Pre sales question

[Cmcken]

I would like to use your search engine on my website and have two questions before I proceed to purchase
1 do you have a crawler that would automatically index new PDF documents as they are added to the website? A spider would not help because I will be uploading the PDF documents and not adding links to them to any HTML pages.

2 can you recommend a hosting provider that supports the asp.net version of your software and if not what should I ask a potential host in order to support the asp.net version of your search engine.
Thanks for any assistance.

[David]

Question 1:
There are several options. For example you could index the files in offline mode (then no HTML nor links are required), or you could turn on directory listing on the server, to automatically make a list of PDF files in a folder. Or you could use a directory listing script on the server. You could also just add new start points directly into Zoom.

Question 2:
ASP.NET is the most complex option we offer to install. If you don't have experience with .NET, you might be better off using the PHP option, as PHP is trivial to install by comparison and supported by many more hosting companies. Are you looking for dedicated hosting, or shared hosting? Does it have to be a Windows based host?

[Cmcken]

with regards to 1 I think adding start points direclty into Zoom is the best option since directly listing is not an option(security) and offline mode requires having the files duplicated (files are being uploaded from multiple locations). That said... how does start points work (date driven or on a schedule?)

With regards to 2 I will start with shared hosting but I plan to do some .net development in the next phase of this website so I probably want to stick with .net and move to dedicated hosting down the road.
thanks for further advice.

[David]

Q1. If security requirements prevents you listing the documents you have on your web site, another option would be to have a hidden or HTTP password authenticated HTML listing page.
To add start points, you can either do this from the "More" button in the start options configuration window, then do a full re-index. Or you can use the incremental indexing options (under the Index menu).
Note that if you have a Windows server that you fully control, then you can run the indexer directly on the server, in offline mode, and avoid the need to have the files in 2 locations.
You can also schedule re-indexing. See,
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/scheduling.html

Q2. We host all our sites on dedicated BSD Unix, or Linux. And of course Unix doesn't support .NET. For dedicated Windows's hosting you could use Softlayer, and you'll get full control over the machine and will have no problem doing .NET development. In most shared hosting situations you only get a limited "trust level". It is hard to know in advance what will work on which shared hosts. There is a discussion on shared .NET hosts in Australia here,
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1054722
(in short we don't have a huge amount of experience with shared window's hosting, maybe someone else might make a suggestion).

[Monday]

Depending on how your new files are being added, you might want to work in a command line option to help automate the index being updated.

http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/faq_commandline.html