P4Search Makes It Easy to Mine Hundreds of Terabytes of Enterprise IP

Key Points:

P4Search enables content-based search across all files stored in Perforce-from intricate code files, to Microsoft Office docs, to audio-visual libraries, to file metadata-regardless of how the content is structured within a file 
Available as an open source tool, P4Search is easy to customise and integrate into existing environments.
Perforce Software today announced the availability of P4Search, a comprehensive search tool for all content stored in the company's version management engine, P4D. Trusted by some of the world's most innovative companies such as Salesforce.com, NVIDIA and Pixar, P4D stores an organisation's most valuable IP-source code, design templates, legal documents and images, among other assets. P4Search is a highly customisable tool, available as a standalone service or as an integrated function within a customer's Perforce environment.

Sophisticated Search Functionality
Built on top of Apache Lucene's Solr™ technology, P4Search enables users to perform a real-time search of their entire P4D repository-often spanning dozens of file types and terabytes of data-to find files containing any keywords, strings or phrases of interest. For example, a user might want to find the piece of code generating a specific error message, reusable libraries from an older project, or video recordings of a tutorial.

P4Search conforms with Perforce's enterprise-grade security standards to ensure that the preconfigured privacy policies established by enterprise IT are enforced, producing only the search results that each user is authorised to access. Enterprises can also embed search results into their home-grown applications via fully documented RESTful APIs, that ship with P4Search.

Advanced search options include limiting the search to specific depots or depot paths, selecting the user(s) who created or last edited the asset, and time the item was created. P4Search can be configured to scan all versions of a file or just the most recent, skip certain file types, index only metadata, and incorporate other customised criteria. Power users can also leverage Solr's custom query syntax for Lucence indexes to customise search.

Available As Open Source Tool
Perforce is contributing P4Search to the open source community and the code is available for download immediately.

"Perforce depots are home to some of the most valuable IP on the planet. P4Search makes it easy to access anything a user might need in a flash," said Christopher Seiwald, founder and CEO of Perforce Software.