Google Wants More Cash – Enter Google Analytics Premium
October 13, 2011
So basically for a fee, Google will provide a stronger server to run your custom reports, a dedicated account manager and a 24/7 support and service level agreement (SLA). The one thing Google didn’t note in their announcement post was the cost for the premium analytics offering. I have received tips from several sources noting that the price for the premium analytics service is A WHOPPING $150,000/year.
How Multiple-Users Can Edit One SharePoint Document
October 13, 2011
- Set the correct permissions to the document library- Enable versioning major and minor versions. If you are using Onenote documents enable only major versions (note: Onenote does autosave and this can result in synch problems with minor versions).- Do NOT require Check Out to edit a document
How Do You Separate the Information From the Disinformation?
October 13, 2011
A healthy dose of skepticism is always beneficial. From Scienceblogs.com comes a post by Orac entitled, “The architects of a ‘disinformation campaign’ against homeopathy are revealed.”
In this entry, Orac critiques a recently published Huffington Post article, “Dana Ullman: Disinformation on Homeopathy.” His main problem lies in the author’s reliance on ad hominem fallacies to take the place of a logical argument.
Orac goes back and forth quoting Ullman’s article and throwing jabs at it in addition to homeopathy:
[S]cientific experiments are designed primarily to falsify, not to prove, hypotheses. That’s where Ullman gets it wrong. He wants an experiment to “prove” homeopathy…If homeopathy can stand up to such hypothesis testing, then that’s an indication that the hypotheses that represent the central concepts of homeopathy might have some validity. They didn’t.
Our position is to remain cynical of anything without empirical evidence. A disinformation campaign seems like it would fall under the category of things I’d question.
The problem with searching for definitive answers on topics such as this, especially in the arena of science, is that non-biased research and reports are hard to come by.
Megan Feil, October 13, 2011
Google Amazon Dust Up. Search and More
October 12, 2011
I have done a few confidential reports about the Amazon Google waltz. For about five years, Amazon has out Googled Google. I noticed the shift when I was working on Google Version 2.0 in early 2006. Amazon was implementing as real commercial services some of the technology which Googlers revealed in their technical talks, some journal papers, and in the mostly ignored “background” sections of Google’s patent documents.
In a Vienna waltz, one dancer leads and the other follows. The roles can shift, but mostly there is one dancer who commands, and the other follows. Consider these steps:
- Cloud services at a low cost for consumers and the enterprise. Check.
- Nifty catalog services with automated data acquisition. Check.
- Street view in search. Check.
- De-emphasis on brute force search. Check.
I cannot provide more meaty examples because this is a free blog. But I think you get the idea.
I noted that Amazon put up an Android store of sorts. Then I noted that the Amazon Fire “ran” on Android. Many pundits and poobahs have and continue to speculate if Amazon is going at Apple. A fresh idea for some appeared in “Google Guns for Amazon Web Services with New Storage, App Engine Offerings.” The write up said:
Google is turning up the heat with its cloud services for the enterprise. Today the company bundled up several announcements ranging from the Cloud SQL service in limited preview to promoting Cloud Storage out of Google Labs. App Engine developers are also getting a premier support option with a 99.95 Service Level Agreement (SLA).
I also marked this passage”:
Google is obviously putting a lot of wood behind its App Engine arrows. The question is whether it’s enough to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Google’s argument is that it offers managed services and takes a lot of hassles out of building and deploying cloud services. The downside is that applications written for GAE are going to be a lot harder to port to competing services.
The gloves are indeed off. My thought is that Google now has another challenge on its hand. Unlike the spats with Microsoft, Oracle, and various other parties to litigation, Amazon just keeps doing Googley stuff quickly. Not much fanfare from Amazon, in fact. Several observations:
- Amazon has an Android store and an Android fork. Amazon is more of a curator than Google. Could this be a key differentiator for Amazon? The use of forked Android adds some zest to the routine.
- Amazon does have customers for its Web services, and it works on a number of levels with these customers. Amazon may have a more sophisticated method of leveraging its customer relationships than Google at this time. Is this another key differentiator.
- Amazon has been following the steps. Amazon lacks some of the athleticism of its “partner”, but precision of execution can overcome athleticism. Is this another key differentiator for Amazon.
But the big point is that Amazon seems to be doing with somewhat less friction than its partner. Amazon seems smoother. Now to the judges…Len?
Stephen E Arnold, October 12, 2011
Freebie
Oracle Plans for CRM Expansion
October 12, 2011
The consulting firm Ovum is weighing in on Oracle’s pending acquisition of InQuira; a move that expands Oracle’s CRM capabilities. Read the full review at, “InQuira buyout firms up Oracle CRM sway.”
Oracle’s pending acquisition of InQuira is a sensible move, providing it with tools to help enterprises unify web information with internal CRM data and provide more targeted sales, marketing, and customer service. Although Oracle already had a partnership and integration with InQuira, the acquisition will ensure that knowledge becomes an intrinsic part of Oracle Siebel and Oracle Fusion CRM applications.
Just as every other sector of the corporate world, customer service channels will need to respond to the ever-changing mobile technology. Oracle will likely bring InQuira’s information expertise to work alongside its already successful suite of process management and business expertise products. The match is a good one and will likely prove fruitful for Oracle.
Emily Rae Aldridge, October 12, 2011
http://www.telecomseurope.net/
SharePoint Best Practices and Beyond
October 12, 2011
No matter the extent of your search implementation challenges, our team at Search Technologies has the processes and technologies to deliver results.
A series of Best Practices articles for SharePoint Server 2010 by Microsoft TechNet includes an article on the best practices for enterprise search, “Best Practices for Search in SharePoint Server 2010.” The article also applies to Microsoft Search Server and covers everything from the deployment to antivirus policies.
Some useful information is covered; one learns to test the crawling and querying subsystems after changing any configuration or applying updates:
We recommend that you test the crawling and querying functionality of the server farm after you make configuration changes or apply updates. An easy way to do this is to create a temporary content source that is used only for this purpose. To test, we recommend that you crawl ten items — for example .txt files on a file share — and then perform search queries for those files. Make sure that the test items are currently not in the index.
Management also needs to be aware of planning the search topology, planning for capacity and performance, and planning for findability. Users must be able to easily find what they are looking for, and managed properties and scopes will enhance the end-user search experience. You must start with a well-configured infrastructure. Defragmenting the search database after a series of crawls and queries can help with content management.
Overall, it is important to test the subsystems, be prepared, and review the anti-virus policy to avoid any unexpected problems.
For more articles in the series, see Best practices (SharePoint Server 2010).
You will want to tap into the expertise garnered in more than 100 Fast search deployments by our team at Search Technologies. That’s where Search Technologies comes into the spot light. We have more experience than any other firm in implementing search best practices for SharePoint licensees. Contact us at www.searchtechnologies.com.
Iain Fletcher, Vice President, Search Technologies October 12, 2011
Search Technologies is the world’s largest independent provider of search engine expertise, consulting and implementation services.
Google’s Management Strives for Irony with Google+
October 12, 2011
Google CEO Larry Page and other top execs don’t seem that invested in Google+. No, I didn’t add them to my circle to see their lack of activity–I don’t have one. This great blog entry from the understatement broke down their usage in the form of a good old pie chart.
It turns out that only 3 of the 12 people listed on the Google Management Team page have ever made public posts on the site, which has been up and running for 3 months now.
The entry sums up some more of the stats they found in their research:
In total, of the 18 most senior people charged with overseeing Google, 11 have either not joined or have never made a single public post, and 5 have barely used it at all. Only Senior VP of Social / head of Google+ Vic Gundotra and SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai have made any effort to seriously adopt Google+.
This lack of internal usage may be indicative of the site’s popularity. Usually if there’s a great product out there the employees, let alone the higher-ups, want to use it. This data collection does make me wonder how many Google employees overall are on Google+.
Megan Feil, October 12, 2011
Into the Future of Sharepoint with a Smooth Sail
October 12, 2011
Here at Beyond Search we keep our readers up-to-date on the latest news related to search, business intelligence, and IT trends. We report regularly on Microsoft SharePoint, because it is a popular collaborative content platform used in many enterprises and companies. Market Watch also noticed SharePoint’s growing presence and reported on it in the story: “ESG Survey Reveals Two out of Three Enterprises Use SharePoint as a Business Critical Application-Need for SharePoint Management Tools a Top Priority to Help Scale and Improve Performance.” While the entire article can be summed up in the title, the meat comes from an Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) whitepaper entitled “Managing SharePoint as a Business-critical Application” and how Metalogix—a leader in providing content lifecycle management solutions for SharePoint—can solve those issues.
SharePoint is a top business application and is driven by a need for team and document collaboration. There are some optimization problems: data mobility and movement, storage management, utilization, and quick response times. The article explains that:
Metalogix solutions for SharePoint delivers this holistic approach to SharePoint management, providing users with the freedom to consolidate, manage and optimize their enterprise content the way their applications behave. Metalogix eliminates the out-of-the-box operational constraints and enables organizations of all sizes to optimize the SharePoint content infrastructure in order to consolidate, scale and cost-effectively manage, migrate, store, archive and protect enterprise content whether on-premise or in the cloud.
We don’t think this market grip will be loosened in the foreseeable future. Microsoft dominated the OS market with Windows 95, but they have slipped in that area. Will SharePoint be their saving grace? End users are comfortable with Microsoft, so we bet it will be around for a long time to come. Where user choice come in is the custom solutions for Sharepoint installations in the enterprise. While Metalogic is making waves, we prefer to surf with the experts at Surfray Ontolica. They make the enterprise ocean solution smooth sailing.
Whitney Grace October 12, 2011
Silver Lake, Alibaba, Digital Sky in Talks of Buying Yahoo
October 12, 2011
Yahoo has been flailing around the internet ever since Google set anchor: this is no new news. The slight possibility for Yahoo to become a multinational corporation places the company in the media with Bloomberg’s article, “Silver Lake Said to Discuss Yahoo Deal with China’s Alibaba, Digital Sky.”
The private-equity firm Silver Lake in addition to China’s Alibaba Group and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies are reportedly considering a joint bid for Yahoo.
We learned about the potential opposition to this deal from the article:
Regulators may oppose foreign ownership of a company such as Yahoo, which plays a crucial role in U.S. communications through the delivery of e-mail and instant messaging. The company also serves as the second-largest U.S. search engine, through a partnership with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) The deal would face tax implications as well because of Yahoo’s stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan Corp. (4689), one person said.
The whole deal is very much up in the air at this point. After the recent firing of CEO Carol Burtz last month, Yahoo plans on evaluating their current plan.
Additionally, it has been reported that the group is not even certain if they will make a bid.
Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma sees it in his best interest to buy Yahoo because Yahoo currently has a 40% stake in Alibaba. It would be interesting to hear about the motivations from the other two companies.
Megan Feil, October 12, 2011
Data Breach Leaves 5 Million Patients Holding the Bag
October 11, 2011
A data breach of military health care records from the past 19 years has left nearly 5 million past and current patients vulnerable to identity theft and other acts of malintent.
Tricare, the healthcare program serving current and former military service members, revealed that contractor Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) lost backup tapes containing health data and other personal information of about 4.9 million people. The tapes were stolen out of an SAIC employee’s car during a Sept.13 burglary.
Tricare released a statement saying that the risk of harm to patients has been judged low and this is why the do not intend to provide the people affected with credit monitoring services.
According to the Information Week article, Military Health Plan Data Breach Threatens 4.9 Million, Ruby Raley, director of healthcare solutions at IT integration and security company said:
Unlike HIPAA, FTC regulations don’t require entities to sign agreements with ‘business associates’ that hold third parties to the same standards when handling sensitive data. Also, HIPAA regulations require organizations to provide a year of credit monitoring to anyone who may have been affected by a breach. They’re only [offering] fraud protection for 90 days.
While no financial records were stolen, this incident leads us to wonder whether government enitites should be forced to follow HIPAA regulations, instead of less strict FTC regulations. This may prevent similar problems from occuring down the road.
Jasmine Ashton, Oct 11, 2011
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