System and method for supporting heterogeneous solutions and management with an enterprise crawl and search framework

A method for search framework management, comprising:

• displaying, via a computing environment, an administration interface for use in administrating an enterprise crawl and search framework (ECSF) which abstracts an underlying enterprise search engine, and serves as an integration layer between a plurality of instances of the underlying enterprise search engine and a plurality of enterprise applications, each enterprise application associated with a set of searchable objects;
• configuring and administering, via the administration interface, a runtime server associated with the ECSF framework;
• synchronizing the runtime server of the ECSF framework with the plurality of instances of the underlying enterprise search engine;
• managing a lifecycle of the set of searchable objects associated with a particular enterprise application, including binding the set of searchable objects to one or more search categories associated with a particular search engine instance;
• and
• importing one or more external search categories registered with a different search engine instance, to make the imported external search categories for direct search.

A non-transitory computer readable storage medium including instructions stored thereon which, when executed by a computer, cause the computer to perform the steps comprising:

• displaying, via a computing environment, an administration interface for use in administrating an enterprise crawl and search framework (ECSF) which abstracts an underlying enterprise search engine, and serves as an integration layer between a plurality of instances of the underlying enterprise search engine and a plurality of enterprise applications, each enterprise application associated with a set of searchable objects;
• configuring and administering, via the administration interface, a runtime server associated with the ECSF framework;
• synchronizing the runtime server of the ECSF framework with the plurality of instances of the underlying enterprise search engine;
• managing a lifecycle of the set of searchable objects associated with a particular enterprise application, including binding the set of searchable objects to one or more search categories associated with a particular search engine instance;
• and
• importing one or more external search categories registered with a different search engine instance, to make the imported external search categories for direct search.