As we are in the Holiday Season and its spirit, we find ourselves reflecting on the past year 2007 and on those who have helped to shape our business in a most significant way.

We value our relationship with you and look forward to working with you in the year 2008 to come.

We wish you a very happy and restful Holiday Season and a New Year filled with peace and prosperity.

Your innoveo solutions Team

© picture: Jed Share/edit66

Laurent and I had the chance to be in Paris for the 4th edition of leweb3 conference. For me, it is the third time I could attend to this conference, the first time for Laurent.

Why are we attending?

• first, as bloggers
• then, to extend and consolidate our network (this part is just exceptionnal by leweb3!)
• third, to listen to the new trends and important Internet technologies that are coming up
• fourth, to be "stimulated" by all these VC and entrepreneurs. We are "tanked" for about one year!

We couldn't resist to wear our "marketing" innoveo T-shirts ;-) Quite successful, a lot of people were looking at us and "reading" our T-shirts.

Very interesting meetings, exciting people (over 1'800 participants from more than 40 countries). Very inspiring, a real success!

Conception using generics and reflection of a search engine to index and search content in your business entities without being intrusive.

Introduction

Today, one of the functionality that almost all web sites implements is a method to index content and give it users the possibility to search that content spread into its web pages. It is one of the simplest ways to improve the user experience on your web site.

Blogs brought categories/tags giving the possibility to label the information. However this advantageous method isn’t always sufficient. It is advisable to then use a real content indexing method.

In this set of posts I propose to take a look at the indexing and searching method I implemented on the web site of innoveo solutions, my new company. I hope also to bring soon this system to my web site Tech Head Brothers.

Both web sites, innoveo solutions and Tech Head Brothers, were developed using Domain Driven Design. So, we started by defining a domain model with our business entities. In this layer we do not concentrate on technical aspects for example like persistence. On the other hand we do concentrate on the domain we want to address.

One of the main ideas is to avoid being intrusive in the domain model with any inheritance of technical classes or to link this layer with any technical frameworks.

To achieve this goal we will use an O/R mapping tool (Euss) for the business entities persistence as well as the Lucene.Net framework for the indexing part.

Following quite some discussions (Thanks Didier ;) in which we asked us if we would better use a service offered by one of the searching big players on the Internet, we finally decided to keep the control of our searching tool.

Wanting to be independent of any database and services like Full-Text indexing, or from services like Indexing Services, we decided to use Lucene.Net to avoid having to re-implement everything from scratch.

In the following posts, I will present an introduction of Lucene.Net; we will see the architecture I have chosen for the indexing and searching framework; the implementation details of that framework and finally an example of integration into a data access layer.

This post is cross-posted on my personal blog "One of the Tech Head Brothers" and in French on my .NET community portal Tech Head Brothers.

Hello World!

Besides our Corporate website which is representing the "official voice" of innoveo, we would like to start a more informal conversation with you all, who are coming and visiting us.

After quite a long (hi)story, we could found innoveo with the Team and start to act as an independent company since October 1, 2007.

As a start-up company, our challenge in the next couple of months will be to correctly handle the parallel delivery of our running projects and the setup of our product and services portfolio for the market.

We will use this blog especially to publish our findings and ideas with regards to the IT industry and insurance market and would like to share thoughts, to start discussions and to get feedbacks.

It will be also the place where you will be able to hear about what we are doing, and how the company is going on.

And surely also, a place for some very technological discussions ;-)

This blog is opened to all the innoveo people, who have to post under our innoveo blogging guidelines, based on the ones of IBM and SUN. You can expect also some cross-posting (will be always specified), as some of us are already bloggers for a while. The postings on this blog are representing the personal opinions of their authors and don’t necessarily represent innoveo’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Our publications are covered by a Creative Commons license.

The comments are moderated and we are keeping the right to publish or not your comments, based on our policy.

We are very excited to start the conversation as innoveo bloggers!