Podcast: Harvard Business School’s and Lucidworks

This week on SolrCluster, we are joined by Ravi Mynampaty and Katia Muser from Harvard Business School (HBS). Ravi and Katia share with us their experience migrating the Harvard Business School Alumni Website from Endeca to Lucidworks Search, Lucidworks’ commercial distribution of Solr. They explain how choosing the Solr approach saved them a ton of custom development and enabled them to offer end users features such as personalization, faceted search and navigation of various types of content (e.g., people, events, alumni stories) and autocomplete. The HBS search team chose Lucidworks Search because of the admin UI and ability to prototype very quickly. Members of the search team who did not have previous Solr experience were able to stand up, configure, and manage their Solr instance through the Lucidworks Search user interface. Listen to the podcast here.

Katia Muser is a Technology Solution Architect at HBS.  She is a seasoned IT professional and has designed effective software solutions in various verticals such as higher education, insurance, finance, and automotive industries.  Most recently, she architected a Solr-driven search-based portal for the HBS Alumni website.  Katia has an M.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from EPF Ecole d’Ingénieurs in France.

Ravi Mynampaty refers to himself as “just another search guy standing tall on the shoulders of giants” and believes that making incremental changes is an effective path towards improving search and tries to make this happen on a daily basis.  He is currently working on Enterprise Search at HBS, which includes setting Enterprise Search strategy, design and implementation of findability standards, search tools, and search user interfaces. Ravi has masters degree in engineering from the University of Massachusetts and Brandeis University.

SolrCluster is hosted by Yann Yu and Adam Johnson. Questions? Email us at SolrCluster@lucidworks.com or on Twitter @Lucidworks #SolrCluster.