What is SmartHub?

SmartHub is a web-based application that appears to users as a website with various layout options. See the graphic below.

SmartHub Capabilities and Key Facts

You may see the SmartHub URL referred to in the documentation as http(s)://<web-app-url>/_admin. The SmartHub website acts as a search portal for a collection of search engines such as:

  • SharePoint

  • Elastic

  • Azure Cognitive Search
  • PubMed
  • Solr
  • NetDocuments

SmartHub runs standalone with the search engines mentioned above. For SharePoint 2013/16/19/SPSE and SharePoint Online, SmartHub is a custom results page. SmartHub provides capabilities for personalized information delivery for multiple search engines, such as:

SmartHub includes a UI that takes advantage of standard web tachnollogies, such as HTML and CSS, and also has APIs to enable integration with your own UI. Additionally, SmartHub can be integrated into a variety of common application such as SiteCore, Outlook, Teams, NetDocuments, ServiceNow, and browsers through a plugin. This plugin enables SmartHub to be integrated into almost any application to ensure that users have the same search experience regardless of the search origin.

Integrated with Other BA Insight Products

Combined with other products in our software portfolio, SmartHub provides the following capabilities:

  • Connectivity to over 70 on-premise and cloud-based enterprise systems, using our indexing connectors, to provide secure unified access to all your information.
  • Auto-tagging and Text Analytics adds metadata and intelligent processing to content using BA Insight AutoClassifier.
  • Best of Breed Cognitive Search: Our best-of breed approach integrates Microsoft Cognitive Services and Google Cloud Machine Learning.
    • For example, Image Search identifies objects and text within images, including figures and pictures embedded within documents, to provide quick and powerful discovery of images as well as better findability.
  • Plug in our Smart Previews to quickly visualize and re-use content regardless of format or location.

SmartHub Site Administration

  • SmartHub can be accessed by default from a web browser using the URL you set up when installing SmartHub.
    • This URL varies depending on the network environment and your unique choices:
      • Hostname and port:
        • http://<hostname>:<port>
      • If accessing SmartHub from the server on which it is installed, localhost is used: 
        • http://localhost:<port> (such as 8080).
      • Fully qualified domain name:
        • <hostname>.<domain>.com:<port>
        • SmartHub.bainsight.com.
      • DNS entry
  • The SmartHub administration interface can be found at the address: http(s)://<YourSmartHub-URL>/_admin

SmartHub and Elasticsearch

SmartHub version 6.0 and later supports Elasticsearch v7 (v7.5.1).

Key Features

Video: Click here for a video walk-through of the new SmartHub v6.0 Features and Changes
Feature Description
Natural Language Query:

  • Enables your users to find the information they need by making requests as if they were speaking to a person.

  • This eliminates the need to learn complex query syntax in order to find the specific information you seek.

Similar Documents:

  • BA Insight’s AutoClassifier Help applies AI-based linguistic analysis to determine the key concepts contained within documents. 

  • SmartHub leverages this information to deliver documents which contain the same concepts as those in the search result but do not match the user’s query, thereby delivering additional highly relevant information to the user.

Machine Learning-Based Recommendations and Analytics: 

  • Uses our SmartHub Analytics to surface recommendations and suggestions, so that users have the information they need, when they need it.

Personalized and Relevant Information Delivery:

  • SmartHub’s unique Intelligent Engine taps into each user’s context to provide personalized dashboards and highly relevant results.

Helper Bot:

  • Users quickly become frustrated when their searches yield no (or too many) results.

  • Our Bot can detect these situations and provide assistance.

  • It may leverage analytics data to:

    • Suggest a query previously executed by other users

    • Suggest removal of a filter

    • Suggest a more restrictive query depending on the situation.

Internet-Like User Experience:

  • A complete UI framework provides many features including visual refiners, intelligent type-ahead, and configurable results presentation.

Type-Ahead:

  • As users begin typing queries, SmartHub will dynamically generate type-ahead suggestions of multiple types.

  • Category Matches search available metadata and suggest matching values, applying Machine Learning to analytics data to deliver suggested queries based on previous searches.

  • It is extensible for delivering suggestions of other types as well.

  • Suggestions of People or Content results match what the user is typing.

Supports Multiple Platforms

  • Lets you use the best search engine for the job or mix-and-match them to handle a wide range of applications.

  • Supported platforms include:

    • Elasticsearch

    • Elastic Cloud

    • Elastic Cloud Enterprise

    • Azure Cognitive Search

    • Office 365

    • SharePoint On-Premise 2013/16/19

Multi-Index Search:

  • Data residency, the use of multiple search engines, or sources which are not suitable to indexing make a single search index impossible.

  • Search Orchestration transmits users’ queries to multiple indexes at once, providing a single interleaved set of search results and facets.

Key Features

New features and enhancements in SmartHub v6.0 are listed here:

  • CBS and Results List decoupled from Coveo

  • SearchBox decoupled from Coveo

  • SPO custom search box (redirect queries to SH)

  • Dynamic Templates for Merck

  • Feedback modules

  • Elastic TypeAhead provider for autocomplete.

  • UI Builder

  • Related NLQ searches in TypeAhead

  • SH Security Roles

  • SmartPreviews API integration

  • Alerts

  • Automated QnA

  • Best bets

    • Ability to display more than 1 best bet