Protected: CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2010
September 14, 2011
Protected: Managing Email with SharePoint
September 13, 2011
Protected: How to Use Multi-Page Forms on SharePoint
September 12, 2011
Protected: More about SharePoint and Collaboration
September 9, 2011
OpenText: Search to Teaching Is Not the Deal about Selling Services?
September 8, 2011
Another data management, search, collaboration vendor does the “we are in a new business” quick step. Searching with the Stars could be a TV sensation because there are more twists, dips, and slides in the search and content ballroom than in an Arthur Murray Advanced Beginners’ class.
Navigate to “Open Text acquires Peterborough’s Operitel”. The news is that one Canadian firm snapped up another Canadian outfit. What makes this interesting is that I was able to see some weak-force synergy between Nstein (sort of indexing and sort of data management) and OpenText, owner of lots of search, content processing, and collaboration stuff plus an SGML database and the BASIS system. But the Operitel buy has me doing some speculative thinking.
Here’s the passage which caught my attention:
Operitel’s flagship LearnFlex product is built on Microsoft Corp.’s .NET platform and is a top tier e-learning reseller for the Windows maker. Open Text also has a long standing partnership with Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft.
I see more Microsoft credibility and a different way to sell services. OpenText strikes me as a company with a loosely or mostly non integrated line up of products. The future looks to be charging into the SharePoint sector, riding a horse called “eLearning.”
In today’s business climate, organic growth seems to be tough to achieve even with RedDot and a fruit basket filled with other technologies. (What happened to OpenText’s collaboration product? What happened to the legal workflow business? I just don’t know.) So how does a company which some Canadians at Industry Canada see as one of the country’s most important software companies grow? Here’s the answer:
Open Text’s growth-by-acquisition strategy has recently won accolades among the analyst community. The company purchased Maryland-based Metastorm Inc. for US$182-million, Texas-based Global 360 Holding Corp. for US$260-million and U.K.-based WeComm Ltd. for an undisclosed amount all in the past six months.
My hunch is that OpenText may want to find a buyer. Acquisitions seem to be a heck of a lot easier to complete than landing a major new account. I am not the only person thinking that the business of OpenText is cashing out. Point your browser at “Amid Takeover Fever, Open Text Looks Like a Bargain.” Here’s a key point in my opinion:
Open Text shares have climbed about 20 per cent this year, an increase that would pale in comparison to what would happen if a potential buyer emerged offering a premium similar to what HP has given Autonomy.
So we see a big payday for Autonomy has triggered a sympathetic response at the Globe & Mail, among “analysts”, and I am pretty sure among some OpenText stakeholders.
Several observations:
First, bankers think mostly about their commissions and fees. Bankers don’t think so much about other aspects of a deal. If there is a buck to be made from a company with a burlap sack of individual, solutions, and services, the bankers will go for it. Owning a new Porsche takes the edge off the winter.
Second, competitors have learned that other companies are a far greater threat than OpenText. A services firm can snag some revenue, but other vendors have been winning the big deals. The OpenText strategy has not generated the top line revenue growth and profit that a handful of other companies in search and content processing have achieved. So the roll up and services play looks like a way to add some zip to the burlap bag’s contents.
Third, customers have learned that OpenText does not move with the agility of some other firms. I would not use the word “glacial,” but “stately” seems appropriate. If you know someone with the RedDot system, you may be able to relate to the notion of rapid bug fixes and point releases. By the way, RedDot used to install an Autonomy stub as the default search engine. I find this interesting because OpenText owns BRS search, Fulcrum (yikes!), and the original Tim Bray SGML data management and search system. (Has SGML and XML come and gone?)
I am not willing to go out on a limb about a potential sale of OpenText, but I think that the notion of eLearning is interesting. Will OpenText shift its focus back to collaboration and document management much as Coveo flipped from search to mobile search to customer support and then back to search again. Canadian search and content processing vendors are interesting. Strike up the music. Another fast dance is beginning. Grab your partner. Search to services up next.
Stephen E Arnold, September 9, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
When Social and Search Meet in the Enterprise
September 8, 2011
Organizations are embracing Microsoft SharePoint as a platform for collaboration and other social online messaging. “If You Must Have In-House Social Tools, Go with SharePoint” is representative of the flood of information about SharePoint’s utility for collaborative activities.
J. Peter Bruzzese said:
he good news, at least from the SharePoint perspective, is that you have a tremendous amount of control over the amount of information people can share. For example, by deploying the User Profile Service Application in a SharePoint server farm, you can deploy My Sites and My Profile options to your users. They can then enter their own profile information, upload images of themselves for a profile picture, create a personal page with a document library (both personal and shared), tag other people’s sites and information, and search for people within the organization based on their profiles. The SharePoint administrator can control the extent to which the sharing occurs. You can adjust the properties in the profile page, turning options on or off and adding new properties if needed. You can turn off the I Like It and Tags & Notes features, and you can even delete tags or notes your corporate policy disapproves of. You can access profile information and make changes if needed. And you don’t have to turn on My Sites or let people create their own blog and so on: It’s not an all-or-nothing situation with these tools (ditto with third-party tools).
The excellent write up does a good job of explaining SharePoint from a high level.
There are three points which one wants to keep in mind:
First, collaborative content puts additional emphasis on managing the content generated by the users of social components within SharePoint. In most cases, short message are not an issue. What is important, however, is capturing as much information about the information as possible. One cannot rely on users to provide context for some comments. Not surprisingly, additional work is needed to ensure that social messages have sufficient context to make the information in a short message meaningful to a person who may be reviewing a number of documents of greater length. To implement this type of feature, a SharePoint licensee will want to have access to systems, methods, and experts familiar with context enhancement, not just key word indexing.
Second, the social content is often free flowing. The engineering for a “plain vanilla” SharePoint is often sufficiently robust to handle typical office documents. However, if a high volume flow of social content is produced within SharePoint, “plain vanilla” implementations may exhibit some slow downs. Again, throwing hardware at a problem may work in certain situations but often additional modifications to SharePoint may be required to deliver the performance users expect. Searching for a social message with a key fact can be frustrating if the system imposes high latency.
Finally, social content is assumed to be a combination of real time back and forth as well as asynchronous. A person may see a posting or a document and then replay an hour or a day later. Adding metadata and servers will not address the challenge of processing social content in a timely manner. Firms with specific expertise in search and content processing can help. The approach to bottleneck issues in indexing, for example, rely on the experience of the engineer, not an FAQ from Microsoft or blog post from a SharePoint specialist.
If you want to optimize your SharePoint system for social content and make that content findable, take a look at the services available from Search Technologies. We have deep experience with the full range of SharePoint search solutions, including Fast Search.
Iain Fletcher, September 8, 2011
Sponsored by Search Technologies
Protected: More SharePoint Myths Dispelled
September 8, 2011
SharePoint: Embracing Social Functions and Features
September 7, 2011
The future of search is a subject that sparks a conversational camp fire. After email, search is one of the principal uses of online systems. In the last year, traditional key word search has been altered by the growing demand for “social content.” The idea is not just to index online discussions, but to use the signals these conversations emit as a way to improve the relevance of a search.
For example, when Lady Gaga sends her fans a Twitter message, the response and diffusion of that message provides useful information to a search system. A query about a fashion trend sent to Bing and Google, for example, will “respond” to the Lady Gaga message and include the retweets of her content as an indication of relevance.
This could apply to enterprise search. It could be possible to configure a mainstream solution such as Microsoft Fast Search Server to respond to social content.
A solid overview of what is possible is available in the InfoWorld article, “If You Must Have In-House Social Tools, Go With SharePoint.” Examples of SharePoint’s social tools are support for Weblogs, the “I Like It” tags, notes, and profiles pages. InfoWorld explains how these tools will contribute to user satisfaction and help enhance the findability of content within an enterprise SharePoint installation. The implementation of social functions falls upon SharePoint administrators. Coincident with the release of the social tools, InfoWorld points out that user training is helpful. The article makes this important point:
I’m not a fan of social networking tools at work. I believe it distracts people more than it provides value. Call me a dinosaur, but when I want to say something important to the entire company, I use this ancient system called email. Maybe I’m not a team player because I don’t like collaborating on documents; if I need your help on a document, I’ll email it to you and you can look it over.
My view is that social networking has a time and a place, is beneficial, and should be taken in small quantities.
“Enjoy Maximum Collaboration with the Help of SharePoint” is especially thought provoking. The author said:
What SharePoint applications do is the customization, configuration and the development of Intranet, Extranet and the portals of information that are present on SharePoint.
My thought is that SharePoint does not perform customization. SharePoint must be configured and tuned to deliver certain types of functions. In our experience, SharePoint requires additional scripts. The default services deliver access to document libraries to manage content, generate reports, locate services, and share content across a wide network. However, social features may warrant changes to the SharePoint infrastructure to ensure that content throughout performance is not compromised and make certain indexing processes receive additional tuning to handle the social content if needed. Due to the abbreviated form of some social content, additional metadata may be required to enhance the findability of a short message.
Search Technologies has implemented social functions into Microsoft SharePoint. The Search Technologies’ team has the experience to derive the maximum benefit from the services which Microsoft includes with SharePoint. In addition, our engineers can implement special features as well as install, configure, and tune third party add-ins from Microsoft certified software developers.
Social has arrived and SharePoint is the ideal platform to use to take advantage of this fast growing content type.
Iain Fletcher, September 7, 2011
Protected: SharePoint and the Future of Technology
September 7, 2011
Protected: SharePoint Social Tools Gets a Major Endorsement
September 6, 2011
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