Introduction

Abbreviated as SCTA, the “Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities” represents the official ministry in charge of developing the Tourism sector in the Kingdom of Saudi-Arabia and strives to achieve this desired development by using the state of the art in the technology.

Due to the fact that there are shared files and various applications hosted in different environments and being used by SCTA employees, a mean is required in order for those employees to be able to search within these files and applications as well as even external web sites, in the most convenient, easiest and fastest way, and from that perspective, the idea of a comprehensive Intranet Search engine was born.

Challenges

It has never been easy for search providers by looking at the global market search provider giants symbolized by Google, Bing and Yahoo, and under such a competitive market, the high standards of a fast, convenient and powerful search engine characterize the main obstacle for creating an engine that can compete with those giant search engines using the “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007” Technology.

The next big challenge reflected the scattered search data across different sources and hosted in diverse environments, whereas it resides in shared files, external web sites, database records and has various formats represented by pictures, documents, records, persons or web site’s content; furthermore, this whole variation of environments, sources and formats needed to be integrated in one single search screen.

Solution 

The strive of excellence, as a fundamental criteria of SURE Technology & Consulting, reflects the pursue of the best technologies and creative solutions. This very fundamental SURE concept has been clearly symbolized in this project using the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

SURE Technology & Consulting follows strict development patterns in all of its projects and the 3-Tier software architecture has been implemented in the SEEK project as follows:

1. The Presentation Layer extended the capabilities provided by the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in such its content could easily be separated from its structure, whereby the common use of the XML format as an Open Standard, provides a convenient and flexible mean to vary the flavor of user interface design using the same data source.

2. The Business Logic Layer has been developed in an isolated environment from the presentation layer in order to ensure the separation of design and user interface from logic.

3. The Data Access Layer has been built based on the ADO.NET using the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 technology as the main data source to provide the associated content in the most flexible and efficient means.

4. MVC: The Model-View-Controller Design pattern is gaining more popularity and proves to provide the best of flexibility in separating the design of user interface, data access models and the logic of applications.

 
5. BDC: The Business Data Catalog technology has been implemented to include the database management system’s sources, crawl and index the records and even process the authentication means to access the privileged data to be indexed.

6. SSO: To ensure convenient and user-friendly operations inside a multi-system environment that requires various authentication and authorization zones, the Single Sign-On played a most efficient role in providing a one-time log-In operation without affecting the performance or reliability of the system.

7. AJAX: The Web 2.0 trend tends to use Web applications more as Desktop applications providing rich user experience that can be clearly remarked by many implementations within global market search provider engines. The SCTA search portal includes the auto-complete search functionality that resembles one of those implementations as well as the fade-effects in switching between different search content modes and options and finally the display of search results.

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Result

The fact that SURE Technology & consulting is one the fastest growing IT companies in the kingdom of Saudi-Arabia, reflects its strive to make a difference in this market; and once again, SURE professional employees proved how much they welcome and solve a real challenge as seen in the SCTA search engine, where the engine has been successfully developed and implemented that lead to providing the SCTA employees with a centralized search engine with much ease and quickness in getting the information they look for and resulting in improving the overall productivity.