Seeds and Connectors Overview

The next few sections provide background information on seeds. Seeds are the starting points of a crawl, and are used by Watson Explorer Engine connectors to retrieve data from the resource that is identified by the seed. Seeds are the programmatic mechanism by which Watson Explorer Engine enables a connector to crawl a resource. All installed connectors in Watson Explorer Engine have a corresponding seed that must be added to your search collection first to enable that connector to crawl your search collection.

Typically, seeds configure URLs to access protocol-based resources such as fileshares, SMB shares, databases, email archives, and other data repositories that are accessible by various web protocols. Moreover, different seed URLs have different capabilities.

Seeds can also be repository-specific to enable connectors to crawl specific third-party applications such as Salesforce, SharePoint, IBM Domino, as well as other client relationship management (CRM) systems, product life cycle (PLC) systems, content management systems (CMS), cloud-based applications, and web database applications.

Note: For a list of all bundled and installed connectors see the subsequent sections of Using Installed Seeds With Latest Connector Versions. For Watson Explorer Engine supported repository version information, see Supported Versions of Data Sources.

Note: To discuss a services engagement for a new connector contact your IBM sales representative.

Tip: The Watson Explorer Engine administration tool displays the list of available seeds in the Add a new seed pop-up dialog that you can display from the Configuration > Crawling tab when you are creating or editing a search collection.

Subsequent sections of this documentation describe how to use, test, troubleshoot, and optimize each connector that is shipped and installed with this version of Watson Explorer Engine.