Intranet Connections and Super Search Version 13
April 2, 2015
I read “Maximize Productivity with Super Search from Intranet Connections (Version 13.0 Release).”
For decades I have been gathering information about enterprise search and content processing. The name of the company was not familiar to me. The assertions in the news article were, however.
Puzzled, I went through my archive of search vendor information and did not find content about Intranet Connections. I noted the date on this article and wondered if the company were an April Fool’s spoof. I know I am getting on in years, but when I wake up and plop in front of my primitive, coal-fired computer, my memory works reasonably well. I know my name and the day of the week.
The write touts an enterprise search system that includes:
- New Search Engine
- Preview Display Cards
- Intuitive Search Filters
- Advanced Search Options
- Controlled Search Security.
I know from the years of experience I have logged examining, testing, and creating search and content processing systems like the one we sold to the long ago Lycos, that “new” is a slippery concept. For some folks, learning about Google’s site operator is a new thing. For others it is a reminder of the many useful search functions that Google no longer exposes to the ad consumers looking for objective information via Google.com.
I am not sure how often a search system innovates across 13 versions. Intranet Connections seems to have been founded in 1999, which makes the company 16 years young. Most of the long lived search engines don’t change too much from the original core; for example, Autonomy IDOL. On the other hand, other companies just discard a search system and graft in open source Lucene and slap on the “new” label. Others take inspiration from Fast Search and call it new.
The company states on its LinkedIn page here:
Intranet Connections is a business intranet software solution that enables organizations to connect, collaborate and create more efficiently yielding significant time-cost savings and stronger employee engagement. We combine key business tools to automate workflows and processes, while delivering improved communication and collaboration among employees to engage and promote culture within the digital workplace.
How new is Version 13 of a search system. I learned from the write up:
“Enterprise intranet search functionality is proving to be more critical than ever as today’s mature intranets face thousands of data entries, pages, forms, and uploaded corporate documents and policies. Employees’ expectations are higher than ever to deliver on an intranet search utility that is fast, focused, intelligent and super simple. We wanted to introduce intranet search that is not just functional but an entire experience.” Douglas also reports that Super Search was a result of close collaboration with Intranet Connections’ customers who were active in feedback for the design and feature set capabilities, ensuring the product release would enhance their needs for enterprise intranet search.
And adds that it can deliver software capable of “triggering emotions on the Intranet using Intranet design such as theme, videos, and photos.” Furthermore, the system seems to be able to marry an “Intranet and an enterprise social network.”
These are significant assertions.
Okay, that sounds great but we are in Version 13, not Version 1.1. The new version was announced in August 2014. In “Intranet Search Designed for Maximum Productivity” I learned:
The first thing customers will notice is the completely redesigned user interface. It is really geared towards making search simple and fast as possible for the average user. We also introduced “one-click filtering”. If a user knows they are looking for a document, a form, or a person, they have the option to filter their results with a single click. This automatically removes search results that aren’t in the specified category. More advanced search options are available for power users, but are hidden by default. These users can choose to filter their results by specific sites, application, modified date, author, or tags. We also introduced the content of feature cards. Most of the time, users can determine if a search result is what they are looking for by the title, category, or short description. However, if there are multiple documents that are similar, a little bit more information may be necessary. Instead of requiring the user to click into the item to view more details, and navigate away from search, we introduced the concept of a feature card. Additional summary information for a search result can be displayed within the search screen, preventing the need to jump back and forth from search and content.
Intrigued by my Overflight systems lack of information about Super Search, I visited the company’s Web site. I learned that the system begins at $15,000, which strikes me as a bargain. Low cost search systems often face significant financial demands as the company struggles to keep pace with the needs of customers, support demands, and the inevitable tweaks that are needed to deal with the wild and crazy nature of behind-the-firewall content.
At www.IntranetConnections.com I learned that the company makes “Intranet software made for you.” I assume that means me. I do have a 2.5 million test corpus which has been known to take days of indexing. One German company promised speedy performance, and I had to leave the system on for five days before I could run a test query. The initial crawl failed because this particularly German, Lucene based system choked on Microsoft’s file locks. Yep, every Microsoft system has these types of files. I wondered, “Yo, why not provide some tools to deal with this like a !readme.txt file.”
Back to Intranet Connections.
The company delivers what I think of as a one-stop, 7-11 solution. The Web site highlights a people directory, forms, document management, Intranet Web sites, but not search. After I scrolled through information about the corporate Intranet, the finance Intranet, and the healthcare Intranet. But no direct link to Super Search.
I used my tools to examine the site and located a blog post about Super Search in an article labeled “Super Search Launch [sic] Scavenger Hunt.” There was a phrase about Super Search, “And much more”. But there was no link. I did locate a link to a story with the title “Super Search (V13.0) dated January 27, 2015. That page did provide links to a feature guide, a support page, a webinar recording (Does anyone have webinar fatigue as I do?) and a recursive link to the blog. There is also a link to the installation guide. The guide is 300 words long and helpful provides me with a user name and password. The guide also makes clear that I need to be deep into the Microsoft world. Mac and Linux users do not seem to be encouraged. Unlike the German outfit, Intranet Connections provides a link to information necessary to get the search engine working.
It appears that the company offers an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. The firm, based in Vancouver, has 1,600 customers. Some have a high profile like NASA and the Mayo Clinics. My hunch is that the company has assembled / developed a suite of software. Search is included.
Other observations:
- I struggled with the “new” concept. I mean after 13 years, how “new” is “new.”
- I had to do some poking around to get access to the fact sheet and basic information
- The pricing of $15,000 seems to apply to the full collection of software available from the company
- I have yet to figure out how I managed to know zero about a company with a search system named “super.”
I need to improve my enterprise search information collection. Some help from vendors with more comprehensive and easy-to-find information would be helpful.
Stephen E Arnold, April 2, 2015
New UltraSearch Version Available for Free Download
April 1, 2015
Anyone who has researched alternatives to Window’s built-in Desktop Search has probably read about the freeware program UltraSearch. Now, MajorGeeks.com offers a free download of the latest version, UltrasearchPortable 2.0.3. The description specifies:
“UltraSearch finds files and folders on local NTFS drives and provides the results in just a few seconds.UltraSearch does not maintain an index which is stored on your hard disk, but achieves its speed by working directly on the Master File Table (MFT) of the NTFS partitions. UltraSearch even identifies NTFShardlinks. Simply enter a file name or a pattern like *.exe and see the first results while you are still typing. In addition, UltraSearch supports regular expressions. Additional information like file size and file dates (last changes, last access and file creation) will be shown for all listed files. Naturally, the Explorer context menu is available inside UltraSearch. UltraSearch enables you to exclude folders, files or file types from searches via an exclude filter. The search results can be sorted according to different criteria, printed or exported as text, RTF, HTML, CSV, and Excel file.”
UltraSearch can be started from within a Windows Explorer directory. It also allows users to store the 100 most recently used search patterns for later reference, and includes an autocomplete function and pattern suggestions.
Keep in mind, though, that UltraSearch is not your only Windows Desktop Search alternative. Some others include Sow Soft’s Effective File Search, Gaviri Pocket Search,Snowbird, ,FileSearchEX, Super Finder XT, Locate32, Search Everything, and Launchy. There’s plenty to check out for the comparative shopper.
Cynthia Murrell, April 1, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
A Little Lucene History
March 26, 2015
Instead of venturing to Wikipedia to learn about Lucene’s history, visit the Parse.ly blog and read the post, “Lucene: The Good Parts.” After detailing how Doug Cutting created Lucene in 1999, the post describes how searching through SQL in the early 2000s was a huge task. SQL databases are not the best when it comes to unstructured search, so developers installed Lucene to make SQL document search more reliable. What is interesting is how much it has been adopted:
“At the time, Solr and Elasticsearch didn’t yet exist. Solr would be released in one year by the team at CNET. With that release would come a very important application of Lucene: faceted search. Elasticsearch would take another 5 years to be released. With its recent releases, it has brought another important application of Lucene to the world: aggregations. Over the last decade, the Solr and Elasticsearch packages have brought Lucene to a much wider community. Solr and Elasticsearch are now being considered alongside data stores like MongoDB and Cassandra, and people are genuinely confused by the differences.”
If you need a refresher or a brief overview of how Lucene works, related jargon, tips for using in big data projects, and a few more tricks. Lucene might just be a java library, but it makes using databases much easier. We have said for a while, information is only useful if you can find it easily. Lucene made information search and retrieval much simpler and accurate. It set the grounds for the current big data boom.
Whitney Grace, March 26, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Elasticsearch Becomes Elastic, Acquires Found
March 25, 2015
The article on Forbes.com titled Elasticsearch Changes Its Name, Enjoys An Amazing Open Source Ride and Hopes to Avoid Mistakes explains the latest acquisition and the reasons behind the name change to simply Elastic. That choice is surmised to be due to Elastic’s wish to avoid confusion over the open source product Elasticsearch and the company itself. It also signals the company’s movement beyond solely providing search technology. The article also discusses the acquisition of Found, a Norwegian company,
“Found provides hosted and fully managed Elasticsearch clusters with technology that automates processes such as installation, configuration, maintenance, backup, and highavailability. Doing all of this heavy-lifting enables developers to integrate a search engine into their database, website or app quickly In addition, Found has created a turnkey process to scale Elasticsearch clusters up or down at any time and without any downtime. Found’s Elasticsearch as a Service offering is being used by companies like Docker, Gild… and the New York Public Library.”
Elasticsearch has raised almost $105 million since its start after being created by Shay Banon in 2010. The article posits that they have been doing the right things so far, such as the acquisition of Kibana, the visualization vendor. Although some startups relying on Elasticsearch may throw shade at the Found acquisition, there are no foreseeable threats to Elastic’s future.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 25, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Cable and Enterprise Search: The Problem of “Peak”
March 22, 2015
I read “Peak Cable.” More people think about television than enterprise search in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. After reading this write up, I scanned the passages I highlighted in pale pink. Here’s a favorite:
Disruption theory suggests that once a product over-serves on meaningful bases of value creation (and underserves on value) it opens the door to disruption.
Lucene/Solr have become the go to search systems for many companies. IBM, for example, gussies up Lucene and hypes Watson. Next generation information access vendors use Lucene as a “good enough” keyword search system. And start ups find that open source search, data management, and analytics are suitable for their purposes. Spare money is used for slick interfaces and, truth be told, Uber rides.
Here’s another passage I found interesting:
The same phenomenon occurred with mobile vs. fixed telephony. For several years it seemed that mobile was sustaining to fixed or that fixed was immune due to lock-ins. The fixed telephone incumbents insisted that the data was inconclusive. Then the trickle of abandonment turned into a deluge. The quality of service for mobile kept increasing and, with data, it became clear that the mobile devices could unleash unfathomable functionality and value. And so it goes. A business dies first slowly then quickly. The exact timing is tricky because of the non-linearity of the phenomenon. It’s also hard to declare end-of-life since business zombies are very common. What is clear however is that the economics will change dramatically and the alliances between talent and distribution will shift to entrants and away from incumbents.
Has enterprise search passed its “peak”? If so, cable providers in the US might look at the enterprise search market for a glimpse of its future.
Stephen E Arnold, March 22, 2015
Enterprise Search Is Important: But Vendor Survey Fails to Make Its Case
March 20, 2015
I read “Concept Searching Survey Shows Enterprise Search Rises in the Ranks of Strategic Applications.” Over the years, I have watched enterprise search vendors impale themselves on their swords. In a few instances, licensees of search technology loosed legal eagles to beat the vendors to the ground. Let me highlight a few of the milestones in enterprise search before commenting on this “survey says, it must be true” news release.
A Simple Question?
What do these companies have in common?
- Autonomy
- Convera
- Fast Search & Transfer?
I know from my decades of work in the information retrieval sector that financial doubts plagued these firms. Autonomy, as you know, is the focal point of on-going litigation over accounting methods, revenue, and its purchase price. Like many high-tech companies, Autonomy achieved significant revenues and caused some financial firms to wonder how Autonomy achieved its hundreds of millions in revenue. There was a report from Cazenove Capital I saw years ago, and it contained analyses that suggested search was not the money machine for the company.
And Convera? After morphing from Excalibur with its acquisition of the manual-indexing ConQuest Technologies, a document scanning with some brute force searching technology morphed into Convera. Convera suggested that it could perform indexing magic on text and video. Intel dived in and so did the NBA. These two deals did not work out and the company fell on hard times. With an investment from Allen & Company, Conquest tried its hand at Web indexing. Finally, stakeholders lost faith and Convera sold off its government sales and folded its tent. (Some of the principals cooked up another search company. This time the former Convera wizards got into the consulting engineering business.) Convera lives on in a sense as part of the Ntent system. Convera lost some money along the way. Lots of money as I recall.
And Fast Search? Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for Fast Search. Now the 1998 technology lives on within Microsoft SharePoint. But Fast Search has the unique distinction of facing both a financial investigation for fancy dancing with its profit and loss statement and the distinction of having its founder facing a jail term. Fast Search ran into trouble when its marketers promised magic from the ESP system. When the pixie dust caused licensees to develop an allergic reaction, Fast ran into trouble. The scrambling caused some managers to flee the floundering Norwegian search ship and found another search company. For those who struggle with Fast Search in its present guise, you understand the issues created by Fast Search’s “sell it today and program it tomorrow” approach.
Is There a Lesson in These Vendors’ Trajectories?
What do these three examples tell us? High flying enterprise search vendors seem to have run into some difficulties. Not surprisingly, the customers of these companies are often wary of enterprise search. Perhaps that is the reason so many enterprise search vendors do not use the words “enterprise search”, preferring euphemisms like customer support, business intelligence, and knowledge management?
The Rush to Sell Out before Drowning in Red Ink
Now a sidelight. Before open source search effectively became the go to keyword search system, there were vendors who had products that for the most part worked when installed to do basic information retrieval. These companies’ executives worked overtime to find buyers. The founders cashed out and left the new owners to figure out how to make sales, pay for research, and generate sufficient revenue to get the purchase price back. Which companies are these? Here’s a short list and incomplete list to help jog your memory:
- Artificial Linguistics (sold to Oracle)
- BRS Search (sold to OpenText)
- EasyAsk (first to Progress Software and then to an individual investor)
- Endeca to Oracle
- Enginium (sold to Kroll and now out of business)
- Exalead to Dassault
- Fulcrum Technology to IBM (quite a story. See the Fulcrum profile at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles)
- InQuira to Oracle
- Information Dimensions (sold to OpenText)
- Innerprise (Microsoft centric, sold to GoDaddy)
- iPhrase to IBM (iPhrase was a variant of Teratext’s approach)
- ISYS Search Software to Lexmark (yes, a printer company)
- RightNow to Oracle (RightNow acquired Dutch technology for its search function)
- Schemalogic to Smartlogic
- Stratify/Purple Yogi (sold to Iron Mountain and then to Autonomy)
- Teratext to SAIC, now Leidos
- TripleHop to Oracle
- Verity to Autonomy and then HP bought Autonomy
- Vivisimo to IBM (how clustering and metasearch magically became a Big Data system from the company that “invented” Watson) .
The brand impact of these acquired search vendors is dwindling. The only “name” on the list which seems to have some market traction is Endeca.
Some outfits just did not make it or who are in a very quiet, almost dormant, mode. Consider these search vendors:
- Delphes (academic thinkers with linguistic leanings)
- Edgee
- Dieselpoint (structured data search)
- DR LINK (Syracuse University and an investment bank)
- Executive Search (not a headhunting outfit, an enterprise search outfit)
- Grokker
- Intrafind
- Kartoo
- Lextek International
- Maxxcat
- Mondosoft
- Pertimm (reincarnated with Axel Springer (Macmillan) money as Qwant, which according to Eric Schmidt, is a threat to Google. Yeah, right.)
- Siderean Software (semantic search)
- Speed of Mind
- Suggest (Weitkämper Technology)?
- Thunderstone
These are not a comprehensive list. I just wanted to layout some facts about vendors who tilted at the enterprise search windmill. I think that a reasonable person might conclude that enterprise search has been a tough sell. Of the companies that developed a brand, none was able to achieve sustainable revenues. The information highway is littered with the remains of vendors who pitched enterprise search as the killer app for anything to do with information.
Now the survey purports to reveal insights to which I have been insensitive in my decades of work in digital information access.
Here’s what the company sponsoring the survey offers:
Concept Searching [the survey promulgator], the global leader in semantic metadata generation, auto-classification, and taxonomy management software, and developer of the Smart Content Framework™, is compiling the statistics from its 2015 SharePoint and Office 365 Metadata survey, currently unpublished. One of the findings, gathered from over 360 responses, indicates a renewed focus on improving enterprise search.
The focus seems to be on SharePoint. I thought SharePoint was a mishmash of content management, collaboration, and contacts along with documents created by the fortunate SharePoint users. Question: Is enterprise search conflated with SharePoint?
I would not make this connection.
If I understand this, the survey makes clear that some of the companies in the “sample” (method of selection not revealed) want better search. I want better information access, not search per se.
Each day I have dozens of software applications which require information access activity. I also have a number of “enterprise” search systems available to me. Nevertheless, the finding suggests to me that enterprise search is and has not been particularly good. If I put on my SharePoint sunglasses, I see a glint of the notion that SharePoint search is not very good. The dying sparks of Fast Search technology smoldering in fire at Camp DontWorkGud.
Images, videos, and audio content present me with a challenge. Enterprise search and metatagging systems struggle to deal with these content types. I also get odd ball file formats; for example, Framemaker, Quark, and AS/400 DB2 UDB files.
The survey points out that the problem with enterprise search is that indexing is not very good. That may be an understatement. But the remedy is not just indexing, is it?
After reading the news release, I formed the opinion that the fix is to use the type of system available from the survey sponsor Concept Searching. Is that a coincidence?
Frankly, I think the problems with search are more severe than bad indexing, whether performed by humans or traditional “smart” software.
According the news release, my view is not congruent with the survey or the implications of the survey data:
A new focus on enterprise search can be viewed as a step forward in the management and use of unstructured content. Organizations are realizing that the issue isn’t going to go away and is now impacting applications such as records management, security, and litigation support. This translates into real business currency and increases the risk of non-compliance and security breaches. You can’t find, protect, or use what you don’t know exists. For those organizations that are using, or intend to deploy, a hybrid environment, the challenges of leveraging metadata across the entire enterprise can be daunting, without the appropriate technology to automate tagging.
Real business currency. Is that money?
Are system administrators still indexing human resource personnel records, in process legal documents related to litigation, data from research tests and trials in an enterprise search system? I thought a more fine-grained approach to indexing was appropriate. If an organization has a certain type of government work, knowledge of that work can only be made available to those with a need to know. Is indiscriminate and uncontrolled indexing in line with a “need to know” approach?
Information access has a bright future. Open source technology such as Lucene/Solar/Searchdaimon/SphinxSearch, et al is a reasonable approach to keyword functionality.
Value-added content processing is also important but not as an add on. I think that the type of functionality available from BAE, Haystax, Leidos, and Raytheon is more along the lines of the type of indexing, metatagging, and coding I need. The metatagging is integrated into a more modern system and architecture.
For instance, I want to map geo-coordinates in the manner of Geofeedia to each item of data. I also want context. I need an entity (Barrerra) mapped to an image integrated with social media. And, for me, predictive analytics are essential. If I have the name of an individual, I want that name and its variants. I want the content to be multi-language.
I want what next generation information access systems deliver. I don’t want indexing and basic metatagging. There is a reason for Google’s investing in Recorded Future, isn’t there?
The future of buggy whip enterprise search is probably less of a “strategic application” and more of a utility. Microsoft may make money from SharePoint. But for certain types of work, SharePoint is a bit like Windows 3.11. I want a system that solves problems, not one that spawns new challenges on a daily basis.
Enterprise search vendors have been delivering so-so, flawed, and problematic functionality for 40 years. After decades of vendor effort to make information findable in an organization, has significant progress been made. DARPA doesn’t think search is very good. The agency is seeking better methods of information access.
What I see when I review the landscape of enterprise search is that today’s “leaders” (Attivio, BA Insight, Coveo, dtSearch, Exorbyte, among others) remind me of the buggy whip makers driving a Model T to lecture farmers that their future depends on the horse as the motive power for their tractor.
Enterprise search is a digital horse, an one that is approaching break down.
Enterprise search is a utility within more feature rich, mission critical systems. For a list of 20 companies delivering NGIA with integrated content processing, check out www.xenky.com/cyberosint.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2015
Enterprise Search: Messages Confuse, Confound
March 19, 2015
I review a couple of times a week a free digital “newspaper” called Paper.li. I learned about this Paper.li “newspaper” When Vivisimo sent me its version of “search news.” The enterprise search newspaper I receive is assembled under the firm hand of Edwin Stauthamer. The stories are automatically assembled into “The Enterprise Search Daily.”
The publication includes a wide range of information. The referrer’s name appears with each article. The title page for the March 18, 2015, issue is looks like this.
In the last week or so, I have noticed a stridency in the articles about search and the disciplines the umbrella term protects from would-be encroachers. Search is customer support, but from the enterprise search vendors’ viewpoint, enterprise search is the secret sauce for a great customer support soufflé. Enterprise search also does Big Data, business intelligence, and dozens of other activities.
The reason for the primacy of search, as I understand the assertions of the search companies and the self appointed search “experts” is that information retrieval makes the business work. Improve search. It follows, according to the logic, that revenues will increase, profits will rise, and employee and customer satisfaction will skyrocket.
Unfortunately enterprise search is difficult to position at the alpha and omega of enterprise software. Consider this article from the March 18 edition of The Enterprise Search Daily.
“Why Enterprise Search is a Must Have for Any Enterprise Content Management Strategy”
The article begins:
Enterprise search has notoriously been a problem in the content management equation. Various content and document management systems have made it possible to store files. But the ability to categorize that information intuitively and in a user-friendly way, and make that information easy to retrieve later, has been one of several missing pieces in the ECM market. When will enterprise search be as easy to use and insightful as Google’s external search engine? If enterprise search worked anywhere near as effectively as Google, it might be the versatile new item in our content management wardrobes, piecing content together with a clean sophistication that would appeal to users by making everything findable, accessible and easy to organize.
I am not sure how beginning with the general perception that enterprise search has been, is, and may well be a failure flips to a “must have” product. My view is that keyword search is a utility. For organizations with cash to invest, automated indexing and tagging systems can add some additional findability hooks. The caveat is that the licensee of these systems must be prepared to spend money on a professional who can ride herd on the automated system. The indexing strays have to be rounded up and meshed with the herd. But the title’s assertion is a dream, a wish. I don’t think enterprise content management is particularly buttoned up in most organizations. Even primitive search systems struggle to figure out what version is the one the user needs to find. Indexing by machine or human often leads to manual inspection of documents in order to locate the one the user requires. Google wanders into the scene because most employees give Google.com a whirl before undertaking a manual inspection job. If the needed document is on the Web somewhere, Google may surface it if the user is lucky enough to enter the secret combination of keywords. Google is deeply flawed, but for many employees, it is better than whatever their employer provides.
IBM Hadoop
March 18, 2015
For anyone who sees setting up an instance of Hadoop as a huge challenge, Open Source Insider points to IBM’s efforts to help in, “Has IBM Made (Hard) Hadoop Easier?” Why do some folks consider Hadoop so difficult? Blogger Adrian Bridgwater elaborates:
“More specifically, it has been said that the Hadoop framework for distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models is tough to get to grips with because:
Hadoop is not a database
Hadoop is not an analytics environment
Hadoop is not a visualisation tool
Hadoop is not known for clusters that meet enterprise-grade security requirements
Foundation fixation
This is because Hadoop is a ‘foundational’ technology in many senses, so its route to ‘business usefulness’ is neither direct or clear cut in many cases.”
Hmm. So, perhaps one should understand what Hadoop is and what it does before trying to implement it. Still, the folks at IBM would prefer companies just pay them to handle it. The article cites a survey of “bit-data developers” (commissioned by IBM) that shows about a quarter of the respondents us IBM’s Hadoop. Bridgwater also mentions:
“IBM also recently conducted an independently audited benchmark, which was reviewed by third-party Infosizing, of three popular SQL-on-Hadoop implementations, and the results showed that IBM’s Big SQL was the only Hadoop solution tested that was able to run all 99 Hadoop-DS queries…. Smith says that this new report and benchmark are proof that customers can ask more complex questions of IBM when it comes to Hadoop implementation.”
I’m not sure that’s what those factors prove, but it is clear that many companies do turn to the tech giant for help with Hadoop. But is their assistance worth the cost? Unfortunately, this article includes no word on IBM’s Hadoop pricing.
Cynthia Murrell, March 18, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Qwant Develops Qwant Junior, the Search Engine for Children
March 17, 2015
The article on Telecompaper titled Qwant Tests Child-Friendly Search Engine discusses the French companies work. Qwant is focused on targeting 3 to 13 year olds with Qwant Junior, in partnership with the Education Ministry. Twenty percent of the company is owned by digital publishing powerhouse Axel Springer. The child-friendly search engine will attempt to limit the access to inappropriate content while encouraging children to use the search engine to learn. The article explains,
“The new version blocks or lists very far down in search results websites that show violence and pornography, as well as e-commerce sites. The version features an education tab separately from the general web search that offers simplified access to educational programme, said co-founder Eric Leandri. Qwant Junior’s video tab offers child-appropriate videos from YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. After tests with the ministry, the search engine will be tested by several hundred schools.”
Teaching youngsters the ways of the search engine is important in our present age. The concept of listing pornography “very far down” on the list of results might unsettle some parents of young teens smart enough to just keep scrolling, but it is France! Perhaps the expectation of blocking all unsavory material is simply untenable. Qwant is planning on a major launch by September, and is in talks with Brazil for a similar program.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 17, 2014
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Assessing SharePoint Content Security
March 17, 2015
With the volume of content housed in SharePoint implementations constantly growing, security threats are becoming an increasingly large problem as well. For organizations that are not sure how to measure the security of their SharePoint infrastructure, Metalogix may have a solution. CMS Wire covers the news in their article, “9 Metrics To Assess SharePoint Content Security.”
The article begins:
“Is your SharePoint content secure? More importantly, do you know how to assess your content security? Given the number of SharePoint environments, it’s likely that a lot of people would answer ‘no.’ Metalogix, however, has just released a new tool it claims will help. The new Insider Threat Index (ITI) offers SharePoint managers insight into their content security based on nine metrics.”
A lot of resources are devoted to helping organizations make the most of their SharePoint solution. Security is not the only concern, but also efficiency, structure, and user experience. To keep up with these and other topics, consider the SharePoint feed on ArnoldIT.com. Stephen E. Arnold has spent his career following all things search, including SharePoint. His expert-run Web site allows users to find lots of tips, tricks, and news pertaining to the enterprise.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 17, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
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