Open sourcing Cloud Search SDK: create secure connectors for third-party enterprise data

At Google, we strongly believe in community-driven development. Developers and partners in our ecosystem play a pivotal role in how we architect our products (and we cannot thank them enough!). Recently, we were fortunate to work with more than 50 partners globally to launch third-party connectivity for Cloud Search. Cloud Search helps employees search across all of their company’s data with the same speed, relevance, and intuitiveness of Google Search.

We released the Cloud Search Connector SDK a few months ago to give Cloud Search partners an easier way to index third-party content and identities. Today, we are open sourcing the Google Cloud Search Connector SDK and all reference connectors built by Google to the broader community.

So how does it work? Cloud Search Connectors act as the conduit between the Cloud Search Indexing API and an enterprise’s repository to index content and identities. They are the fundamental building blocks that allow us to provide more secure search when it comes to third-party enterprise data. These connectors enable employees to search on-premises, cloud or SaaS applications to gather information they need to do their jobs more efficiently. This includes third-party storage, collaboration, ERP, sales, support systems and more.

About the SDK

The Connector SDK is designed to be easy for developers to use, handling many common tasks like service communication, multi-threaded API operations, traversal strategies, connector configuration, error handling and more. The reference connectors built by Google demonstrate the usage of SDK for various enterprise repository types and traversal strategies.

“The Cloud Search SDK has made it so easy to implement connectors for repositories,” says SADA Systems Director, Chad Johnson. “We exclusively rely on the SDK for all our deployments.”

Through the help of the SDK and APIs, our partners have developed connectors for many third-party repositories, including:

• Storage solutions, like Amazon S3, Box and Microsoft OneDrive.
  
• Collaboration solutions, like Atlassian Confluence, Jira, and Microsoft Sharepoint.
  
• Sales, support and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, like Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow.

Browse more than 80 connector options in the Cloud Search Connector directory.

Getting started with Google Cloud Search connectors

If you’re interested in building a connector for Cloud Search or you would like to explore the SDK and reference connectors, check out our GitHub repo and our developer guides on how to create content connectors and identity connectors. You can also walk through this tutorial to see how a simple deployment of Cloud Search can work. The tutorial also demonstrates how to utilize the SDK to index data.

We welcome your feedback and contributions, and are excited to see how you’ll use the SDK to build connectors for Cloud Search and extend the SDK to support additional functionality.