Microsoft’s Middleware Strategy Explained… Almost
December 3, 2008
Computer Weekly’s “Microsoft’s Middleware Strategy Puts Developers First” by Danny Bradbury is an interesting run down of what Microsoft’s enterprise software approach encompasses. You can read the story here. As I worked through the information in the write up, I was struck that Microsoft is creating tools for others to use. I keep forgetting that Microsoft does not deliver products that are ready to use by people other than developers. The article also reminded me why I have to build functions that other vendors provide in their applications. Mr. Bradbury said:
Now, the firm is planning .net 4.0, which includes some significant enhancements. It will make building REST-based services (resources manipulated via URIs) simpler, and makes it easier to use its own markup language, Extensible Application Markup Language, to manipulate the Workflow Foundation and Communications Foundation services. It is promising a tenfold performance increase in the Workflow Foundation, along with enhancements including persistence control and an enhanced visual interface. But the most important overhaul lies in the Windows Server itself, which will include an application platform called Dublin. Initially released as an add-in pack for Windows Server, Dublin will eventually be folded directly into the server platform. It is a set of extensions to Internet Information Server that make it easier to host Windows Communication and Workflow Foundation services on the platform. It is essentially designed to make the assembly and running of composite applications easier, thereby bolstering the firm’s position in the SOA market. Dublin will interoperate with Oslo, which is Microsoft’s next-generation modeling platform. This will include a new visual design tool called Quadrant, a modeling language code named “M”, and an SQL Server database that will be used to store model schemas.
I have a difficult time keeping the shipping products, the service packs, and the proposed products and their betas straight. I haven’t figured out where Dynamics X++ language fits in, and I am clueless when it comes to the M language.
The scale of Microsoft’s effort is somewhat interesting. The problem for me is the timeline that Mr. Bradbury includes in his article. Scanning its entries, I concluded that Microsoft has lacked a clear vision for the products and services on the timeline. As a result, when I read an article that, in effect, says, “We’re almost there”, I don’t have much confidence in this assertion.
In Europe, there is more interest in using open source software to achieve the benefits that Microsoft asserts its middleware delivers. Open source is far from perfect, but it lacks the proprietary taste of the Microsoft approach. Open source doesn’t market very well. When I read about open source software, the information has a more concrete like feel. The job lock in for a Microsoft developer who presumably is conversant with Microsoft’s time line knows that there are consulting fees available for someone who can make Microsoft systems work.
Microsoft’s middleware approach has a component not addressed in Mr. Bradbury’s article–costs. Figuring out how much to budget for a software system is tough. Microsoft makes the implied integration of its middleware approach operate like a cost reducing diet for information technology. The potential problem is the same as for weight loss schemes. There’s some savings, but then the person on the diet gets fat again. Cost control under this type of control plan becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Stephen Arnold, December 2, 2008
Stephen Arnold
Autonomy Profiled
December 2, 2008
Magazines are jumping into the technology profile business. That’s good and bad. The plus is that you can get a good summary of a company’s marketing message and a description of its technology. The downside is that the writers are not able to put the technology in a context. Nevertheless, if you want a quick useful summary.
A good example of this trend is the eContent profile of Autonomy Ltd., arguably the largest vendor of search and information access systems in the world. eContent’s write up reviews the “meaning based computing technology” that has helped propel the company’s sales to $400 million territory. You can read this useful profile here. For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was this segment:
Autonomy has a market capital of $4 billion. It is the second largest pure software company in Europe and was named the Best Performing Software Company in Europe in 2007.
That’s impressive by itself. When you toss in 17,000 customers, Autonomy is a force with which even Google must reckon. Too bad that the write up did not provide more context for Autonomy, which is a better sales and marketing operation than some other vendors.
Stephen Arnold, December 2, 2008
New Overflight Features
December 2, 2008
ArnoldIT.com has added two new features to its public Overflight service. Overflight provides a round up of news stories on more than 70 Google Web logs.
Exalead, developers of the CloudView information access system, indexes the Google Web logs. You can access the service from the Overflight splash page here or navigate to this vertical content collection here. Among the features of this index are:
- A thumbnail view of the Web page in a relevance ranked results list
- Full text searching of the entire corpus of Google’s Web logs. This means that you can identify a topic such as “semantics” and locate every reference to the subject. Given the recent suggestion that Google is not interested in semantics, you will find that when you run a query for “semantics”, Google’s Web logs make it clear that semantics are an important subject at Google.
- You can access content with a date filter. With this feature you can segment a results list by time.
- If a query matches documents in languages other than English, you can select the documents by language. The query “pdf” returns hits in English, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Korean.
A happy quack to the Exalead technical team. Use the comments section of this Web log to share your ideas with us.
The highest traffic on Overflight is flowing to the Google Ads Web logs here. We have added a continuously updated stream to this selection of Google Web logs. The “river” makes it easy to watch for important new developments in Google advertising services. You can try it here.
Watch for other developments on the public Overflight site. If your firm would like to create this type of information service for your Intranet, Web log, or competitive intelligence program, write us at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Stephen Arnold, December 1, 2008
Social Media and a Search Postscript
December 2, 2008
A happy quack to my one Canadian reader who sent me a link to “Most Businesses Don’t Have a Handle on Social Media Marketing”. You can find this story by Nestor Arellano here. The article appeared in ITBusiness, a Canadian Web site. Mr. Arellano summarizes the results of a survey by the Marketing Executives Networking Group in the US. The study revealed that executives realize social media is important, but at the time of the survey about 60 percent those surveyed in the sample allocate significant money to the this type of marketing. For me the most interesting comment in the article was:
For instance, 33.1 per cent of them said they were never able to determine ROI, while an additional 25.6 per cent said they “hardly ever” knew if their social media efforts were worthwhile. In addition, only 26.3 per cent thought social media marketing was more effective than using other online media tools for marketing, such as search advertising or display ads.
Mr. Arellano also notes that more than half of the IT staff and senior executives are not too keen about the use of social media for marketing. The concern is that employees will waste time fiddling with the applications. Social tools are likely to enter organizations the way personal computers did in the early 19080s; that is, some employees will just use these systems under the radar of management. One of the applications that may have applicability is a social wiki. Employees and possibly customers can contribute information.
After reading Mr. Arellano’s write up, I remain balanced on the fence with regard to social media in organizations. Employees are often spurred by their advisors and blue chip consultants to use social tools to improve operations, reduce costs, or whatever other benefit attributed to these systems. The issues that disconcert me are:
- Liability. Most consultants and employees are not the targets of legal action. As a result, their desires are not tempered by the liabilities certain information systems create the moment the systems become available. Consultants will weasel word their way around responsibility, and the employees often change roles or even jobs, leaving the “problem” to their successors.
- Finding what’s in these systems. Most employees and consultants deal with the surface or one aspect of a system. However, when someone asks, “Who gave the customer this information about this product?” someone has to hunt for the answer. My team has had this thankless task, and it is neither easy nor cheap to pull together the information from and within a social media system. We love this type of job, but it is expensive and time consuming. Furthermore, what’s “in” these systems can be quite interesting.
- Controlling costs. It is easy to fire up a wiki. It can be expensive to put in place a reliable mechanism to manage the wiki, keep the content fresh, and expand the system so it does not die on the vine. Like newsgroups, participation is often sporadic and brief. Social systems have to be marketed and managed. If ignored, these systems become a cost sinkhole when a problem surfaces. There is neither staff nor time to figure out what happened and then to fix the problem.
There are legitimate uses of messaging systems within organizations and for customers. The approach with which I am most comfortable is one that includes planning, budgeting, controlled testing, focused deployment, assessment, and then next steps, if any. Creating a customer-employee wiki and stepping back to see what happens is too risky for my taste. Companies have learned the importance of managing user groups. Now most organizations with active customer involvement try to schedule “summits” or some other type of organized activity over which the company exercises control. A user group can turn into a snake pit left to its own devices. An unmanaged wiki may have the same characteristics.
The problem of capturing the information, indexing it, and making it searchable is not intractable. Exalead has a social search capability, for example. But some effort is required before the system is deployed. Otherwise, the cost of playing catch up may erode the financial payoff of the system itself.
We have investigated a number of start ups in the last year. We’ve found that when the organization bakes in social media, the problems of shoe horning a social media system into an established organization are minimized. Consultants and some bureaucrats assume that the new functions can be layered on to the existing infrastructures and business methods. In our experience, the assumption may be incorrect. Furthermore, organizations engineered to use Internet centric applications as part of their basic business methods have a cost advantage. There is not much information about this aspect of social media available to us at this time. We also have a working hypothesis that start ups with social media baked in may have a competitive advantage over established operations that are taking the add on approach to social media.
Stephen Arnold, December 2, 2008
Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Queries
December 2, 2008
Have you had a hankerin’ to build your own FullTextQuerySQLQuery Object? Well, fire up VisualStudio and dig in so you understand the cost implications of making SharePoint do your bidding. Oh, you don’t have VisualStudio! Oh, oh, you aren’t a developer! Well, just get yourself a Windows Certified SharePoint Professional and you are ready to go.
The place to start is the Fringe SharePoint Web log here. I have to congratulate the author. Figuring out how to create a FullTextQuerySQLQuery Object was not trivial. You, like me, may be wondering why the search system in SharePoint needs a FullTextQuerySQLQuery Web part. The answer is that the search in SharePoint does not handle certain tasks very well; for example, querying content stored in a SQL Server table. Keep in mind that there are search and content processing vendors that offer systems that support these types of queries. You load these systems and the system does the work.
Not so with SharePoint. You get to build the function, or your developers do. That’s the main reason why Certified SharePoint Professionals like SharePoint so much. It is better than being and Oracle or IBM database administrator. One SharePoint engineer told me in Aarhus, Denmark, in November 2008, “I have a job for as long as I want it.”
Okay.
Now let’s see how complicated this FullTextQuerySQLQuery Object is to create. Fringe SharePoint Web log has a four part series that makes the process understandable.
- Creating a Recent Hire WebPart using FullTextSQLQuery object and Linq (Part 1) is here
- Creating a Recent Hire WebPart using FullTextSQLQuery object and Linq (Part 2) is here
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Creating a Recent Hire WebPart using FullTextSQLQuery object and Linq (Part 3) is here
- Creating a Recent Hire WebPart using FullTextSQLQuery object and Linq (Part 4) is here
To give you a flavor of the method, here’s a snippet of the explanation:
For the first Field I used a HyperLinkField.Notice that I Hardcoded the Url of the current site. This might not be the way you want to do it, you can dynamically retrieve this field. Notice the AccountName that is part of the object we created. It is mapped to the DataNavigateUrlFormatString. This is how you make that link Clickable!! I think the code speaks for itself. If you have questions on that let me know. The second thing to note is line 101, It has a RowDataBoudn event!! this is for the formatting of the string in the hire date. This event occurs just before it binds to the SPGridView which is great because we want to format it before it is displayed.
What does the code look like? Here’s an example from the fourth post on the subject:
Yep, I had some trouble reading the code snippet as well.
Let’s step back. You have SharePoint. You have SQL Server. You have a need to search the content in the SQL Server table. You have to code a method.
When I put on my accounting hat, I realize that it is difficult to estimate the cost of creating a Web part. I suppose I can plug in a number based on the costs for similar work in the past, but what if this new Web part doesn’t work. Then the costs begin to climb, and as an accountant I only have one way to stop the bleeding. I cut off the funding and then I have complaints about the SharePoint system. Now what do I do?
If I were the hypothetical accountant, I would buy a copy of Beyond Search, read the profiles, and license a system that comes with this function. The fix will be easier to budget in my opinion.
I hope to hear from some SharePoint Certified Professionals to tell me why my hypothetical accountant is off base. Please, PR people, don’t email me directly. Post your comments using the feedback system for this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, December 2, 2008
AP Now Faces a Direct Challenge from CNN
December 1, 2008
Update: December 1, 2008, 10 am Eastern: A reader sent me a link to this Los Angeles Times’s story “Writers Strike Out on Their Own with a Web Site” here. Although not aimed at news, the notion of pooling content in a Web services seems interesting.
Original Post: December 1, 2008, 8 am Eastern
TechMeme ran an interesting story about CNN’s wire service for media companies. What makes the service interesting to me is the point made in “CNN Pitches a Cheaper Wire Service to Newspaper” here. The Associated Press’s fees are becoming unpalatable to some of its subscribers. CNN offers an alternative that is “cheaper”. For me the most interesting detail in this write up was:
But this week editors from about 30 papers will visit Atlanta to hear CNN’s plans to broaden a service to provide coverage of big national and international events — and maybe local ones — on a smaller scale and at a lower cost than The A.P.
When I read this, I thought, “That’s one way to slash marketing costs. Get the prospects to come to you.” In my experience, newspaper and magazine editors are often inclined to follow the pack. If CNN lands some of the visitors, I think others will follow and quickly. In my opinion, the AP will have to rethink its business model or look for a partner with cash. I can think of a couple of suspects, but we might we in the midst of the first step in a more significant shift.
Keep in mind that this is a hypothetical situation conceived by an idle goose. The AP gets acquired. The buyer merges Web logs into the “new” AP. CNN then finds itself on the wrong side of the deal. CNN’s approach is really a slightly more modernized version of AP. Therefore, CNN may find itself having to change its approach. The destabilizing of the news business accelerates, and as the established players jockey, the opportunity for another player, savvy to the Web log space, steps in. A third player, therefore, has the opportunity to force further changes in the news business.
Destablilization recently has not helped the incumbents. Destabilization, if anything, rewards organizations sufficiently agile to exploit opportunities and large enough to have the capital to undertake a dicey venture.
What would it mean if Google or Microsoft jumped into news, signing up writers to create content for their services? What happens if an investment bank funds a start up with technology and a business model that converts AP’s and CNN’s tired old business into something newer and more exciting? My thought is that CNN itself is vulnerable.
Even if AP and CNN survive, the traditional news business is now up for grabs. If newspapers and magazines keep downsizing, the people who write the news will be open to new opportunities. Sure, some will get the equivalent of their old jobs back, but most will be intellectual gears in the next-generation news system.
Where does search fit into this? Easy. Organizations want to know what the major media outlets are saying. But more and more organizations want to obtain intelligence as a combination of what’s publicly available, what some specialists can provide, and what their own internal information offers. This means more appetite for systems that can acquire and process these information streams. Companies that gain value in this type of climate are outfits like Silobreaker and others with “mash up” and intelligence functions.
Stephen Arnold, December 1, 2008
Microsoft’s Cloud Stability
December 1, 2008
TechCrunch’s “Live Cashback Having a Bad Black Friday” is a gentle description of a cloud service outage at Microsoft. You can read the post here. The diplomatic write up said, “the [Microsoft] site has been down much of the morning [November 28, 2008].” The outage is a problem for Microsoft. I think it is an even larger problem for consultants who suggest that their expertise includes cloud computing. Microsoft is spending for what it views as the best technical talent in cloud computing. If Microsoft can’t pull off a service for its important Live Cashback system, are the self proclaimed Enterprise 2.0 experts part of the solution or part of the problem? Unike the Enterprise 2.0 jargon, cloud computing refers to specific technical functions. Maybe Microsoft should turn over its cloud computing efforts to an Enterprise 2.0 wizard and fix the problem. Sound silly? Well, it’s not silly; it’s a dangerous and flawed idea. Engineers are needed, not MBAs with an inflated sense of their own abilities.
Stephen Arnold, December 1, 2008
Can the Vista Disease Spread to SharePoint
December 1, 2008
Computer World in the UK ran an interesting story “The Outlook for Vista Gets Even Worse” on November 28, 2008. You can read the Glyn Moody’s story here: This is not another bash Vista write up. For me the most important comment is the one below:
…the myth of upgrade inevitability has been destroyed. Companies have realised that they do have a choice – that they can simply say “no”. From there, it’s but a small step to realising that they can also walk away from Windows completely, provided the alternatives offer sufficient data compatibility to make that move realistic.
If Windows Vista changes the rules, what happens when the 100 million SharePoint customers learn about the costs, the performance issues, and the lack of compatibility with other Microsoft products ranging from analytics to CRM? What happens when the push to move SharePoint customers to Fast Search’s Enterprise Search Platform spills a bucket of red ink? If the Computer World story is on track, the same push back could afflict SharePoint. The companies who benefit from this situation will be the search vendors with snap in solutions to information access problems. No happy face painted on the SharePoint system will be easily resolved if the Vista “disease” spreads.
Stephen Arnold, December 1, 2008
ISYS Search Software CEO Interview
December 1, 2008
Scott Coles has joined ISYS Search Software as the firm’s chief executive officer. Ian Davies, founder, remains the chairman of the company. Among Mr. Coles’s tasks will be to lead the firm’s new strategic direction characterized by an expanded presence in Europe and Asia, specialized vertical-market offerings, a broader channel sales strategy, and a deeper set of embedded search solutions for original equipment manufacturers and independent software vendors.
Coles joins ISYS with a significant background in the commercialization of innovation for multinational corporations, holding senior executive roles with companies such as EDS, Lucent Technologies and Avaya. In the mid-1990s, Scott was the driving force behind the establishment and success of AT&T Bell Labs in Australia.
In his interview with ArnoldIT.com’s Search Wizards Speak, Coles provided information about the company’s focus in 2009.
On this topic, he said:
We are seeing significant increase in other software vendors coming to us to license our engine for incorporation into their products. This marks a general industry trend that I believe will increase significantly in the coming year. A number of applications today that previously had either none or only rudimentary search are finding that their products can be significantly enhanced with a sophisticated search engine. The amount of data that these applications have to deal with is now becoming so large that some form of pre-processing to narrow down to that which is relevant is becoming essential.
Mr. Coles also noted that Microsoft SharePoint continues to capture market share in content management and collaboration. However, the SharePoint user needs access to a range of content and:
ISYS can search all data, both inside and outside of SharePoint. In addition, ISYS provides high quality relevant results through features such as Boolean search operators, multi-dimensional clustering, and many others for which SharePoint users have expressed a desire that are currently not available in the native SharePoint product…we’ve taken great care to ensure our new “intelligent content analysis” methods are reliable, predictable and easily understood by the end user. These include parametric search and navigation, visual timeline refinement bars, intelligence clouds, de-duplication and intelligent query expansion. We’ve even added additional post-query processing to help streamline the e-discovery process. The end result is a core set of new capabilities that help our customers better cull and refine efficiently, without cutting corners on accuracy or relevance.
You can read the full text of the interview with Scott Coles at http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak or click here.
Search: Simplicity and Information Don’t Mix
December 1, 2008
In a conversation with a bright 30 something, I learned that a person insisted that the Google Search Appliance was “simple and easy”. I asked the person, “Did the speaker understand that information is inherently difficult so search is not usually simple?”
The 30 something did not hesitate. “Google makes the difficult look easy.”
The potential search system customer might hear the word “simple” and interpret the word and its intent based on the listener’s experience, knowledge, and context. “Simple”, like transparency, is a word that covers a multitude of meanings.
My concern is that search has to deliver information to a user with a need for fact, opinion, example, or data. None of these notions is known to the software, electrical devices, and network systems without considerable technical work. Computers are generally pretty predictable. Smart software improves the gizmo, but the smarter software becomes the less simple it is.
So, when a system like the Google Search Appliance or any search system for that matter is described as simple, I have questions. I don’t think the GSA is simple. The surface interface is simplified. The basic indexing engine is locked up and accessible via point and click interfaces or scripts that conform to the OneBox API. But anyone who has tried to cluster GSAs and integrate the system into proprietary file types knows that the word “simple” is pretty much wrong.
Now what about search becoming “simple and easy”?
Search is simple because of the browser and the need to type some words in a search box or look at a list of links and click one. Search is not simple. I would go so far as to say that any system that purports to allow a user to access digital information is one of the most complex technical undertakings engineering, programmers, and other specialists have undertaken.
That’s why search is generally annoying to most of the people who have to use the systems.
Now let’s consider the notion of a “transparent search system.” I have to tell you that I don’t know why the word “transparency” has become a code word for “not secret”. When someone tells me that a company is transparent, I don’t believe them. A company cannot be transparent. Most outfits have secrets, market with ferocity first and facts second, and wheel and deal to the best of their ability. None of this “information” becomes available unless there’s a legal matter, a security breach, or a very careless executive.
Are search systems transparent? Nope. Consider Autonomy, Google, or any of the high profile vendors of information access systems. Google does not allow licensees to poke around the guts of the GSA. Autonomy keeps the inner workings of IDOL under wraps. I have heard one Autonomy wizard say,”Sometimes we need to get Mike Lynch to work some of his famous magic to resolve an issue.” I track about 350 companies in the search and content processing space. I make my living trying to figure out how these sytems work. Sue Feldman and I wrote a 10-page paper about one small innovation that interests Google. Nothing about that innovation was transparent, nor was it “simple” I might add.
What’s Up?
I think that consultants and parvenues need an angle on search, content processing, text mining, and information access. Since search is pretty complicated, who can blame a young person with zero expertise for looking at the shopping list of issues that are addressed in Successful Enterprise Search Management, and deciding to go the “simple” route.
I understand this. I worked at a nuclear consulting firm for a number of years. I always thought I was pretty good in math, physics, and programming (if the type of programming done in 1971 could be considered sophisticated). Was I wrong? I was so wrong it took me one year to understand that I knew zero about the recent work in nuclear physics. By the end of the second year, I had a new appreciation for the role of Monte Carlo calculations in nuclear fuel rod placement. For example, you don’t inspect nuclear rods in an online reactor. You would have some helath problems. So, you used math, and you needed to be confident that when you moved those bundles of nuclear fuel around, you got the used up ones where they were supposed to go. Forget the modest health probem. The issue would be a tad more severe.
Search shares some complexity with nuclear physics. The essence of search today is hugely complex subsystgems that must perform so the overall system works. Okay, that applies to a nuclear reactor. You can’t really inspect what’s going on because there are too many data points. Yep, that’s similar to the need to know what’s happening in a reactor using math and models. A search system can exhibit issues that are tough to track down because no one human knows where a particular glitch may touch another function and cause a crash. Again, just like a nuclear reactor. Those control rooms you see in the films are complicated beasties for a reason. No one really knows what exactly is happening to cause an issue locally or remotely in the system.
Now who wants to say, “Nuclear engineereing is simple?” I don’t see too many people stepping forward. In fact, I think that most people know enough to not offer an opinion when it comes to nuclear engineering and the other disciplines required to keep the local power generation plant benign.
I can’t say the same for search. Serach is popular and it has attracted a lot of people who want to make money, be famous like a rock star, or who know one way to beat the financial down turn is to cook up an interesting spin on a hot topic. I congratulate these people, but I think the likelihood of creating trouble is going to be quite high.
I have learned in my 65 years one thing:
What looks simple isn’t.
Try and do what a professional does. You probably won’t be able to do it. Whether physical or intellectual, if you haven’t done the time, you can’t equal the professionals’. Period.
At a conference, a speaker mentioned that for a person to become accomplished, the individual has to work at a particular skill or task for 10,000 hours. I know quite a few people who have spent 10,000 or more hours working on search. I wrote a book with one of these people, Martin White. I am a partner with another, Miles Kehoe. I know maybe 50 other people in the same select group. Most of the consultants and experts I meet are not experts in search. These people are expert at being friendly or selling. Those are great compentencies, but they are not search related.
If you have read a few of my previous posts in this Web log, you know that any search or content processing system described as “simple” or “easy” is most definitely not either. Search is complicated. Marketing and sales “professionals” routinely go to meetings and say, “Search is simple. Our system is completely open. Your own technical team can maintain the system.” In most cases, I don’t believe the pitch.
That’s why the majority of users are annoyed with search in an organization. And why most of the search systems end up in quite a pickle. See the upside down and back wards engine in the picture below. How did this happen? I haven’t a clue, and that is how I react when I see a crazy search and information access system at an organization.
Let me give you an example. A large not for profit and government subsidized think tank had the following search systems: Microsoft SharePoint, Open Text, multiple Google Search Appliances, and a couple of legacy systems I had not encountered for a decade. Now the outfit wants to provide a single interface to the content processed by this grab bag of systems. What makes this tough is that one can use any of the systems to provide this access. The organization did not know how to do this and wanted to buy a new system to deliver the functionality. Crazy. What the outfit now has is another search system and the problem is just more complicated. The “real fix” required thinking about the needs of the users and performing the intensive informatoin audit needed to determine the scale of the project. This type of “grunt work” was not desirable. The person describing this situation to me said, “We want a simple solution.”
I am sure they do. I want to be 18 again and this time I want to look like Brad Pitt, not some troll from the catacombs in Paris. Won’t happen.
How did we get our search system in this predicament?
Three Types of Simple Search
Let me give you three examples:
- Boil the ocean easy. Some vendors pitch a platform. The idea is that a licensee plugs in information connectors, the system processes the content, and the user gets answers. Guano. In fact, double guano. This approach is managerially, technically, and financially complex. Boiling the ocean solutions are the core reason why such outfits as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP give away search. By wrapping complexity inside of complexity, the fees just keep rolling in. The multi month or multi year deployment cycles guarantee that the staff responsible for this solution will have moved on. Search in most boil the ocean solutions only works for some of the users.
- Buy ’em all. Use Web services to hook ’em up easy. Quite a few vendors take this approach. The verbal acrobatics of “federated search” or “metasearch” gloss over the very real problems of acquiring disparate content without choking the network, building a fortune on a repository infrastructure, and transforming the content to a representation are happily ignored or marginalized. Unfortunately these federated solutions require investment, planning, and building. I wish I had a dollar every time I have heard one vendor struggling to make significant sales say the words “federated” and “easy” in the same sentence.
- Unpack it, plug it in, and just search easy. This argument is now coming from vendors who ship search appliances and from vendors who ship software described as appliances. Hello, earth. Are you sentient? Plugging in an appliance delivers one thing: toast. These gizmos have to be set up. You have to plan for failure which means two gizmos and maybe clusters of gizmos. In case you haven’t tried to create hot spares and fail over search systems, the work is not easy. And you haven’t tackled the problem of acquiring, transforming, and processing the content. You haven’t fiddled with the interface that marketing absolutely has to have or the MBAs throw a hissy fit. Get real. When a modern appliance breaks, you don’t fix it. You buy another one. You don’t open a black box iPod or BlackBerry and repair it. You get a new one. The same applies to search. What’s “easy” is the action you take when the system doesn’t work.
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