QuePlix: Legacy Data Search
April 2, 2009
Several years ago I listened to a presentation from Index Engines. The company developed an appliance that sat in a back up stream. The idea was that an authorized user could search for a document processed by the back up system. I thought the idea was an interesting one. A number of eDiscovery firms address the legacy data issue via other methods. Today the organization wanting to query legacy information has a number of options.
QuePlix offers a search system for legacy data. Troy Dreir’s “QueSearch: A Search Engine for your Legacy Data” here alerted me to another vendor in this market space. Mr. Dreir wrote:
QuePlix has just released the second of its platform-agnostic programs which are each designed to retrieve information from legacy applications. The first solution was QueWeb, which not only extracts legacy application metadata, but then builds a user interface on top of it. The allows the company to make a transition toward new applications while still using the data from legacy apps. Because it’s based on existing systems, there’s no need to train staff on how to use it and that allows for a smoother migration. The program’s simplicity and usefulness translates into a huge ROI, Tenberg says. QueWeb was launched in 2001 and is already up to its third version.
I did have some information in my files about this company. The key points I had noted when I got a demo in 2007 included:
- The company is a Google partner so there’s an integration capability available to its customers
- Customers can use QuePlix’s cloud option and shift some of the hassles to hosted services such as Amazon’s S3
- A white paper provides more detail. You can get it here.
More information as I locate it.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
Traditional Journalism Is Dead, Well, Not Exactly
April 1, 2009
Short take: the Huffington Post has a way to keep investigative journalism alive. I hope so. Since Gannett bought the Courier Journal & Louisville Times Co. in 1986, the investigative and the journalism have disappeared from the newspaper. Click here to read “Huffington Post Launches Investigative Journalism Venture” here. I think this warrants close observation. Great idea.
Stephen Arnold, March 31, 2009
Cutting Information Technology Costs
April 1, 2009
I read CIO Magazine’s “Five Things You Need to Know: Budget Cutting” here and realized that there are journalists and their are more sophisticated financial types. Before you read the article, click here and learn how Qantas slashed its information technology costs.
Now you can romp through the tips and come away vulnerable to the machinations of a cost analyst. These tips provide a sense of false security which may give way to some even bigger organizational realignments in certain situations. One realignment may be suggesting the person who followed these tips find his or her future elsewhere. In short, there’s more to cost cutting that the tips suggest.
I don’t feel comfortable parroting the five tips. I want to highlight one and offer a few comments. Let’s look at item three:
Break down exactly how you spend your budget. Start by identifying your expenses. A CIO might know she has employees with BlackBerrys, but how much is each person spending on their phone bills? With more specifics, you can set more accurate goals for saving.
Sounds pretty safe, right? The problem is that analysis of a segment of a budget means that the numbers reflect the person’s understanding of costs. Most information technology managers are clueless about the secondary costs triggered by routine information technology actions.
Let’s look at one example. A marketing team must produce a proposal. The marketers named Trent and Wendy need to output the document in two forms: PDF and to an ftp server. The client wants to get ftp access on a Monday and receive the FedEx package with the six copies of the proposal no later than Tuesday, before 5 pm. The Trent and Wendy duo understand the PDF part, but neither knows how to move files to the organization’s ftp server. Trent calls the information technology department and asks for help. The IT person says, “We’ll be there before 2 pm.” The IT person does not arrive. At 5 pm, Wendy calls. The phone rings in space. Trent and Wendy call a consultant, explain the problem, agree to a fee for the ftp part of the job, and complete their work. The cost for the ad hoc consultant is lost in the organization’s budget. The IT manager and the CIO are clueless about the cost their unit created.
Sound familiar?
The problem with the recommendations is that the actions will not return a comprehensive picture. A true cost analysis will surface dependent costs and indirect costs, not just the obvious direct costs. Once tallied, these costs can be tracked back to the root cause of the over or under run.
In my experience, that’s too much work. As I learn about companies going out of business, the casual approach to cost analysis bites back and bites hard. Read the five tips. Track down a cost analyst and enlist his or her help. The present financial climate does not look kindly on those involved in projects such as search. It’s easy to blow through $500,000 in a matter of three or four months and have a non functioning system. Undisciplined thinking about enterprise systems and their costs can crush a career and an organization. The five tips omit that point.
Stephen Arnold, April 1, 2009
Passwords List
April 1, 2009
Short honk: you can get three lists of common passwords here. These lists often come in handy when filtering government information prior to putting documents online. ArnoldIT.com has used this method for years. If you are indexing an organization’s documents, you might want to filter test your corpus. Might be helpful.
Stephen Arnold, April 1, 2009
Microsoft Search Community Toolkit
March 31, 2009
SharePoint search is like Baskin-Robbins. Lots of flavors. To create the ice cream treat that suits your taste, you need a selection of toppings. A reader sent me a link to a list of code snippets contributed by SharePoint faithful. You may want to click here and peruse what’s available. Some of the choices:
- SharePoint WildCard Search Web Part http://www.codeplex.com/WildcardSearch
- Faceted Search V2 – http://www.codeplex.com/FacetedSearch
- Smart Search for SharePoint – http://www.codeplex.com/smartsearch
Not an April 1, 2009, spoof.
Stephen Arnold, April 1, 2009
Teen Codes
March 31, 2009
Short honk: I know among my two or three readers I have at least one person with a teenager. For this person, I want to point out “50 Sexting/IM Acronyms Every Parent/Teenager/Person Should Know” here. For example, WYCM? Might be useful when trying to sort out the Twitter thing young folks do. Not an April 1, 2009 joke.
Stephen Arnold, April 1, 2009
Guardian’s Prescient April Fool Story
March 31, 2009
Short honk. The Guardian’s April 1, 2009, “Twitter Switch for Guardian, after 188 Years of Ink” here may be more accurate than a bit of British humor. The Chicago Sun Times went south. At about the same time, the scribes at the dead tree publication in the UK wrote:
As a Twitter-only publication, the Guardian will be able to harness the unprecedented newsgathering power of the service, demonstrated recently when a passenger on a plane that crashed outside Denver was able to send real-time updates on the story as it developed, as did those witnessing an emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River. It has also radically democratised news publishing, enabling anyone with an Internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea.
Twitter like services may become the news source for those who want currency and brevity. The most effective market research for the Guardian’s scribes may be talking to their children. Those folks will determine how accurate the Guardian’s article will be.
Stephen Arnold, April 1, 2009
Search Me Integrates Twitter Tweets
March 31, 2009
Searchme, Inc. is the first major search engine to integrate “Tweets” into search results and make it easier for searchers to share results with the Twitter community by adding a ‘one-click’ post to Twitter button on every search page.
Searchme is a search engine, designed from the ground up to provide a superior search experience over traditional text-based engines designed more than ten years ago. Less than a year old, Searchme has gained favor with web searchers and has more than 6 million monthly users now growing at a rate of more than a hundred thousand users a day.
Instead of a list of blue links, Searchme delivers large images of the web pages, videos, music and products that play right on the search result page making it easy to find and consume things on the web. Now Searchme has included Twitter search results in this mix and also made it easy for searchers to share their discoveries with the Twitter followers by clicking the large Twitter button on every search result page.
The new Twitter integration adds to the array of social sharing tools in Searchme for sharing stacks with friends and family via email, their blog or the most popular social networking and community sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Stumble Upon! and Delicious.
“Search, by its nature, is social. People like to share what they find with friends and family,” said Randy Adams, Searchme Founder and CEO. “We’re big fans of Twitter at Searchme and quickly realized that this was a great way to make sharing search results fun and easy. The web isn’t just about web pages anymore and we’re committed to embracing this new media as we continue to innovate around the search experience.”
For more information about Searchme, click here.
Stephen Arnold, March 31, 2009
Wales Wikia Search Beached
March 31, 2009
In London at the International Online Meeting a couple of years ago, I listened to a talk by Jimmy Wales. He was explaining the idea of different type of search system. What he referenced emerged as Wikia Search. Bouyed by the success of Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia that slew Encarta), Mr. Wales rolled out a user-generated serach engine. My view of the idea remained neutral. When humans are involved in search, the problems come out of the wood work. Say what yoiu want about Google and its math recipes, but at least there are reasonably objective. When humans pick sites and index, objectivity becomes a matter for discussion. According to the CNet story here, usage was modest, about 10,000 uniques per month.
User generated search listings are a great idea in theory but tough to operate over time an ensure consistency. Other challenges of user generated services include:
- Humans want to be recognized with money or fame. Algorithms work without too much threat of unionization, slow downs, or quitting
- Humans get bored. Algorithms don’t, at least not yet
- Humans volunteer and then only a couple of individuals carry the freight. Algorithms can be spawned and killed when they are no longer needed.
Our 1993 Point service relied in humans and algorithms. We sold it. I try to stick with automation. Some clever folks will find a way to make human labor pay off in the search and content processing space. These will be niche plays because of cost and speed considerations (more accurately, throughput).
Now that Wikia search has reached the beach to die, which human-powered search system is next?
Stephen Arnold, March 31, 2009
Coveo Lands a Whale-Sized Search Deal
March 31, 2009
Bell Mobility and Coveo, a leading provider of information access and search solutions for the enterprise, announced an exclusive next-generation search and access tool called Enterprise Search from Bell.
Powered by Coveo’s patented search and index technology, Enterprise Search from Bell offers business clients comprehensive search capability on their BlackBerry smartphones, including full mobile access to information contained within their Microsoft Exchange server accounts and even across their entire corporate information technology systems.
Wade Oosterman, President of Bell Mobility and Chief Brand Officer for Bell, said:
Enterprise Search from Bell is the only mobile business tool available that provides clients with such instant mobile access to critical enterprise content via their BlackBerry devices. Our partnership with Coveo is another example of Bell’s dedication to delivering data solutions that meet the evolving needs of mobile business. Enterprise Search from Bell provides business users with the ability to securely search and retrieve any information within their Microsoft Exchange server accounts, including emails, attachments content, calendars, tasks and contacts via their BlackBerry devices. With this capability, users can access the precise information they need within seconds, when they need it, without having to know where the document was previously stored.
Louis Tetu, Coveo’s Executive Chairman, said:
Search technology is by far one of the most promising information technology investments for enabling workforce productivity across the enterprise. Mobile search solutions provide employees with all the relevant information they need from any location. In contributing our expertise to Bell Mobility, we are helping to drive innovation in their mobile business solutions, which is part of our initiative to be a player in the ‘smartphones for business revolution’ market trend.
The service features Coveo’s user-friendly interface. The new enterprise search service from Bell offers numerous possibilities to business users who work with large amounts of rapidly changing information. Executives, sales professionals, account managers, professional services providers, customer care, call center representatives, IT administrators, project managers and human resources, legal and engineering professionals are provided instant access to the information they require to perform their roles more effectively. As a result, this drives improved productivity and enables higher levels of self-service across the workforce.
Bell Mobility’s partnership with Coveo is unique in the market as it combines the mass distribution reach of a market-leading national mobile carrier with an innovative enterprise search solution to offer customers in all areas of Canada the ability to drive better business performance across their workforce in a rapid and economical deployment model.
For further information on Enterprise Search from Bell click here. For more information about Coveo, click here. To read the interview with Laurent Simoneau, the search expert driving Coveo’s technology, click here.
A happy quack to the Coveo team from the goslings in Harrod’s Creek.
Stephen Arnold, March 31, 2009
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