Coveo and GEICO Host Webinar on March 23, 2010
March 21, 2010
Fierce Media has asked Beyond Search to facilitate a discussion about “how GEICO thinks about leveraging its data-rich enterprise systems to generate real-time business value and intelligence.” The participants are GEICO and Coveo as well as Stephen E Arnold.
Topics include how the Coveo system can:
- Enable improved business intelligence and decision making through dynamic dashboards and information mashups that provide actionable business information
- Access structured and unstructured data from across enterprise systems and repositories without complex integration or data migration, improving efficiency and cost effectiveness through a unified indexing layer
- Lower the cost of legacy system integrations and upgrades, and reduce time-consuming data migration
- Optimize social networks and incorporate the value of collaboration and just-in-time information exchange into the knowledge ecosystem
The audio program will be on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 beginning at 11:00am Eastern/8:00am Pacific. More information about Coveo may be found at http://www.coveo.com. You can register here.
Ben Kent, March 21, 2010, Beyond Search
This is a sponsored post.
Autonomy and Customer Relationship Management
March 21, 2010
I learned when I read “Autonomy Delivers the First Meaning-Based Multichannel Customer Interaction Analytics Application” that:
- Autonomy was at the Gartner Customer Relationship Management Summit. (Gartner is, like Ovum, an azure chip consultant with aspirations to define the information technology world. I believe everything both firms output too. Well, almost, I suppose.)
- Autonomy is a player in customer relationship management.
According to the write up:
Autonomy Explore gives businesses a much more insightful and valuable view of their customers. For instance, the same customer that submitted a complaint to the contact center, searched for products on the company’s Web properties, and then commented about the company on Twitter, may have expressed different levels of satisfaction and used different terms through each channel. Autonomy Explore detects the evolving sentiment of that customer by analyzing the concepts and patterns communicated across each touch point, in order to more effectively engage with that customer as well as other customers from the same segment.
The Autonomy system includes a range of functions, including concept understanding and automated reporting and workflow. For more information, navigate to www.autonomy.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2010
An unpaid write up. I will report this to the agency with the best customer support in the Federal government, the Office of Citizen Services.
Microsoft Fast Customer Support
March 20, 2010
Short honk: Got your Microsoft Fast installation up and running but have a wee question? You will want to keep this information handy:
- FAST standalone technical support assistance, navigate to http://support.microsoft.com/oas
- FAST telephone support: +1 866-922-5260 (8:00 AM – 8:00 PM Eastern Time)
Enjoy!
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2010
A freebie pure and simple.
Interdependency: Why IT Costs Are Tough to Control
March 20, 2010
Network World ran a very interesting article which, in my opinion, helps explain why search and content processing applications are characterized by sky rocketing costs. The story is “Is IT Keeping Up with a Changing Infrastructure? “ When I read the write up, I realized that most IT departments are like buggy whip manufacturers who did not want to manufacture automobile seat covers. Bad move but understandable. Buggy whips were comfortable just like silos of on premises applications and users who did not know that data could be mashed up and displayed in an actionable format.
For me, the most interesting segment of the article was:
A new study from Forrester Research Inc. shows that application developers and their project managers are not keeping up with the times…. [a] senior analyst…, said IT pros aren’t necessarily adjusting to what is the new reality of a tough economy and the popularity of certain technology trends.
I think I would have inserted the word “some” so that the statement would have stated: “some IT pros aren’t necessarily adjusting.”
In San Francisco earlier this week, I talked with a New York consulting firm. One of the interesting throw away remarks was that this outfit has found a number of new customers among the consulting firms in New York. I probed but was unable to get the names of this company’s consulting firm clients, but I recall the comments made during out chat.
One message that came through was that consulting firms are struggling to manage their information technology operations. The challenges range from cost control to finding information that someone in the consulting firms knows is on a server.
The Network World has hit the nail on the head. I wonder if the clients of the firms who purport to point out IT problems have the expertise, money, and time to fix their own IT problems.
My hunch? No. But talking about the flaws in companies is much easier and more fun than fixing one’s own problems.
Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2010
A freebie. No one paid me to write this. I will report information technology cost issues to the General Accountability Office, an outfit with responsibility for tackling such issues. I don’t think the GAO works for free as I do, but perhaps the entity will sympathize.
WAND and Layer2 Team for SharePoint Taxonomy Functions
March 19, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Jump-Start Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Knowledge Management Using Pre-Defined Taxonomy Metadata”. The Microsoft Fast road show is wending its way among the Redmond faithful. In its wake, a number of companies see opportunity in the Microsoft demos. But with Microsoft making some tasty offers to incentive those looking for search systems, Microsoft may be doing third-party add-on vendors and Fast ESP consultants a big favor.
The Earth Times’ article said:
In cooperation with WAND, Inc – one of the leading providers of enterprise taxonomies – Layer2 now offers pre-defined Taxonomy Metadata for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, a robust and expanding library of taxonomies covering a wide variety of domains to help jumpstart classification projects. Taxonomy Metadata for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is currently available in 13 languages, e.g. English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese.
WAND has developed structured multi-lingual vocabularies with related tools and services to power precision search and classification applications. The company asserts that WAND makes search work better. WAND Taxonomies are used in online yellow pages and local search, ad-matching engines, business to business directories, product search, and within enterprise search engines. The firm’s library contains more than 40 domain specific taxonomies. WAND’s taxonomies are available in 13 languages.
Layer 2 GmbH is a specialist for creating custom components and solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Based in Germany, Layer2 offers products and solutions that add additional features to portals based on Microsoft SharePoint technology.
My view is that Microsoft may be creating opportunities at the same time it leaves some SharePoint customers wondering why their systems do not work as expected. If taxonomy management was a priority, Microsoft should have included a system to perform this type of work within the SharePoint package. Third party vendors now have an opportunity to sell a “solution,” but customers may have to go through a learning process and then spend additional money to get the functionality required to make SharePoint more useful.
Perhaps another mixed result from SharePoint? Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2010
Freebie. No one paid me to point out that talking about “taxonomies” is much easier than implementing a high value taxonomy and then enforcing consistent tagging across the processed corpus. I know that the IRS is good at indexing by social security number, so I will report non payment to that agency.
Are You Ready for Enterprise Search? Nope
March 19, 2010
A reader sent me a link to a white paper from Silicon.com. I clicked the link and was presented with a download request form. I apparently filled a similar form out years ago because I was asked to update my information. I did so. I was then given another page from which to click a link to download a white paper from MobilVox, Inc.
The title? “Are We Ready for Enterprise Search.” The subtitle? “Text analytics and intelligent agents cannot be overlooked.” No problem with the title but the text of the white paper was two pages. This is more of a flier or a fact sheet. A white paper is in my opinion somewhat more substantive. The last one I wrote was about 12 pages long, had diagrams, and included some hard metrics about the performance of a search system.
The white paper pointed me to www.irissearch.net, which through me.
The point of the white paper by MobilVox is to boil down what took me 300 pages to explain in three editions of my Enterprise Search Report to a publisher who, like a chameleon, changed its appearance, and Martin White and I filled 125 pages for Successful Enterprise Search Management, published by Galatea in 2009.
I don’t disagree with the information in the two page write up, but it is a bit short on detail. Here’s phase II of a search implementation:
Strategically select information repositories most critically important to the organization. Deploy the enterprise search solution with these core repositories. Scale up initial roll-out by adding more repositories and connectors to other legacy systems.
Martin and I explained the steps and some of the constituent nuances in 16 pages, and we chopped quite a bit of detail to meet the stipulations of our publisher in the UK.
If you want a white paper that gives you enterprise search on two sheets of paper, have at it. After you end up in a bit of a technical, managerial, and budget bind, drop me an email. seaky2000 at yahoo dot com. I won’t be able to help, but I like to keep track of potentially interesting case examples.
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2010
No one paid me to write about search challenges. I will report this sad state of affairs to the Department of Energy, an outfit with deep experience is search systems that are often interesting challenges to senior managers.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze and Its Lotus Connector
March 18, 2010
I was able to read a white paper prepared by Fabasoft Mindbreeze about its updated Mindbreeze IBM Lotus Connector. The document is “Configuration of Mindbreeze Enterprise Search for IBM Lotus” and is available from the company. When I worked at Ziff Communications in New York City, I had an early exposure to the product. Since that time 20 years ago, Lotus Notes has found its way into many commercial and governmental entities. Those who love the product cannot live without it. People like me tolerate some of the system’s peculiarities exemplified by this question, “Why can’t you restore my email?”
Fabasoft is the successful Austria-based enterprise software and integration company. Mindbreeze is its search, content analytics and content processing subsidiary. The Mindbreeze engineers have developed a solution for organizations with Lotus Domino/Notes as well as a lot of other types of content systems. You can get Mindbreeze and its Lotus Domino/Notes support, snap it into your environment, and search for Notes content, even in mobile environments, including the RIM Blackberry, Apple iPhone, and Google Android devices.
In January 2010, I got a preview of the system and I received a copy of the white paper. I followed up with Daniel Fallmann, founder and managing director of Mindbreeze. Here’s what I learned in an email exchange on March 14 and 15, 2010:
What is the main focus of the IBM Lotus Domino/Notes support you offer?*
What is very important for us is that that the Mindbreeze Connectors run with a minimum of required configuration, even to very large scale. So Notes items and even complex Lotus Domino object models are very easy to adapt to fulfill the need of the customer/users. So Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise makes it easy to search-enable any line-of-business application based on IBM Lotus Domino within a minimum amount of time with great results for the knowledge workers, even with their mobile information needs. Of course our customers get all the needed social search and federated search features built-in. We have a lot of Lotus partners that love the ease you can now search-enable IBM Lotus line-of-business applications.
As we offer an appliance as well you can buy the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance or you can install Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise and run the IBM Lotus Connector on a Linux environment which totally saves you the money of the operating system and enables you to even support our customer’s users with IBM Lotus line-of-business-application in the cloud with a modest and easy to calculate investment.
What is the method for indexing Lotus Mail which has been moved to an archive?*
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise follows the “link-information” (for example, a link to an archived mail for example in a Fabasoft iArchive for IBM Lotus Notes) left in the remaining item stub and index the archived information by applying the rights based on the stub object that’s left in the IBM Lotus installation.
How are emails across Lotus Notes installations indexed so that only the authorized person can see a single email or a group of emails?
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise uses the rights based on an IBM Lotus object information to evaluate if a user has the right to read information based on the document level or even extensible to the field level. Things like inherited rights and user name fields are as well taken into account. As Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is based on a modern distributed service architecture, it is easy to spread queries against several instances and respond to a user’s query. Thanks to our innovative technology and architecture we typically are up and running at customers in between 30min and 2 days, of course this highly varies on the customer’s needs.
When Lotus Notes is used with an IBM collaboration tool like Lotus Notes Traveler, how are the indexes federated so a single query retrieves the content across the Notes’s components?
First: It typically makes sense that Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise crawler, filter, index services are located where the information is, so the best practice is to use the distributed architecture of Mindbreeze Enterprise Search to bring together information from several IBM Lotus databases. Second: As Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise connects against the IBM Lotus web services it is even trivial to get information from different locations and index it in a central location.
How does your system’s pricing work?
We have a per named user pricing model as well as a concurrent use model that is very easy to calculate and use. Moreover the Mindbreeze IBM Lotus Connector supports custom object models as well and you can host the whole product on a Linux platform. As far as I know there is no other IBM Lotus Connector and search product, that can so easy adapt to IBM Lotus Domino object models for your specific line-of-business application. This of course has to be taken into account.
Do you support the Notes – Cisco Unified Meeting Place?
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise allows you to index all the calendar information for all meetings that you are invited to by Cisco’s Unified Meeting Place. This information can be updated in the index during the meeting place notification mechanisms. You could even index the audio content streamed via a Cisco MeetingPlace Audio Server by using speech to text functionality.
If you want to index Lotus content, we think the Mindbreeze solution warrants a test drive. Contact the company at http://www.mindbreeze.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2010
When I am next in Linz, Mindbreeze promised me a pastry. Until then, this is an uncompensated post.
Limitations of MSFT Exchange 2010
March 16, 2010
I am not sure how one of my goslings came across this spreadsheet tucked away on the Microsoft Exchange Web log. When I tried to access the file, the system did not recognize my “official” Microsoft MSDN user ID nor my Windows Live credentials. So you may have to register to access the blog. Once there, you need to look for the download section and visually inspect the file names for the one that points to the Exchange Performance Excel spreadsheet. Running a query in the blog’s search box produced zero hits for me. But with some persistence and patience I was able to get a copy of the spreadsheet. Latency was a problem when I was fiddling with this download. (Note: if the link is dead, write one of the goslings at benkent2020 at yahoo dot com, and maybe he will email you a copy of this document.)
Once you get the document “Scalability Limitations”, you will see some pretty interesting information. One quick example is that the spreadsheet includes three columns of specifics about scaling amidst the more marketing oriented data on the spreadsheet. These three juicy columns are:
- Limitation
- Issue
- Mitigation.
Here’s the information for the row Database Size:
- Limitation–Exchange 2007 – 200GB; Exchange 2010 – 2TB or 1 disk, whichever is less
- Issue–The DB size guidance changed from 200GB (if you are in CCR) to 2TB or 1 disk, whichever is greater (if you have 2+ copies of the DB in question)
- Mitigation—Blank. No information.
Okay.
I hope you are able to locate this document. For those of you eager to install Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Fast Search 2010, you will want to make sure you have these type of spreadsheets at your fingertips * before * you jump on the Microsoft Enterprise steam engine. The information in the spreadsheet makes clear why some types of email content processing may be expensive to implement.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2010
This is the equivalent of the free newspaper Velocity in Louisville. Read it for nothing. I will report working for no dough to the Jefferson County agency that thinks I work in Louisville when I spend most of my time in the warm embrace of airlines.
Indexing Craziness
March 15, 2010
I read “Folksonomy and Taxonomy – do you have to choose?,” which takes the position that a SharePoint administrator can use a formal controlled term list or just let the users slap their own terms into an index field. The buzzword for allowing users to index documents is part of a larger 20 something invention—folksonomy. The key segment for me in the SharePoint centric Jopx blog was:
The way that SharePoint 2010 supports the notion of promoting free tags into a managed taxonomy demonstrates that a folksonomy can be used as a source to define a taxonomy as well.
Let me try and save you a lot of grief. Indexing must be normalized. The idea is to use certain terms to retrieve documents with reasonable reliability. Humans who are not trained indexers do a lousy job of applying terms. Even professional indexers working in production settings fall into some well known ruts. For example, unless care is exercised in management and making the term list available, humans will work from memory. The result is indexing that is wrong about 15 percent of the time. Machine indexing when properly tuned can hit that rate. The problem is the that the person looking for information assumes that indexing is 100 percent accurate. It is not.
The idea behind controlled term lists is that these are logically consistent. When changes are made such as the addition of a term such as “webinar” as a related term to “seminar”, a method exists to keep the terms consistent and a system is in place to update the index terms for the corpus.
When there is a mix of indexing methods, the likelihood of having a mess is pretty high. The way around this problem is to throw an array of “related” links in front of the user and invite the user to click around. This approach to discovery entertains the clueless but leads to the potential for rat holes and wasted time.
Most organizations don’t have the appetite to create a controlled term list and keep it current. The result is the approach that is something I encounter frequently. I see a mix of these methods:
- A controlled term list from someplace (old Oracle or Convera term list, a version of the ABI/INFORM or some other commercial database controlled vocabulary, or something from a specialty vendor)
- User assigned terms; that is, uncontrolled terms. (This approach works when you have big data like Google but it is not so good when there are little data, which is how I would characterize most SharePoint installations.)
- Indexes based on parsing the content.
A user may enter a term such as “Smith purchase order” and get a bunch of extra work. Users are not too good at searching, and this patchwork of indexing terms ensures that some users will have to do the Easter egg drill; that is, look for the specific information needed. When it is located, some users like me make a note card and keep in handy. No more Easter egg hunts for that item for me.
What about third party SharePoint metadata generators? These generate metadata but they don’t solve the problem of normalizing index terms.
SharePoint and its touting of metadata as the solution to search woes are interesting. In my opinion, the approach implemented within SharePoint will make it more difficult for some users to find data, not easier. And, in my opinion, the resulting index term list will be a mess. What happens when a search engine uses these flawed index terms, the search results force the user to look for information the old fashioned way.
Stephen E Arnold, March 15, 2010
A free write up. No one paid me to write this article. I will report non payment to the SharePoint fans at the Department of Defense. Metadata works first time every time at the DoD I assume.
BA-Insight: New Angle on Lead Generation
March 13, 2010
The Microsoft Fast search road show was in New York this week. I stayed in rural Kentucky watching the acid run off trickle into my goose pond. I took time out from this strenuous activity to read “BA-Insight Announces New Direct Access to Free Information and Resources for SharePoint Search and Fast.”
BA-Insight develops software, including Longitude which “helps people find an analyze relevant information across the entire enterprise independently of format or location.” The firm’s Web site has been revamped and features “an enhanced support portal and new free resource library specially designed for enterprise evaluating SharePoint or Fast Search or engaging in SharePoint or Fast Search deployments, including Fast ESP.”
I took a look at the site. The splash page is below, but you will see different graphics because the rectangular area features a slide show of information.
Source: http://www.ba-insight.net/Pages/Home.aspx
You can download white papers, get inks to videos, and access the company’s Web logs. One of the documents is the Microsoft Enterprise Search 2010 Roadmap. When I clicked on that link, I saw another link and the icon labeled premium shown below.
In order to access that document, I was given an option to fill in a form with my name, title, organization, phone, email, and interests. The angle seems to be that to get this document, one must go through a vendor like BA-Insight.
One of the goslings filled in the form and the road map is a single page that explains Microsoft’s five search technologies and lists the capabilities, repository indexing, and manageability features of each product. Interesting stuff.
Here’s one snippet of the roadmap, which is more of a table than a map in my opinion:
Interesting stuff. Particularly with regard to scaling, I wonder if organizations will have the appetite for this type of hardware footprint on site. Will enterprise Fast ESP work from the cloud? © Microsoft 2010.
Several questions:
- Will more search vendors shift into education or missionary marketing mode to move their systems?
- In today’s financial climate, will the portal approach supplant the more traditional features-benefit type of marketing that characterizes some search vendors’ Web sites?
- Has the complexity of the product offering broken the back of the adage “KISS” for business oriented communications?
I will watch to see if other vendors embrace the educational portal approach to sales and lead generation. The addled goose just makes information available via a blog, assuming that content with an edge will generate inquiries. Perhaps once again I am wrong?
Stephen E Arnold, March 13, 2010
No one paid me to write this short article. Because of the references to Microsoft and its five search options, I will report non payment to the Department of Defense, an organization with an interest in Microsoft’s technology.
