Integrate other sources into IBM Connections search

Question

I know there has been a short discussion about this here but I'd like to point out a specific use-case. Maybe there is other ways to accomplish this or IBM could take the use-case and evaluate if this would make a good addition to an upcoming feature release of IBM Connections:

Knowing that the Connections search engine is basically a nicely configured lucene with some seedlist agents crawling profiles, wikis, etc. makes me think it can't be too hard to do this:

Use-Case:

1.) There's an application that posts its updates to users' ActivityStream as AS entries/events (not status updates).
2.) There's OpenSocial Gadgets that make an EE (Embedded Experience) for these entries - users can work with the application directly from their ActivityStream. Makes an excellent user experience.

PROBLEM:

3.) ActivityStream entries with their fancy markup and specific EE gadget attached can't be tagged or searched. Only StatusUpdates can be searched - but these can't have fancy markup and can't have a custom EE.

As a result - there is no way for a user to find a specific work item via Connections search.

SOLUTION:

4.) Add a custom search option. The 3rd party app would have to provide an endpoint to be crawled, but that's the least.

5.) Add a way to add result categories to the Connections search result page (I mean, in addition to wikis, profiles, status updates,... etc. have e.g. 'work items').

I don't think that should be too hard to implement, but there should be an "official" or at least "tolerated" way to do that. I don't really want to dissect and reverse-engineer the lucene configuration, the search agents and search result JSPs...

What do you think - that's not really a far out use-case, is it?
Has anyone out there done anything in that direction?

Cheers.

Answer 1

According to the documentation here it seems like you can search the activity stream in IBM Connections.