The journey ahead for Search & Navigation (A.K.A. Find)

Hi dear customer, partner and colleague.

Today marks 365 days since I joined Epi as Product Director for DXP. During my first 11 months at this company the Find product and service was managed by a colleague of mine, but its whereabouts was always on the radar of several reasons. The main reason was (and still is) that Find is a corner stone in our Customer-Centric Digital Experience Platform (DXP). It needs to operate as a clockwork and allow customers and partners to innovate and deliver a great end-user experience.

What happened last year:

• Release of a new backend which improved our capabilities to provision more capacity and new service clusters (internal name is version 3.0)
• Development started of next generation Search & Navigation service (we call it version 4.0)

Listening to you, our customers and partners, in January and early February helped us put new spotlight on our plans and current efforts. The focus on delivering a great customer-experience 24/7/365 had to improve. Of that reason the roadmap for Episerver Search & Navigation (the name Find has from now on) has just been updated.

Here’s summary of the changes we have made, and decisions taken since January 2020:

• Since Mid February we have been working version 3.5 of the service to provide further stability improvements for existing customers, improved incident management and enable rich analytics and telemetry for us internally and for you as a user of the service. This is our focus in Q1-Q2 2020.
• As a developer you probably know find.episerver.com (AKA the Find Demo service) and one thing is clear, it’s more than “a demo service” despite its name. It’s where many developers get their indexes for development projects. It must work, otherwise our partners and customers can’t work. So, we have after recent issues tripled its capacity and will work on improving the developer experience going forward. Any feedback on how to update this service and how it relates to the paid Developer Indexes is greatly appreciated!
• The exciting work on the next generation Search & Navigation service (version 4.0) will continue in Q2, enabling the service to run on a totally new modern architecture with improved functionality around individualization, performance and search accuracy. Keep an eye open for the beta program that will be announced mid-2020.

Improving the customer experience is crucial, and I promise that we will be even more transparent with you going forward. If you’re a customer to the Digital Experience Platform, you will soon see your daily Search & Navigation usage, uptime and performance in the DXP Management portal in Q2 together with other interesting usage data.

Thanks for reading this and I would love to get your feedback in the comments field below. I'll get back to you with a new update on our progress in month or so.

Best, John

Product Director for Episerver Search & Navigation (Find), and the Digital Experience Platform