Social SharePoint Tips from SharePoint Conference 2014
March 10, 2014
The Internet is full of the latest news, announcements, and tips from SharePoint Conference 2014, #SPC14. It seems that Microsoft has decided to lead with all things social, focusing on their integration with Yammer and other social features to improve collaboration. Read more in the CMS Wire article, “Socializing SharePoint #SPC14.”
The article says:
“Since Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012, it has marched forward with the message of ‘Yammer First.’ The company has encouraged businesses to lead with Yammer whenever possible and promised new integrations that will transform the ways users work together. In two keynotes at the SharePoint Conference yesterday, Microsoft revealed some of the new ways it is integrating Yammer into existing Microsoft tools.”
And the article goes on to describe their takeaways from the sessions. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search, and he follows SharePoint, in and out of the conference season. His Web site, ArnoldIT.com, highlights the pros and cons of various search systems. He recognizes that SharePoint is the biggest and broadest, but when it comes to enterprise infrastructure, it is necessary to customize SharePoint in order to reap benefits in user experience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 10, 2014
Fast Redefined: The 2008 Search Acquisition Does a 365
March 9, 2014
Figure skating, anyone? You can do a Salchow jump. The skater has some options. Falling is not one of them. The idea is to leap from one foot to another. The Axel jump tosses is some spinning; for example, a triple Axel is 3.5 revolutions. Want creativity? The skater can flip, bunny hop, and Mazurka.
But the ice has to be right. Skating requires a Zamboni. Search requires information retrieval that works.
One should not confuse a Zamboni with an ageing ice skater.
Fast Search & Transfer has just come back from an extended training period and is ready to perform. The founder may be retired after an unfavorable court decision. The Fast Search Linux and Unix customers have been blown off. But, according to Fortune CNN, Microsoft has made enterprise search better. Give the skater a three for that jump called Office 365.
Navigate to “Can Microsoft Make Enterprise Search Better?” The subtitle is ripe with promise: “Updates to its Office 365 suite show benefits from a 2008 acquisition.” There you go. Technology from the late 1990s, a withdrawal from Web search, a run at unseating Autonomy as the leading provider of enterprise content processing, and allegations of financial wrongdoing and you have a heck of base from which to “make enterprise search better.”
At one time, Fast Search offered an alternative to Google’s Web search system. The senior management of Fast Search decided to cede Web search to Google and pursue dominance in the enterprise search market. Well, how did that work out? The shift from the Web to the enterprise worked for a while, but the costs of customer support, sales, and implementation put the company in a bind. The result was a crash to the ice.
Microsoft bought the sliding Fast Search operation and embarked on a journey to make content in SharePoint findable. The effort was a boom to second tier search vendors who offered SharePoint licensees a search and retrieval system. Most of these vendors are all but unknown outside of the 150 million SharePoint license base. Others have added new jumps to their search routines and have skated to customer support and business intelligence.
Wolfram Alpha Is Not Your High School Research System
March 9, 2014
If Wolfram Alpha had been around when I was in high school it would have made my math and science homework a whole lot easier. Other than solving physics equations, Wolfram Alpha can be used for a whole lot more. The smart database just released a new endeavor called the Documentation Center.
The Documentation Center is still in the preliminary version, but it can be used for:
“The Wolfram System’s unified computation and dynamic document architecture makes possible a new level of interactive presentation—notably allowing finished “slides” on which full interactive input and dynamic computation can still be done. The Wolfram Language’s cell-structured documents also conveniently allow calculations leading up to graphics or other elements to be maintained in the underlying document, but hidden for presentation.”
A whole new interactive level with data is a great idea! It makes it more interesting and Wolfram Alpha gives the chance to improve its quality. Browsing through the new Documentation Center, however, is confusing. It’s not explained how it can be used, only what it can do. Perhaps it requires a purchased membership. It looks like a system for the one percent.
Whitney Grace, March 09, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Data.gov: Listing May Be Enough
March 8, 2014
I am all for slipshod work, particularly when delivered by government contractors. Hey, the emphasis is on scope changes and engineering change orders, not on delivering what the wild and crazy statement of work requires.
I was delighted to read the Hacker News thread at http://bit.ly/MW4epC about broken links and missing data sets on Data.gov at www.data.gov. The thread contains a number of interesting comments. These may be evidence that substandard attention to detail suggests digital eczema. Just Bing it.
Examples range from corrected links that fail to odd ball outputs. See, for example, http://1.usa.gov/1qiegkT. There are some gems in the comments; for instance, http://1.usa.gov/1lI1Fqj.
In the early days of www.firstgov.gov, some effort was expended to minimize the number of dead links on US government servers. In the present incarnation as www.usa.gov, there are some interesting changes.
My view is that the dead links are a lesser problem than content that is no longer available and to which the links have been removed. If I were younger, I would suggest that you, gentle reader, look for information about MIC, RAC, and ZPIC contract awards. But I will not.
Stephen E Arnold, March 8, 2014
IBM and Cybertap LLC
March 8, 2014
Short honk: At a security conference last week, a rumor floated around that IBM purchased Cybertap LLC. I did some poking around and found convoluted wording on a LinkedIn profile that suggests the deal is done. Public information about Cybertap, based on a precursor technology, is scarce. The LinkedIn profile, which may require registration or a fee, is at http://linkd.in/1n4P7ee. An interview with one of the founders of Cybertap is available in my Search Wizards Speak series at http://bit.ly/1exL1Fg. Our DeeperQI report series has additional information available on a fee basis. IBM owns i2 Group, a firm that tapped the resources of ArnoldIT prior to its purchase by IBM. In my opinion, the Cybertap technology is excellent. Watson is a swing for the fences. Cybertap makes sales to a specific market. IBM needs more Cybertaps and fewer game show winners.
Stephen E Arnold, March 8, 2014
Ontotext Offers Interesting Services
March 8, 2014
Ontotext delivers very interesting services to their clients. All of their products are associated with semantic technology and utilizing big data to benefit its users. On their Web site, the company describes itself as:
“Ontotext develops a unique portfolio of core semantic technologies. Our RDF engine powers some of the biggest world-renowned media sites. Our text-mining solutions demonstrate unsurpassed accuracy across different domains – from sport news to macro-economic analysis, scientific articles and clinical trial reports. We enable the next generation web of data and we can efficiently extract information from today’s structured web – be it recipes, adverts or anything else.”
It offers services for job extraction, hybrid semantics, and semantic publishing for industries such as life sciences, government, recruitment, libraries, publishing, and media. Ontotext has a range of products to help people harness semantic technology. The most interesting to us is the Semantic Biomedical Tagger that is described as an extraction system that creates semantic annotations in biomedical texts. Ontotext also has the requisite search engine and semantic database. Its product line is fairly robust and we intend to keep an eye on its offerings.
Whitney Grace, March 08, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Company Promises Rich Automated Content
March 7, 2014
Linguastat promises to transform big data and uses the metaphor “turning haystacks into gold.” Its Content Transformation Platform was developed for military intelligence with the goal of generating procedures specific, user-defined content. Since its launch, Linguastat counts ecommerce companies, real estate groups, sports organizations, digital publishers, and others among its client list.
What caught our attention was this bullet point about the Content Transformation Platform:
“Automatically writes optimized and copyrightable content.”
Linguastat states that its platform produces thousands of products and digital stories a day for their clients. They also take note that consumers are more likely to make online purchases when there is rich product content. The content is used to inform the consumer about the product. Its clients are in the market for usable content that comes at a cheap price.
While software is written to be extremely “smart” these days, we have a few doubts about the quality of the platform’s stories. Having never worked with the platform before, we can only go off our own experience with automated stories. Often they lack conversational or readable tone that consumers strive for and they tend to list facts in sentences. Cohesiveness is lost in automation. It is possible Linguastat has come across the magic formula that makes machine written stories digestible. Then again, they did promise to turn haystacks into gold.
Whitney Grace, March 07, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Expert System Rolls In The Dough
March 7, 2014
Good news for Expert System! According to their press release archive, “Expert Systems Raise $27 Million In IPO.” Expert System specializes in semantic technology. The $27 million was raised in the company’s IPO on the Italian stock exchange AIM Italia, making it the largest in AIM history. With the new funding, Expert System plans to invest in its US firms with a new San Francisco office and additional sales and technical staff.
Expert System saw record growth in 2013. The company offered a range of new products, including its first semantic intelligence API and an end-to-end taxonomy management and categorization platform.
Expert System expects to increase its size in 2014:
“The growing reliance on information to solve business problems is placing increasing demands on software to enhance the effectiveness of search, capture weak signals in information streams and support customer interactions. Expert System is responding to these needs by increasing development of integrations and connectors that brings the power of its semantic technology to existing platforms and traditional applications.”
With that amount of funding and decent product line, Expert System will continue to grow, especially as semantic technology demand rises.
Whitney Grace, March 07, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Infogistics Starts Daxtra
March 7, 2014
Infogistics calls itself a leading company in text analysis, document retrieval, and text extraction for various industries. One would not think that after visiting their Web site that has not been updated since 2005. The company does, however have a new vested interest in DaXtra Technologies, its new endeavor to provide content processing solutions for personnel and human resources applications.
Here is an official description from the Web site:
“For almost a decade we’ve been at the forefront of technology and solutions within our marketplace, giving our customers the competitive edge in their challenge to source the best available jobseekers, and find them quickly. Over 500 organizations, spanning all continents, use our resume analysis, matching and search products – from the world’s largest staffing companies to boutique recruiters, corporate recruitment departments, job boards and software vendors. This global reach is made possible via our multilingual CV technology which can automatically parse in over 25 different languages.”
DaXtra’s products include DaXtra Capture-a recruitment management software, DaXtra Search, DaXtra Parser-turns raw data into structured XML, DaXtra Components-to manage Web services, and DaXtra Analytics to come in 2014. The company appears to make top of the line personnel software that deletes the confusion in HR departments. What is even better is that the Web site is updated.
Whitney Grace, March 07, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Document Workspace Work Around in SharePoint 2013
March 7, 2014
As with every new version of any software, certain new features are gained while other favorites are potentially lost. However, most clever software aficionados can find a clever work around. That is just the case in the recent Redmond Magazine article, “How To Create a Document Workspace in SharePoint 2013.”
The article begins:
“There is no Workspaces Tab or obvious way to create a sub site based on the Document Workspace in the browser. Or is there…? Let’s take a look. In this article I start with a site collection with the top-level site based on the team site template in my development environment . . . It bears to mention that officially the Document Workspace is listed as one of the features that has been discontinued or modified and the reason listed is that all the functionality is available with the team site template.”
Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in all things search and a frequent contributor to the SharePoint discussion on his Web site, ArnoldIT.com. He has also found that the most satisfied SharePoint users are those who customize and make the most of their implementation. If that means holding on to some favorite features with a little bit of creativity, then that is an added bonus.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 7, 2014
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