WAND and Layer2 Team for SharePoint Taxonomy Functions

March 19, 2010

A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Jump-Start Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Knowledge Management Using Pre-Defined Taxonomy Metadata”. The Microsoft Fast road show is wending its way among the Redmond faithful. In its wake, a number of companies see opportunity in the Microsoft demos. But with Microsoft making some tasty offers to incentive those looking for search systems, Microsoft may be doing third-party add-on vendors and Fast ESP consultants a big favor.

The Earth Times’ article said:

In cooperation with WAND, Inc – one of the leading providers of enterprise taxonomies – Layer2 now offers pre-defined Taxonomy Metadata for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, a robust and expanding library of taxonomies covering a wide variety of domains to help jumpstart classification projects. Taxonomy Metadata for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is currently available in 13 languages, e.g. English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

WAND has developed structured multi-lingual vocabularies with related tools and services to power precision search and classification applications. The company asserts that WAND makes search work better. WAND Taxonomies are used in online yellow pages and local search, ad-matching engines, business to business directories, product search, and within enterprise search engines. The firm’s library contains more than 40 domain specific taxonomies. WAND’s taxonomies are available in 13 languages.

Layer 2 GmbH is a specialist for creating custom components and solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Based in Germany, Layer2 offers products and solutions that add additional features to portals based on Microsoft SharePoint technology.

My view is that Microsoft may be creating opportunities at the same time it leaves some SharePoint customers wondering why their systems do not work as expected. If taxonomy management was a priority, Microsoft should have included a system to perform this type of work within the SharePoint package. Third party vendors now have an opportunity to sell a “solution,” but customers may have to go through a learning process and then spend additional money to get the functionality required to make SharePoint more useful.

Perhaps another mixed result from SharePoint? Just my opinion.

Stephen E  Arnold, March 19, 2010

Freebie. No one paid me to point out that talking about “taxonomies” is much easier than implementing a high value taxonomy and then enforcing consistent tagging across the processed corpus. I know that the IRS is good at indexing by social security number, so I will report non payment to that agency.

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One Response to “WAND and Layer2 Team for SharePoint Taxonomy Functions”

  1. ARB Security Solutions » WAND and Layer2 Team for SharePoint Taxonomy Functions : Beyond Search on March 19th, 2010 2:01 am

    […] SharePoint Blog Post From SharePoint Security – Google Blog Search: A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Jump-Start Microsoft SharePoint 2010 […]

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