Smart Previews for SmartHub: Components Overview

The following image provides a detailed overview of the Smart Previews application.

Use this graphic and others to understand the main processes as you are installing, configuring, and administering Smart Previews for SmartHub.

Smart Previews for SmartHub

Smart Preview Components

Smart Previews is composed of a number of various components working together such as:

  • Databases

  • Crawlers

  • Services

See the description of the various Smart Preview components in the table below:

Component Description
Content Sources (Source Systems)

  • Indicates where the content to be crawled originated from. 

  • In most Preview for SmartHub implementations these are the content sources from the Connectivity Hub, populating your search index.
Crawler This is the BA Insight Connector, or another crawler, which crawls the content sources to retrieve the documents.
Preview CEWS Service

  • The Content Enrichment Web Service is an enrichment component called by the Connectivity Hub at crawl time, and saves the content so that a preview can be generated. 

  • This component saves to the Preview CEWS Output Directory.
FAST Proxy Service

  • This service that takes the files that are stored in the Preview CEWS Output Directory, and places them into the Transfer Folder.

  • Fast Proxy service validates the file against the preview generation rules configured via the Import Server UI, discarding any files that do not need to be processed based on the rules.
(Smart Previews SharePoint) Indexing Monitoring Service This is the service that monitors the Transfer Folder and moves data to the Smart Previews Import Server.
Import Server This is the Smart Previews Import Server generates the Previews and places them in the databases.
Databases

There are 3 Smart Previews databases:

  • Preview Cache:
    • Where the generated previews are stored.
    • (You may have 1 or more of these databases.)
  • Preview Configuration:
    • Contains a master index of the generated previews generated along with the required configuration settings.
  • Preview User Profile:
    • Contains information that is added or updated when users use their workspace.
Fetchers A part of the Smart Preview Hybrid service, fetchers retrieve files from the source when generating previews on-demand.
Smart Previews Hybrid Site

This site is hosted on-premise in IIS, and retrieves the preview data from the preview databases in response to requests from the Smart Previews Web Resources site.

Smart Previews Web Resources

  • This site is hosted on-premise, in IIS. 

  • This component is called by the end users browser to deliver preview templates to the SmartHub search results page, as well as to process requests to retrieve previews.
SmartHub Register the Smart Previews component in the search pages.