Learn How To Fix the Most Common SharePoint Mistakes
February 10, 2012
Mistake #10: Not Pointing Your SharePoint Servers at ThemselvesWhen SharePoint works, it is magnificent. When it doesn’t work, it can be a nightmare to fix. For this reason, anything you can do to ease troubleshooting is time well spent. To that end, I make sure that every server in the SharePoint farm points to itself for all web apps. If I get sporadic reports about SharePoint not responding, I can easily use RDP to log into each server and try to pull up SharePoint. If this attempt works, then I know that the server is working. If SharePoint does not come up, then I know in exactly which Microsoft User Location Server (ULS) logs to look for the relevant errors.
When Disaster Strikes – Loss of a SharePoint Farm
February 10, 2012
Most SharePoint developers and administrators have nightmares about losing their content. Any number of things can go wrong when one deals with fragile electronic data storage and retrieval. Quite frankly, it is a miracle that data disasters do not strike more often. Our blog author, Paul, describes his terrifying account in “Five Things I Learned From Losing My SharePoint Farm.”
He recounts his thoughts and actions immediately after the loss:
I went home and made the first sensible decision of the evening. I went to bed. Partly I thought I should stay up and work on the problem but I was shattered and I wasn’t going to solve anything in the state I was in. When I woke up – at 5:00AM, screaming – I got to work and thankfully by midday I had the farm back in a working state and all the data accessible. During those painful hours I learned 5 valuable lessons that I thought were worth sharing for relative newcomers – like me – to SharePoint.
Paul goes on to suggest some practical solutions so that others do not suffer his same loss. Ideas include regular SQL backups and details documentation that is stored outside of the SharePoint installation itself, outside being the operative word there.
Many organizations are turning to smart third party solutions to help make the backup and restore process much simpler. Add automatic backup to the features of the Cloud and SharePoint administrator nightmares could be greatly reduce in frequency and severity.
One alternative that many organizations are turning to is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Their comprehensive suite of solutions can stand alone or compliment an existing SharePoint infrastructure. Particular attention is given to their backup and restore options here.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 10, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Oracle’s PLM Summit Focuses on Profitability
February 10, 2012
The 3rd Annual Oracle Agile Product Lifecycle Management Summit just wrapped up in Santa Clara, California. The focus this year was to Optimize Your Product Value Chain for Increased Profitability.
The attendees were introduced to “trends, challenges and best practices that are helping organizations to:
- Accelerate innovation through ideation management and collaboration, product portfolio management and analytics, data consolidation and cleansing, and a rich enterprise product record.
- Design for supply with product cost management, outsourced manufacturing and product collaboration, product supply risk analytics, and spend consolidation.
- Align the value chain through integrated portfolio and business planning, enterprise quality management and analytics, accurate and clean product data publishing, and rapid product commercialization
There were general sessions discussing everything from profitability to optimization; as well as break out session and industry focus groups.
Oracle is not the only company “turning innovation into a competitive advantage.” Technology companies like Inforbix may not be as big, but are offering companies, big and small, the same advantages. Inforbix is designed to simplify data access, increase profitability, and yet be affordable for manufacturing companies of all sizes. Who knows – may be next year Inforbix will be holding a summit of their own!
Jennifer Wensink, February 10, 2012
A Corner for Helpful SharePoint Info
February 10, 2012
Johnny’s RIA Corner publishes some valuable information, like “Fast Tips for FAST for SharePoint #2.” However, we have to say that the site wins the Hard-to-Read-SharePoint-Information Award. The inverted colors are really hard on the eyes, especially in articles with multi-colored code. Please, Johnny, consider fixing this trendy problem.
The article mentioned above shares a couple of query tips. The write up states:
When trying to query for a document that has a question mark (?) in its name or address as part of a FQL query, you may notice weird behavior from FAST. . . . Sending the query as is, will cause FAST to automatically evaluate the question mark as a wildcard character that will match any single character. Since this is not our desired result, we need to tell FAST not to use wildcards in our specific string.
The code changes for achieving this feat is included in the post.
Cynthia Murrell, February 10, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Managing an Online Reputation
February 10, 2012
Zimbio calls our attention to the judgment of the Web with “Monitoring Tools for Management Reputation Online.” (As evident in the title, the piece seems to have originally been written in a language besides English, one in which the adjectives come after the nouns. Keep that in mind when reading it.)
The freewheeling nature of the Internet, at least for now, means that anyone can go online and say anything about any person or company. It is the wise business that monitors and manages its online reputation. Besides working to remove or bury negative information, companies should make the effort to promote their brands online in a positive light.
The write up asserts:
Thus management reputation Internet, reputation web or reputation online with the help of e-reputation enterprise and cleaner nets not only saves the name from being violated on the Internet but also has the tendency to create business for those who have their e-reputation handled very carefully.
This is a very brief piece, with imbedded links that point to French online reputation management company Zen-Reputation. (Ah ha, French! That explains the sentence construction.) Whether through this company or a competitor, though, paying attention to their Internet image is a good idea for many companies. What happens if someone posts something unfavorable and links aggressively to that write up? Good question.
Cynthia Murrell, February 10, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Lucid Imagination Dives into the Cloud
February 9, 2012
Continuing to reap the benefits of investment in open source, Lucid Imagination has just launched its cloud contender. Marketwire reports, “Lucid Imagination ‘Search-as-a-Service’ Powers Flexible, Cost-Effective Enterprise-Wide Data Discovery.” Like the company’s enterprise version of LucidWorks 2.0, the cloud-based version builds on Apache Lucene/Solr. The write up explains:
“LucidWorks Cloud helps businesses of all sizes conquer even the most daunting data and business quandaries by rapidly firing up cost-effective, flexible, and scalable enterprise search applications that help users find the information they need, when they need it. More than 30 companies used the pre-release version of LucidWorks Cloud, shaping the new product to meet even the most rigorous demands of cloud-based enterprise search.”
Both versions of LucidWorks add a lot of features to their open source foundations, like an improved user interface, monitoring and reporting tools, and an open connector framework that bridges to alternative data sources.
Founded in 2007, Lucid Imagination focuses exclusively on Apache Lucene/Solr search technology. Eight out of the 30 core committers to that open source project work for Lucid. The company also offers free developer software. Many of its clients around the world are huge household names, like AT&T, Ford, and The Smithsonian, to name just a few.
Cynthia Murrell, February 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Bing on Social Search Controversy between GOOG and Facebook
February 9, 2012
Bing finally speaks up about its social search advantage; surprising, since the company has somehow been flying under the radar recently with the controversy surrounding Google privacy and social networking.
Liz Gannes from AllThingsD.com interviewed Bing Search director Stefan Weitz regarding social data and search results in the article, “Bing–Which Has Deals With Facebook and Twitter–Finally Speaks on Social Search Controversy.” In the interview, Weitz states that social search has positively impacted the Bing experience and attributes that impact to the company’s attention to people. Weitz also comments on capitalizing on the debate around Google’s privacy and social settings. The article states:
“They [Google] are doing a nice job on their own of handling this problem. But they are learning just like we are. They did what we didn’t want to do, which was make the user experience peppered with this stuff, with +1s everywhere, the Google+ content in the top corner. I think [Google] realized we were ahead and they overextended. But I know a ton of guys there and they’re smart and they’re reacting to what has been said.”
I struggle to see exactly how Microsoft is different than Google on this issue. Instead of pressing the company’s own network (like Google using Google+,) Microsoft is using Facebook and Twitter in the same regard. Bing has just been a little slower about incorporating social data into its search results—according to Weitz, this is because making sense of social signals is complex.
I think making sense of this social search contention is possibly even more complex. Is there too much ego and testosterone in the social locker room?
Andrea Hayden, February 8, 2012
Numbers Show Increase in Cloud-Based PLM Usage
February 9, 2012
Although everyone working with product lifecycle management (PLM) suspected the numbers for 2011 would show a definite shift toward the cloud and new PLM solutions the numbers are finally proving it. A recent press release titled, Arena Grows New Business 19% in 2011, on Marketwatch, tells of how a leader in cloud based services for small to mid-sized businesses exploded in growth due to the release of their latest creation, PDXViewer, cloud based app for viewing PDX files.
To explain the 19% growth the press release said,
“Helping drive that growth were increases in annuity bookings — up nearly 15% for the year — and an increase in subscriptions coming from new strategic partnerships. New customers were up 18% for the quarter compared to the same quarter in 2010. In addition to 2011′s strong subscription and renewal numbers, Arena fulfilled its commitment to expand the company by building out its software, infrastructure and partner community.”
What these numbers signify is that there is a new trend for companies to move to cloud based PLM solutions. As data continues to grow, expenses continue to be cut and a new technologically savvy workforce demands the latest in cloud technology and access to company data companies of all sizes are turning to new data management solutions.
As Arena is proving with their impressive numbers companies of all sizes are looking to unify departments by making data accessible and manageable by all. This unification in the form of cloud based PLM not only reduces overlap between design and production but eliminates redundancies that only serves to cost more money.
Catherine Lamsfuss, February 9, 2012
Enterprise Search Meets the Cloud in 2012
February 9, 2012
In “2012 – Ready or Not,” Mike Alsup, Senior Vice President at Gimmal Group, lays out a summary of 2011 and speculates on 2012 in the world of SharePoint and content management. Of course, 2011 was another growth year for the ubiquitous SharePoint platform. One estimate puts SharePoint users at 125,000,000 and counting. Although, Alsup says, many of these SharePoint sites are collaboration sites, intranet, and other lightweight knowledge management, meaning lots of room to grow and innovate among the users.
Otherwise, 2011 is noted for lots of infrastructure consolidation and lots of waiting to see what happens with SharePoint Records Management. And for 2012? Alsup gives somewhat lengthy explanations on Records Management 2.0 and content enabled vertical applications. Of course, 2012 speculations are not complete without mention of the Cloud. Here’s what Alsup says,
In the world of SharePoint, the product is different in the cloud and on premise because of limitations on what can be deployed in the cloud and how it needs to be deployed. There are many SharePoint applications that provide great value that can’t be deployed in the Microsoft Clouds (Microsoft private cloud solutions, Windows Azure, Office 365) because of product limitations. If Microsoft enabled these applications to be more easily deployed in their clouds, and their customers could deploy their SharePoint applications similarly in each of the three environments, then the decisions on how and where to host would be based on economics and deployment strategy instead of the limitations of SharePoint in the clouds.
While SharePoint is a powerful and complex system, we know there are limitations when the Cloud is introduced. For a Cloud solution in your SharePoint environment, check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Here you can read about the power of information pairing.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze . . .
smoothly integrates itself into your website so that the user doesn’t even realize that Cloud services are working in the background. Furthermore, InSite always knows what a user is interested in. Navigation behavior on the website serves as the basis for recognizing their interests. If the user finds themselves on one of your sub-pages on the topic mobility, for example, even at this level Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite still displays further information such as blogs, news, Wikipedia etc. on the relevant topic.
Check out the full suite of solutions at Mindbreeze to see what works for you.
Philip West, February 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Expert System Italy
February 9, 2012
In 1989, Marco Varone, along with Stefano Spaggiari and Paolo Lombardi, founded Expert System Italy. The three wanted to develop semantic software to extract knowledge from text by replicating human processes. Varone is the father of the company’s Cogito technology.
Unlike traditional technologies based on keyword and statistics that can only guess the content of a text, Cogito reads and interprets knowledge trapped in unstructured text, finding hidden relationships, trends, and events. It relies on deep linguistic analysis and semantic disambiguation of text to ensure a complete understanding of a text. The technology can be used on files, e-mails, articles, reports, and Web pages.
After developing Cogito, Expert System partnered with Microsoft and integrated the linguistic and semantic technologies into Microsoft Office. The Cogito Categorizer is also integrated to the SharePartXXL Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft SharePointby the SharePartXXL Cogito Connector. In April 2011, the company was awarded a US patent for the Cogito semantic platform.
Products include Cogito Semantic Search, Cogito semantic Advertiser, and Cogito Answers, and Cogito Intelligence Platform. Expert System positions Cogito Semantic Advertiser as an alternative to Google’s AdSense search keyword ad management tool. The company applies semantic technologies to its contextual ad formula, discerning greater meaning from the text in an article to provide more relevant ads. Cogito Answers can be used to improve customer service, combining semantic analysis of sentiment and customer satisfaction monitoring with advanced natural language customer interaction features.
Profitable from the start and with recent growth at a compound annual growth rate of 50%, Expert System has a client list that encompasses a variety of industries. Customers include Vodafone, Eni Group, Pirelli, Telecom Italia, the Italian Ministry of Defense, RIM and CVS Pharmacy. Competitors are Google, Cisco, Flurry, Nuance Communications, and RAMP. Expert System has a strong following in the mobile search space.
Rita Safranek, February 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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