JackBe Embraces SharePoint with Presto Release
July 19, 2013
An article on Business Wire titled JackBe Presto Makes SharePoint Real-Time for the Enterprise reports on the software provider, JackBe. JackBe provides intuitive dashboards that organize Big Data. Presto Add-On for SharePoint, the most recent version of their software, allows users to build apps and dashboards with a familiar interface. The article explains,
“Presto Add-On for SharePoint enables users to query Presto-connected data within SharePoint, using SharePoint Search. In addition, the solution’s new “FAST Enterprise Search” Wires block provides a simple drag-and-drop search experience using FAST, SharePoint’s popular enterprise search capability. Powered by Wires, Presto’s “point-click-mash” visual assembly tool, Presto Add-On for SharePoint enables mashing of multiple FAST search results with support for keyword and FAST Query Language (FQL) queries. This allows users to easily combine data from multiple sources, lists and queries into single, meaningful data visualizations.”
Not only FAST Search block, but several other new Wires are included in the recent upgrade. SharePoint List Add Item, SharePoint List, SharePoint List Merge, SharePoint Search and External Content Adapter are all Wire blocks that will enable reading and replying to data sources and solving List ID issues. We can’t help but notice that as soon as other vendors are exiting SharePoint, JackBe jumps in full throttle.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Topology Configuration for SharePoint 2013
July 16, 2013
We’ve found an interesting how-to on topology configuration. The Team Blog of MCS @ Middle East and Africa posts, “Configuring SharePoint 2013 Search Topology.” Blogger and Microsoft employee Issa Ayyash begins:
“When creating the Search Service application, a default topology will be built automatically where all Search components are assigned to the server which is running the Central Administration, in multi servers farm scenario you need to change this topology, the only available way currently is through PowerShell which will provide more flexibility in configuring the topology, (you can NOT modify the topology through UI like you used to do with SharePoint 2010)”
Yes, that change could be frustrating if one didn’t get the memo. For a rundown of the differences between SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, click here.
Ayyash goes on to guide us through an example five-server setup, complete with a helpful diagram, a screenshot, and snippets of code. The model dedicates three servers to query processing and two as application servers. This post is a concise and informative resource for anyone who may be called upon to configure a SharePoint 2013 search topology.
Cynthia Murrell, July 16, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Call for Answers to SharePoint Mystery
July 10, 2013
SharePoint pro Marc D Anderson believes Microsoft has some explaining to do, he asserts in his blog post, “SharePoint 2013’s Search Continuous Crawl: an Enigma.” While updating one intranet system, he was working with the continuous and incremental crawl settings. He describes his confusing results, complete with screenshots, so see the write-up for the technical details. He summarizes:
“Continuous Crawl seems to be working, but at some underlying schedule which isn’t visible. There have been some suggestions that the Continuous Crawl schedule is set to every 15 minutes by default, and the evidence above seems to support that since the second piece of content showed up in 12 minutes, about 15 minutes after the last crawl that was visible in the logs. There is some PowerShell you can use to get at properties of the Continuous Crawl, but it’s not totally clear what impact they have on the schedule. . . .
“Another thing that’s not clear is how many Continuous crawl threads might stack up if things get backed up. One person has suggested an unlimited number and someone else told me there’s a maximum of 8 threads.”
Anderson calls for Microsoft to put out documentation that will clear up the confusion. He does list a few links that may be of some help to some SharePoint users, and calls for readers to share any information they have in the comments section. If this enigma might be of concern to your organization, you might want to check back there for more answers.
Cynthia Murrell, July 10, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comperio 2013 SharePoint Seminar to Charge Extra for No Shows
April 17, 2013
Held in Oslo, Norway, this year’s Enterprise Social and Search with SharePoint seminar promises its usual diverse audience and tech-based discussions. It will take place on May 14, 2013 from 9:00-11:30. Although official events begin at 9:00, show up early for breakfast and networking at 8:30.
The seminar is free, unless, of course you do not show up without providing advanced notice.
According to the seminars registration page, the audience will include the following:
“CIOs, IT Directors, Collaboration Leads, SharePoint Leads, Social Networking Leads, Enterprise Search Leads, Big Data Leads, Business Intelligence Leads, Communication Directors, HR Directors.”
Technology discussed includes SharePoint 2010 and 2013, FAST Search for SharePoint, Comperio FRONT, Hadoop, HD Insight, and Yammer.
Not a bad line up for a free seminar in Oslo. However, those who register but do not attend (and do not provide notice) will be charged a fee of kr. 200, or about $30 US dollars. Considering the expenses Comperio will shell out for each attendee, this no-show charge is an interesting approach to guaranteeing attendance and accounting for wasted expenses.
Samantha Plappert, April 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Creating Search Based Apps in SharePoint Simple and Effective
February 20, 2013
New SharePoint users can often benefit from a hands on learning tutorial that lays out step by step how to get things done accurately and well, accurately. Let’s face it, in this fast paced world of ever evolving technology it is important to not waste time. Time is MONEY and money is the business.
Ontolica has done it again. With “Building Search Based Applications with SharePoint,” author Robert Piddocke walks users through an easy and effective way to create a search based application.
“Creating Search Based Applications in SharePoint is an easy and effective way to drive contextually valuable information to users without the limitations of having the documents in a specific library. Search can surface content from not just SharePoint but even from File Shares or other document management systems. All you need is the content crawled and you can create a document display mechanism based on search.”
The first step is to identify what metadata you want to use and if custom columns on SharePoint lists exist and can be used for your search. You must make a metadata mapping in the search service application for each piece of metadata you want to use. Run a full crawl.
Next up is creating a new page for your search based app. Then you must configure th core search result web parts but don’t forget that each web part needs a unique setting in order to function properly. After you adjust the layout xalt on the resut web parts to exclude the description and display relevant metadata you then have to set the sort on the result web part for date to display the most recent items and ply a query hat will match what you need users to see.
For more detailed information and some ridiculously helpful screenshots as well as a download we suggest heading over to Piddocke’s article.
Leslie Radcliff, February 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Nexans Licenses PolySpot Search Engine
January 10, 2013
We learned that the Nexans Group, a global player in the infrastructure, industry, building, and local area network data markets, uses the PolySpot search engine to cross-reference its internal sources of information and all of its information portals.
According to information provided to Beyond Search:
The goal of the roll out was to streamline collaborative processes while ensuring the integrity of security regulations. The strong point of the solution lies in the simplification of access to information regardless of the source. Using the PolySpot engine, users, customers, partners, and employees of Nexans can now easily access the product catalog and at a level of information consistent with their right of access.
Nexans tested various competing solutions on the market. PolySpot told Beyond Search:
PolySpot stood out because of the performance and strength of its Microsoft SharePoint connector. The PolySpot connector for Microsoft SharePoint is characterized by a very large tolerance of isolated errors (corrupt data, crashes, micro network outages, etc).
PolySpot supports the indexing of an entire SharePoint farm and provides fine-grained filtering. The PolySpot approach limits the the maximum load on the application and network.
As a result, Nexans Group users have access to faceted navigation within the relevant Group directory. Information access is pivotal to Nexans Group’s business which offers an extensive range of cables and cabling systems to raise industrial productivity, improve business performance, enhance security, enrich the quality of life, and assure long-term network reliability.
For more information about PolySpot’s technology and services, visit www.polyspot.com.
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2013
SharePoint 2013 Offers Improvements in Search
January 10, 2013
An overall architecture for SharePoint 2013 Search can be found on the Search Technologies’ Web site.
As new releases tend to do, SharePoint 2013 has made some tweaks that users would do well to explore, we learn in “Search Engine Changes in SharePoint 2013” from iT Pro. SharePoint consultant Veena Sarda details the search-related changes and presents them in a handy chart.
The first thing to note is that FAST Search has now been worked into the SharePoint code base. That means that FAST capabilities like metadata extraction, visual search, and advanced linguistics are now part of the package. Content and analytics processors have been added to the logical architecture, and a specialized Search Administrator now manages these and other search-related components. Also new is a dedicated analysis engine, which performs both search and usage analytics.
Crawling has been improved; it is now possible to crawl http sites anonymously, and the time for the index to merge and present those results has been dramatically shortened. Results rendering has been moved from the server to the client side. Document parsing is now much more refined, relying on a set of new parsing features, rather than on file extensions to do the job.
Other welcome improvements affect the user experience. The UI has been revamped to accommodate the new features, with a re-design based on nested layout templates defined in JavaScript and HTML. This change allows for easier extensibility. Furthermore, end users now have an easier time of it; the write-up notes that the platform now provides:
“Direct access to the most granular information inside of sites and documents, and then enables users to act on the results without having to leave the results page. Every search box in every team site offers full access to enterprise-wide search, people search, and other specialized search experiences in addition to the traditional scoped site search.”
Part of this simplified workflow is the new Hover feature, which presents a visual preview of sites, documents, and conversations at the pause of a mouse.
A few more search-related improvements: Authors are identified as experts based on document content, where before they were identified by My Site profiles. People Search (which used to be independent of document search) has been integrated with the core results and can be targeted by name, location, phone number, and other properties.
Perhaps one of the most noteworthy shifts is the new Query Rules feature. SharePoint 2010 only allows for simple queries—one query, one set of results. Sarda writes:
“Query Rules are a new feature in SharePoint 13 that help act upon the ‘intent’ of a query – Query Rules are composed of three top level elements: Query Conditions (i.e. matching rules), Query Actions (i.e. what do you do when you find a match), Publishing Options (i.e. when should this rule be active). Query Rules allows to have search requests from a user trigger multiple queries and multiple result sets.”
A welcome addition. For more information on SharePoint 2013, see the “brief functional walk-through” posted at Search Technologies. It contains, among other things, an easy-to-understand flow chart. The SharePoint experts there also promise to post future updates at that link.
Search Technologies leverages search engines to provide business advantages to their clients. With over twenty years of experience in the field, the company asserts that it is the largest IT services company dedicated to search engine implementation, consulting, and managed services. For information on the firm’s SharePoint 2013 Search Services, visit www.searchtechnologies.com. Search Technologies is headquartered in Herndon, Virginia.
Cynthia Murrell, January 10, 2013
SharePoint Gets a Stricter Governance Tool
December 31, 2012
SharePoint is Microsoft’s glorified collaborative content management platform. It usually provides decent out-of-the-box solutions for managing projects and allowing users to work and share on content collectively, but sometimes it needs help from an IVP to make it better. Metavis is an add-on software solutions provider and according to Web Media 360 they have “Metavis Introduces New SharePoint Governance Enhancement Tool.”
The new governance tool is called Informant and is currently in its beta phase. It is supposed to help control the comings and goings of files outside of SharePoint. These actions hold a security risk for all enterprise-based companies:
“Metavis says it is the transfer of content beyond the confines of SharePoint which holds the gravest potential consequences in terms of undermining the integrity of an enterprise’s content management and security strategy. Such transfers, says Metavis, have become more frequent owing to the proliferation of file sharing platforms.”
Informant will help SharePoint users monitor and control transfers in their SharePoint environment as well as tagging, archiving, and placing permissions on files. Securing data is a big part of any information governance. Technology makes it so easy to steal information, but it also makes it easier to lock it down. Take precautions to monitor your data.
Whitney Grace, December 31, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Users Will Discover Built-in Search Is More Than Icing On Cake
December 13, 2012
After Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference, which took place over the summer in Toronto, more information has been released in regards to SharePoint 2013. In fact, Search Technologies has published an article on “Search For SharePoint” that includes the major bullet points of SharePoint 2013’s search functions and capabilities. The article follows the flow of documents, providing an idea of the process from crawling all the way to search functionality provided to users.
The driving force behind this latest version of SharePoint is the FAST search technology that Microsoft acquired back in 2008. Additions from Bing and other search companies have been added into the software in order to offer clients a comprehensive solution; that also means customization is available for companies with specific needs.
As for the process, once crawling – or capturing metadata – occurs, the content processing known as the indexing pipeline takes place:
“In SharePoint 2012, this resembles the FAST pipeline and looks to have retained important features. The content processing component also writes information to a “link database”. This information can be subsequently used by the analysis processing component to calculate link popularity statistics and provide relevancy weighting possibilities. Anchor text within links can also contribute to page content for ranking purposes.”
The analytics processing that happens next in the sequence of events allows for additional context to be woven into the indexing process. The final step after indexing lies in an often overlooked aspect of enterprise search: query processing. This component improves search with attention to precision, recall and relevancy.
Now that SharePoint 2013 includes a top-tier enterprise search infrastructure, competitors do not have as much room in the conversation on search. Companies are lining up to implement SharePoint everyday, and with that software in the bag they also get to discover the magic of FAST technologies. Search is not just the cherry on top for SharePoint, it encapsulates the entire sundae.
Megan Feil, December 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
An Intriguing Idea: SharePoint Search Is a Data Access Technology
December 7, 2012
Shortly after the SharePoint 2012 Conference, I had time to think about an interesting and quite intriguing view of search. The idea is that search is another “data access technology.” The idea was explained in “SharePoint Conference 2012: Prominent Role for Search in SharePoint 2013.”
Sanjeev Bhutt gave a tip of the hat to Scot HIller, who was a speaker at the conference. Mr. Bhutt reported:
In his session on building search-driven applications, Scot Hillier made the point that we should no longer think of search in the limited scope of what occurs when a user types in a search term in a search box and the corresponding results that appear. Rather, we should think of search as a data access technology, in the same vein as CAML, REST and CSOM. In fact, he went as far as to say that search is the data access technology because, as he put it, “Search knows where all the skeletons are buried.” [Emphasis in the original text.]
Since the conference, I have noticed more emphasis on the use of a traditional and faceted search interface was a way to access a wide range of data and information types. Sphinx Search, for example, provides a system which eliminates the need for command line queries for content stored in MySQL databases. Many other vendors are moving in the same direction.
Search Technologies offers a range of services related to SharePoint 2013 search. Of particular relevance is the company’s search architecture design services. The firm’s engineers provide due diligence reviews of existing systems, to the detailed planning and costing of new search applications.
If you want to make the shift from search to finding and discovery, you will want to explore a range of technical methods and engineer your SharePoint or other information solution to deliver the results that users want: Information which answers a question without guessing what key words unlock the riches in the organization’s knowledge stores.
For more information about Search Technologies, visit www.searchtechnologies.com.
Iain Fletcher, December 7, 2012
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