Microsoft: Role-Based Approach to Enterprise Apps
June 6, 2008
Colin Barker, ZDNet UK, wrote an interesting article “Microsoft Launches Connected, Role-Based CRM.” You will want to read the full story here. The key idea is that Dynamics AX 2009 (one of the different flavors of customer relationship management software Microsoft sells) supports roles. The idea is that a user, once assigned a role, interacts with the system from the point of view of the role. The article quotes Microsoft’s Gary Turner, who makes this point:
This is different from the way in which ERP systems have worked in the past, where everyone has one ‘vanilla’ front end… A chief executive will look at the information differently from someone in marketing or whatever. Your needs and requirements will be different.
The system also supports direct connections to eBay (the troubled online retailer) and PayPal. The system, if I understand Mr. Turner correctly, supports smartphone access. The default Dynamics user-facing interface is a dense, detailed beastie. Presumably, the smartphone interface will be stripped down to fit the smartphone screen real estate. Support for Microsoft’s business intelligence tools is included.
Why’s this important in search?
My research indicates that role-based interfaces may be one of Microsoft’s weapons as it tries to expand the market for its different enterprise systems. Applied to search, each user would “see” an interface and search results tailored to his or her role. This personalization of the system allows Microsoft to shift from a one-size-fits-all interface to a more specialized approach to a complex system.
With announcements about the integration of Fast Search & Transfer with Microsoft’s own search technology, there is little hard information about role-based interfaces available. In my opinion, competitors can offer similar functionality if the feature gets traction with customers.
Oh, the other products in the Dynamics line up are Dynamics NAV, Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL. I have difficulty keeping each straight in my mind. Microsoft’s preference for multiple versions of products like five flavors of Vista, SharePoint’s ESS and MOSS, and four ERP systems sends me to Google’s Microsoft search here to keep track of the differences. I rely on Google to locate Microsoft information. Response seems quicker and the index appears to be refreshed more frequently.
Stephen Arnold, June 6, 2008
SolveIT: Fancy Math
June 5, 2008
Several years ago I found myself in a meeting. I was paid to attend a session in North Carolina; otherwise, I wouldn’t go to Charlotte. The city is too sophisticated for this Kentuckian.
In the meeting, a soft-spoken mathematician, his son, a couple of cousins, and maybe an uncle explained sparse sets, assigning probabilities to boundaries, and ant algorithms. As I struggled to dredge definitions about these concepts from my admittedly poor memory, the soft-spoken mathematician asked me a word problem. A waiter had 12 customers and ended up with an extra dollar. Why? I just sat there and looked my normal stupid self.
Later, he explained that his inspiration was a mathematician named Stanis?aw Le?niewski. Okay, early 20th century wizard. That was the end of my knowledge. Puzzles are the key to learning math he told me. In his spare time, this fellow has set up a Web site to make this concept more widely known. You can see it here.
I had no clue who these fellows were, but I was getting paid to listen so I listened.
A Super Guru: Who Says He’s Just a Regular Guy
The super guru is a fellow named Zbigniew Michalewicz, a highly regarded mathematician everywhere except in Harrod’s Creek. The relatives were also mathematicians. The crowd could finish one another’s sentences and equations. Math, it turns out, is something that runs in the Michalewicz family and has for decades.
Dr. Michalewicz is an expert in generic algorithms and data structures. When added together, the mathematical recipe yield evolution programs. You can read more about this approach to some tough data problems in Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures = Evolution Programs, published by Springer-Verlag ISBN: 3-540-60676-9. No, your local book store won’t stock it. Amazon does.
The group sold its US enterprise and Dr. Michalewicz and a family member or two moved to Australia.
After losing track of these fellows, I learned that Dr. Michalewicz, his son, and a handful of mathematical gurus set up shop as SolveIT Software. Click here to navigate to the company’s Web site.
The new company uses new math to solve old problems. The company is in the business of delivering solutions that deliver “adaptive business intelligence”. The company’s range of technology is remarkable and it may be meaningless to you unless you took a couple of advanced math classes; for example:
- Agent-based systems
- Ant systems (my favorite)
- Evolutionary strategies
- Evolutionary programming
- Fuzzy systems
- Genetic algorithms
- Neural networks
- Rough sets (great stuff!)
- Swarm intelligence
- Simulated annealing (does with math to data what oil quenching does to low-grade steel)
- Tabu search (I have no clue what this numerical method yields).
You can figure out most of these notions by dipping into Peter Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence or E. J Borowski’s and J. M. Borwein’s Web-Linked Dictionary Mathematics. (Note: there is a subtle difference between the Norvig approach and the Michalewicz method. Google uses humans. Humans play an optional role in the Michalewicz recipes. No big deal, but you can explore the differences yourself by reading each guru’s text book.)
A Case Example
Equations are not likely to raise my Google ranking. Let me describe an outcome of Dr. Michalewicz’s skills.
Here’s the set up. You are Ford, Honda, or Toyota. Each week you get a couple of thousand lease cars back. You want to sell the cars quickly. You want to minimize how much you have to spend to truck these white elephants to a location where a particular model will sell. Pink convertibles don’t fly in Nome, Alaska, but are hot items in Scottsdale, Arizona. Your resale team would rather go to a bowling convention that work Excel models.
You want to maximize return, minimize expenses, and get the decisions out of your resale team’s “instinct” and into something fungible like a SolveIT solution.
SolveIT’s analysts beaver their way through the data, the work flow, and the exogenous factors that you and your resale team did not consider. The company builds from its mathematical Lego blocks, a computerized system that prints out a map and report telling your sales team where to ship which car.
You use the SolveIT system for a couple of months, and you notice that your expenses go down and your net goes up. SolveIT removed the guess work and let the “fancy math” do the heavy lifting. When I spoke with the company several years ago, one beta client was generating cash positives in six figures within six weeks.
Like most sophisticated companies run by serious math geeks, there’s not much information available on the company’s Web site. I did dig through my files, and I found an example of the company’s outputs. Keep in mind that this diagram is probably out of date, but it will give you a flavor of what the SolveIT operation does.
The system “shows” the resale team where certain cars will sell. Then the system prints out a report that says, “Send the pink convertible to Chicago and the truck to Paducah.” The math does the heavy lifting. The resale team looks at simple diagrams. The math remains safely hidden away.
Observations
SolveIT is one of a handful of companies pushing the envelope in analytics. If you want to tap into some serious math, contact this company. I have one tip. Don’t ask, “How does this work?” The explanation requires a solid foundation if traditional mathematics and post-doctoral work in set theory. How complicated is the math. I found in my files one example which I had to scan and convert to an image. I kept it as a reminder of how little I know about the next big things in mathematics; for example, in my notes I had this pair of statements:
If these statements speak to you, then you can dig more deeply into the SolveIT systems and methods.
Based on my personal experience with Dr. Michalewicz, he’s a capable mathematical thinker. For more about his company’s approach to problem solving, you will find useful How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics, also by Springer Verlag. You can get a copy here.
Stephen Arnold, June 6, 2008
Google: No Game Changer … Just Yet
June 5, 2008
Imagine my surprise when Computerworld picked up on information in my April 2008 Gilbane Group study, Beyond Search. You can read the Computerworld story here. (Hurry. Computerworld content can be hard to find if you dally. I won’t try to summarize the article nor will I comment on it beyond one modest observation.)
The GOOG bought Transformic. Transformic has some very prescient innovations. These are not new. In fact, the core insights date from the early 1990s. With the Google plumbing in place, XML and semi structured content processing in the bag, Google has to look beyond today. Never mind that Google’s competitors don’t have a clue what Google does on a day-to-day operational basis. The GOOG is the future.
The killer comment in the nice article by Chris Kanaracus is:
Inside an enterprise, and maybe unlike the Internet, you can know a lot about a user,” such as who they report to, said Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google’s enterprise division. “There’s a lot of empirical information you can derive. All of that can be used to create a very, very rich profile about the user, which can then be used to create a really rich search experience.” Do not expect Google to suddenly bring a game-changing product to market, according to Glotzbach. “The model is not these kind of big-bang approaches where we work for multiple years and then roll something out. In terms of what we do in enterprise search, you’ll see a constant flow, as opposed to one sort of big bang — here’s a whole new thing,” he said.
Mr. Glotzbach was on a panel billed as a debate late last year. Ah, he’s a canny wordsmith that wizard be.
Mr. Glotzbach’s comment comes from the belly of a company planning to start building housing in the year 2013 on prime NASA real estate in Mountain View, Calif.
Time, to Google, means right now and really fast. Time also means the drip drip of incremental functions slipstreamed in apparently meaningless droplets. The pace will be Googley slow. You will need a time lapse camera to note the changes.
Should IBM, Oracle, and other giants in data management worry? Nope, executives at the companies told me that their knowledge of Google is rich, deep, and wide. I do have a nifty briefing about the Transformic technology. Interested? Write me at sa at arnoldit dot com.
A chipper quack to Computerworld for the reference to my new study.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2008
More Google Transparency… A Googley Transparency
June 5, 2008
I loathe search engine optimization, the folks who sell snake oil to hapless souls desperate for traffic, and the media for covering this alleged discipline. But I’m 64 and schooled in Model T notions like consistent content, meaningful indexing, and regular additions to the information stock pile.
For the 99 percent of the people who love SEO, you will want to read this Googley post from super Googler Matt Cutts. He provides some candor, some new information, and some spin. The full post is here. The Web log post is “Improved SEO documentation galore!”
The Googler writes:
Google just added a bunch of nice documentation in various places. We even did it in official places — much better than doing it on my personal blog.
Then in the comments, a person identifying himself / herself as “James” cut right through the Googzilla’s clouds of steam. “James” wrote:
What about a place a webmaster can go to communicate with Google about said penalties or changes? Check out webmaster central. It’s littered with webmasters who had great organic traffic one day.. and none the next. This has got to be the most frustrating thing for webmasters trying to do the right thing and follow all Google’s guidelines
Not long ago, a journalist with a nationally-syndicated column called me. The parent company had received some legal instruction to remove a certain article from the Google index. Why this person called me I don’t know. The caller–an ace reporter, mind you–could find the name, email, or phone number of a person at Google to discuss this issue. In fact, the ace reporter told me, “I called a dozen numbers. No one calls back.”
So that’s standard Googley procedure for people who aren’t Googley. The GOOG wants to vaporize Harrod’s Creek geese like me, and it has ignored my requests for comments, queries, and input for several years. But I do keep a collection of super-Googlers on my trusty Treo 650. I was a good person. I provided the ace reporter with some names of people who, in theory, might recall my name much in the way I remember that my barber’s name.
Well, one of my magic Googley names worked. The GOOG listened and allowed the ace reporter to dodge a coronary.
But until the average goose can access lines of communication that work, I’m skeptical. When I read a reassuring statement, I’m inclined to put my head under my wing. Here’s a snippet from Mr. Cutts’ essay:
We do appreciate getting suggestions and feedback from users, webmasters, and SEOs. I’m especially interested when people want to report spam, including paid text links….No search engine is perfect, and everyone will have different opinions about what a search engine should focus on. But I appreciate the feedback that we get from users, webmasters, and SEOs. I know that the suggestions that we get help to make Google a better search engine.
I’m not ready to believe that James’ rejoinder is not dead on and completely transparent. Does the GOOG talk to you? Can you get a Googler on the phone? Does your Google engineer call you back to explain why your Web site has been put in purgatory? Let me know in the comments section of this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Attensity: Packaging Text Processing for Higher Value Applications
June 5, 2008
Enterprise search is like a poinsettia three weeks after the holidays. The form of the lovely plant remains, but the color is gone. Poinsettia look unhealthy, and my mother callously tossed them in the trash.
Attensity has been working to take its core content processing technology and apply it to problems where search-and-retrieval won’t work or have already failed. With a modest cash infusion from the CIA’s not-so-secret venture arm, Attensity refined its “deep extraction” technology and looked for big problems remained unresolved by other vendors.
For example, customer support is a sore spot. It’s expensive. It’s hard to manage because turnover often soars to 50 to 60 percent per year. Automation remains blind to import clues in a customer email or voice call. Many systems can figure out that “I’m going to sue you” is a negative message. But most don’t know what 🙁 means.
Attensity has taken its rocket science technology and created MarketVoice. According to Insurance Technology, a CMP Publication, and created:
a new solution enabling insurers to track, analyze and act on customer conversations in blogs, Web forums, product review comments, and other forms of online customer exchanges
Please, read the original story by Kristi Cattafi here. Do this quickly. CMP, like other traditional publishers, takes some interesting angles on its own search and retrieval system. Sometimes it is very good. Other times, it is a bit disappointing.
MarketVoice uses the deep extraction technology, but the system figures out where problems may be warming to a boiling point. Attensity has made its system easier to set up than some of the others that claim to do similar functions. You may be familiar with ClearForest, now part of Reuters, which is now part of Thomson, a multi-national professional information company. Attensity’s appraoch strikes me as easier to set up and more nimble. Your perception may differ from mine, but I think Attensity’s MarketVoice is a wake up call to vendors of text processing systems that are designed to do one function, leaving the licensee to the job of integrating the system’s outputs. Attensity delivers a product. Others deliver programming tool kits.
The company has also swizzled its deep extraction invention to process content on Web logs. Web log content is often hard to figure out. Some comments are declarative. Some are tongue in cheek. Others are spoofs; for example, today I received a comment from a person claiming to be a Googler. Google does not interact directly with me. This is an “old” Google-conceived rule. This spoofer tipped his hand by contacting me directly. That type of context is beyond the ken of text processing systems. Not even Attensity can figure out the sub text for the alleged Google post and my remarks in this paragraph.
Most text processing systems can’t figure out the context of the information, so indexing these primary and secondary components of an article and figuring out what the link means is not trivial. Atensity’s system grinds through text on a Web log and generates reports about customer sentiment. Attensity’s approach is useful, and it works quite well. You can read more about this system here. If the link 404s, just navigate to www.attensity.com and poke through the information on the site.
Dr. David Bean, a wizard with a passion for language, has been aggressive in his push to make rocket science useful to mere mortals.
Attensity’s productizing of content analysis is a good example of how to grow a market without making your customers withhold their licensing fees. The company is focusing on large back office specialists. More information about this MarketVoice application is here.
As the screws tighten on vendors of pure search or stand alone text processing software, studying Dr. Bean’s retooling of his rocket science technology may be useful. Attensity is a bit ahead of some of its competitors. Companies will sagging revenues may want to bone up on Attensity’s business model sooner rather than later.
I flagged Attensity as a company to watch in my April 2008 study Beyond Search.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2008
A Wizard Tells It Straight: The Web Is Not an Operating System
June 4, 2008
Straight up Tim Bray’s post here is one of the best things I have read today, maybe in the last few months. Dr. Bay may not be as well known at Paris Hilton, but he’s been a contributor and innovator for many years. One example: He teamed with Dr. Ramanathan Guha to whack out the document that defined some of the semantic Web’s more interesting bits.
The most important point for me in his excellent essay was:
Lots of modern business is all about pumping information. The classic example would be finance; banks are giant information pumps with cash machines at the edges. Organizations (business, governments, clubs, political parties, religions) who figure out how to surf the new information flow will succeed and prosper; those who push back will be swept away. And it won’t have anything to do with whether anything’s like an OS or not.
Highly recommended, and he hits the theme “the Internet is about people” dead on as well. If you don’t recall any other innovations from Dr. Bray, think SGML. He contributed to that as well. For a fuller bio, click here.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Wikia Search: Social Search Is Blooming
June 4, 2008
I haven’t done much thinking about social search. Years ago when I saw a demonstration of Eurekster, now Euereksterswicki. I thought sites suggested by users was interesting. As the Internet expanded, a small collection of recommended sites would be useful. We built Point (Top 5% of the Internet) in 1993, eventually selling the property to CMGI’s Lycos unit. Social search was a variation on Point without the human editorial staff we relied upon 15 years ago.
Wikia: User-Modifiable Results
The big news in the last 24 hours is the sprucing up of the Wikia Search system. The venture is a result of Jim Wales’ creative nature. If you have not tried the system, navigate here and fire several queries at the system. It’s much more comprehensive than the system I tested several months ago. I still like the happy cloud logo.
I ran the query “enterprise search” on the system. The result was a pointer to Northern Light. The second result was a pointer to the enterprise search entry in Wikipedia. So far so good. What sets Wikia apart is that I can use an in-browser editing function to change a hit’s title. I can also move results up and down the page. I can see how that would be useful, but I save interesting hits to a folder. I then return to these saved files and conduct more in-depth investigations. So, the system generates results that are useful to me, contains a dollop of community functionality, and sports a larger index. You can read more about the system on Webware.com, which has a useful description of the service here.
Vivisimo’s Social Search
In New York at the Enterprise Search Summit, someone asked me, “Have you seen Vivisimo’s new social search system?” My answer was, “No, I don’t know much about it.” When I returned to my office, I have a link to Vivisimo’s explanation of social search. Vivisimo announced this function in October 2007, and I think that the catchphrase hooked some people at the New York show, and You can read the announcement here.
The point that resonated with me is:
Enabling users to vote on, rate, tag, save and share content within the search interface is just the first step in creating a collaborative information-enriching environment. Velocity 6.0 allows users to add their own knowledge about information found via search directly into the search result itself in the form of free-text annotation.
In this context, social search means that I can add key words or tags to an item processed by Vivisimo. The term is added to the index. If I provide that term to a colleague, the index term can be used to retrieve the document. An interactive tagging feature is useful, but it was not the type of functionality that I use. Others may find the feature exactly what is needed to make behind-the-firewall search less frustrating.
 |
 |
Social search taps into the wisdom of crowds. Some crowds are calm, even thoughtful. Others can be a management opportunity.
Baynote
Today I received an email from a colleague asking, “Did you see the social search study published by Baynote, Inc. Once again, the answer was, “No, I don’t think so.” I clicked on a link and went through a registration process (easily spoofed) to download PDF of the six-page report.
Baynote is a company specializing in “on demand recommendations and social search for Web sites.” You can explore the company’s Web site here. I didn’t read the verbiage on the Web page. I clicked in the search box and entered my favorite test query, beyond search. No joy The three hits were to information about Baynote. (The phrase beyond search sent to Clusty.com delivers a nice link to this Web log, however.)
I clicked back to the PDF report and scanned it. The main idea I garnered from the white paper is:
Baynote combines a site’s existing search engine results with community wisdom to produce a set of optimized results that is proven to yield greater conversions, longer engagement, and improved satisfaction. Thus, Social Search can be thought of as a community layer on top of the site’s existing search engine. The original search results may be re-ordered in the process, and the augmented results may include additional results that weren’t originally produced by the search engine, but proven to be valuable to your Web site visitors. Because Baynote is delivered as SAAS (software as a service), it can be live on a Web site in as little as 30 days with little or no development, installation or configuration.
If you have an existing search system, you can use Baynote as an add-on. With minimal hassle, you can rank results using the Baynote algorithms, monitor user behavior to shape search results, generate See Also references, and merge results from different collections.
I’m going to update my mental inventory about search, adding social search to list of search types that I lug around in my head.
Observations
I do have reservations about social anything. I’m 85 percent convinced that the Vivisimo and Baynote approaches have merit. But I want to end this short item with these observations:
- Social anything can be spoofed. When I visited Los Alamos National Labs, people with access to the facility fiddled with hard drives and other digital assets. If this stuff can happen at a security-conscious facility, imagine what a summer intern can do with social search in your organization.
- Users often have very good ideas about content. Other users have very bad ideas about content. When there are lots of clicks, then the likelihood of finding something useful edges up. The usefulness of Delicious and StumbleUpon are evidence of this. However, when there are comparatively few clicks, I’m inclined to exercise some extra caution. Tina in the mail room is a great person, but I’m not sure I trust her judgment on the emergency core cooling system schematics.
- The lightweight approach to tagging is not going to yield the type of information that a system like Tacit Software’s provides. If you want social, then take a look at Tacit’s Active Net system here.
- My hunch is that nearly invisible monitoring systems will yield more, higher quality insights about information. In some of my work, I’ve had access to outputs of surveillance systems. The data are often quite useful and generally bias-free. Human systems have humanity’s fingerprints on the data, which can obscure some important items.
Social search can be quite useful. Its precepts work quite well in high traffic environments. In more click sparse environments, a different type of tool is required to ferret out the important people and information.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Changes in Store for Microsoft Live.com Search
June 4, 2008
Jessica Mintz filed an information-charged story on June 3, 2008. Titled “Microsoft Exec Says Live Search Needs Image Fix.” Please, read her article here. These AP pieces have wacky urls and can be tough to find a day or two after the stories appear.
There were several points in her write up of Kevin Johnson’s talk at a conference operated by Third Door Media. Mr. Johnson is the president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, and he is one of Microsoft’s top dogs in the search-and-retrieval sector.
The points that struck me as particularly important were:
- There is brand confusion. A fix or a change may be in the cards
- Microsoft is working to convince stakeholders that it has a plan in the aftermath of the bolloxed Yahoo deal
- Microsoft is focusing on “commercial intent queries”, which I think means buying something.
What’s tough for me to convey in this short commentary is the tone of Mr. Johnson’s remarks. For some reason, I heard this highly-paid wizard expressing himself with a tinge of frustration.
Google’s been chugging along for a decade, and the company shows few signs of losing steam. When old Google wizards become Xooglers, young wizards take a close look at Google as the equivalent of a cow being stamped “Grade A Prime”. Legal documents hurled at Google have done little to slow the GOOG.
With Microsoft’s Web search market share sliding, maybe I am reading emotion into Mr. Mintz’s summary of Mr. Johnson’s remarks. Check out the story and let me know if you agree or disagree. Try to locate this story using http://search.live.com. When I checked, the story wasn’t in the Live.com index. The GOOG had indexed it. I think Google makes an effort to index Microsoft-related stories. What do you think?
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
How Much Info Is There? The Answer Is Coming
June 3, 2008
A happy quack to the colleague who sent me the link to this story: “Groundbreaking UC San Diego Research Study to Measure ‘How Much Information?’ Is in the World”. You can read this story here.
What hopped off the screen was this statement:
We have designed this research as a partnership between industry and academics to take the next steps in understanding how to think about, measure, and understand the implications of dramatic growth in digital information,” said Professor Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, co-leader of the new program. “As the costs per byte of creating, storing, and moving data fall, the amounts rise exponentially. We know that overall information technology increases productivity and human welfare, but not all information is equally valuable.”
Wizards from many high-profile organizations will work to answer this question. In the meantime, I’ll keeping upgrading my storage devices and parking data on cloud storage services. My data grows 2X each year. I wonder how much data my neighbor’s 14-year-old video music collector stores. I’m certain he’ll provide hard data. Maybe it will be easier to ask his parents. Neither uses a computer. Also, I bet the folks in Brazil, China, India, and Thailand, among other data centric countries will be particularly forthcoming.
I’m looking forward to the results of this study.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Coveo: Beyond a Billion Documents
June 3, 2008
Most licensees of enterprise search systems don’t know how many documents the system must index. Coveo can handle more than 1,000,000,000 documents.
Even fewer search system licensees know that many enterprise search systems have hard limits on how many documents a system can index before choking, sometimes expiring without warning. For example, Microsoft SharePoint has a hard limit significantly below the Coveo billion document target. Microsoft acquired Fast Search & Transfer, in part, to have a work around for this scaling problem.
Coveo’s G2B Information Access solutions deliver security, relevant results, and very strong ease of use. You can “snap in” Coveo to SharePoint, Documentum, and IBM FileNet environments without custom coding. For more information, navigate to the Coveo Web site. A free trial is available.
Stephen Arnold, June 3, 2008
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
