SharePoint: Anyone Not Baffled, Please, Stand Up
August 5, 2008
For years–even before I wrote the first three editions of CMSWatch’s Enterprise Search Report–I have been pointing out that enterprise search in general is not so useful and Microsoft enterprise search in particular is in the bottom quartile of the 300 or so “enterprise search” offerings available.
In a sense, it’s gratifying that youngsters are starting to look at the reality of information in an organizational setting and asking, “What’s wrong with these vendors and their systems?” You can get a dose of the youth movement in what I call search realism here. Shawn Shell, embracing knowledge about enterprise search, identifies some of the wackiness that Microsoft employees routinely offer about enterprise search or what I call “behind the firewall” search. I am pleased with the well-crafted article and its pointing out that Microsoft has a bit of work to do. I find it amazing that four years after the first edition of Enterprise Search Report, that old information is rediscovered and made “new” again.
Even more astounding is the Microsoft news release about the Fast Search & Transfer acquisition, which became official, on August 4, 2008. You can read the full text of this news release, as reported in AMEinfo here. Quoting Patrick Beeharry, Server and Product Marketing Manager for SharePoint in the Middle East and Africa, AMEinfo reported Mr. Beeharry as saying:
‘With our companies combined, we are uniquely positioned to offer customers what they have been telling us they want most – a strategy for meeting everything from their basic to most complex enterprise search needs. We are pleased to have the talented team from FAST joining us here in the Middle East. Together we aim to deliver better technologies that will make enterprise search a ubiquitous tool that is central to how people find and use information.
Okay, Microsoft is offering a strategy. I don’t know if a strategy will address the problems of information access in an organization. Vivisimo’s white paper takes this angle, and I think that the cost issues I raised are fundamental to a strategy, but I may be wrong. Maybe a strategy is going to tame the search monster and the 50 to 75 percent of the users who are annoyed with their existing search and retrieval system.
I suppose I was not surprised to read in To the SharePoint: The SharePoint IT Pro Documentation Team Blog the essay, “Which Microsoft Search Product Is for You?” You must read this stellar essay here. For me, the key point was this table:
You can see the original here if this representation is too small. The point is not to read the table. My point is look at the cells. The table has 35 cells with the symbol Ö and seven cells with no data. In the table’s 54 cells only seven have data. For me, the table is useless, but you may have a mind meld with the SharePoint team and intuitively understand that High availability and load balancing is NULL for Search Server Express and Ö for Search Server 2008 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. How about a key to the NULL cells and the Ö thingy? (For more careless Microsoft Web log antics, click here. The basics of presenting information in tables seems to be a skill that some Microsoft professionals lack.)
Er, what about Fast Search & Transfer? The day this Web log posting appeared, Microsoft officially owned Fast Search, but it seems to me that either the author was not aware of this $1.2 billion deal, had not read the news story referenced above, or conveniently overlooked how Fast Search fits into the Microsoft search solution constellation. I can think of other reasons for the omission, but you don’t need me to tell you that communication seems to be a challenge for some large organizations.
The net net is that Microsoft has many search technologies; for example:
- Powerset
- Fast Search & Transfer (Web indexing and behind the firewall indexing)
- Vista search
- Live.com search
- The SharePoint “flavors”
- SQLServer “search”
- Microsoft Dynamics “search”
- Legacy search in Windows XP, Outlook Express (my heavens), and good old Outlook 2000 to 2007.
The word confusion does not capture the Microsoft search products. Microsoft has moved search into a manifestation of chaos. If I’m correct, licensees need to consider the boundary conditions of these many search systems. Hooking these together and making them stable may be fractal, not a good thing for a licensee wanting to make information accessible to employees. The cost of moving some of these search systems’ functions to the cloud may be resource intensive. I wanted to write impossible, but maybe Microsoft and its earnest Web log writers can achieve this goal? I hope so. Failure only amps the Google electro magnet to pull more customers from Microsoft and into the maw of Googzilla.
I am delighted to be over the hill. When senility finally hits me, I won’t have to struggle through today’s ankle biters making the old new again or describing symptoms, not diagnosing the disease. Don’t agree? Set me straight. Agree? You are too old to be reading Web logs, my friend.
Stephen Arnold, August 5, 2008
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One Response to “SharePoint: Anyone Not Baffled, Please, Stand Up”
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Well, being maybe in the same age-class as Stephen, I would offer up an observation of MS employees at TechEd in Orlando. Earlier in the summer, many of the MS folks who came past my company’s booth were genuinely surprised that any company would sell add-ons to SharePoint(?). They were mystified by SP’s apparent popularity and importance. “SharePoint?” one said, “Is there a market for SharePoint? The intranet stuff?” The fact that SP as a technology wave is outpacing almost all MS products of recent years was lost on many of the MS employees I spoke to – all of it indicates that yes, in any given segment of MS’s business there is huge ignorance about most of the other MS’s businesses. MS creates it’s own ecosystems, but is also so large as to make it hard for even someone inside the tent to keep track of it all.
This leaves aside the ability for an MS employee to know more than a smattering of 3rd parties outside the tent.
And with a business as large as “search” within MS, it’s not surprising so much confusion reigns – there is no doubt the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.
While I am confused by MS search product offerings (esp in the area of federated search), I find this is a little like talking to IBM folks back in the mid-80’s where the big iron people had no idea PCs were becoming important.