Useful SharePoint Info, Useless Presentation

July 30, 2008

A happy quack to J. Peter Bruzzese for his “Desperately Seeking Enterprise Search” which appeared in the July 30, 2008, InfoWorld Web log. You can read the story here. For me the most useful part of the write up was this passage:

Although the MOSS and Search offerings are still available and current, Microsoft has moved on with offers like Search Server 2008 Express and Search Server 2008. From a feature comparison perspective, MOSS 2007 still wins out despite the lack of streamlined installation; it more than makes up for that with such features as People and Expertise Searching, Business Data Catalog, and SharePoint Productivity Infrastructure.

One useful part of the write up is the inclusion to links about SharePoint in its various incarnations. These comparisons and descriptions can be tough to find on the InfoWorld Web site. I recommend that you snag these links and tuck them away for future reference.

Now, to the presentation. Mr. Bruzzese just writes the articles, some other group sets up the InfoWorld Web log. Here’s what you will encounter if you try to print the page: partial printing and two blank pages. Pretty annoying.

There are some workarounds involve that browser extensions, but here’s a work around that doesn’t require installing any:

  1. View the source
  2. Scroll to the beginning text for the story; that is, “There’s a new search player…”
  3. Copy the text of the story plus any tags to this point in the story: “I’d like to know your opinion.”
  4. Paste the text into an HTML editor or even a blank Word document
  5. Save the file.

InfoWorld is so eager to sell that it uses a pop up before you see this story. This is called a “prestitial”, which I dismiss instantly. Then it dumps into the page with the useful information lots and lots of ad baloney, which I also ignore.

You can go back and edit out the embedded calls within Mr. Bruzzese’s quite useful write up. So only Mr. Bruzzese gets the happy quack. The Beyond Search addled goose is winging toward InfoWorld’s Web wizard’s automobile to deposit an avian memento on the vehicle’s waxed fender.

To bad a good story was made hugely annoying to me by a presentation that is more confused than this addled goose.

Stephen Arnold, July 30, 2008

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