Enterprise Search with Amazon Kendra – A Beginner’s Guide

Amazon Kendra as a Foundation for an Enterprise Search

Amazon Kendra comes with strong language understanding capabilities and thus offers the means to find the right answers and insights when you need them. Amazon Kendra’s query APIs allow you to implement your own tailored search experience and to deliver customized results to your users. You can furthermore integrate many of your data silos and content sources into this unified search experience. Combining this with Amazon Kendra’s advanced relevancy model results in a solid foundation for your enterprise search.

How Does Amazon Kendra Index Third-Party Content Sources?

You can easily integrate third-party sources like Atlassian Confluence, ServiceNow, or OpenText Content Server into Amazon Kendra so that it becomes the enterprise search you need. To get started, it is crucial to have Amazon Kendra licensed with the right quota. After you set up your Kendra instance, you can directly configure the built-in connectors or web crawlers. If these do not suffice, we also offer all our Raytion Enterprise Search Connectors for Amazon Kendra.

What Is Needed to Index and Display New Content Sources?

You can set up and configure the following components in order to index more content sources:

1. Create an index with the document volume which you want to index. Tip: Kendra offers a developer license for testing and piloting purposes.
2. For each of your sources, create a “data source” within the Kendra administration interface.
3. AWS will guide you through the configuration of the connector, schema, result display, and search filters.
4. Depending on the source and its settings, the search is quickly ready for indexing.

Now, you configured the connectors and search index to provide the right metadata to help your users quickly find the information they are looking for. With our Raytion connectors, we provide pre-tailored schemas.

Search Experience and User Journeys

Amazon Kendra helps your users to solve their tasks faster and more efficiently. Therefore, a customized search experience for your company is a worthwhile long-term investment. Based on the query APIs provided by Amazon Kendra, you can integrate it directly into your intranet through a search-as-you-type. Also a standalone search center, such as the Raytion Search & Retrieval Interface, uncovers even hidden information with faceted filters and source-specific display of results.

Who Is Involved in the Configuration Process?

The involved people are the content source owners or administrators, who are active during the configuration of a connector. Other involved people are the Kendra or search administrators, who are needed for the data source configuration and the setup of the connection and search experience.
For setting up the search interface’s authentication, you would generally need the administrator of the identity provider, such as Amazon Identity Services or Okta.

The Result

Amazon Kendra is a solid, state-of-the-art foundation for a great enterprise search. Integrating one or more content sources with Amazon Kendra is done either with Kendra-provided connectors or third-party connectors, such as the Raytion Enterprise Search connectors. Fully customized search solutions, such as our Raytion Search & Retrieval Interface, ultimately provide your users with the best foundation for an efficient work.

If you are interested in more information about building an enterprise search based on Amazon Kendra, our experts will be happy to assist you.