Protected: SharePoint Ranks High on New Enterprise Search Markertscope
December 20, 2011
United Nations and Its Tech Challenges
December 20, 2011
From the “Why Am I Not Surprised” Department. News Flash.
UN Computer System Failure
A flub at the United Nations— an estimated nearly $400 million flub– has been made public as UN officials are scrambling to get the botched project back on track. Perhaps “flub” is too strong? Maybe in UN speak, the error was an administrative concern. Yes, that’s it. Administrative concern.
The United Nations’ project, known as Umoja, is a computer and software system that promised to reform the organization but has been at a standstill since June. Umoja, which was intended to be an administrative system to cut down on waste and fraud, was led by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Fox News’ article, “UN’s Botched Computer-System Overhaul: A Major ‘Failure’ of Ban Ki-Moon’s Management” tells us more:
Ban’s officials are scrambling to get the jinxed project known as Umoja (Swahili for unity) back on track after a key UN budget committee heard from Ban’s office last week that the sweeping information technology overhaul, already a year behind schedule, won’t be finished until 2015, three years beyond the original target date. The committee also said it was “deeply disturbed and dismayed” by the UN’s “apparent lack of awareness and foreknowledge” about the sputtering status of the project.”
This is entropy from top to bottom. Is this the UN’s approach to information management? It appears that guessing about technology may not work and the organization should probably make more solidified plans before pushing such a large and costly project forward. From peacekeeping to computing, the UN is rowing against the current of competence in my opinion.
Andrea Hayden, December 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint 2010 Lags Behind in Social Features
December 20, 2011
Beyond Search has written extensively on social media and implementations that help to achieve a higher level of social media integration. Recently, we have found more reporting devoted to the incorporation of social features into an organization’s enterprise solution. Bjorn Furuknap gives his insight into SharePoint 2010’s social functionality in his lighthearted blog entry, “Why SharePoint 2010 Social Features Suck.”
Try to get the activity feed to behave like the FaceBook activity feed and add simple things like a ‘Like’ or ‘Comment’ functionality to the feed . . . Try creating an ad-hoc filter of the activity feed, for example to implement a ‘Social Groups’ functionality where a temporary team, say the people in an organization responsible for the next department annual review, can organize their activities into a single activity feed. It turns out that the way the activity feed is implemented is so locked down and restricted that seemingly simple extensions like these are virtually impossible to create.
So how does an organization tackle both its social and enterprise needs? There are several good third party solutions out there, including Fabasoft Mindbreeze, who are devoting time and attention to social features. Fabasoft Mindbreeze has received the prestigious KM World Trendsetting Product of the Year 2011, making it the fourth year in a row that the Austrian enterprise solution took home the prize. In its previous win in 2010, its social media functionality was sited as a major factor.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise covers corporation -wide heterogeneous document stores and data sources such as email systems, file systems, databases, document management systems, intranets, the internet and social media.
We agree with Furuknap that social features, and social media functions, are just now being developed and implemented into enterprise solutions. Microsoft has never been one for rapid adoption or innovation, so SharePoint is suffering a bit in the social department. To meet your organization’s social needs we recommend seeking a smart third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, and avoiding unnecessary aggravation.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
IBM Predictions for Computing
December 20, 2011
Short honk: The $100 billion public relations machine caught me by surprise today. I have read some crazy stuff about the future. I did not expect IBM to climb a tree, crawl out on a limb, and then jump up and down to get my attention. Pretty darned nimble.
Navigate to “IBM ‘5 in 5’ Predicts No More Passwords, Mind-Reading Smartphones.” Here’s the passage I noted:
“If you just need to think about calling someone, it happens,” IBM said of its prediction. “Or you can control the cursor on a computer screen just by thinking about where you want to move it.”
Mind-reading technology, known as bioinformatics, has already shown up in simple forms from toy makers such as Mattel, and engineers at IBM and other companies “have designed headsets with advanced sensors to read electrical brain activity that can recognize facial expressions, excitement and concentration levels, and thoughts of a person without them physically taking any actions,” the report said.
Okay, 60 months. My mobile drops calls, cannot misinterprets voice instructions, delivers a lousy data rate, and has the sound quality of talking through a tin can in my backyard when I was 10 years old. Mind control in 60 months. Not in rural Kentucky, dude.
I am starting the countdown now. Wow. Sounds like a great future.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Big Data Analytics and Sense Making with Synthesys
December 19, 2011
Tim Estes is the CEO and co-founder of Digital Reasoning. Digital Reasoning develops and markets solutions that provide Automated Understanding for Big Data.
There’s a great deal of talk about “big data” today. If you walk into an AT&T store near you, you may see the statistics of users sending over 3 Billion text messages a day or over 250 million tweets. Compare that to closer to 100 million or less tweets a day a year or two ago, and it’s daunting how rapidly the volume of digital information is increasing. A mobile phone without expandable storage frustrates users who want to keep a contacts list, rich media, and apps in their pocket. In organizations, the appetite for storage is significant. EMC, Hewlett Packard, and IBM are experiencing strong demand for their storage systems. Cloud vendors such as Amazon and Rackspace are also experiencing strong demand from companies offering compelling services to end users on their infrastructure. At a recent Amazon conference in Washington, Werner Vogels revealed that the AWS Cloud has hundreds of thousands of companies/customers running on it as some level. Finally, companies like Digital Reasoning are working the next generation of Cloud – automated understanding – that goes from a focus on infrastructure to sense-making of data that sits in hosted or private clouds.
While most of the attention has been on infrastructure like virtualization / hypervisors, Hadoop, and NoSQL data storage systems, we think those are really the enablers of the killer app for Cloud- which is making sense of data to solve information overload. Without next generation analytics and supporting technology, it is essentially impossible to:
- Analyze a flow of data from multiple sensors deployed in a factory
- Process mobile traffic at a telephone company
- Make sense of unstructured and structured information flowing through an email system
- Identify key entities and their importance in a stream of financial news and transaction data.
These are the real world problems that have engaged me for many years. I founded Digital Reasoning to automatically make sense of data because I believed that someday all software would learn and that would unleash the next great revolution in the Information Age. The demand for this revolution is inevitable because while data has increased exponentially, human attention has been essentially static in comparison. Technology to create better return on attention would go from “nice to have” to utterly essential. And now, that moment is here.
Digging a little deeper, Digital Reasoning has created a way to take human communication and use algorithms to make sense of it without having to depend on a human design, an ontology, or some other structure. Our system looks at patterns and the way a word is used in its context and bootstraps the understanding much like a human child does – creating associations and building into more complex relationships.
In 2009, we migrated onto Hadoop and began taking on the problem of managing very large scale unstructured data and move the industry beyond counting things that are well structured and toward being able to figure out exactly what the data means that you are measuring.
Digital Reasoning asks the question: “How do you take loose, noisy information that is disconnected and unstructured and then make sense of it so that you can then apply analytics to it in a way that is valuable to business?”
We identify actors, actions, patterns, and facts and then put it into the context of space and time in an efficient and scalable way. In the government scenario, that can mean to finding and stopping bad guys. In the legal environment they want to answer the questions of “who”, “what”, “where”, and “when”.
Digital Reasoning initially set our focus on the complex task of making sense out of massive volumes of unstructured text within the US Government Intelligence Community after the events of 9/11. But we also believe that our Synthesys software can be utilized in the commercial sector to create great value from the mountains of unstructured data that sit in the Enterprise and streaming in from the Web.
Companies with large-scale data will see value in investing in our technology because they cannot hire 100,000 people to go through and read all of the available material. This matters if you are a bank and trying to make financial trades. This matters for companies doing electronic discovery. This matters for health sectors that need help organizing medical records and guarding against fraud.
We are an emerging firm, growing rapidly and looking to have the best and the brightest join our quest to empower users and customers to make sense of their data through revolutionary software. With the recent investment from In-Q-Tel and partners of Silver Lake, I believe that Digital Reasoning has a great future ahead. We are on the bleeding edge of what is going on with Hadoop and Big Data in the engineering area and how to make sense of data through some of the most advanced learning algorithms in the world. Most of all we care that people are empowered with technology so that they can recover value and time in the race to overcome information overload.
To learn more about Digital Reasoning, navigate to our Web site and download our white paper.
Tim Estes, December 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Inteltrax: Top Stories, December 12 to December 16
December 19, 2011
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, the issue of change in the analytic world—for the better, for the worse and everything in between.
One example of change came from our story, “Data Mining Changing Scientific Thought” shows how the way scientists think is being streamlined by analytics.
On the other hand, “ManTech has Uphill Climb with Intelligence Analytics,” shows that not all change looks promising, like one company’s new focus on intelligence.
And some change, well, we’re just not sure how it’ll pan out, like with the story “Predicting the Ponies is Just Unstructured Data” which exposes how the gambling industry could be changed by analytic tools. For the better or worse is up for debate.
Change, in any aspect of life, is inevitable. However, the world of big data analytics seems more susceptible than most. And we couldn’t be happier, as we watch the unexpected turns these changes bring to the industry every day.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting http://www.inteltrax.com/
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
Protected: Use SurfRay to Process Excel Import
December 19, 2011
Manufacturing Gains New Taxonomy
December 19, 2011
Most people commonly think of biology classifications when they hear the word taxonomy. However, it is a broader concept and Wand Inc. has developed taxonomies for numerous topics from medical specialties to corporate policy. The article, WAND Manufacturing Taxonomy Now Available discusses the advantages of their new manufacturing taxonomy.
Wand says that this taxonomy works well for companies with a document management project and has a need:
“to tag these documents based upon manufacturing process or concepts.” This taxonomy “covers manufacturing processes, quality control, manufacturing sales, manufacturing sales, manufacturing accounting, engineering and design, planning and more.”
Thus far, Wand had received overwhelmingly positive feedback on their latest addition.
Taxonomies are becoming an important tool and are enhancing the manufacturing process. What we really like is that it works not only with project data management systems, but also with the more advanced software solutions like Inforbix. Inforbix can use the existing taxonomies and get more out of your product data. These are revolutionary changes from revolutionary companies.
Jennifer Wensink, December 13, 2011
SharePoint 2010 Not Ready for Enterprise
December 19, 2011
SharePoint is broad, powerful and widely adopted, but its drawbacks are also commonly publicized. Not known for its ability to innovate rapidly, Microsoft suffers from a lack of agility, especially in fledging applications. Bjorn Furuknap tackles the drawbacks of SharePoint 2010 in, “SharePoint Server 2010 Isn’t Really Ready for Enterprise Applications–And What Microsoft Should Do About It.”
With SharePoint 2010, there’s a new ballgame, but sadly, it’s riddled with bugs that prevent it from being a great platform for building enterprise or even professional applications . . . It may just be that I’m working with more ‘enterprise’ projects now than earlier, but it seems to me that the issues I see with SharePoint 2010 are more serious and obvious than in 2007.
Some of the specific examples Furuknap lists include Office document formatting and the immaturity of social features. He blames SharePoint’s shortcoming on their (unsuccessful) shift to innovation at the expense of a stable and basic platform. Perhaps he is right. But who do you turn to in order to keep up with fast pacing technology? We think third party solutions are the answer, and one we really like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. The industry must be thinking the same thing, as Fabasoft recently received the KM World Trendsetting 2011 Product of the Year.
’Our focus on agility, quality, usability and style in the monthly shipments of our latest product innovations enables us to integrate and implement client requests into our product development rapidly and sustainably. In addition to our on-premise offering, everyone can now try out our product in the Cloud, immediately. This is a possibility much appreciated by our clients and partners alike,’ says Daniel Fallmann, founder and managing director of Mindbreeze Software GmbH.
Furuknap has a point. Microsoft needs to get back to the main thing, creating a stable and effective enterprise base. However, ease and functionality can be achieved despite the challenges if a smart third party solution is adopted.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Chicago Sun-Times to Charge Online
December 19, 2011
In order to generate revenue from online content, a vendor must have a critical mass of digital information. Some of that information can be fluff, but a chunk should be what’s called “must have” content. Newspapers perceive themselves as having “must have” content. Most don’t and those with must have content have burned the fudge.
As most readers (including our two or three) have started getting their news online instead of reaching for the paper in the morning, print newspapers have been suffering.
Signs of this change are obvious in Chicago; The Chicago Sun-Times will begin charging customers to view content on their websites. In the Huffington Post article “Chicago Sun-Times Pay Wall: Paper to Charge Online Readers,” Sun-Times Media Chairman Jeremy Halbreich states, “It is certainly award-winning content and we need to find new ways to support it.” The article also tells us:
The announcement arrives one day after another round of layoffs at the paper, which Halbreich called the ‘final piece’ of 18 months of staffing reductions, Crain’s Chicago Business reports. Sun-Times Media has handed down hundreds of layoffs over the past two years.
In the same article, Sun Times movie critic Roger Ebert says he is upset with the pay wall concept and I agree. Ebert claims that instead of his reviews gathering dust in a pile, they are being read globally and daily online. Charging for online content will only cause readers to stray elsewhere to sites where they can get unlimited free information. Right now, the Sun Times is exempting mobile apps from the fees, which I think they should reconsider as an alternative to the pay wall. But I’m just a mere Kentucky gosling, I may be off on my business advice.
The big goose is not uncertain. The newspaper is likely to earn more from a bake sale than trying to replace the print based ad model with a pay wall. The big goose is, of course, Stephen E Arnold, our beloved leader.
Andrea Hayden, December 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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