SharePoint 2010: The Twitter Version
October 23, 2009
Short honk: I found “Random Tweets on SharePoint 2010” quite useful. Imagine. Several days of conference glamour boiled down to a string of 140 character messages. When someone asks me “What is the value of Twitter?”, I am going to point out that a handful of tweets can save days of conference fun.
Stephen Arnold, October 23, 2009
Twitter Tizzy
October 22, 2009
Big day for Twitter. Instead of selling out to one big dog, Twitter is fraternizing with the litter. Microsoft announced that it is indexing tweets. Google announced that it is indexing tweets. Tweets are already indexed by Twitter and a kennel of real time search systems. In short, tweets are everywhere and findable.
Lots of posts are chasing their tails around the Internet. The addled goose had three thoughts:
First, with tweets as common as cats and dogs in Harrod’s Creek, any differentiation is going to have to come via value-adding. I don’t see much high value adding. Over time, tweets may become a way to differentiate the vendors from one another.
Second, tweets are not new and I think that the extensions of the basic few words broadcast model are going to challenge some of the tweet indexing systems. How will rich media be indexed and made searchable in a meaningful way? For me rich media and some embedded links are exercises in frustration. More indexing means more hits on the Twitter system and I am not sure that Twitter will be able to cope.
Third, the Google – Microsoft dust up seems to be spreading into real time search. Since this is a relatively new content domain to many online searchers, the winner of this battle gains more than users who want access to this content domain. Dominance in Twitter search reflects on the winner’s technology and marketplace magnetism.
In short, Twitter’s puppies are going to produce one formidable online canine in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, October 22, 2009
No one bought me dinner to share my opinion. Better luck next time wish I.
PeopleMaps: Finding Connections Among People
October 22, 2009
Relationship maps are not new. Companies like i2, Megaputer, and other vendors offer these types of systems now. You can use the Cluuz.com relationship map system for any query you pass to the company’s free service. When I read “PeopleMaps Finds New and ‘Hidden’ Connections”, I was not sure how the company was going to differentiate itself. After reading the story, I spotted one important feature. PeopleMaps integrates with Salesforce.com. As a result, a Salesforce.com can “see” how one’s connections hook into other people data to which the user has access. Internet.com quotes a PeopleMaps.com executive as saying:
“Our competitive advantage is that we have a massive business social graph,” said Sheehan [PeopleMaps executive]. “We’ll link your private data and marry it to this huge set of public social data including job history, family relationships, group affiliations, boards and more. There are tons of ways people may know each other or are related that they don’t know about.”
The company offers a free service and a more robust professional version. Interesting approach in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, October 22, 2009
Another freebie. What am I chopped liver?
Gartner and ZL Technologies
October 22, 2009
I zipped through my Overflight output this morning and noticed a story from Silicon Valley Watcher cited in the MarkLogic Web log. A bit of clicking revealed that I was not alone in noticing the item “Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Goes to Court – ZL Technologies Lawsuit”. I don’t know much about lawyers and I know even less about the methods used to populate tables and graphics presented in consulting firm’s reports. I know what I was taught by my boss at Booz, Allen & Hamilton in the 1970s. The methods of other firms are closely guarded secrets.
Consulting is often a marketing game. People often forget this premise of the largely unregulated information niche.
The gist of these Gartner-centric stories is that a company called ZL Technologies alleges damages because of the Gartner firm’s presentation of information. You can read these stories and draw your own conclusions. I located some additional public information, and I will take a look at these on my airplane flight this morning.
Several observations:
- The consulting industry has undergone a dramatic change in the last decade. The emergence of rent-an-expert outfits like the Gerson Lehrman Group, Coleman, and Guidance, among others, make it easy and cheaper to get expert inputs without the big costs levied by large, overhead choked service firms. At the same time, the high end firms—like Booz, Allen & Hamilton—have been struggling internally about how to maintain profits. At Booz, Allen, the outcome of the stress was dividing the firm. Other large consulting firms face pressures as well. Smack in the middle of the rent-an-expert outfits and the dominant high-end outfits are the mid-tier consulting firms. I call these “azure chip firms”, and they are caught between a rock (the top firms like McKinsey and BCG) and a hard place (the rent-an-expert firms). As a result, these mid tier firms have had to find ways to differentiate themselves, generate revenue, and capture headlines. The “reports” some firms issue are means to a revenue end, not pure intellectual efforts.
- Consultants will work overtime to get in the spotlight, build buzz, and become a magnet for sales leads. Consultants who lack star power are like struggling actors who hire an aggressive agent. After a couple of Hollywood projects, I can tell you with confidence that the business methods are pretty darned flexible in La La Land.
- Many companies today look alike. The marketing verbiage is often the same. I know when I was writing the mind numbing Enterprise Search Report, some vendors would offer to assist me in my efforts. I imagine similar offers flow into any firm preparing an industry overview. I recall one outfit that praised a particular CMS. My own experience with this system was that it did not work. The reason the particular CMS was licensed was a direct result of a Web log and consultant who insisted that the product was superior. It wasn’t and I realized that the words often existed in a world different from the reality of the software. In today’s tough economic climate, the line between a profile of a company and marketing collateral is narrow. Consulting firms under pressure may find the fuzziness comfortable. As a result, the reader of a report may not understand fuzziness and see the report as something closer to a PhD student’s thesis. The way to bring clarity to fuzziness is by shaping information to a marketing purpose, not hidden persuaders, just subtle persuaders.
- Companies omitted from influential industry reports may find themselves a bit like a Web site not indexed by Google. If one is not in the report, one does not exist for a certain user slice. Omission, then, is a very powerful editorial decision. I know that I get push back when I tell public relations people who want me to write about their client’s product, “Not my area.” Fortunately no one reads my Web log or my long, dull studies for that matter. When a company has a large client base, the pressure must be many times greater. Humans are quite human; hence the potential for interesting decisions. The answer to the question “How can I gain an advantage?” varies widely from firm to firm.
I have not seen the most recent flock of Gartner magic quadrants. I did learn from a person in Europe that Google continues to drift out of the most desirable quadrant. I found that hard to believe. I spend 90 percent of my time tracking Google’s technology, and in my opinion it is among the leaders in a number of search and content processing sectors. I know that figuring out the technology that makes one vendor superior (successful firm with proprietary technology) to another (a Lucene repackager or a start up with zero track record) is tough. If the person who pointed out Google’s drift in the Gartner quadrant is correct, that interpretation of what the Google possesses is at odds with my research data. This is not surprising. Some of my former colleagues at Booz, Allen & Hamilton gathered data and looked at it in interesting ways in order to find a useful and fresh perspective. That’s why those individuals worked at BAH in the 1970s when the firm was firing on all eight cylinders.
The problem is that most of the people who are “experts” in search and content processing may not know as much as they assume. This is the “they don’t know what they don’t know.” You can see this in the comments to some of my Web log posts. People are not operating from the same fact base as I. Their comments point out that one of my observations is crazy. Yep, if you don’t know what you don’t know, some of my comments do seem crazy. After all, who would market a search system that crashes when it has to process more than 50 million documents? Well, a vendor does in point of fact. Some consulting firms take advantage of this ignorance by making complex issues simple. I have written about the C minus brain that encounters complexity and then reduces it to an absurdly general statement. Sorry. Some methods at Google require knowledge of non Euclidean geometry. I can’t make those numerical recipes “simple”. Others may pluck a handful of new companies from a quick Google search and present them as the latest and greatest. Simplification and the reduction of problems with manifolds to a simple diagram or a grid are fooling themselves, fooling potential licensees, and fooling quite a few “experts”. Fooling is good as long as one is doing stand up at the Comedy Caravan. Fooling is not too helpful in work centric software procurements.
I am not sure where this legal matter will lead. I think that the present economic climate will cause other objections and counter claims to blossom. The net result will be more confusion which, of course, makes it easier for another consultant to cash in.
Part of the present business environment I fear. I have learned to live with this approach to technical information.
Stephen Arnold, October 22, 2009
Dear government watchdogs, I wrote this without compensation. Tess did lick my hand whilst writing this, however. Does that count?
SharePoint Search and GSA Enhancements
October 21, 2009
The goslings and I have been following the news from the SharePoint conference, which was Sold! Out! Among the points we noticed were support for Boolean queries (ham NOT eggs), facets, and wild cards. We picked up some rumblings that there are versions of the Fast ESP high end search system. The info flowing to us left us confused, which is our normal state of affairs.
One interesting but not unexpected aspect of the “search news” from the SharePoint conference was Google’s announcements about its enterprise search solution. Google said:
Today we’re announcing more than 10 new features available on the GSA from Google Enterprise, including one that automatically improves results over time, the Self-Learning Scorer.
The key point for me is the two word phrase “self learning”. Microsoft focused on catching up with third party search solutions. Google pushed forward with “smart software”. The notion that humans have to do the work to find information in SharePoint is trumped by Google’s idea that the smart software makes the information find the user who needs it.
Google explains the approach this way:
With the new Self-learning Scorer, we’re adding a new step to the mix: analysis. As the GSA continually serves up results, it’s also learning to dynamically improve – automatically. This gives the GSA new self-improving intelligence, and adds a new step to the enterprise search cycle.
Who is going to care about Google’s beefing up the Google Search Appliance? I am not sure. Microsoft has the marketing sophistication and Google has the technology sophistication. As the flow of tweets from the SharePoint conference make clear, there are lots of SharePoint search believers.
You can check out the full Google announcement by reading “Singing a New Tune”.
With few SharePoint and GSA analysts focusing on the total cost of ownership of each of these systems, much of the information is out of a business context. Microsoft can bundle and discount. Google’s GSA pricing is not given much attention.
The escalation and confrontation between Google and Microsoft has added some zip to a somewhat commoditized enterprise search market.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2009
In-Q-Tel Pumps Cash into Visible Technologies
October 21, 2009
Overflight snagged a news item called “Visible Technologies Announces Strategic Partnership with In-Q-Tel”. In-Q-Tel is the investment arm of one unit of the US government. Visible Technologies is a content processing company that ingests Web log, Tweets, and other social content and extracts information from these data.
The company said:
Through its comprehensive solution set, Visible Technologies helps organizations adopt new ways of gaining actionable insight from social media conversations. By using Visible Technologies’ platform, organizations both big and small can harness business intelligence derived from social media data to drive strategic direction and tactical implementation of marketing initiatives, improve the customer experience and grow business. Visible Technologies’ end-to-end suite, powered by the truCAST engine, encompasses global features that enable real-time visibility into online social conversations regardless of where dialogue is occurring. Additionally, the company’s truREPUTATION solution is a best-in-class online reputation management service that provides both individuals and brands an effective way to repair, protect and proactively promote their reputation in search engine results.
The company is no spring chicken. Founded in 2003, Visible Technologies has a range of monitoring, reputation, and content analysis tools. The firm’s social media monitoring system is a newer weapon in the company’s arsenal. With police and intelligence agencies struggling to deal with social media, an investment in a firm focusing on this type of content makes clear that the US government wants to keep pace with these content streams.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2009
Microsoft and Big Data
October 21, 2009
Short honk A happy quack to the reader who sent me information about a free book from Microsoft. The book is The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. I downloaded the file and whipped through the 270-page volume edited by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle. The book is a collection of essays by Microsoft professionals and experts. The book is dedicated to Jim Gray, who joined Microsoft from Digital Equipment. I cited some of Jim Gray’s work in my three part series about Microsoft’s data center architecture. The essays are grouped by discipline; for example, health and medicine, number crunching for scientific research, and communication, for example.
If this book were offered for sale, I would buy it. I think it is a useful look at big data.
I made several notes on a placemat in the restaurant in which the goslings and I ate today. I offer these as my opinion, so you may disagree:
- The DEC influence struck me as easy to spot. In fact, some of the lingo and the examples reminded me of Google’s technical papers. Google had a strong DEC flavor in its early days. I wonder if this influence was intentional, accidental, or an indication that the work of the those behind Alta Vista has reached outside the world of search and retrieval.
- The big data theme is one reason why architectures that don’t scale are likely to disappoint users and stakeholders. As I scanned the pages, I wondered in the Microsoft technology is going to be affordable and sufficiently flexible to handle the wide range of applications the Microsoft researchers and industry experts reference in their essays.
- The notion of big data and computational pervasiveness in many disparate fields triggered in my mind questions about “smart” software. Some of the work referenced cannot be performed by traditional methods. The need for “intelligent agents” became evident to me. I don’t think of Microsoft’s technology as being focused on making smart software. Today I had to move a Word 2007 document to my Mac in order to get a 2007 Word feature to work.
If I were back in grade school and writing a book report, I would label the work “Googley”. If my teacher were a Microsoft employee, I would probably get an F. Writing about big data is not the same as manipulating at scale big data. Microsoft wants to make clear that it is in the big data game. I have an open mind.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2009
Coveo Rings in Its New Call Center Solution
October 21, 2009
I met the new marketing vp for Coveo on the phone before I left for Europe last week. I was not able to wrangle any information from Diane Berry, a former Ziffer. She did offer to buy me dinner next time I was in Québec City. (Unfortunately Québec City is a week long trek via air and rail from Harrod’s Creek.)
This morning I learned Coveo has rolled out a Customer Service Knowledge Console. The announcement said:
Coveo’s new solution places the power of enterprise knowledge access in the hands of call center agents, managers, and, importantly, B2B customers. The Coveo Customer Service Knowledge Console provides, though role-specific, customizable interfaces, access to all customer, product- and service-specific enterprise knowledge, regardless of where it is stored.
The features of the Coveo console include:
- The Coveo Enterprise Search 6.0 Platform, including always-on indexing of relevant enterprise systems, including desktop, email, CRM, databases and other help-desk content
- Connectors into all customer, product and service-related information, including customer communities
- Distinct and individually customizable interfaces for call center agents, call center managers and executives, and B2B customers
- Business Intelligence (BI) Dashboards that measure and report on call center performance and customer relationship health, effectively creating real-time reporting of KPIs;
Social media customer sentiment analysis - Blackberry and other smartphone access for field customer service staff.
One of the trends in “enterprise search” is that broad bush, one-size-fits-all solutions are somewhat yesterday. Vendors are developing solutions that include search functions. The emphasis is upon delivering a solution to an information problem. Coveo is in step with what customers want. The sharply focused approach makes it easier to explain the benefits of an information access solution. In today’s rough financial seas, focus strikes me as the more informed way to approach information access.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2009
If and when I get that promised dinner, this write up will have been one for which I received rich, satisfying compensation. I hope I don’t catch pneumonia cold as the winds blast snow though the river valley.
Microsoft SharePoint—Juggernaut or Juggled Stats
October 21, 2009
ComputerWorld’s “Is Microsoft’s SharePoint Unstoppable, or Mostly Smoke and Mirrors?” struck me as a rain-on-the-parade write up. The story appeared during the sold-out SharePoint conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. (I am waiting for Day 2 which will reveal the results of the time and money invested in Fast ESP, the industrial strength search and retrieval solution for SharePoint and other enterprise information systems.) The core idea is that Microsoft inflates its market and financial data. Microsoft says that it does not.
The ComputerWorld write up presents data about the number of SharePoint users (more than 100 million) and the revenue attributed to the product (about $1.3 billion dollars). The story also gives Microsoft and experts who follow Microsoft activities to offer examples of the importance of the product. The story highlights some folks who think that SharePoint’s track record is one of those inflated marketing efforts that some vendors use to define reality.
My view is a bit different. The status quo for SharePoint is important but SharePoint is going to have to respond to Google’s increasing commitment to enterprise applications. I am less interested in SharePoint today than in what Microsoft does to thwart Google. The face off promises to be interesting because both companies share some similar characteristics; for example, arrogance.
But Microsoft is a better marketing operation and it has a larger reseller and partner mercenary force. Google, on the other hand, has demographics, money, and technology. In terms of technical excellence, I can’t get too excited about Microsoft SharePoint. On the other hand, Google is not rolling out products that give me a great deal of confidence either. Both companies have to do more with their enterprise solutions.
Long road ahead for ShaerPoint and Google’s enterprise applications. Long, long road for the juggernaut to travel. Both companies are pretty good jugglers. I quite like Google’s assertion about its market penetration. Two peas in a pod.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2009
Another freebie. Rest happily FCC, FTC, or LoC. No moola to me for this write up.
Newsnow Writes to Big Newspaper Bosses
October 21, 2009
I met with executives of Newsnow.co.uk when the company first opened its doors. Since that meeting, I have relied on Newsnow.co.uk as a way to keep track of certain content that is not available to me via other indexes. (Yes, Newsnow.co.uk is an index in my goose pond.) I am not wild about some of the interface but when I am looking for information from Australia, to cite one example, I use Newsnow.co.uk. I don’t think the managers of the index think of the service as a pointer to Australian technology information, but I use the service to tap into that content domain.
The open letter appeared when I did some routine checking about a New Zealand company called Pingar. To be frank, I did not chase down Pingar. I read the “Open Letter to the UK’s National, Regional, and Local Newspapers”. Several points made sense to me. The passage that struck me as quite important was:
The truth is, if anything, it is the growth of the Internet itself — not link aggregation — that has undermined your businesses by destroying the virtual monopoly that you once held over the mass distribution of written news. If you are seeking to blame something for your current predicament, we suggest you start there. It is disingenuous to blame legitimate link aggregation websites like ours for your financial woes and it is misguided to attempt to control linking. This cannot be the way forward. Linking is free, and links (and the sites that provide them) are at the heart of the Web. They are the means by which the Web works. We don’t think linking is something you can, or should be allowed to, control or charge for.
Please, keep in mind that I worked for the Courier Journal & Louisville Times Co., owner of a newspaper that was at one time listed as one of the world’s 25 best. I also worked for Bill Ziff, whose businesses usually had magazines at their core and who funded a daily technology newspaper which, I must point out, failed because the effort was a decade ahead of its time.
I understand the position taken by Newsnow.co.uk. I want to add three points:
- The children of newspaper (and magazine and book publishers) are going to put the nails in the coffin of many publications. The parents have not been able to prevent their children from finding the path that best suits their information acquisition preferences. When the kids of the newspaper bosses are undermining the future of certain traditional information business models, I don’t think there’s much hope for changing the behaviors of individuals who are not living in one’s home and under the direct control of one’s parents.
- The shift to the “digital Gutenberg” is just starting and the changes will be coming more quickly and be more far reaching than most people anticipate. I think Newsnow.co.uk executives will be better prepared than traditional publishing companies, but the changes will be stressful for young-at-heart outfits as well. The difference is that the Newsnow.co.uk type of company can adapt. Ossified publishing companies try to adapt but in the end fall back on the tired excuses that “we don’t have money” or “we have methods to protect” or some other reason. Without the ability to adapt, organisms die. Lawyers cannot change this fact of life… yet.
- The technology of the Internet is not new. What is different is that some countries are forcing their citizens and organizations to shift their business methods to these technologies. Some countries want citizens and businesses to have high speed access. Others drag their feet. At the end of the day, the diffusion of Internet-centric technologies is spreading in multiple dimensions because users are willing to embrace these solutions. The reasons may vary, but the diffusion is quite real.
The sum of these three points is obvious to some people. Others struggle with the “new math” of the Internet. What we have is a new dividing line between those who surf the new waves of technology and those who want, like Venice, to alter the way in which the Mediterranean flows. Sure, Venice may survive as a European Disneyland, but Venice no longer rules the financial world, and Venice is a long shot to regain that title. Venice survives, but it does so at a considerable cost and the anguish of a new business model.
Newspapers are in a tough spot, but Newsnow.co.uk and similar Web sites did not create the problem. A failure to adapt created many of the problems that bedevil newspapers. Maybe a Venice strategy will work? I know I won’t make many trips to Venice. I like to visit every six or seven years. I can envision a time when today’s 12 year old views a printed newspaper in a similar way. Useful but not a frequent or necessary activity.
The Gutenberg era is ending. The digital Gutenberg era is beginning and gaining momentum. Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2009
To the DEA, IRS, and DoC or whichever US federal entity is regulating Web logs: No one paid me to write this. I did it for internal mental satisfaction, which for an addled goose is sufficient compensation.
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