Congratulations, you have either purchased or are interested in purchasing the Google Search Appliance.  You will soon be able to search until your heart is content.  Your friends will be jealous.

Now might be a good time to think about the staff required to deploy and maintain your cool new toy investment.

The Google Search Appliance, being an appliance, does not have exactly the same staffing profile as other enterprise search engines.  Some people will go so far as to claim it requires virtually no staff to deploy or maintain.  You just plug it in and it works, right?

Sort of.

I would like to discuss three critical people (or roles) you will need for your implementation, and roughly when they will need to engage throughout your implementation.  These may be applicable to other vendor’s solutions, but I am going to specifically address the types of maintenance the GSA requires.