SharePoint Sites Offers Customized Solutions
May 2, 2012
Perhaps one of the more useful aspects of SharePoint 2010 is the Sites feature, allowing customization of numerous sites based on included templates. Jennifer Mason of CMS Wire explores in, “SharePoint 2010 Sites: One Infrastructure for All Your Business Web Sites.”
Sites are one of the most powerful components within SharePoint. In fact, they are the foundation for many of the different solutions that can be built within SharePoint. By using Sites we can quickly build many different focused solutions, including items like:
Team Collaboration Areas
Corporate Intranets
Public Websites
Blogs
Database Tracking Solutions (Access Templates)
The solution is essentially one of convenience, as the templates themselves are not touted as anything beyond ordinary. Users often remark on SharePoint’s ability to keep them on the one platform, looking internally to SharePoint for all of their information needs.
We propose Fabasoft Mindbreeze as a smart third party solution and compliment to an existing SharePoint infrastructure. While a web site is relatively easy to create, endowing that web site with a smart and efficient search feature is much harder. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite provides unrivaled searchability for your public facing web sites.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite…
- is intuitive and user friendly.
- is instantly ready for use as a Cloud service. It turns your website into a user-friendly knowledge portal for your customers.
- recognizes correlations and links through semantic and dynamic search processes. This delivers pinpoint accurate and precise “finding experiences”.
- is the perfect website search for your company.
No installation, configuration or maintenance required.
So if your organization is looking for a way to take your public web sites to the next level, improving user satisfaction, consider adding Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 2, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
GSX Streamlines SharePoint Monitoring
May 1, 2012
Every SharePoint developer knows that a SharePoint infrastructure requires a lot of love and attention. Monitoring is essential to heading off major problems. GSX Solutions is now offering an automated way to monitor enterprise environments. Market Watch gives a full report in, “GSX Assures Around-the-Clock Performance for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.”
GSX Solutions, the global leader in proactive, consolidated monitoring and reporting of enterprise collaboration environments, including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and Lotus Notes, today announced its latest release of GSX Monitor & Analyzer assures around-the-clock availability and performance for Exchange 2010 and SharePoint. The new release provides pinpoint alerts that enable Exchange and SharePoint administrators to head off emerging issues before they impact the business and dramatically reduce user complaints.
Claiming that the service can alert you to your emerging enterprise issues before they impact the line of business, GSX definitely has a market. Such monitoring can save a SharePoint team a lot of costly time and energy in manual monitoring. We think an addition of a third-party enterprise solution may also help ensure that problems do not occur in the first place.
The suite of solutions offered by Fabasoft Mindbreeze lead the pack in terms of interoperability and ease of use. They function on their own or in addition to an existing SharePoint installation. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is an intuitive, efficient enterprise alternative, that has been proven to save users time and improve user satisfaction.
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.
It is important to have a lot of tools at your disposal when overseeing a large SharePoint installation. But as hotly anticipated as SharePoint 2013 may be, we believe that the wave of the future will be smart, agile third party solutions such as the ones created by Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Be sure to check out all that they have to offer.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 1, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Prepare Your Organization for SharePoint 2013
April 30, 2012
SharePoint users are hotly anticipating the release of SharePoint 2013. Will the changes be large or small? How will it affect an organization’s existing infrastructure? Market Watch turns hypothesis into practical action, discussing the upcoming release and also preparations that you can take now to prepare your organization. Read the full report in, “Eight Ways to Prepare for the Next Release of SharePoint Now.”
Quest Software, a provider of enterprise tools for SharePoint, offers the following:
Microsoft is gradually revealing details on what users can expect in the next version, which many anticipate will be available in early 2013. With widespread expectations beginning to surface around social capabilities, the cloud, and a new interface, the early anticipation indicates users are already thinking about what’s next for SharePoint. As organizations start considering the next version, there are many ways they can prepare the environment to gain immediate benefits now, and be ready to quickly take advantage of new features later.
Quest goes on to layout what it calls a “next version readiness” plan. However, we think that things could be made a bit simpler. Microsoft is known for its ritualistic three-year cycle of software overhaul. However, smart third-party enterprise solutions like Fabasoft Mindbreeze update on a timetable that is much less disruptive. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise unveils new releases quarterly for on-site installations, and even more often for Cloud installations.
Updates are performed seamlessly, requiring no major overhauls or contingency plans. Rather, updates make the user experience even more pleasant. Above all, findability and efficiency are increased with Mindbreeze, whether it stands alone or works in tandem with an existing SharePoint infrastructure. Explore the entire suite of offering by Fabasoft Mindbreeze and see what they can do to improve your organization’s information management system.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Goes Fully Mobile
April 27, 2012
With each of its quarterly releases highly anticipated, Fabasoft Mindbreeze has made exceptionally newsworthy headlines with its Spring 2012 Release. Read what Daniel Fallmann, founder of Fabasoft Mindbreeze, has to say:
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze 2012 Spring Release is specially designed for tablets and smartphones. Everything that Mindbreeze could previously do on a desktop it can now do on tablets and smartphones too. Apple, Microsoft or Android – it makes no difference. This is important to us, since we’ve been working on strategy 100 for many years – 100% functionality on all platforms.
With more and more business being conducted on mobile devices, Fabasoft Mindbreeze is truly ahead of the pack in its adoption of mobile technology. The Spring 2012 Release seals their victory over the competition in this area. Instead of just being “more” capable of mobile searching than its competitors, Fabasoft Mindbreeze is now completely capable of conducting all enterprise functions from mobile devices, regardless of the platform.
Additional improvements include those made to Fabasoft Mindbreeze Insite, a solution that seamlessly integrates between an organization’s enterprise and its public facing web presence, insuring that the web site is always up to date. Internal users also get continuous updates without having to initiate a search.
Mindbreeze InSite integrates itself smoothly. You can now make your website searchable in the Cloud with InSite and make this data instantly available to internal users. In this way your website becomes a company- internal information center with maximum synergy effects. To exaggerate it slightly, new products, blog posts etc. concerning the company no longer need to be distributed via e-mail – instead the website automatically becomes the knowledge platform for everyone.
We have always been a fan of the smart solutions by Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Their adherence to intuitive quarterly updates is another strong selling point, with the Spring 2012 Release giving many organizations a reason to consider a second look.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 27, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Breaking Down SharePoint
April 26, 2012
Tim Anderson breaks down the nuts and bolts of SharePoint, what it is and what it is not, in “Making Sense of SharePoint 2010.” Anderson gives an overview:
Microsoft calls SharePoint a ‘business collaboration platform,’ a suitably vague description for a multi-faceted product. SharePoint can be a content management system for an internal or external website, a document management system, a business search portal, and more. So what is SharePoint really? Technically, it is an ASP.NET application which runs on Internet Information Services (IIS), Microsoft’s web server, and which stores most of its data in a SQL Server database. Conceptually, it is the outcome of Microsoft’s efforts over many years to create a web storage system, a document repository accessible via a web browser.
SharePoint has become ubiquitous, and almost obligatory, yet little writing is dedicated to what SharePoint is at its heart. Instead, much talk is devoted to customization options. But if we see it for what it is, perhaps we can also recognize that there are other options. There are alternatives to installing an overwhelming SharePoint infrastructure and then spending countless resources on customization processes.
Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze for instance. The Mindbreeze solutions are more than search, extending into mobile, web site, and enterprise realms.
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.
Perhaps most valuable, Fabasoft Mindbreeze ensures that all of their solutions work alone, or as a compliment to an existing SharePoint infrastructure. Mix and match Mindbreeze offerings to get the customization your organization wants without all the headaches and extra work.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 26, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Lifecycle of SharePoint
April 25, 2012
Bjorn Furuknap is a longstanding SharePoint blogger and expert. His piece, “Could SharePoint 2013 be SharePoint 2012?” is not notable so much for its predictions as it is for its explanation of the SharePoint lifecycle of development. Furuknap’s hypothesis, which he ultimately refutes, is that the projected release of SharePoint 2013 could in fact be a SharePoint 2012 release, flouting the traditional three-year cycle.
He explains:
I know the cycle at Microsoft says it should be three years between a major Office release, but with the state of completion of Windows 8, and with the new Metro interface making an appearance, perhaps Microsoft aims to get Office 15 out as soon as possible, maybe even in 2012. It wouldn’t make any sense to leave SharePoint behind then. Microsoft would want the Office client suite to take advantage of the latest and greatest, and that leads me to believe that if Office comes out named 2012, then SharePoint will be so too.
From this we see that the Microsoft web is tightly woven with many interconnecting parts. With Furuknap’s article a bit dated, we are now more certain that SharePoint 2013 will indeed be SharePoint 2013, even if released in 2012. But what is interesting is the tight lid that Microsoft keeps, rigidly scheduling updates even when other competing technologies have passed them by.
Take Fabasoft Mindbreeze for instance. Fabasoft Mindbreeze is a third-party vendor offering a suite of solutions including Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise. Standing alone or working in tandem with an existing SharePoint infrastructure, Mindbreeze works hard to meet the intuitive needs of its users. Updates are released quarterly for on-site installations, the latest edition being Spring 2012. Updates are even more frequent for Cloud users.
If third party vendors are responding to customers’ needs quickly, releasing updates to keep pace with competing and complimentary technologies, we think Microsoft could make it a point to do the same thing. In the meantime, explore the offerings by Fabasoft Mindbreeze and see if they can provide the efficiency and flexibility your organization needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 25, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Customizing the SharePoint Search Box
April 24, 2012
Customization of SharePoint is almost a necessity in order to extract the full benefit from such a large and broad enterprise implementation. Christian Stahl addresses customization of one very important component, the search box, in his piece, “Brand the Search Box in SharePoint 2010.”
Stahl begins:
I have written some blog posts, in the past, about branding the global navigation which is an important part of the SharePoint user interface. The search box is another part of the user interface that often needs a bit of branding especially if it concerns a public faced web site where the search box could be one of the most important elements in the user interface.
Stahl has a good point; the search box is an important branding piece, especially when used in a public facing web site. However, the complications of customization can be daunting, especially if designated staff is not available. Third-party solutions can be a smart add-on solution to an existing SharePoint implementation.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze has an especially attractive web site search feature in Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite. Read what Dr. Manfred Weiss of Computerwelt had to say about customized web site search with Fabasoft Mindbreeze Insite:
We want to stand out from the crowd with a top internet presence. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite is part of this strategy. Our readers value the service of a perfect search. Regardless of which of our portals the information is on, Mindbreeze finds it. Since the search function is operated as a Cloud service, we save time and money.
Put your best public foot forward with a customized web site search, made possible by the intuitive solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Mindbreeze Holds its Own in Forrester Assessment
April 23, 2012
Fabasoft Mindbreeze was included in a recent Forrester assessment of enterprise search offerings. Twelve vendor/products were analyzed, grouped into three categories: specialized, integrated, or detached. The official assessment will require an account to access, but CMS Wire does a good job of giving us the overview in, “Forrester Evaluates Enterprise Search Landscape, None Open Source.”
Today, the impetus for search enterprise search is much the same as it was decades ago: Finding information quickly. We just have exponentially more information and often have to find it more quickly. Despite the age of search, according to Forrester, many organizations don’t see enterprise search as a fundamental service like email. However, as content sizes continue to grow, become more diverse and the workplace is filled with a generation of web-savvy workers who just expect search to work, enterprise search solutions that help staff quickly locate information in disparate and diverse sources is becoming more of a necessity.
Here are a few of our initial observations:
First, we are just as shocked as the author at the lack of open source coverage. Open source is a growing force in the enterprise search market, driving innovation. Many of the successful commercial vendors are incorporating features pioneered in open source.
Secondly, Microsoft’s SharePoint offering, particularly its FAST search received no “excellent” ratings in any category. However, SharePoint is still seen as an obligatory tool for a broad enterprise infrastructure.
Lastly, Fabasoft Mindbreeze holds its own as a relatively small and young company amidst many big players such as IBM and Microsoft. Fabasoft Mindbreeze shines as a specialized tool, flexible and intuitive in meeting the specific needs of a fast moving market that are often overlooked by big infrastructures like SharePoint. In fact, many organizations use Mindbreeze as an add-on to an existing SharePoint infrastructure to increase efficiency and user satisfaction without costly customization.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze continues to win recognition, including an inclusion in KM World’s 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management for four years running.
Mindbreeze, a Fabasoft subsidiary and a leading provider of software for enterprise search and information access, is again listed among the 100 companies in knowledge management. Fabasoft Mindbreeze has thus made the grade for the fourth time.
Keep an eye on the fast moving world of enterprise search, and check out the offerings of Fabasoft Mindbreeze to see if they might be a good fit for your enterprise.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint and Open Source: A Collision Ahead?
April 22, 2012
The latest release of SharePoint contains the features needed in order to function as a document, record, and content management system all rolled into one. In addition, it easily integrates into the MS Office Suite, particularly Office 2010 and 2007.
However, SharePoint 2010 lacks many features that a lot of users are looking for such as high-volume processing and document capture. In addition, because web technologies have evolved and come so far, users wish to see the same level of UI intuition, interactivity, and richness that modern websites possess. In order to reach that level, SharePoint has to be enhanced. Enter third-party solutions. And because many enterprises are using SharePoint (as of 2011 78% of Fortune 500 firms utilize it) want more from it on top of its in-the-box features yet don’t have enough resources to do so, SharePoint enhancement solutions have become a booming business.
A good example is Best Bets. In the white paper by SurfRay entitled “How to improve SharePoint Search with Best Bets in SharePoint 2010”, it is discussed how the said enhancement can improve the search experience of users:
Users who search in an enterprise context usually expect relevant document to populate the top of results every time, which can result in a poor user experience and abandonment of search when those expectations are not met. Best Bets, in effect, bypass the normal search engine algorithm’s assignment of relevance and value to a particular piece of content in order to make it rank highest for the selected keywords.
But SharePoint has many competitors, both licensed options and open-source ones. And open-source systems such as Alfresco, Drupal, and MindTouch have experienced an increase in user and developer base. Why? Probably mainly for the zero licensing cost. Then for their flexibility and wider browser compatibility.
But rumor has it that Microsoft will be releasing SharePoint 15 within this year. Will SharePoint remain a leader or will it suffer the same type of pressure brought by open source search solutions. You can track news about open source search in out new publication OpenSearchNews. There may be some fender benders but the intersection of open source and proprietary software is getting more heavily used.
Lauren Llamanzares, April 22, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
SharePoint Development Tutorial Within 85 Pages
April 21, 2012
Although the SharePoint Fast search option is under assault from many quarters, many organizations want to “run what Microsoft brung.”
No longer do you have to scour the Web for basic tutorials on how to start SharePoint development? You can waste a lot of working hours researching sources, when you can save yourself time and money by heading over to SharePoint Tutorial and reading about their book, “Learn SharePoint Development.”
Pulling from six years of experience, the author pours his knowledge into a short eighty-five guidebook. It was written with the absolute beginner in mind, it includes step-by-step instructions, focused viewpoint with pictures for explanation, concepts and practices for training with source code to start.
“This document shows you basic concepts of SharePoint regarding development and deployment of solutions as well as customizations like Web Parts. It helps you to understand the basic development and deployment process and what elements are involved since the process differs from the ASP.NET process although SharePoint is based on ASP.NET.”
You are also treated to the tools for data organization, SharePoint environmental development, deployment, and Visual Studio 2010 basics. You can either purchase the book for $24, but for an additional $10 you can get the source code as well. One of the problems I have with these SharePoint start up books is that they hardly ever address SharePoint search. If you do not understand search enterprise concepts, then it is good to rely on SurfRay Ontolica—a search enterprise platform that requires zero to little extra programming for adoption.
Whitney Grace, April 21, 2012
Sponsored by OpenSearchNews.com
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