, in, uh, in order to keep up with that, I actually have a beer blog that I run. So what I'm looking at here is my beer site, the beer observer, and we have sort of, um, a little bit more content to see what this looks like. So in this example, I searched on the term beer and it told me, told me I found 41 items. Again here, I've created a couple of things. So I have style as a choice list in a content type. So we have beer reviews on the site. So you can see, you know, this is a choice option. So we have all the filters here and I can show more things or show fewer, um, right on my filter. Beer style tags are, are user generated tags. So they can come in and put whatever they want in there as well. And then now here, here are a bunch of facets. Everyone can relate
20:21to exactly many facets of beer. That's right. Um, we have categories of content type authors. And again, we can sort. And so, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I like hoppy beers. So I want to look at India pale ales and, you know, get a narrow list there and, and, uh, and see how those go. Not surprisingly, I have content recommendations too. So, uh, in the case of beer reviews, it's other beers on tap. So also on tap right up. But then I, what I can do here is I can come over into the Acquia network. So what I'm looking at now is the Acquia network and I can go to my search page that tells me, so it gives me some information about how to get started and then, um, what's happening. So, you know, this is my demo site. I have 13 documents in the index and I can see my search pages, you know, you know, the results, it's a demo site. So it doesn't have a lot of content here. If I flip over, um, to the beer observer site, I'll see a little bit more, um, information. And so, um, one of the things that we're doing, so we see a little bit more over here. So we're going to flip through this page and, you know, again, not a ton, uh, a ton of happening here, but on a content with, on a site with a lot of content, there's a lot of information here. You can see what your common search terms are without results, with results. You can start to, um, tweak your content associated. So it sort of works in, plugs well into your SEO strategy, um, because you get real information. Each one of our subscription packages, basic, professional and enterprise, um, has, will have a certain level of, uh, the Aqua search service available to it. Um, the network service here. So, so some level of based on volume, the number of nodes you have, um, and potentially the number of queries that you're, you're getting on your site. So some, you know, there'll be a basic service level with each one of those subscription packages. And obviously the more you pay, the bigger that is. And then what we'll do is we'll establish premium tiers based on, again, volume here, the number of nodes you have. Um, and sort of in, in one of the goals of our beta program is to sort of get an understanding on our side and the infrastructure side, you know, what does it cost to, to run that? If you have sites that have
22:23millions of nodes, you know, um, you know, what is, what is the implication on our side for that? And then what, you know, what, what, uh, what do we charge for that? So we're in the process of determining that now, but at every subscription level, including as low as $200 a year, you can add this to your site, um, and get search, you know, for a smaller, uh, smaller Drupal website. It shouldn't cost the beer observer too much. That's definitely, definitely not. Yeah. Well, that's fantastic. Well, I appreciate you spending all the time to show this to us today. Well, uh, Coté, I appreciate you giving me the opportunity, opportunity to do so. Absolutely.