Microsoft Fast Says Google Not a Threat
December 17, 2008
Business 24-7.ae published on December 18, 2008, “Microsoft Eyes Google Turf” here. This is a wacky url, so the article by Nancy Sudheer may 404 by the time you read this. The premise of the article is that Microsoft Fast does not see Google’s enterprise initiatives as a threat. I have to tell you that I don’t agree. I think Google is a threat to Microsoft at this time, and the orange level is heading for red in 2009, gentle reader. As you may know, Microsoft paid $1.23 billion for Fast Search & Transfer in April 2008. About 45 days later, the Microsoft Fast programming team released a Web part. In October, Norwegian police raided the Microsoft Fast office and is investigating alleged criminal behavior at the company.
In the meantime, Googzilla has moved past 25,000 licensees of the Google Search Appliance. The customer count does not include educational institutions such as 1.5 million users of Google Docs in New South Wales or the thousands of organizations using Google Maps. I don’t believe that Google is getting 3,000 new sign ups for Google Apps every 24 hours. I think one of the Googlers was guzzling too much Odwalla juice at 3 am. I do believe that the GOOG is getting a steady flow of sign ups. Some are tire kickers and some are for real. The point is that Google is grinding forward.
Ms. Sudheer is reporting a story and relying on the information provided by her sources. I am not faulting her writing or her effort to be clear. I am not comfortable with her accepting the premise that Google is not a threat. For goodness sake, Microsoft is tangled in knots, spending hundreds of millions on data centers, buying companies with recycled technology and companies with lousy accountants, and changing search strategies more frequently than Tess, my technical advisor, rolls over in her cedar chip Orvis bed.
Ms. Sudheer quotes a Microsoft Fast big wig–Neil Garner, VP International Operations, Fast, Middle East–as saying:
“Google is not about enterprise search as they focus more on advertising, which is their revenue source. Microsoft is converse to that as our enterprise resource planning product SharePoint itself is a billion-dollar business issuing 100 million licenses, of which Fast will be an integral part,” he said. “Search will be able to service Microsoft’s present set of customers interested in e-commerce and provide specific capabilities to enhance business. Our new branding activities will also bring out this awareness as consumers have to go to a single vendor,” Garner said.
I have heard that Microsoft is putting pressure on SharePoint licensees to use the Fast ESP technology and abjure a third party solution such as Coveo or Isys Search Software. My hunch is that Microsoft may have to make the Fast ESP system financially attractive. What’s interesting is that Google’s enterprise pricing is headed the other way. Based on my analysis of search vendors’ pricing for 2008, Google is one of the most costly systems to license. Oracle seems to have retreated from the enterprise search market, but Microsoft is sticking with it. Which strategy is better? Fighting the GOOG or poking one’s head in the sand? Let me know your thoughts. Oh, if you have any update on the police action in Norway, please, let me know. Maybe the case has been dismissed? I hope so.
Stephen Arnold, December 17, 2008
MOSS 2007: Teetering on the Brink in 2009
December 14, 2008
The year numbering strikes me as odd. It’s the tail end of 2008, and I am reading about MOSS 2007’s accomplishments. In two weeks it will be 2009. I think, “What’s been accomplished in SharePoint” in this time period?” Well, I don’t have a very good answer. I have quite a few questions about Microsoft’s MOSS 2007; for example, how can one minimize the complexity and cost of the system while delivering sub second response times? With an eagerness that surprised the other geese in the pond, I read “SharePoint 2007 – A Quick Review” here. The write up was brief. Here are the points that jumped off the page and lodged in my goose brain:
- MOSS 2007 is user friendly
- MOSS 2007 indexes business data and “other relevant information from remote data stores”
- MOSS 2007 supports collaboration
- MOSS 2007 supports standards
- MOSS 2007 improves in Web and “Web 2.0 content management”
The writer notes, “There is however, some difficulty that is experienced with customization and there are also concerns about ongoing maintenance.”
Stepping back, I don’t agree that MOSS 2007 is that much different from previous versions of SharePoint. The product is positioned as a Swiss Army knife. Most of the features my team and I have tested are convoluted and buggy; for example, accessing Dynamics and Performance Point data rank right up there with getting a root canal or a hip replaced.
SharePoint is a remarkable product, but I don’t think the list of benefits and features in this write up maps to what I have experienced. SharePoint, MOSS 2007, and the Fast Web part will help consultants have a pleasant holiday and a great 2009. SharePoint consulting is a booming business. But the cheerful summary can’t neutralize the ominous shadow of “some difficulty” referenced fleetingly by Moss Consulting.
Stephen Arnold, December 14, 2008
Another SharePoint Goodie: Minimal Deployment Infrastructure
December 7, 2008
In London, I got a real laugh from my audience of about 200 people. Usually the audience boos and throws balls of paper at me. I heard several people talking about the low cost of SharePoint and how the basic install ran so well on available hardware. I did not address these cheerful thoughts directly. I showed a diagram of a recommended SharePoint deployment process, and the audience howled. Developed by a certified partner, the diagram is so complex it is overwhelming. Imagine my delight when I came across “The Minimal Full Deployment Infrastructure” for SharePoint. You must read the write up here. Chris Mullendore, the author, provides a useful discussion of why the minimal deployment is needed for SharePoint. For example, he explains some considerations for using SharePoint in a virtual and non-virtual environment. The non-virtual part is needed to test original code with third-party code and to perform load and performance testing. I know most SharePoint users are quite happy with the snappiness of a SharePoint system. To find out how snappy and how to make SharePoint even more speedy, you have to have a minimal deployment. So what’s a minimal deployment include. Here’s the diagram from Mr. Mullendore’s write up:
The minimal set up is a combination of virtual and non-virtual systems. Counting the non-virtual systems–what I would call servers–one needs only 11 servers. When I hear azure-chip or gray-chip consultants (these are consultants who have not worked at Bain, BCG, Booz, or McKinsey) talk about SharePoint’s low cost and ease of use, I marvel at their “wisdom”.
What’s the minimal hardware you are using for your SharePoint system. Have you been able to get by with fewer than 11 servers? What’s the actual number of servers a large SharePoint installation requires. Recommendations such as Mr. Mullendore’s are not easy to get in my experience.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
SharePoint Thesaurus Tool
December 7, 2008
I know you love SharePoint as much as I do. With taxonomies quite the hot ticket, I have wondered how to create a word list for SharePoint quickly. Mauro Cardarelli has come to my rescue and maybe yours too? His”SharePoint Thesaurus Utility” here provides nifty Excel file and macro to make my life a little easier when pumping SharePoint full of terms. One of the clever twists in SharePoint thesaurus file is that the thesaurus won’t work if a term is duplicated. Now I know this makes a difference in organizations where meta is a term, meta-data is a term and meta-meta-data are valid terms. You can download the Excel file here. If the link is dead, you can hunt through the postings at http://blogs.officezealot.com/mauro. A happy quack to Mr. Cardarelli as well.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Queries
December 2, 2008
Have you had a hankerin’ to build your own FullTextQuerySQLQuery Object? Well, fire up VisualStudio and dig in so you understand the cost implications of making SharePoint do your bidding. Oh, you don’t have VisualStudio! Oh, oh, you aren’t a developer! Well, just get yourself a Windows Certified SharePoint Professional and you are ready to go.
The place to start is the Fringe SharePoint Web log here. I have to congratulate the author. Figuring out how to create a FullTextQuerySQLQuery Object was not trivial. You, like me, may be wondering why the search system in SharePoint needs a FullTextQuerySQLQuery Web part. The answer is that the search in SharePoint does not handle certain tasks very well; for example, querying content stored in a SQL Server table. Keep in mind that there are search and content processing vendors that offer systems that support these types of queries. You load these systems and the system does the work.
Not so with SharePoint. You get to build the function, or your developers do. That’s the main reason why Certified SharePoint Professionals like SharePoint so much. It is better than being and Oracle or IBM database administrator. One SharePoint engineer told me in Aarhus, Denmark, in November 2008, “I have a job for as long as I want it.”
Okay.
Now let’s see how complicated this FullTextQuerySQLQuery Object is to create. Fringe SharePoint Web log has a four part series that makes the process understandable.
- Creating a Recent Hire WebPart using FullTextSQLQuery object and Linq (Part 1) is here
- Creating a Recent Hire WebPart using FullTextSQLQuery object and Linq (Part 2) is here
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Creating a Recent Hire WebPart using FullTextSQLQuery object and Linq (Part 3) is here
- Creating a Recent Hire WebPart using FullTextSQLQuery object and Linq (Part 4) is here
To give you a flavor of the method, here’s a snippet of the explanation:
For the first Field I used a HyperLinkField.Notice that I Hardcoded the Url of the current site. This might not be the way you want to do it, you can dynamically retrieve this field. Notice the AccountName that is part of the object we created. It is mapped to the DataNavigateUrlFormatString. This is how you make that link Clickable!! I think the code speaks for itself. If you have questions on that let me know. The second thing to note is line 101, It has a RowDataBoudn event!! this is for the formatting of the string in the hire date. This event occurs just before it binds to the SPGridView which is great because we want to format it before it is displayed.
What does the code look like? Here’s an example from the fourth post on the subject:
Yep, I had some trouble reading the code snippet as well.
Let’s step back. You have SharePoint. You have SQL Server. You have a need to search the content in the SQL Server table. You have to code a method.
When I put on my accounting hat, I realize that it is difficult to estimate the cost of creating a Web part. I suppose I can plug in a number based on the costs for similar work in the past, but what if this new Web part doesn’t work. Then the costs begin to climb, and as an accountant I only have one way to stop the bleeding. I cut off the funding and then I have complaints about the SharePoint system. Now what do I do?
If I were the hypothetical accountant, I would buy a copy of Beyond Search, read the profiles, and license a system that comes with this function. The fix will be easier to budget in my opinion.
I hope to hear from some SharePoint Certified Professionals to tell me why my hypothetical accountant is off base. Please, PR people, don’t email me directly. Post your comments using the feedback system for this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, December 2, 2008
Can the Vista Disease Spread to SharePoint
December 1, 2008
Computer World in the UK ran an interesting story “The Outlook for Vista Gets Even Worse” on November 28, 2008. You can read the Glyn Moody’s story here: This is not another bash Vista write up. For me the most important comment is the one below:
…the myth of upgrade inevitability has been destroyed. Companies have realised that they do have a choice – that they can simply say “no”. From there, it’s but a small step to realising that they can also walk away from Windows completely, provided the alternatives offer sufficient data compatibility to make that move realistic.
If Windows Vista changes the rules, what happens when the 100 million SharePoint customers learn about the costs, the performance issues, and the lack of compatibility with other Microsoft products ranging from analytics to CRM? What happens when the push to move SharePoint customers to Fast Search’s Enterprise Search Platform spills a bucket of red ink? If the Computer World story is on track, the same push back could afflict SharePoint. The companies who benefit from this situation will be the search vendors with snap in solutions to information access problems. No happy face painted on the SharePoint system will be easily resolved if the Vista “disease” spreads.
Stephen Arnold, December 1, 2008
Concept Searching
November 30, 2008
Concept Searching Inc. offers a suite of horizontal search and classification products with the goal of delivering critical precision and recall. They’re moving beyond keyword identification and traditional taxonomy approaches. As the company’s tagline “Retrieval Just Got Smarter” suggests, the products use compound term processing to manage unstructured content. The concept extraction improves access to unstructured information so companies can better leverage data. What’s useful is that their cross-platform products, a search program, a classifier, a taxonomy manager, and SQL, are fully integrated with Microsoft SharePoint. There’s no need for a separate index, and the suite respects preset SharePoint security. Features can be integrated or delivered in pieces, and system access is administered using standard SharePoint administrative tools. Some of these functions were among the most popular in the SurfRay Ontolica product which is now long in the tooth. Perhaps Concept Searching will benefit from what seems to be a growing demand for SharePoint tools.
Jessica Brather, November 30, 2008
Microsoft and Its CRM Strategy
November 30, 2008
Colin Barker’s “How Microsoft Plans to Make Its Mark in CRM” is a must read here. The article is an interview with a Microsoft executive named Brad Wilson. Mr. Barker was firing on all cylinders when he questioned Mr. Wilson. There were a number of interesting points in the interview. Let me highlight several of those that resonated with my research into Microsoft’s CRM products and services.
First, Microsoft has 16,000 CRM customers and more than 750,000 users. Dynamics is not in SharePoint territory but 16,000 is a good number. I wonder why SharePoint doesn’t include CRM functions, hook seamlessly into the flavors of Dynamics, and can’t use the report engine in Dynamics? These questions may be answered at some point in the future.
Second, Dynamics “comes with a choice of either having an on-demand subscription offering or buying the software.” According to Mr. Wilson most of Microsoft’s customers have an on premises installation.
Third, CRM 4.0 is a fully multi-tenanted system that a licensee can deploy “from outside the cloud.” I don’t know exactly what this means, but I wonder if the Microsoft approach to multi tenancy works like Salesforce.com’s system. Salesforce.com has some interesting patent documents which struck me as having quite a broad swatch of claims.
Fourth, “Microsoft is investing more annually on data centers than the complete revenue of all the on-demand players–$1 billion annually.” With 90 percent of the customers using Dynamics on premises, I was not clear about the pace at which customers will shift to Microsoft’s cloud system, if ever?
Fifth, Microsoft is providing portions of the CRM product for free. Will this pricing policy jump start a market or will it devalue the Dynamics solution? Who will pay for the big investments in the cloud if much of the Dynamics system is free or low cost?
There’s more useful information in this interview. Dynamics is going to have an impact on the CRM market and on Microsoft’s bottomline. And what does one do to locate information in a Dynamics system? Use the built in system which works a bit like search in Outlook Express or snag a third party tool.
Stephen Arnold, November 30, 2008
SharePoint and Document Management
November 20, 2008
If you are in the midst of a discovery process, you will find some surprising information in the article “MOSS 2007 Document Management Services — Document Centralization” here. This Web log post appeared on Mastering SharePoint Community on November 19, 2008. The author was Bob Mixon. The write up covers a number of SharePoint document management topics, but for me the most important point was in this comment:
I don’t believe you will find anyone (or I at least hope not) at Microsoft recommending the use of a single Document Library to store all of your organizations documents.
What this means is that Microsoft is opening the door to third party vendors who can build a single collection of documents, put them in one place, and provide access control tools so the documents in the repository cannot be changed. The fancy word for this is spoliation. SharePoint, the Swiss Army knife for content, ships with a broken knife blade and some rust on the moving parts. You may find the many collections approach useful. I don’t think some senior managers who are facing litigation will be too thrilled to learn that special purpose systems will be needed because SharePoint doesn’t recommend a single repository. If you have licked this problem, let me know.
Stephen Arnold, November 20, 2008
More on SharePoint in the Cloud
November 18, 2008
Mary-Joe Foley, author of Microsoft 2.0, wrote “What Does SharePoint in the Cloud Mean?” This is a good Web log post. For me the most important part of the write up is the table that shows what SharePoint in the cloud will deliver. To summarize her post is easy. I would just say, “Not much.” Ms. Foley wrote:
For some users, this stripped-down feature set is no doubt worth the cost savings. Others — who aren’t ready to entrust Microsoft (or any cloud vendor, for that matter) with their data — or who need all the functionality in Exchange, SharePoint, etc., will stick with the software-only versions of these products.
Everyone is quite gentle when talking about SharePoint. Microsoft is a big company and it can be vindictive I suppose. At some point, the SharePoint craze may wane and reality set in. I am not sure when customers will realize that hosted SharePoint delivers only a few functions. On premises SharePoint delivers a steady flow of certified engineers.
Stephen Arnold, November 19, 2008
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