Overview of the Federated Search for KMS and KAF-based Applications
As adoption of Kaltura products like MediaSpace and KAF-based extensions continues to grow, there is increasing demand to make content published in these applications discoverable in other customer properties. These fall, traditionally, into two main “Intranet” categories:
- Intranet portals – Employee or student content “hubs”, powered by a CMS, often pulling in content in real-time from multiple third parties, with an expectation of users to run interactive searches and consume results without leaving the portal. These use cases will be addressed moving forward as “Federated Search – Interactive”.
- Federated search engines – Home-grown or 3rd party solutions, providing a central index of all content used by the enterprise/institute, periodically crawling multiple repositories and updating the index as content changes, supporting fast access to unified results as a user only has to query the single internal index. These use cases will be addressed moving forward as “Federated Search – Indexing”.
Another emerging use-case is MediaSpace being used not as a destination, but as a “publishing hub” powering Extranet portals. Customer’s Marketing, Sales Enablement, Alumni Relations, Channels, or Partners teams would set up a “digital, life-long dialog” portal targeting known users (customers, partners, alumni), who would login to a gated portal using a non-employee SSO, and engage with the customer’s content for various needs, for example, Alumni communications, Life-long Learning customer programs, Channels/Partners Sales Enablement etc.
Logged-in users’ engagement with content, not unlike in traditional, external marketing cases, is often tracked and acted upon, be it for marketing follow-ups, churn prevention, or measuring correlation with sales performance. In all cases, video, being a high-engagement medium, can be used front-and-center by incorporating full galleries into the portal, presenting content first published and (continuously) curated in MediaSpace. Later, the business owners of the extranet portal would track user-level engagement, either in MediaSpace’s analytics dashboard or in Marketing Automation systems. These use cases also fall under “Federated Search – Interactive” and their Kaltura deployments would often also include a Marketing Automation player plugin, for the Kaltura player to be used in the portal.
To better support customers with such needs, Kaltura’s Federated Search modules provide easy, and secure methods of accessing content published in MediaSpace/KAF-based extensions, while maintaining content governance and entitlements schemes employed by the portal owners. In all cases, only non-private content will be made available to 3rd parties. This, together with a focus on reducing learning curve and time to market, are the main differentiators between the Federated Search modules and other more traditional Kaltura alternatives – API queries and KMC syndication feeds.
Kaltura offers two Federated Search modules in MediaSpace/KAF, each catering to one of the two main use cases.
Based on your use case, please refer to either one of the following two modules:
The information guides for each module describe how to incorporate and index content from MediaSpace and KAF-based applications in 3rd party contexts, mainly – intranet/extranet portals, and federated search indexes. The information is intended for customer's MediaSpace/KAF admins and business-unit or department CMS developers, building content solutions that would like to federate content from customer’s MediaSpace/KAF applications.
