Gartner Predicts a Volatile Year for the IT Industry
January 21, 2012
Technological innovation and the creation of media tablets and advances in mobile is having a disruptive impact on many industries. Taume recently reported on a predictive Gartner study for the IT industry in the article “Gartner Identifies Top Vertical Industry Predictions for IT Organizations 2012 and Beyond”
According to the article, Gartner’s annual Predicts research on industry trends features 15 strategic planning assumptions that CIOs, senior business executives and IT leaders should factor into their enterprise planning and strategy-setting initiatives.
Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner said:
“Many industry business models will be challenged through 2015 as customers continue to adopt an always-connected digital lifestyle and market competitors exploit emerging technologies to achieve business growth and success. Cloud computing and social media will continue to provide industries with new avenues for effective customer communication and engagement, facilitating increased revenue and sustainable interaction with key customers.”
It looks like 2012 is going to be a volatile year unless IT companies use the Gartner study predictions to effectively align their business practices with the needs of customer base and partner organizations.
Jasmine Ashton, January 21, 2012
Protected: Personalizing SharePoint’s Search Box
January 20, 2012
Considerations in SharePoint Hosting
January 20, 2012
Finding an enterprise search solution that works for your organization is no longer just about securing the best solution, it now extends to securing the best hosting option as well. SharePoint is obviously the most widely implemented enterprise solution, but even after choosing a SharePoint installation, a decision must be made whether to host on-site or in the cloud. More and more customers are moving toward cloud hosting for reasons including security and access.
A blog entry, “SharePoint Cloud Hosting Explained,” emphasizes the need to secure an appropriate and smart cloud hosting solution:
When searching for Sharepoint Cloud hosting, companies should be sure that whatever hosting company they choose to work with, is willing to create a system that is tailored-made to their particular needs, if necessary. Some hosting companies will allow businesses to pay as they go or give them the option of purchasing a license. It will also be extremely important that all of a business’ data is stored on servers that are secure.
One third-party solution that has received accolades for its work in the cloud is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. While working as an alternative to SharePoint, or as a compliment to an existing SharePoint infrastructure, Mindbreeze is a smart enterprise solution that works seamlessly on the cloud. Read more on their “Search in the Cloud” page.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise and the Cloud fit together perfectly. The Cloud makes your business mobile; Mindbreeze finds its way in the Cloud. This intelligent search is available as a Cloud service. This means that, if you so desire, Fabasoft Mindbreeze can run without any installation whatsoever – we operate the search engine for you. All the data that you manage in the Cloud is made searchable by Fabasoft Mindbreeze. This makes Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise the center of excellence for your knowledge in the Cloud too.
If you desire to cut down on installation and maintenance time and cost, hosting your enterprise solution on the cloud is worth looking into. Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze and see if their solution and cloud hosting opportunities will work for your organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Inforbix Offers Demo for New iPad App
January 20, 2012
Recently we reported on the company Inforbix and their upcoming new application for iPad users which will allow employees access to company documents and files from any i-device. This ingenious technological marvel is a result of a growing demand within the workforce to make company files more accessible and cloud technology. Inforbix, not satisfied with leaving good-enough alone has now introduced a demo for their new app. The article, How to test Inforbix on the web and on the iPad, on Inforbix’s website explains how companies considering the technology can experience the difference the cloud can make.
“The technology behind how Inforbix demos work is exactly the same as what our customers deploy. With one exception. We use our own data-set to emulate what a typical Inforbix customer would be using. That’s it. Everything else is precisely the same: 1. The Demo Data provided by Inforbix is scanned and the meta-data collected is sent to the Inforbix cloud. 2. In the cloud, the meta-data is processed. 3. Users access the demo data either via a web browser…or if they downloaded the new Inforbix iPad app on the App Store and use the demo facility on it.”
Catherine Lamsfuss, January 20, 2012
Protected: More News on How to Migrate Your Content to SharePoint
January 19, 2012
Customization Best Practices for SharePoint Users
January 19, 2012
SharePoint customization has become a whole world, a whole community unto itself. The reason is simple, almost every feature of SharePoint is customizable. Furthermore, many specialists defend that SharePoint is only useful when it is fully customized. Out-of-the-box, SharePoint is simply a blank slate, an infrastructure.
Gale Pomper offers her insights on the topic in “SharePoint Customization Best Practices.” The piece is a white paper offered through Global Knowledge. While written before the SharePoint 2010 release, many of the principles still stand.
Pomper gives an overview of what can and cannot be customized in SharePoint:
It might be easier to define what cannot be customized because almost every aspect of the SharePoint implementation can be customized, including applications, look and feel, and web parts. Some of the more commonly implemented customizations are identified in the table below. But first, let’s discuss one element of SharePoint that cannot be customized – the SQL Server database.
Pomper goes on to offer her top ten suggestions for customization, as the case has already been made for the need for customization. However, the overarching question is why so much customization is needed in the first place. With SharePoint being such a highly used enterprise solution, shouldn’t developers have a good grasp on what is desired and strive to implement those changes?
This brings us to the discussion of third-party solutions. One we particularly like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Mindbreeze implements smart features out-of-the-box, saving administrators and end-users time and energy. One smart feature that we will highlight is the Fabasoft Mindbreeze query language.
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Query Language is a powerful query language by itself. Users can intersect document hits using an AND expression, join hits with an OR expression, restrict queries to metadata, and much more. Despite our powerful query language, sometimes you need to customize the query language to your own domain specific requirements. Because of this Fabasoft Mindbreeze provides an API extension point, which makes it possible to transform a given query. The possibilities are manifold: transformations can replace, extend or even remove parts of query expressions.
This is an example of a smart customization option. What SharePoint offers as customizable features are often features that should be included out-of-the-box. However, with a smart third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, customization is optimized for an enhanced user experience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
PLM Takes the Checkered Flag
January 19, 2012
Every Sunday from spring to fall NASCAR shows off its best drivers and advertise-ridden cars. However behind the scenes, team engineers could be the difference between taking home the checkered flag or not finishing the race. As discussed in “Every Second Counts at Penske Racing,” the top NASCAR teams are using product lifecycle management (PLM) to assist engineers with difficult time constraints.
Penske Racing uses Parametric Technology Corporation’s (PTC) Windchill PLM software along with Creo CAD software to help “the team and third-party collaborators work together to manage the engineering process from concept to completion.” PLM is important to them because:
Whether work is being done in machine shops, at Penske’s Mooresville, North Carolina, racing facility, or at tracks around the country, the web-based business collaboration software helps Penske Racing manage, develop, and deliver the products created to enhance the team’s performance.
Other teams are seeing the benefit as well. In fact, earlier this fall “Joe Gibbs Racing and Siemens PLM Software Extended Multi-Year Technology Partership” through 2016.
With racing engineers often having only mere hours to develop and create new parts, we wonder how much time they spend gathering data. With innovations like Inforbix software, that search time could be greatly diminished. Their software is a collection of integrated applications that help find, re-use and share data through the company. When every second counts, this might be the next big breakthrough in technology and racing.
Jennifer Wensink, January 19, 2012
Protected: How SharePoint Fails as a Social Platform
January 18, 2012
SharePoint: Document Access Versus Storage
January 18, 2012
SharePoint is an information management tool, focused on organization and retrieval. However, the “storage” element of SharePoint is one often critiqued. Is SharePoint the best place to store documents, and if so, which ones? The SharePoint Pro blog takes on this question in, “Access All of Your Content Through SharePoint, Yes. Keep All of it There, No.”
The author states:
All content may be created equal, but it certainly doesn’t exist equally throughout its lifecycle. Some content is business critical, some is purely personal, some is connected to a series of workflows in a process and some is destined to get pushed directly into an archive, some files have a large footprint and some are measured in bytes. And in some cases content can share a number of these attributes all at once. My point is that we need to think about the content we’re putting into SharePoint, as in a number of cases above, it might not actually be the right place to store it.
While the author makes a good point about some documents being more pertinent to workflow than others, sorting documents based on their relevance is a time-killer. With a third-party solution, users do not have to worry about where items are stored in order for them to be accessed by SharePoint or by an accompanying third-party enterprise search. One solution that we like, Fabasoft Mindbreeze, pays particular attention to this topic in its “Winter 2012 Release Notice.”
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise 2012 Winter Release . . .enables all information that is connected to Mindbreeze to be displayed in Microsoft SharePoint . . . In this way not only information contained within Microsoft SharePoint, but also all other information that is available within the respective company, can be consolidated within one “platform.” Mindbreeze, therefore, delivers real additional value to Microsoft SharePoint in the form of an add-on. The Microsoft SharePoint search is replaced by Fabasoft Mindbreeze, with the added value of information pairing, which extends the search to the entire connected company knowledge – all on one page. So-called search-driven dashboards can also be created . . . All information of a page is displayed by Web Parts made available by Mindbreeze. A simple configuration is all that’s needed. The displayed content is always up-to-date and to the point. And after the initial configuration, this takes place automatically and maintenance-free.
With more intuitive and agile third party enterprise solutions being developed, less attention needs to be paid to sorting and organizing. Saving the end-user time equates to saving the organization time and money. Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze and see if its solution might be beneficial to your organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 18, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
PLM is Spreading to Retail
January 18, 2012
Product lifecycle management (PLM) is no longer just for manufacturers. It is spreading to other industries including retail. Even though “PLM: Retail Adoption Slows,” merchandisers are realizing that “PLM can integrate and optimize the activities of merchants, product designers, technical designers, sourcing and suppliers.”
Retail could certainly benefit from specifically targeted PLM software. Those benefits would include:
- Improve product development
- Reduce product cycle times, costs and defects
- Merge product development and product sourcing to shrink the time to go from product concept to product delivery
- Improve coordination between merchants and suppliers
“Analysts were predicting a 30-40 percent annual growth rate of Retail PLM through 2014;” however, the recession hit and the growth is “closer now to a 20 percent annual growth rate through 2014.” Expansion in China and India is more significant than in the U.S. and European markets.
We are curious to see how technology companies like Inforbix curtail their software to the retail industry. We are sure it is just a matter of time. Inforbix revolutionized the way manufacturers search and share product data and we bet they will revolutionize retail in the future as well.
Jennifer Wensink, January 18, 2012
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