A New Angle on Personalization
November 21, 2011
Web site personalization is a broad category with a variety of facets. Should you personalize? How? CMS Wire tackles this issue in “CXM Practices: Beneficial Personalization.”
Pete Iuvara weighs in:
I have seen this firsthand, the tremendous amount of benefits to personalizing content for your website’s audience. I am a firm believer in embracing a customer-centric implementation. It adds time-saving and relevant-first value for your website’s visitors . . . The key here is being transparent. Your visitors should know that personalization has been implemented in the hopes to benefit their experience first and foremost.
We have found that a user’s web site experience is greatly improved by the implementation of effective search. No matter how attractive a web site, if the search function does not allow the user to quickly remedy a query, the web site is essentially worthless. But personalization options, especially for search, can be costly and clunky. One option that we like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze and their InSite solution.
An attractive website is a company’s digital business card; its shop window. Surprise your website visitors with an intuitive search. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite is instantly ready for use as a Cloud service. It turns your website into a user-friendly knowledge portal for your customers. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite recognizes correlations and links through semantic and dynamic search processes. This delivers pinpoint accurate and precise ‘finding experiences.’
It’s hard to imagine an organization’s web site being any more essential to their overall image. It is often the first “stop” a potential customer makes when learning more about a company. Personalize your web space in a smart way, and take advantage of smart solutions like Fabasoft Mindbreeze to improve the overall user experience for your patrons.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Open Search Server
June 14, 2011
TechWorld’s “Open Search Server Releases New Developer Preview” offers details on a preview of a new Apache Lucene-based search system.
Written in Java, the article reports that:
Open Search Server can crawl file systems, databases and websites” and supports a wide variety of document formats. The preview includes “a new screenshot feature that captures screenshots of the Web pages being crawled, similar to the preview feature of a big name public search engine.
The open software offers companies independence in developing their information management strategies. In the “Cloud” era, these strategies – how users will be able to search and retrieve documents – will become strategic.
If you are tracking open source search vendors, add this one to your list.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Nuxeo and the Google Search Appliance
April 28, 2011
I saw a brief news item about the integration of the open source content management system with the Google Search Appliance. Nuxeo already hooks into Lotus Notes and a number of other enterprise applications. The cheery “Great News…Nuxeo Integration with Google Search Appliance” points out:
Nuxeo’s recently announced Google Search Appliance (GSA) connector is an important component for any enterprise indexing and search strategy. Nuxeo content is actively indexed and can be searched using the familiar Google search page. Of course, to access Nuxeo content you still to login and you must have appropriate rights. And because the Nuxeo connector is open source, it can always be customized to meet your specific requirements!
My reaction to this announcement was a question about the cost of scaling a GSA search solution. I covered some of Google’s publicly posted pricing data for its GB 7007 and GB 9009 devices. The article appeared in ETM, a publication of ISIGlobal.com. (This was a for fee column, so you will have to chase down the hard copy of the publication or contact ISIGlobal.com.) I had a couple of comments about the cost of the GSA, particularly when an organization has to upgrade to handle tens of millions of documents.
My reaction is that organizations considering the GSA will want to make certain about the document count and then get written price quotations for the appropriate GSA AND the cost of scaling that Google Search Appliance as the volume of content increases.
The savings from an open source CMS could be consumed by a GSA upgrade unless the licensee does his or her homework.
Stephen E Arnold, April 28, 2011
Freebie unlike the GSA
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Search Appliance
November 19, 2010
Austria’s Fabasoft Mindbreeze – a Microsoft centric development and integration vendor — has rolled out an appliance that offers users the opportunity to customize their configuration in order to meet the specific needs of the organization.
This Appliance combines hardware with specialized software to create a highly efficient search platform. In their blog post “Three Configurations for Dynamic Scalability and Deployment” (http://blog.mindbreeze.com/blog-en/-/blogs/three-configurations-for-dynamic-scalability-and-deployment) Fabasoft Mindbreeze outlines the various ways their Appliance can be used. The first level is a single Appliance, for small-scale enterprise environments; the second level involves adding additional Appliances and utilizing automatic data partitioning; and the third level involves multiple Appliances and index replication. It remains to be seen whether this type of set-up will be seen as beneficial by end users.
Many companies are offering appliances and the market is getting crowded. Some vendors, such as Exalead have moved towards cloud alternatives. The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance will have to compete with EPI Thunderstone, Index Engines, and the Google Search Appliance and prove that this Appliance performs where others can’t.
Laura Amos, November 19, 2010
Freebie
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
