I love working with Coveo for Sitecore. Here is my top ten list of reasons why I enjoy the platform and why it is valuable to customers. The photo above was taken in Québec City while I was at training for Coveo.
Top Ten Reasons:
- Easy to Architect - Search indexing platforms like Solr are difficult to install and become an entire beast of themselves. You have to worry about maintenance, backup, tuning, scaling, and high availability. Most customers don't want to spend the money on the infrastructure to support this and it is always the first thing to start small and "scale up later when needed". The reality is if you are building a monster application you are going to need more than a shared VM. Even worst, just sticking it on your web server isn't going to cut it. Coveo is a Search platform in the Cloud. They take care of all the heavy work so that you don't have to. They make it easy to plug into Sitecore and get running quickly out of the box.
- Published Pricing - You can see pricing of the different options here.
- Ready to Use - Coveo for Sitecore has pre-built search interface modular components out of the box. Once installed you can just create a search results page and start configuring the layout in a modular wave they call "Hive". You can get a feel for the UI as they leverage it on their Community search page at https://connect.coveo.com/s/
- Great Documentation - They have great documentation that is up to date. https://docs.coveo.com
- Great Training - The training for partners is free. It is really well executed and you can take a certification test after you complete training.
- Great Support - The support team is very responsive and they understand search and Sitecore really well. They found a bug in Sitecore as part of a Coveo ticket and also had a workaround that helped keep us on track.
- Free Trial - Download the Coveo for Sitecore module and install it. From Sitecore you can provision a Coveo cloud instance for 30 days to test out the full functionality.
- Machine Learning - The Coveo engine uses analytics to tune the ranking and develop relationships between search terms and content even without tagging. You can tune and customize how aggressive the engine is over a period of time.
- Open Development Model - You can view the Search UI on GitHub. If you need something you can extend or add on.
- Enterprise Ready - The Coveo platform has many connectors to other products such as Salesforce or SharePoint so you can leverage Coveo as your enterprise search platform beyond Coveo.