Learning SharePoint and PowerShell is Worth It
May 25, 2012
In “Getting to Grips with PowerShell,” Robert Schifreen continues his SharePoint 2010 odyssey series by taking a closer look at the importance of PowerShell. The powerful scripting language may leave many users baffled, but Schifreen explains the benefits of being well-versed in PowerShell:
Although you can do all your SharePoint admin through the web interface via something called Central Administration, getting to grips with doing things in PowerShell is well worth the investment in time. For example, instead of sitting in Central Admin creating dozens of departmental site areas, you can take a CSV file of your department names and quickly turn it into a PowerShell script that does the job for you. If the resulting site structure then doesn’t look quite right, just alter the script, delete all the sites you created (using PowerShell, naturally), and run the script again. So being a good SharePoint admin means learning SharePoint and PowerShell. That’s just the start.
Schifreen also suggests investing in a decent book on the topic, and if you want enterprise-level search, he suggests adding a book on FAST, InfoPath, Business Intelligence connectivity services, Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer, and more. While enterprise-search is an investment, there are out-of-the-box solutions out there that can save you valuable training and setup resources.
To bypass the need for some expensive or time–consuming training, consider a third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, which extends the capabilities of your SharePoint system. Their Web Parts based information pairing capabilities give you powerful searches and a complete picture of your business information, allowing you to get the most out of your enterprise search investments. And your end users will benefit from the fast and intuitive search with clearly displayed results and simple navigation.
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.
Mindbreeze’s intuitiveness means less training required. They also have tutorials and wikis that are easy to use and more efficient. Here you can browse Mindbreeze’s support tools for users, including videos, FAQs, wikis, and other training options. Check out the full suite of solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, May 25, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint Options for iPhone and iPad
May 24, 2012
Mobile devices are moving from a business necessity to a formal mandate. While apps exist for most major functions, tackling mobile access to SharePoint is a bigger creature to tame. We may have a breaking development in, “Use SharePoint on your iPad or iPhone,” by Dave Johnson.
Collaborating with an iPad in a corporate environment is sometimes challenging, because the ubiquitous tablet hasn’t had the same access to SharePoint as laptops and desktops. Sharing a document, then, has meant sending attachments, and iPads were blocked from accessing the vast stores of corporate documents already archived in SharePoint. Now harmon.ie delivers substantially the same SharePoint experience as your desktop PC provides.
The free harmon.ie app offers an upgrade to a premium addition for a slim $20. And while accessing an existing SharePoint infrastructure via an iPad or iPhone is now possible, the usability and efficiency is still in question. How much work can actually be accomplished by forcing SharePoint to fit the mobile mold?
For those who are high mobile users, we would recommend a smart third-party solution that integrates a mobile offering into their primary solution. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile is one such option.
Smartphones and tablets are constant companions, indispensable in the business world. Information needs to be able to be exchanged at all times and wherever you are. Easily. Quickly. Securely. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile makes company data available on all mobile devices, regardless of whether you have a BlackBerry®, iPhone®, Windows Phone or Android™ Smartphone or a tablet such as the Apple iPad, Samsung Chromebook/GalaxyTab or Blackberry Playbook. You can act independently and freely – yet always securely. Irrespective of what format the data is in.
Perhaps most importantly, security is never compromised with the Mindbreeze compliance and industry-vetted solution. So while some apps will let you access your SharePoint installation, Fabasoft Mindbreeze is built to make your mobile access fully functional.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Working with SharePoint Active Directory
May 23, 2012
Continuing to following the excellent SharePoint series by Robert Schifreen, our current focus leads us to a discussion of Active Directory. Read Schifreen’s full piece at “Active Directory: Tips from the front line.”
SharePoint can’t look up users’ information in Active Directory (AD) on the fly. Instead, it has a User Profiles database which, alongside each person’s username, holds their full name, job title, location, photograph, boss’s name, and dozens more attributes besides. You need to set up AD Sync to regularly and automatically copy everyone’s up-to-date details from AD into the User Profile database. Unfortunately, despite this being one of the key facets of running a successful corporate SharePoint installation, it’s also buggy as hell.
All of these quirky pieces of SharePoint are what makes it what it is, quirky. However, they are also necessary. That does not mean that they are effective or intuitive. Smart third party solutions such as those offered by Fabasoft Mindbreeze may prove a less painful option that allows the user to achieve the same result.
Consider the federated search options of Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise:
You can use the Account settings to activate data sources from a source directory. If a federated data source needs authentication a dialog will appear. Each user can activate and deactivate the data source he/she needs. Your administrator defines a source directory and everything else is up to your users. No domain level trusts have to be established.
News pieces such as this one by Schifreen are important to keep a running dialogue about the progression of SharePoint and how to make it more usable for a wider audience. However, for many organizations, a smaller, more intuitive solution is more approach. Such organizations should consider Fabasoft Mindbreeze and its suite of solutions.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Challenges for Microsoft SharePoint Integrators
May 22, 2012
I don’t care too much about outfits who surf on other company’s software. Been there. Done that. In my experience with Infozen, an outfit with which I was affiliated during the wild and crazy “index the Federal government” years, I learned:
- Integrators and resellers take advantage of clients who lack the expertise, time, and management acumen to get a job done in a cost effective manner during normal work hours
- Partners, integrators and resellers sell what generates money. Investing in research and development is a PowerPoint or Keynote slide, not a business practice. Clients pay for the resellers and integrators to solve a problem. If the solution works, the integrator or reseller will resell the solution, emphasizing that it is an invention.
- Integrators and resellers are trying to avoid the “pay to play” model enforced by a number of software giants. A good way to determine if the outfit requires integrators or resellers to pony6 up hard cash for the privilege of selling enterprise software is too look for print advertising in various trade publications.
- Integrators and resellers use a tie up as an occasion for a news release. A good example is the “Oracle Endeca Getting Started Partner Guide.”
At a recent briefing I gave in New York, I had an occasion to talk to a very energetic investment type. I picked up three signals about the Microsoft SharePoint reseller and partner ecosystem. Like most information floating around after 6 pm in Manhattan, I suspect there is mostly baloney in the observations. But I wanted to snag them before they slipped from my flawed short term memory bank:
First, it seems that Microsoft is not putting much wood behind Fast Search & Transfer technology. I believe the phrase the MBA squirrel used was “end of life.” If true, the $1.2 billion and messy Fast situation may be in the midst of a rethink. What will Microsoft do? With the juicy search companies gobbled up, Microsoft may have to pull some rabbits out of its many hats. Open source, non US search and content processing vendors, making a cake from its own search ingredients, leveraging Powerset and other technologies?
Second, some Microsoft partners are starting to “go off the reservation.” In the free blog, I do not want to mention names. I learned that one prominent Microsoft Certified Partner had quietly embraced non Microsoft technologies. The “quietly” suggests to me that Microsoft could choke off a flow of sales leads if the shift caused big waves. The reason to “go off the reservation” boiled down to the sense that some Microsoft centric shops were starting to demonstrate “fee fatigue.” What do resellers do when revenue from Old Faithful slows, resellers and integrators look for what will sell.
Third, after decades of having a sure-fire business model, some partners and integrators see that alternatives exist and may be worth exploring. Examples include cloud alternatives to on premises Microsoft solutions or – hang on to your hat – open source solutions.
The impact of the lousy financial climate is taking a toll on some Microsoft centric vendors. The toll will be more burdensome going forward. In short, integrators and resellers are in play.
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
Building a SharePoint Farm
May 22, 2012
Continuing our coverage of the SharePoint series by Robert Schifreen, we turn our attention to, “Building the Farm: From learning to Testing,” on ZD Net UK Edition. (See our coverage of Robert’s first installation in the series, “SharePoint Deployment: Pitfalls of a Pioneer.”) In this piece, Schifreen discusses the details and hardships of starting the actual SharePoint farm.
You’ll need servers set up, SAN storage provisioned, new domain accounts created, DNS entries adding, access to your Active Directory database, firewall holes punching, server licences purchasing, Active Directory security groups creating, installation DVDs downloading, workstations being put into domains for testing, access to VM management consoles granting, servers adding into the load balancer pools, IP addresses allocating, users’ home drives re-mapping, SSL certificates applying for, login scripts amending, and more.
All of the necessities listed above are quite overwhelming. Schifreen goes on to mention the value of expert advice, including paying for outside consulting. For many organizations, expert advice is a sound investment. However, we have another suggestion.
Among the leaders in third-party enterprise solutions is Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise. Mindbreeze can work alongside an existing SharePoint installation, or as a standalone solution. Implementing any new infrastructure will take planning, but a smart third-party solution has built-in customization options, making it a much smoother and intuitive process than trying to get SharePoint to the point of viability.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise understands you, or to be more precise, understands what the most important information is for you at any precise moment in time. It is the center of excellence for your knowledge and simultaneously your personal assistant for all questions. The information pairing technology brings enterprise and Cloud data together.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze also offers a suite of complimentary solutions to link together all aspects of an organization’s information management: mobile solutions, cloud, email management, web site search, etc. While SharePoint is capable of these auxiliary features, too much time and attention has to be devoted to customization.
So if your organization is looking for an effective but less painful way to manage information storage and retrieval needs, consider the offerings of Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 22, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search Genius for Scientists with SharePoint.
May 22, 2012
Sys-Con Media reports, “PerkinElmer Unveils Search Genius software for Use with Microsoft SharePoint Framework.” The system, designed for researchers, unifies searching, saving, and sharing of unstructured data in one application. We learned from the write up:
“The Search Genius platform is a powerful search application that enables researchers to use both text and structure searches of reports and technical documents stored using the SharePoint framework and [PerkinElmer’s own] E-Notebook system, as well as text searches of the Internet. With the Search Genius platform, researchers can more readily gain broader access to previously difficult-to-access data. This enables greater and more holistic visibility to organization-wide information resources that researchers can then more easily leverage into new and existing projects. Scientists can also save their search results and easily create links and annotations that document their ideas and facilitate collaboration.”
Health care information technology is in the Stone Age. Will this crack the problem of fragmented medical information?
A longstanding leader in the science community, PerkinElmer turns 75 this year. The company is based in Waltham, MA, but has operations around the globe. Their mission statement: “Improving the health and safety of people and the environment.” Let us hope Search Genius is up to the task.
Cynthia Murrell, May 22, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
TIBCO News: Hadoop Support added to Spotfire Analytics
May 21, 2012
Organizations around the globe are experiencing challenges with managing the explosion of big data and meeting the demands of digital consumers. Tech entities are eagerly stepping up and collaborating to develop solutions for these big data challenges, including innovative alternatives to industry standards, like SharePoint.
TIBCO Software Inc. is a provider of infrastructure software for companies to use on-premise or as part of cloud computing environments. Chris Kanaracus recently discussed some TIBCO news in the ComputerWorld.com post, “Tibco adds Hadoop Support to Spotfire Analytics Tool.” The new release is explained:
Spotfire 4.5 will become generally available this month and features a data service connector to Hadoop, which is known for its ability to handle unstructured data such as weblogs, sensor information and text. The connector will allow users to combine and analyze information from Hadoop clusters along with structured data from business applications such as an SAP or Oracle ERP (enterprise resource planning) system.
But some analysts, such as Boris Evelson of Forrester Research, are less than giddy. Evelson adds, “However, other aspects of the release, such as the management tooling and iPad support, are less than earth-shattering.” According to Evelson, mobility has become a basic requirement of any BI platform.
TIBCO’s new partnerships are another indication that enterprise search is the hot new market for competition and development. While acquisition and development news is exciting, you may want to turn to an established search solution that already understands the value of federated search and mobility. We like the feedback we’ve seen about Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Here you can read about the mobility solutions from Mindbreeze,
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile makes company knowledge available on all mobile devices. You can act freely, independently and yet always securely. Irrespective of what format the data is in. Full functionality: Search results are displayed homogenously to the web client with regards to clear design and intuitive navigation.
And with information pairing of your cloud and on-premise data, users can easily access important business information on the go from their smartphones and tablets. The well-established and cost-effective solution is worth a second look at http://www.mindbreeze.com/.
Philip West, May 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Prepare in Advance for SharePoint 15
May 18, 2012
Much like the discussion that flowed before the release of SharePoint 2010, the same voices are now chattering about the impending release of SharePoint 15, likely launched in the first quarter of 2013. Many experts are already weighing in on how to best prepare your enterprise for the move. David Roe of CMS Wire talks with Chris McNulty of Quest Software in, “SharePoint 15: 8 Things to Help You Prepare.”
Everything, McNulty said, is about planning; you can’t just jump into SharePoint 15. But you couldn’t just jump into SharePoint 2010, or 2007 or 2003, for that matter. So just like the last time, Quest is advising companies to plan any future deployments, even if many companies appear to have had their head in the sand when that lesson was being given out the first time.
Chris McNulty goes on to suggest eight major categories of preparation: optimized environment, consolidate content, data externalization, governance plan, enterprise content management, be social, custom coding, and cloud strategy. While each of those categories comprises a good bit of advice, we think that they could extend to any number of enterprise offerings, and many organizations are looking beyond SharePoint.
Consider Fabasoft Mindbreeze. This smart third-party enterprise solution can stand alone or work alongside an existing SharePoint infrastructure. Furthermore, Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers Connectors that work to seamlessly integrate all electronic data.
As the optimum search and information access solution, Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise facilitates the comprehensive incorporation of all electronic data repositories. Data sources and storage systems are connected to Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise via Fabasoft Mindbreeze Connectors. The standard product scope includes Connectors for the most common data sources. Additional Connectors are available to purchase as required.
While many will still consider SharePoint as the flagship of the enterprise market, many organizations are eager for more agile, intuitive solutions that update more frequently than the typical three-year Microsoft cycle. These organizations would do well to consider Fabasoft Mindbreeze and their suite of solutions.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 18, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
IBM Big Data Initiative Coming in Focus with Cloudera, Hadoop Partnerships
May 17, 2012
Big data management and analytics is becoming a key basis of competition as organizations look to turn their complex and large data sets into business assets. In “Analyst Commentary: IBM Adds Search and Broadens Hadoop Strategy with Big Data,” Stuart Lauchlan comments on IBM’s Vivisimo acquisition. Lauchlan says that the acquisition puts to rest the ambiguity of IBM’s Hadoop partnership strategy. He also has this to add about handling big data:
By definition, one of the major problems in discovering the information “nuggets” in Big Data environments is that the volume of data is large and consequently difficult to traverse or search using traditional enterprise search and retrieval (ESR) tools that require the creation and maintenance of indexes before a query can be made. Vivisimo’s offering indexes and clusters results in real time, and its scalability enables dynamic navigation across results delivered, as well as the automation of discovery, reducing the burden/time of analysis.
Even though the actual value of the acquisition has not been declared, we do know that IBM has spent $14 billion in the last seven years on analytics-related products and companies. And while IBM has already acquired a service like Vivisimo, it seems that IBM saw value in the search software’s new capabilities, such as federated discovery and navigation. IBM is no doubt trying to take SharePoint, the major player in enterprise.
Lauchlan’s article is a comprehensive overview of the IBM strategy. It may be a worthy read to keep in the loop on enterprise search news. But while IBM seeks to develop a comprehensive search solution with big acquisitions, organizations can turn to expert third party solutions to also get the power of efficient and federated search now.
The search experts at Fabasoft Mindbreeze offer a cost-effective suite of solutions to tame big data sprawl and connect your users to the right information at the right time. And with Folio connectors, organizations can access on-premise and cloud data with one easy search. Here you can read about the enterprise search solution:
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…But an all-inclusive search is not everything. Creating relevant knowledge means processing data in a comprehensible form and utilizing relations between information objects. Data is sorted according to type and relevance. The enterprise search for professionals.
Navigate to http://www.mindbreeze.com/ to learn more.
Philip West, May 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Perspectives on SharePoint from a Pioneer
May 16, 2012
As an early adopter of SharePoint 2010, Robert Schifreen was tasked with deploying SharePoint for the University of Brighton community. At the time, very little was formally written about the product, and Microsoft itself did not know how widely adopted the product would become. Schifreen relays his personal experiences in, “SharePoint Deployment: Pitfalls of a Pioneer.” He begins with the difficult task of defining SharePoint.
To some it’s a corporate collaboration tool that does everything you need straight out of the box. To others it’s a development platform upon which, with the addition of tools such as SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio, you can build a ‘portal’ (whatever that might mean). Microsoft really needs to come up with an accurate, punchy description in order to persuade more people to give it a try.
Tasked with forming his own definition of what SharePoint is and does, Schifreen soon learned that SharePoint was not always willing to work with files and software outside of its own comfort zone.
While Microsoft likes to shout loudly about the fact that SharePoint 2010 embraces not just Windows and IE but also other browsers and other hardware, the relationship does indeed stop at a mere embrace. Some of the rich editing controls don’t like non-Microsoft browsers.
While no enterprise solution is without its quirks, we have found some to be more intuitive and agile. Consider checking out Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise. This award-winning enterprise solution is prized for its ability to play nice with a wide variety of data types.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise finds every scrap of information within a very short time, whether document, contract, note, e-mail or calendar entry, in intranet or internet, person- or text-related. The software solution finds all required information, regardless of source, for its users. Get a comprehensive overview of corporate knowledge in seconds without redundancy or loss of data.
Launching an enterprise infrastructure is not yet easy, nor may it ever be. However, finding a smart and intuitive solution can go a long way in easing the task of the enterprise developer. Check out the Fabasoft Mindbreeze suite of solutions for more information.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 16, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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