Inmagic Presto
July 10, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who told me about Inmagic’s upgrade to its social knowledge management platform. I read a story in CIOL.com, a developer oriented publication. Years ago I was on the Board of Directors of Inmagic, and I thought highly of their product. The company has evolved over the years, and now offers an interesting range of products. You can get the full scoop from the company’s Web site.
The Presto product connects content management, knowledge management, and social technologies. Inmagic has a search service that operates within a Presto environment too. Support for Microsoft SharePoint is quite good. With more than 100 million SharePoint licenses “in the wild”, Inmagic’s Presto adds useful functions to SharePoint installations.
Presto 3.1 uses Web Parts technology that allows the search parts on the Presto homepage to be embedded and used in a SharePoint deployment. A new Web Services API lets SharePoint communicate with Presto to create, replace, update, and delete records seamlessly.
Phil Green, CTO of Inmagic said:
With Inmagic Presto 3.1, companies can enhance their SharePoint environment with a cost-effective, off-the-shelf solution suited to their needs. They can create internal, secure knowledge communities around enterprise content, with sophisticated social, search, security, and library workflow capabilities not found in SharePoint. The use of Web Parts, Presto, and SharePoint together can deliver tremendous value to an organization’s bottom line.
Based on the research I have been doing for a major SharePoint installation, a software such as Presto can save many hours of fiddling. Recommended by the Beyond Search goslings.
Stephen Arnold, July 10, 2009
SharePoint Sunday: Best Practices Series
July 8, 2009
An interesting series of Web log articles lit up my radar screen. You can find the first installment of ““Best Practices of SharePoint Farm Configuring and Deployment” here. SharePoint Magazine plans six segments:
- Part 1 – Architecture and Logical Planning
- Part 2 – Installation is here.
- Part 3 – Development Environment
- Part 4 – Backup and Recovery Strategy
- Part 5 – Virtualization
- Part 6 – Post Deployment.
The diagram below provides a visual reminder why such best practices’ write ups are essential for SharePoint. The system is complicated, and one can argue over lunch whether the demo Google Wave is more or less complicated. I know for certain that SharePoint is a hairy beastie. Your mileage may differ, and Microsoft Certified Partners will insist that SharePoint is not too tricky. Just add a dash of hoisin sauce to the MVP’s pre invoice appetizer.
Source:Michael Nemtsev
The author is Michael Nemtsev is a Microsoft MVP and an expert in SharePoint and .NET technologies. With the strong software engineering and development background, Michael has been leading development projects for industry giants like Microsoft, IBM and Dell since year 2000. Based in Sydney, Australia, Michael is a SharePoint consultant for Readify, Australia’s industry recognized business technology company. Michael runs “SharePoint Tips & Tricks” site http://sharepoint-sandbox.com, SharePoint blog and tweets actively (via @laflour).
I will do my addled goose best to update the links as I locate them. If I miss one, please, use the comments section of this Web log to provide the two or three readers I have of the source material.
Stephen Arnold, July 8, 2009
Concept Searching Update
July 3, 2009
Founded in 2002, Concept Searching provides licensees with search, auto-classification, taxonomy management and metadata tagging solutions. You can download a fact sheet about the privately firm here. The software can be used on an individual user’s computer or mounted on servers to deliver enterprise solutions. The company’s secret sauce is its statistical metadata generation and classification method. The technology uses concept extraction and compound term processing to facilitate access to unstructured information. The company operates from Stevenage in Hertsfordshire. A list of the Concept Searching offices is here.
The company emphasizes the value of lateral thinking, and its approach to content analysis implements numerical recipes to find these insights and linkages within unstructured text.
When I updated my profile for this company earlier this year, I noted that the firm had signed Portal Solutions, a company that focuses on things Microsoft. The idea is to make it possible for a user to search for “insider dealing” and retrieve documents where that bound phrase does not appear but a related phrase such as “insider trading” does appear. This type of system appeals to intelligence officers and financial analysts. Concept Searching’s methods generated lists of related topics. You can see an example of the system in action by navigating to this page. I ran several test queries and the interface provided useful information and suggestions about other related content in the processed corpus. A screen shot of the output appears below:
Concept Searching is a Microsoft and Fast Search partner. The idea is that Concept Searching’s technology complements and in some cases extends the search and content processing services in Microsoft products. In May 2009, the company sponsored a best practices site for Microsoft SharePoint. The deal involves a number of companies, including ShemaLogic, KnowlegeLake, and K2 Technologies among others. The site is supposed to go live in the next couple of weeks, but I don’t have a url or a date at this time.
The company had a busy May, signing deals with Allianz Global Investors, Directory, and AT&T Government Solutions.
For me, the most interesting system that Concept Searching offers is its ability to generate and classify terms found in SharePoint documents into a taxonomy. The company has prepared a brief video that demonstrates this functionality. You can find the video here. The company’s approach does not require a separate index. Microsoft Enterprise Search can use the outputs of the Concept Searching system. I noted two “uniques” in the narrative to the video, and I remain skeptical about categorical affirmatives. I think the bound phrase extraction and the close integration with SharePoint are benefits. I just bristle when I hear “unique”, which means the one and only anywhere in the world. Broad assertion in my experience.
Concept Searching’s president, Martin Garland, said here:
Our intellectual property is still unique as we are the only statistical search technology able to indentify multi-word patterns within text and insert these patterns directly into the index at ingestion or creation time. We call this “Compound Term Processing”.
Last week I sat in a briefing given by one of Microsoft’s enterprise search team. I thought I heard descriptions of functions that struck me as quite similar to those performed by Concept Search and such companies as Interse in Copenhagen, Denmark.
I think it will be fruitful to watch what features and functions are baked into the upcoming Microsoft Fast ESP version of the old Fast Search & Transfer system. Remember: the roots of Fast Search stretch deep to 1997, a year before Google poked its nose from the Stanford baby crib.
Partners like Concept Searching have invested significant resources in Microsoft technologies. Will Microsoft respect these investments, or will Microsoft in an effort to recoup is $1.23 billion investment take a hard line toward such companies as Concept Searching.
I am on the fence regarding this issue.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2009
SharePoint and Social Computing
June 29, 2009
You will want to read “Social Computing in the Enterprise. Microsoft Vision for Business Leaders”. You can download the Microsoft white paper from the SharePoint Web site. What makes this paper most intriguing is that it plops into the gap between the hyperbole about social computing and the information I saw this week that most business executives don’t do Web logs or other types of social computing. You can get a general sense of this somewhat surprising state of affairs in Computerworld’s “Top CEOs Still Shunning Twitter, Facebook”.
I don’t think Microsoft wrote its white paper in response to the news that CEOs “shun Twitter”. I think Microsoft wants to position SharePoint as a social operating system. The white paper employs routine rhetorical methods to create a need for a SharePoint solution. SharePoint, by the way, is not positioned as complex. Other approaches are complex. See page 10 for more along this line:
This complexity makes it difficult to apply traditional structured project management and collaboration solutions. Social computing can help optimize the performance of teams by adding a dimension of unstructured collaboration. This provides a forum for cross-disciplinary dialogs and authentic, spontaneous conversations between people in previously isolated areas of the company that can expose best practices—and call attention to inefficiencies and duplication—more rapidly.
So, SharePoint as a social operating system. Two references to the word “search”. I wonder what happened to the potent relationship mapping tools in Fast ESP. Any thoughts?
Stephen Arnold, June 28, 2009
SharePoint, Criticism, and a Rigid Microsoft Wizard
June 28, 2009
I am not sure what a Fierce Media is, but it ran a story that frightened me. Addled geese are easily startled as you know. I think of the poem in which a young girl who dies comes alive when she chases geese “who cried in goose, ‘Alas’. The headline for the SharePoint “brown study” was: “SharePoint Director Remains Bloodied but Unbowed.”
Here are some selected fang-like phrases from the Fierce write up:
- “Often-maligned content management tool”
- “Microsoft claims 100 million [SharePoint] licenses, but even if that number is exaggerated…”
- “Coopetition” to “fill in the [SharePoint] gaps”
- “When it comes to document management, Finn [Microsoft wizard] says that might not have as comprehensive an offering as say EMC Documentum…”
- “Finn admits that they are lacking in this area, but says channel partners make up for the gap.”
- “The whole issue of SharePoint governance is definitely a pain point…”
You get the idea. Fierce Media certainly makes me think that SharePoint has more rough edges that smooth, slick edges.
For me the most interesting parts of the story were this statement:
Finn understands that Microsoft is a target, but he defends his product (just as you would expect) and he points out that they were offering MySites, a collaboration environment, in SharePoint 2003 before Facebook even existed, but it didn’t get any attention because it was so ahead of its time. Perhaps so, but he’s certainly satisfied with his market share and he can always point to that. With that kind of presence, everyone has to take SharePoint seriously, and frankly it would be crazy to ignore it.
And, second, there was zero reference to enterprise search. Search is a big deal, and I did not find one single mention of the free SharePoint search, the search tool that runs out of gas at 50 million documents, and the highly publicized Microsoft Fast ESP solution. After spending $1.23 billion, starting a special Web site, and creating a Web log for the product prior to Mr. Ballmer’s stream of commentary about the importance of search, I expected something about SharePoint search. I came away from the write up with more concerns than before.
Stephen Arnold, June 28, 2009
SharePoint Virtualization
June 23, 2009
“SharePoint Virtualization Survey Results” offered some insight into how on sample of Microsoft licensees uses virtual servers. The person running the survey and preparing the summary of results is Wictor Wilén. Among the findings that I found interesting were these:
- About 96 percent of the respondents virtualized their development environment and half virtualized their production environments. (I was surprised at the disparity between the two percentages.)
- The Web front end was virtualized by most respondents; query service was the second most virtualized operation. Mr. Wilén wrote: “A quite high number of respondents answered that they were virtualizing the database role (73,9%) but only half of them could really recommend it (37,2%). The Excel Services role was something that about half of the participants virtualized (47,8%) and recommended for virtualization (44,2%).”
You can get more survey details from Mr. Wilen’s Web site.
Bing, Ballmer, Bets, and Blodget
June 19, 2009
I have been quite forthright about my enjoyment of Henry Blodget’s analyses. An MBA (once high flying) wanted to introduce me to him, but the meeting got postponed, then there was a financial meltdown, and the rest you know. Mr. Blodget’s “Steve Ballmer Is Making a Bad $10 Billion Bet” is one of those Web log write ups that the Murdoch crowd and the financially challenged New York Times’s staff should tape to their cubicle panel. The beat around the barn approach to Microsoft’s search challenge does no one any good. The excitement about early usage of Bing.com is equally unnerving because until there are several months of data, dipping in a clickstream provides snapshots not feature length movies.
Mr. Blodget runs down some of the history of Microsoft’s spending in the search sector. The historical estimates are hefty but the going forward numbers are big, even for a giant like Microsoft. Mr. Blodget wrote:
Steve has already been investing about 5%-10% of Microsoft’s operating income on the Internet for the past decade, and he has nothing to show for it.
Mr. Blodget inserts a chart with weird green bars instead of the bright red ones that the numbers warrant. Green or red, big bucks. Zero payoff. He continued:
In fact, maybe it would be more realistic (but not actually very realistic at all) to assume that Bing might make a lot less than $8 billion a year–say, $1-$2 billion a year, if it was very successful. Or that, more realistically, once Google saw that Bing was actually making some headway, it might decide to spend some or all of its own $8 billion of free cash flow a year to protect its franchise, given that Bing seemed intent on destroying it. And that, because Google already had 65% market share of the search market versus Bing’s 10% and had weathered all of Bing’s previous attacks, it might very well succeed in defending itself.
Several comments flapped through this addled goose brain of mine:
- Microsoft does not have one search problem. Microsoft has multiple search problems; for example, the desktop search, the enterprise search baked into the 100 million SharePoint installations, the SQL Server search, and the Fast Search & Transfer search system. Each of these costs time and resources. So, Mr. Blodget’s numbers probably understate the cash outflows. The police issue in Norway has a price tag, if not in money, in terms of credibility of the $1.2 billion paid for something that certainly seems dicey.
- Microsoft is constrained by its own technology. There’s lots of rah rah about Microsoft’s data centers and how sophisticated these are. The reality is that the Google has a cost advantage in this chunk of the business. My research suggests that when the Google spends $1.00, Microsoft has to spend as much as $4.00 or more to get similar performance. Another big cash outflow in my opinion.
- Google is in the leapfrog business. I have mentioned Programmable Search Engines, dataspaces, and other interesting Google technology. Even Yahoo with its problems has begun to respond to the Google leapfrog, but so far Microsoft has been focused on the incremental changes, and while helpful, these incremental changes will end up costing more money down the line because the plumbing at Microsoft won’t scale to handle the next challenge Google causes in the online ocean.
Exciting times for Microsoft shareholders because the shares will open in about an hour at $23.50. IBM which has been through the same terrain as Microsoft opens at $106.33. What’s that say?
Stephen Arnold, June 19, 2009
Three Months, Eight Outside Consultants, and Microsoft Staff= One Web Site
June 19, 2009
Here’s the sentence that made me quack happily:
In only three months we were able to understand the existing Web site content, create a new information taxonomy and Web site design, develop the components, move content, conduct performance tests, and roll out the site to production. Building on the SharePoint platform allowed us to meet or exceed all of the project goals in a short amount of time. The product group is already realizing the benefits of the improved content publishing model and the Web site is growing and improving every day.
Who built what?
Microsoft’s SharePoint team created its own SharePoint Web site. If you find this expensive and a bit much for your constrained budget, you will want to read the case history “How We Did It: SharePoint.Microsoft.com” on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Web log.
The case is a lengthy write up with a number of workarounds and their solutions. One example:
Another interesting requirement was to display content for targeted audiences at the bottom of the home page. When users click tabs at the left side of the home page, relevant content is displayed without refreshing the page. Additionally, content authors needed to be able to update the content inside a Web browser without requiring Web site coding skills. To implement this requirement, Advaiya created a custom content type and page layout to store information that corresponds to the audience content requirements, and to provide an interface for authoring. Based on the custom page layout, we created publishing pages that correspond to each audience tab on the home page. Content is stored in a page layout so authors can easily write and update it, track versions, and take advantage of the Web content management approval functionality that SharePoint provides. Content authors can create and edit the audience content with out-of-the box SharePoint publishing functionality. Only authenticated users have permission to create, edit, and delete content in these pages, and publishing approval workflows ensure that only approved content appears on the home page.
Keep in mind that Microsoft’s engineers did not do this work. I find that quite interesting. I recall the “dog food” references I have heard at Microsoft conferences. Perhaps the notion does not apply to SharePoint because the system is too complex, too resource intensive, and too interdependent for Microsoft employees to tackle. Enter Advaiya. You will need Silverlight and some other plug ins to view this company’s Web site.
The vendor is described by Microsoft in this way:
The Microsoft® Office SharePoint® product group teamed with Advaiya, Inc. to rebuild the SharePoint Web site using the SharePoint Server 2007 platform. Microsoft chose Advaiya, a consulting company in Kirkland, WA, to work with the SharePoint product group because Advaiya has a long history of working closely with many Microsoft teams to develop strategies to roll out new technologies, content, and solutions.
Good work for Advaiya. Maybe not such good work for a small shop struggling with SharePoint. When the vendor needs help implementing a Web site, I think outfits like SquareSpace.com have a real business opportunity. Also, nary a word about search. I wonder how many people it would take to hook Fast ESP into this site. The SharePoint build, according to the write up, involved eight people from Advaiya. No report of the number of Microsoft engineers pressed into service. Quack!
Stephen Arnold, June 19, 2009
A Surprising Ripple for Wave in the SharePoint Ocean
May 31, 2009
Information Week published an interesting article about Google Wave. You will want to read Thomas Claburn’s informed essay “Google Wave May Challenge Microsoft SharePoint” here. Unlike the gushing at the nerd-centric Web logs, Mr. Claburn steps back and points out that Google Wave is a not exactly the consumer thrill ride that those receiving free HTC Android 1.5 G2 mobile devices cheered.
Mr. Claburn wrote:
Wave also has the potential to blunt the success of Microsoft’s SharePoint. While Google isn’t positioning Wave as a SharePoint competitor, Gundotra at a press conference following the Wave demonstration highlighted Wave’s openness as something lacking in SharePoint. Within a year or two, businesses considering SharePoint but worried about vendor lock-in may have an attractive lightweight alternative.
Wave is a demo, not a product or platform as I write this. If Mr. Claburn is right, Microsoft may have to shift its attention from one more suicide run at Google’s Web search bunker and shore up its defenses in its SharePoint stronghold.
Stephen Arnold, May 31, 2009
SharePoint Sunday: Performance Testing
May 31, 2009
If you have a zippy SharePoint system, you won’t need to read this post. If you have users complaining about 30 second or longer wait times for basic operations like saving and opening objects, you will want to note JOPX’s “Web Testing (and Load Testing) SharePoint 2007 with Visual Studio 2008” here. Last week I watched a SharePoint installation cause employees to open documents before lunch. The idea was that the system would display the document by the time the worker drank a bottle of water and ate a cheese sandwich. Believe it or not, that 30 minute interval was not sufficient. What’s even more remarkable is that SharePoint users in this organization are resigned to such performance issues.
Among the performance sources and code snippets are these useful items:
- Load Testen van SharePoint met VSTS 2008 en VSTT Load Agents – Deel 1 (Dutch only). We fired this up and were able to figure out what to do reasonably well. The sticky wickets were easily resolved with a trip to Google Translate at http://translate.google.com
- SharePoint (Performance, Stress) Load Testing
Useful post, JOPX.
Stephen Arnold, May 31, 2009
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