User Guide

Chapter 3
Leveraging Existing Content
RoboEngine contains information that your users can search using the natural
language search option. In order to best serve your users, it is important to
have high-quality content. Creating content from scratch can be time
consuming, so RoboEngine makes it easy to leverage content you may already
have outside of your project, including a variety of document types. If you have
HTML files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, or
.PDF documents, RoboEngine can scan the content and make it available to
your users. This saves valuable time because the documents do not have to be
converted into HTML.
There are several ways you can include external documents in your project. You
can move documents manually into a folder for scanning or allow RoboEngine
to automatically scan them. Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint
presentations, and .PDF documents are automatically scanned if they are
included as links on Web pages within your project, so when you scan your
entire project those links to documents are followed.
For example, in your project you may have a topic about how to order
equipment. The topic contains a link to a purchase order form in Microsoft Word
format. The scanning process scans the topic and follows the link to the Word
form, scanning its content. Then, when a user asks the question, "How do I
order equipment?" using the natural language search option, one of the top
search results should be the form itself in Microsoft Word format. The user can
see the format of the document found during the search because the Microsoft
Word icon displays. The user simply clicks on the search result and the form is
displayed in the right-hand pane.
Notes:
§ Documents are scanned and searched as single units and are not
broken into pages when scanned. Therefore, in long documents end
users must navigate to the page containing the answer to their
question.
§ Graphics, and any text on graphics, are not scanned and do not
display as a search result to users. For example, if you have a
Microsoft PowerPoint slide with a graphic that lists the products your
company offers, the text on the graphic is not scanned and is not
searchable.
§ If you want to view an external document linked to your site when
you view content from the engine, you need to check that you have
the correct access.
§ Currently, Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT) files created with PowerPoint
95 are not supported by the Microsoft Index Server and cannot be
searched.