Big Changes in Store for SharePoint 2013
March 14, 2014
Microsoft is rolling out some big changes for Office 365. Most users won’t be surprised, as it is in response to frequent user requests, but social aspects will be front and center. Read more in the ZDNet article, “Microsoft to Integrate New Social, Machine Learning Technologies into Office 365.”
The article begins:
“Microsoft is about to make some big changes as to how Office 365 looks and works. At the company’s SharePoint 2014 conference . . . executives will preview some of these coming changes — specifically ones involving social and machine-learning technologies that Microsoft is baking into its cloud suite of Office apps. Once these technologies begin rolling out later this year, the lines between Exchange, SharePoint and Yammer will be blurred, and social collaboration will become more of a centerpiece of the more tightly-integrated suite.”
The conference concluded last week and the headlines are starting to roll out with announcements of what users can expect from Service Pack 1. Stephen E. Arnold has been following the news closely, and continues to report on SharePoint through his Web site, ArnoldIT.com. As a longtime leader in search, Arnold has seen SharePoint evolve and grow, but customization and training tend to be the two consistent components that make SharePoint work for an organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 14, 2014
Google: Cracks in the Facade
March 13, 2014
In The Google Legacy (now out of print), I identified some weaknesses that would signal the decline of Google. One of the points I made concerned the working relationship of the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I wrote in 2004 that management at Google was a challenge for Messrs. Brin and Page. I pointed out:
Whether one embraces the Greek tragic flaw or cuddles next to the Seven Deadly Sins, Google has an ego problem. Messrs. Brin and Page make clear that Google is a smart operation, maybe the smartest company ever. Too much ego can work like insect killer on picnic ants. (Source: The Google Legacy, page 11)
A decade after I wrote these words, I read “O.K., Glass: Make Google Eyes.” In that article about the quite personal affairs of Mr. Brin, I spotted this passage:
News of the Wojcicki-Brin split finally broke on August 28, quickly followed by online speculation about Brin’s relationship with Rosenberg. “It was inappropriate,” says the source close to the situation, of the relationship. “Larry is so ethically strict. . . . I heard Larry was insanely upset by this whole situation and wasn’t talking to Sergey” for a time. [Emphasis added]
If the statement is accurate, has the team of Larry Page and Sergey Brin taken the first step down different paths? How do the investments in medical and health technology factor in to the Google product portfolio? What’s more important the DNA and synthetic biology initiative or equipping doctors with Google Glass to read QR codes of patients?
Worth watching.
Stephen E Arnold, March 13, 2014
How to Download Dassault’s White Paper on Cloudview Master Data Management
March 13, 2014
The update on Business & Decisions titled White Paper: EXALEAD Cloudview Master Data Management offers a download of a paper on master data management. In order to download the white paper, you must register, send a comment and return to the download page. At this point you will be able to download the white paper. The paper offers such information as an introduction to master data management (MDM), how to improve MDM with EXELEAD Cloudview, how to hasten processes and generate results quickly. Cloudview enables a business to “democrative” their master data usage by making it available to users and applications outside of the organization. There is even information on how to be cost-effective and avoid MDM when dealing with limited data volumes. However your business is using Cloudview, this white paper will be helpful. The article explains,
“To download your copy, please click the download button on the right to submit your information. Once the form is completed and submitted, you may click the button once more to download your document.”
Registration seems like a small price to pay for Dassault Exaleads offer of a white paper about master data management. Just register and learn how search at Dassault has morphed in a quest for sales traction.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 13, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Future of Big Data in the Classroom and Beyond
March 13, 2014
The Harvard Magazine article Why “Big Data” Is a Big Deal cheers for big data and lexalytics. The lengthy article touches on many of the details of big data. Harvard is noticing a thirst for big data and data analysis in almost every field from government to sociology to social sciences. The article noted that it is troubling that big data is not being shared among these fields, for legitimate reasons like privacy, and less legitimate reasons like vanity among academics. On top of this, businesses now own more big data than academia does, and they certainly aren’t sharing. The article gets into many of the current uses of big data,
“In the public realm, there are all kinds of applications: allocating police resources by predicting where and when crimes are most likely to occur; finding associations between air quality and health; or using genomic analysis to speed the breeding of crops like rice for drought resistance.”
These uses are exciting and innovative. The article also explains that given all of these areas of usefulness, big data must be brought into the “foundational courses for all undergraduates.” Teaching undergrads how to work with big data might solve one of the large pitfalls that the article pinpoints. When you are looking through such huge swaths of data, the possibility for false correlations is magnified. Bringing data analytics into the core of undergraduate studies might help prevent the misuse of data. Overall the article is a celebration of how big data is being used to help real people all over the world.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 13, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Facts About Endeca Guided Search
March 13, 2014
The article (and videos) titled Oracle Endeca Guided Search: Superior Search System For Your Website on the Four Cornerstone Blog will most likely convince any doubters that Endeca is right for your search needs. Endeca’s “guided navigation context” allows users refine their search. Search results are narrowed by categories, and organized within those categories (such as price range, ratings etc.) This prevents users from getting too many results or too few. Other perks included in the article,
“You can also use Oracle Endeca Guided Search with Oracle Endeca Experience Manager. This way, you can get control over the littlest details that are related to customer experience. This also allows you to get better content targeting and search personalization when using dynamic pages. Lastly, you can use Oracle Endeca for Mobile and Oracle Endeca for Social so that your customers have the same search experience no matter where they are.”
If this does not convince you, watch the Endeca Extensions for E-Business Suite “The moving parts” which showcases and the “simplicity of the integration” and Leveraging Your Existing OBI Investment with OEID v3.1, which explains how “IT organizations can quickly tap into their existing OBI repositories to jump start the provisioning of their own Endeca discovery applications.” Once you have read the article and seen the above Youtube videos you will most likely lose interest in open source options.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 13, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Analytics Improves SharePoint Experience
March 13, 2014
Microsoft partners are responsible for SharePoint add-ons that increase usability and efficiency for users. Webtrends is one such partner that offers an Analytics for SharePoint solution. Broadway World covers their latest announcement in the article, “Employee Adoption for SharePoint Soars With Webtrends Analytics.”
The article begins:
“Webtrends, a Microsoft-preferred partner for SharePoint analytics, today announced a 64% year-over-year increase in customer bookings for its Analytics for SharePoint business . . . Leveraging deep analytics expertise and use cases from customers like BrightStarr and Siemens, Webtrends highlights key insights and successes, including a preview of an analytics for Yammer solution, during the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, NV on March 3-6.”
Stephen E. Arnold has a lot to say about SharePoint from his platform, ArnoldIT.com. As a longtime search expert, Arnold knows that SharePoint’s success hinges on customization and add-ons, which allow an organization to take this overwhelming solution and make it work for them.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 13, 2014
HP: Deconstructing IDOL
March 12, 2014
Michael Lynch did what no other founder of a search-and-retrieval company was able to achieve. He operated a company that grew from a couple of government contracts into an $800 million plus giant in 15 years.
My analyses of the pre-Hewlett Packard Autonomy emphasize several facets of Mr. Lynch’s achievement. Competitors were not able to match Autonomy’s marketing. Whether it was the “Portal in a Box” or the augmented reality system Aurasma, competitors had to catch up with Mr. Lynch’s products, features, and benefits. As other search vendors played musical CEOs, Autonomy built a stable senior management team. With each change in leadership, competitors lost time with reorganizations and relearning. Autonomy’s management capabilities have been ignored. Mr. Lynch figured out that growth from search required acquisitions. Once the financing was in place, Autonomy gobbled up companies and its revenues soared.
Companies like Fast Search & Transfer and Endeca labored to close the revenue and marketing gap with Autonomy. Both failed. Fast Search resorted to accounting tricks, and Microsoft has been “investing” in Fast Search technology to make it fit with today’s enterprise. Endeca hit a glass ceiling at about $140 million in annual revenue despite evangelists, fancy MBAs, and a clever partnering method. Oracle is marketing Endeca as a business intelligence system and eCommerce system, not a search system. Other companies with promise just failed. These include Convera, Delphes, and Entopia. TeraText retreated to the government sector. IBM abandoned its in house search technology and just adopted Lucene, an open source toolkit. Other vendors remained essentially invisible like Albert, dtSearch, Lextek, and EPI Thunderstone, among others. Exalead disappeared into an engineering firm that is struggling with its core business.
Autonomy, like it or not, emerged after 15 years as the major brand in search, content processing, and a number of closely related fields.
Despite the changes in the search sector and in Autonomy’s technology line up, Autonomy delivered one product—IDOL, the integrated data operating layer, and its DRE, the digital reasoning engine. One product name persisted for 15 years. One technology, the DRE, powered the famous “black box” at the heart of every autonomy product or service when developed in house or acquired. Once Autonomy bought a company, it IDOLized the product or service.
I read “HP Breaks Autonomy IDOL into Discrete Services.” The write up smacks of the “real journalism” from the azure chip outfit IDC. The story reported in cheerleader fashion:
The service will expose most of the IDOL features as discrete services, accessible through APIs (application programming interfaces). HP is hoping that enterprise developers use the service to embed IDOL functionality into their own applications.
At first glance, this is no big deal. Exalead was moving in this direction before it was purchased by Dassault. Elasticsearch offers a compelling open source and lower cost alternative as well.
In my view, HP has a big job ahead of it. The company has to generate enough revenue from Autonomy licenses to pay back its purchase price, now deeply discounted to several billion dollars. Considering that it took Autonomy 15 years to nose toward $900 million, the HP sales professionals have to get in gear. After all, HP needs to turn Autonomy into a net producer of revenue and profit.
In addition, HP has to make certain that its deconstruction of IDOL does not lose the famous Autonomy magic. Without magic, I am not confident that 1996 technology can cope with the challenges of today’s information processing needs. (Google is also a late 1990s company faced with similar problems of ageing technology and concepts.) Good enough search is available from open source repositories. Lower cost options are available from upstarts like Elasticsearch and Searchdaimon. Once the magic is gone, magic is tough to recapture.
HP has to find a way to make Autonomy’s services usable to those customers who want to download and app and have it work. Autonomy reaches back to the 1990s. Today’s information technology professionals are into a different type of computing experience. Of course, there are organizations that have the money, time, and appetite to tackle Bayesian methods infused with Monte Carlo and Markov Chain methods, seasoned with Laplacian techniques. My hunch is that complexity has the potential to add friction to the chopped up mini-IDOLs and DREs.
Net net: HP has to find a way to make big money flow in a market which is coveted by IBM Watson, Microsoft, and numerous other vendors.
Would Michael Lynch have chopped up IDOL? I don’t think he will be available to answer this question. The squabble about HP’s purchase price generate considerable noise at a time when HP needs focus, clarity, and numerous sales.
Worth watching.
Stephen E Arnold, March 12, 2014
Thiess and IBM Work Together to Improve Thiess’s Efficiency
March 12, 2014
The article titled IBM and Thiess Collaborate on Predictive Analytics and Modeling Technologies on Mining-Technology.com explores the partnership of IBM and Thiess, an Australian construction, mining and service provider. The collaboration is centered on both predictive analytics in regards to maintenance and replacement information as well as early detection of malfunctions. The article states,
“Thiess Australian mining executive general manager Michael Wright said the analytics and modeling can offer great opportunities to improve business of the company. “Working with IBM to build a platform that feeds the models with the data we collect and then presents decision support information to our team in the field will allow us to increase machine reliability, lower energy costs and emissions, and improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of our business,” Wright said.”
This is another big IBM bet. The collaboration will start with Thiess’s mining haul trucks and excavators. Models will be constructed around such information as inspection history of the equipment, weather conditions and payload size. These models will then be used to help make more informed decisions about operational performance, and will allow for early detection of anomalies as well as predictions about when a piece of equipment will require a replaced part. This will in turn allow Thiess to plan productions more accurately around the predicted health of a given machine.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 12, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Tableau Finds Success Since Going Public Last Year
March 12, 2014
Investment site the Street is very enthused about Tableau Software, which went public less than a year ago. In fact, they go so far as to announce that “Tableau’s Building the ‘Google for Data’.” In this piece, writer Andrea Tse interviews Tableau CEO Christian Chabot. In her introduction, Tse notes that nearly a third of the company’s staff is in R&D—a good sign for future growth. She also sees the direction of Tableau’s research as a wise. The article explains:
“The research and development team has been heavily focused on developing technology that’s free of skillset constraints, utilizable by everyone. This direction has been driven by the broad, corporate cultural shift to employee-centric, online-accessible data analytics, from the more traditional, hierarchical or top-down approach toward data analysis and dissemination.
“Tableau 9 and Tableau 10 that are in the product pipeline and soon-to-be-shipped Tableau 8.2 are designed to highlight ‘storytelling’ or visually striking data presentation.
“Well-positioned to ride the big data wave, Tableau shares, as of Tuesday’s [February 11] intraday high of $95, are now trading over 206% above its initial public offering price of $31 set on May 16.”
In the interview, Chabot shares his company’s research philosophy, touches on some recent large deals, and takes a gander at what’s is ahead. For example, his developers are currently working hard on a user-friendly mobile platform. See the article for details. Founded in 2003 and located in Seattle, Tableau Software grew from a project begun at Stanford University. Their priority is to help ordinary people use data to solve problems quickly and easily.
Cynthia Murrell, March 12, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Tumblr Firehose Now Integrated into Pulsar Platform
March 12, 2014
The social media specialists at Pulsar have incorporated Tumblr’s Firehose data sluice into their platform, we learn from their blog post, “Introducing Tumblr Firehose Data on the Pulsar Platform and a Whole New Interface for Mining Visual Content.” Writer Cierra Buck tells us that access to all of that Tumblr data, real-time and historic, has been integrated into their revamped dashboard. Though many types of data pass through Firehose, most of it is visual. This means Pulsar had to make a few changes. The write-up specifies:
“Working with a platform like Tumblr where 84% of the content is visual, we also realised that researching it meant designing a whole new interface which would allow visual mining. The first step we are taking to support visual mining is re-designing the Results and Conversation Views. This allows Pulsar to display the actual image and video content rather than a preview end enabling endless scrolling rather than organising the content in pages. This allows for easy browsing of rich media social content which, coupled with advanced filtering using all the metadata we generate, is going to give you a powerful mining tool to uncover visual patterns and trends in your dataset. To start with, Pulsar now displays the actual images and video content in the Results View.”
See the post for more details and some screenshots. Boasting a decade of social-data experience, Pulsar counts big names like NBC, Lysol, and ING Direct among its clients. The company maintains offices in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Cynthia Murrell, March 12, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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