Oracle has announced the general availability of its Secure Enterprise Search 10g Release 10.1.8, a major upgrade to Oracle's comprehensive, standalone search engine that enables customers to make critical business information available to authorized users while enforcing corporate security policies. This release introduces new features including support for securely searching a broad range of popular third-party data sources, integration with Oracle applications, support for third-party directory servers, and a federated search feature.

"Oracle realizes that organizations want to empower their knowledge workers to quickly find relevant information from -- a wide range of data sources while imposing security policies," said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies, Oracle. "The latest release of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g provides customers with broad access to enterprise information sources without compromising security."

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g features support for securely searching Oracle data sources such as the Oracle Database and Oracle Portal, Oracle Content Database and Oracle Applications. This new release of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search also offers support for non-Oracle information sources such as EMC Documentum Content Server DocBases, FileNet Content Engine object stores, IBM Lotus Notes databases, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, and Open Text's Livelink ECM, among others. Additionally, Oracle has launched a partner program, Oracle Secure Search Initiative, whereby Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and System Integrators deliver an even broader set of connectors that enable Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g to support non-Oracle information sources such as user desktops and business intelligence repositories.

To enable Oracle Applications users to easily, quickly and securely track down information within applications and across enterprise data, Oracle Applications are integrating and embedding Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g. For example, this integration will enable users of Oracle Applications to search across these applications' business objects and content from a wide range of enterprise data sources.

"The use of search is growing in the applications domain," said Oracle Senior Vice President of Application Development John Wookey. "Oracle Applications are integrating Oracle Secure Enterprise Search to enable users to navigate to information quickly while complying with application security rules. This new functionality is one more example of technology we are leveraging across Oracle Application product lines to increase the value of our customers' investments."

Today's regulatory requirements drive organizations to walk a fine line between allowing knowledge workers to quickly access pertinent information from various data sources while protecting sensitive information. Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g addresses those requirements by enabling organizations to deliver search results based on a user's role. This release introduces a new, extensible authentication, identity management and authorization framework that enables Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g to support third-party identity management directories such as Microsoft Active Directory, Novell eDirectory, Sun Java System Directory Server, and OpenLDAP while also enabling the support for any unique authentication and authorization scheme of an enterprise information source through "plug-ins" delivered with the product.

The new release also features federated search capabilities via the new suggested link feature and Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g to Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g federation framework. The suggested link feature of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g enables real-time information as well as search results to be delivered from any information source. This feature is also compatible with Google OneBox and would support any Google OneBox provider application. The federation framework enables search requests from a Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g instance to be federated to other Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g instances present in the enterprise, either in the form of standalone servers providing search for individual information portals or in the form of embedded search of an application.