Tips for Empowering User Search in the Enterprise
August 22, 2012
Susan Hanley shares some SharePoint tips in her NetworkWorld.com post, “10 Essential SharePoint Search Hints.” Hanley points out that rich metadata is necessary for improved findability, but users also need to be taught how to search for better results.
Aside from using metadata and meaningful file names and titles, the author has this to say about search suggestions:
Use best bets. A great way to ensure that people can easily find the common things that you know they need in your organization is to create a directed best bet for them. Even if you are not monitoring search logs to identify candidate best bets (which you should be doing, by the way), I can promise you that you know something about what people need to find on your intranet.
We agree with the search tips. Empowered users can really add efficiency to their search and overall production. But to save time and training resources, consider adding a third party solution that gives your users a friendly interface with intuitiveness for search.
Here you can read about Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise:
Highly efficient enterprise search and specific connectors link together data sources in companies and organizations. Be well informed – quickly and accurately. The data often lies distributed across numerous sources. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise gains each employee two weeks per through focused finding of data (IDC Studies). An invaluable competitive advantage in business as well as providing employee satisfaction.
Read more about the full suite of solutions available from Mindbreeze at http://www.mindbreeze.com/.
Philip West, August 22, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Thake Discusses Business Opportunities with SharePoint 2013 Marketplace
August 20, 2012
In “Why We Need a SharePoint 2013 Marketplace,” Jeremy Thake shares his thoughts on the opportunities that lie in the new SharePoint app home. In looking back at the history of marketplaces, Thake credits Apple iOS marketplace as the best example where Microsoft has a number of marketplaces, but they do not share the same platform.
He adds this about potential Web parts:
There is already an app for World Clock and Weather app. I expect a Stock Ticker app to be close behind this also. The big limitations with making web parts available this way is that there is no API to automatically add a web part to the parent site collection homepage at the moment. The metro tiles on the site home pages can’t be manipulated by the apps to add the web part there.
Thake also comments on the possibilities of community involvement, financial rewards, and the light integration hoped for the Marketplace. The new feature for SharePoint is exciting as it may greatly enhance work processes and collaboration. But we also know there are gaps in an out of the box SharePoint deployment. Thake sees some blockers with the expected Web part functionality.
Here you can read about the smooth integration of Fabasoft Mindbreeze with rich Web part capability:
It enables all information that is connected to Mindbreeze to be displayed in Microsoft SharePoint. This takes place smoothly via Web Parts. In this way not only information contained within Microsoft SharePoint, but also all other information that is available within the respective company, can be consolidated within one ‘platform.’ Mindbreeze therefore delivers real additional value to Microsoft SharePoint in the form of an add-on.
Philip West, August 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Search: A Persistent Disconnect between Reality and Innovation
August 17, 2012
Two years ago I wrote The New Landscape of Search. Originally published by Pandia in Norway, the book is now available without charge when you sign up for our new “no holds barred” search newsletter Honk!. In the discussion of Microsoft’s acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer SA in 2008, I cite documents which describe the version of Fast Search which the company hoped to release in 2009 or 2010. After the deal closed, the new version of Fast seemed to drop from view. What became available was “old” Fast.
I read the InfoWorld story “Bring Better Search to SharePoint.” Set aside the PR-iness of the write up. The main point is that SharePoint has a lousy search system. Think of the $1.2 billion Microsoft paid for what seems to be, according to the write up, a mongrel dog. My analysis of Fast Search focused on its age. The code dates from the late 1990s and its use of proprietary, third party, and open source components. Complexity and the 32 bit architecture were in need of attention beyond refactoring.
The InfoWorld passage which caught my attention was:
Longitude Search’s AptivRank technology monitors users as they search, then promotes or demotes content’s relevance rankings based on the actions the user takes with that content. In a nutshell, it takes Microsoft’s search-ranking algorithm and makes it more intelligent…
The solution to SharePoint’s woes amounts to tweaking. In my experience, there are many vendors offering similar functionality and almost identical claims regarding fixing up SharePoint. You can chase down more at www.arnoldit.com/overflight.
The efforts are focused on a product with a large market footprint. In today’s dicey economic casino, it makes sense to trumpet solutions to long standing information retrieval challenges in a product like SharePoint. Heck, if I had to pick a market to pump up my revenue, SharePoint is a better bet than some others.
Contrast the InfoWorld’s “overcome SharePoint weaknesses” with the search assertions in “Search Technology That Can Gauge Opinion and Predict the Future.” We are jumping from the reality of a Microsoft product which has an allegedly flawed search system into the exciting world of what everyone really, really wants—serious magic. Fixing SharePoint is pretty much hobby store magic. Predicting the future: That is big time, hide the Statue of Liberty magic.
Here’s the passage which caught my attention:
A team of EU-funded researchers have developed a new kind of internet search that takes into account factors such as opinion, bias, context, time and location. The new technology, which could soon be in use commercially, can display trends in public opinion about a topic, company or person over time — and it can even be used to predict the future…Future Predictor application is able to make searches based on questions such as ‘What will oil prices be in 2050?’ or ‘How much will global temperatures rise over the next 100 years?’ and find relevant information and forecasts from today’s web. For example, a search for the year 2034 turns up ‘space travel’ as the most relevant topic indexed in today’s news.
Yep, rich indexing, facets, and understanding text are in use.
What these two examples make clear, in my opinion, is that:
Search is broken. If an established product delivers inadequate findability, why hasn’t Microsoft just solved the problem? If off the shelf solutions are available from numerous vendors, why hasn’t Microsoft bought the ones which fix up SharePoint and call it a day? The answer is that none of the existing solutions deliver what users want. Sure, search gets a little better, but the SharePoint search problem has been around for a decade and if search were such an easy problem to solve, Microsoft has the money to do the job. Still a problem? Well, that’s a clue that search is a tough nut to crack in my book. Marketers don’t have to make a system meet user needs. Columnists don’t even have to use the systems about which they write. Pity the users.
Writing about whiz bang new systems funded by government agencies is more fun than figuring out how to get these systems to work in the real world. If SharePoint search does not work, what effort and investment will be required to predict the future via a search query? I am not holding my breath, but the pundits can zoom forward.
The search and retrieval sector is in turmoil, and it will stay that way. The big news in search is that free and open source options are available which work as well as Autonomy- and Endeca-like systems. The proprietary and science fiction solutions illustrate on one hand the problems basic search has in meeting user needs and, on the other hand, the lengths to which researchers are trying to go to convince their funding sources and regular people that search is going to get better real soon now.
Net net: Search is a problem and it is going to stay that way. Quick fixes, big data, and predictive whatevers are not going to perform serious magic quickly, economically, or reliably without significant investment. InfoWorld seems to see chipper descriptions and assertions as evidence of better search. The Science Daily write up mingles sci-fi excitement with a government funded program to point the way to the future.
Sorry. Search is tough and will remain a chunk of elk hide until the next round of magic is spooned by public relations professionals into the coffee mugs of the mavens and real journalists.
Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
Web Content Management in SharePoint 2013
August 17, 2012
John Ross gives us an updated view of web content management (WCM) in light of SharePoint 2013 in his piece, “SharePoint 2013: WCM and Search Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly.” With SharePoint 2013 the FAST search engine has been fully integrated into the platform and will be the primary force behind WCM.
Ross states:
Search will be a far more efficient way to surface content in almost all circumstances. The way we’ll plan and think about WCM in SharePoint will fundamentally change. For example in the past, content needed to be in SharePoint for us to roll it up. With the new model, as long as content is in the search index we can surface it where ever [sic] we need. So the biggest limiting factor we’d have would be whether we’d be able to get SharePoint to crawl a datasource. This has massively huge implications!
While the web content functionality of SharePoint has been improved, there are good third party solutions that integrate search more successfully into the platform without needing additional customization. Fabasoft Mindbreeze is an Austrian vendor worth keeping an eye on. In addition to increasing the intuitiveness of in-house enterprise search with Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise, Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite can also enhance search on public facing Web sites.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 17, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Administrative Options in SharePoint 2013
August 16, 2012
The blog world is buzzing with analysis of the public preview of SharePoint 2013. The Cloudshare Community Blog specifically breaks down the issues of administrative options in their post, “Administration Options in SharePoint 2013 with CloudShare!”
There are many things to show with SharePoint 2013, but I have decided to start with a basic one: how to administer the platform. In this article I will show you the available approaches you have to handle administrative tasks for SharePoint 2013. These approaches are essentially the same as in SharePoint 2010 with one big exception: you are not supposed to use (or even see!) the Stsadm command line tool that is now considered as deprecated.
It seems at this point the SharePoint world would be tired of the concept of customization, but apparently not yet. It seems like for every efficiency issue in SharePoint, the answer is customization. This is of course despite the fact that Microsoft does not want customers customizing SharePoint 2013. But how could a user possibly get around it, as SharePoint is still far from perfect?
The answer lies in smart third party solutions that can be added to an existing SharePoint infrastructure. A product like Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise can streamline processes with its intuitive interface, specifically designed to meet users’ needs where SharePoint lags. Additionally, Fabasoft Mindbreeze releases smart and frequent updates, preventing the drama and hassle of huge and infrequent overhauls.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 16, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Increase Company Productivity with Streamlined Project Management
August 15, 2012
Tim Cermak discusses project management for the upcoming SharePoint release in his CMSWire.com post, “Project Management Today: How SharePoint 2013 Can Help.” Cermak explains some of today’s challenges with workflow:
Companies today face the challenge of determining what is happening both within their organization and externally in their marketplace. Information such as who is working on what and the progress of directives is fundamental and yet it is often elusive. The only way for companies to improve their business is to know what is happening, who is doing the work and what the outcome really is. People need to easily be able to collaborate on jobs and with colleagues, communicate with many people, and easily report the facts.
The author shares tips for all departments in an organization to work as a team to become a more successful company. To help drive your employees to increased productivity and collaboration, consider adding a comprehensive third party solution. Mindbreeze offers a lean suite of products that can add rich value to your workflow processes. Look to gain each employee two weeks per year through focused finding of data (IDC Studies) with Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise. Read more at http://www.mindbreeze.com/.
Philip West, August 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Long Wait for SharePoint 2013
August 14, 2012
Microsoft has hyped the release of SharePoint 2013, with many enterprise junkies highly anticipating the public availability of the revamped product. ClearBox Consulting takes on the question of whether or not the new SharePoint is worth the hype, and the long wait, in, “Is SharePoint 2013 worth waiting for?”
While the author has many positives to highlight, he does have this to say in reference to the negatives:
By SharePoint 2010 the main challenges for an intranet manager had become governance and user adoption. Governance has definitely been improved, but adoption has been less substantially addressed. For example, the user experience for content owners is still over-fiddly and at the moment the mobile experience is well below what will be needed over the next 2-3 years. Moreover, the new version has done little to reduce the complexity involved in producing and managing a SharePoint-based intranet for business owners of sites and content.
It is no mystery that regardless of the changes that are made to SharePoint, it is a huge product that requires a lot of time, attention, and customization. So for many smaller organizations, a smarter, more efficient third party solution may be a better choice. A product like Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise can work as a standalone enterprise search solution, or as an enhancement to an existing SharePoint infrastructure. Used either way, customers will marvel as the intuitive interface and increased productivity of Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 14, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
SharePoint Server 2013 Preview
August 13, 2012
Microsoft posted two documents which we believe merit any SharePoint licensee’s attention. The principal features of the latest SharePoint appear on the Microsoft SharePoint site.
Search will be particularly important because SharePoint 2013 will make it easier to incorporate social content and support mobile access. The new SharePoint will be available later this year or early in 2013. Getting a head start is important if you plan to upgrade.
The SharePoint Server 2013’s enterprise search model provides information we found quite useful. The diagram’s PDF is 560 Kb and available from the Microsoft download center. The PDF covers:
- Search Components, including the application components and the search databases
- Example topologies. The illustrated use case is a medium-sized search farm with 40 million items or content objects in the system
- Scaling out. The diagram includes a proposal model for a search farm which handles 100 million item or content objects.
Of particular value are the details for the hardware required to support the 100 million item farm. A series of tables covers the scaling considerations, detail about the application servers recommended, and a table layout the hardware requirements necessary to handle upticks in the volume of content to be processed.
In the general guidance section, Microsoft points out that one additional crawl database is needed per additional 20 million items. One link database is recommend per additional 60 million items. The schematic’s detail recommends that the system include redundancy.
Bottom line, there is no mistaking the Fast-like functionality described here. Search Technologies has delivered more than 30,000 consultant-days of search implementation services to Fast and SharePoint users since 2005. We believe that this new search functionality will be widely adopted over the next few years, and we look forward to helping our customers to implement it.
Iain Fletcher, August 13, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
To Customize or not to Customize SharePoint
August 13, 2012
Chris Wright discusses the look and feel of SharePoint in his recent CMSWire.com post, “Microsoft Doesn’t Advise You Customize SharePoint 2013.” The author points out that many users get caught up in the “look and feel” of the system when working on SharePoint projects. Wright explains that the vast majority of projects he’s been involved with have had a significant branding and UI element.
He goes on to say this:
In my previously mentioned piece I argued that time spent on such endeavors would be better spent looking at functionality and content. Jeff seems to be advocating a slightly different view, though one that reaches the same conclusions. He is focusing on the importance of providing a stable performant solution, and appears concerned that custom code can be the quickest route to undermining this.
The article may be worth the read to help you stay on track with SharePoint goals and priorities. You may also consider investing in a third party solution that provides a rich SharePoint experience with a user-friendly interface out-of-the-box. One we like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise. Mindbreeze Enterprise Search lets you “be well informed – quickly and accurately. The data often lies distributed across numerous sources. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise gains each employee two weeks per year through focused finding of data (IDC Studies). An invaluable competitive advantage in business as well as providing employee satisfaction.”
Philip West, August 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Open Source Options for Collaboration in SharePoint
August 10, 2012
In “Open Source Tools Level SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Playing Field,” Shawn Shell discusses collaboration options in the SharePoint community.
Shell has this to say:
But while there are many available tools that can expand SharePoint’s collaboration capabilities and fill the gaps in its out-of-the-box functionality, some organizations simply can’t afford them because of budget constraints. As a result, many often find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. The good news is that one of the strongest dimensions of the SharePoint universe is a surprisingly robust open source community. It comprises individuals, user organizations and even ISVs that provide tools and utilities that are reasonable alternatives to commercially licensed add-on products.
The author also comments on collaboration alternatives for employees, such as the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) and the Learning Management System (LMS). However, Shell also states that it is important to read the documentation of these two projects very carefully because they are handled by separate teams. The read may be worth it if you’ve been looking for possible fixes to SharePoint’s capability gaps.
Collaboration capabilities are imperative as businesses get social. To tap into the new possibilities, consider a third party solution to complete your enterprise search system. We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Managing director Michael Hadrian explains the Mindbreeze solution:
Fabasoft Folio Cloud enables quick, secure and mobile collaboration both internally and between international companies. Business processes with customers and partners cannot be realized any quicker or more cost effectively…This enables worldwide connected collaboration and secure data exchange in protected team rooms.
For a complete search solution with the power of information pairing, check out the full suite of solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, August 10, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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