Another Band-aid for SharePoint?
November 26, 2010
PR-inside.com has published an announcement of Metalogix and Microsoft’s team effort in the production and release of a free migration accelerating tool dubbed “Search First”. This application will aid organizations in unlocking some new SharePoint 2010 tricks within their existing SharePoint 2007 systems including more accurate and relevant search results, improved performance and increased customization.
Per the referenced post, says Metalogix CTO Julien Sellgren:
Metalogix prides itself on providing easy to use tools and solutions for customers to leverage the robust features SharePoint has to offer. We were thrilled at the opportunity to work with Microsoft and help existing SharePoint 2007 customers to leverage new SharePoint 2010 search capabilities. This will help them better manage their SharePoint data and prepare for a move to SharePoint 2010 in the future.
Sounds good, right? Perhaps, but several things strike me about this passage. Forgive me, but I’m all questions. Isn’t it troubling that one cannot leverage SharePoint’s robust features with SharePoint alone? No offense to Metalogix, but rather than ensure SharePoint is itself fully functional, Microsoft instead endorses a third party to do the job for them? And, Microsoft can’t help users with the transition from the 2007 to the 2010 versions of its own product within its own product?
Most responsible consumers learn early on that free products are generally too good to be true. Based on the v2010 features that are being extended to v2007, is there an ulterior motive to this complimentary offering? It sounds as though the real function of Search First is to patch the sub-par features of SharePoint 2007 without divulging to existing users that Microsoft’s software had some issues.
Sarah Rogers, November 26, 2010
Freebie
MetaVis: Another SharePoint Helper
October 19, 2010
SharePoint, SharePoint, my kingdom for a working SharePoint. Apologies to Little Willie. Last week I was surrounded by various shifty types for three days. Those law enforcement and intelligence conferences are darned interesting. I never know who is like to burst out with a SharePoint solution and who will dig into the exotica of Linux.
I did learn that one happy intelligence outfit outside the US was making SharePoint work like a humming Singer sewing machine. The trick, I think I understood, was to use a product from MetaVis. I had heard of the company and its taxonomy solution, but I did not know too much about it. With a word of encouragement from a government official, I did some checking.
The basics are:
MetaVis Technologies is a Microsoft Gold Certified ISV that develops packaged software solutions to help organize SharePoint environments for improved search, findability and e-discovery. MetaVis takes the complexity out of designing, deploying and managing content within SharePoint by offering reusable taxonomies, metadata management and migration software and services. The benefit is an organized SharePoint environment that is easily understood and well documented. The company believes that taxonomy management within SharePoint should not be complicated to implement and use. MetaVis products are based on intuitive, graphical interfaces that are easy to use and easy to install. Drag and drop features allow information architects to design SharePoint metadata models and reuse them saving valuable time and resources. As a result, MetaVis products improve search optimization, consistency, content migration, and workflows across corporate SharePoint sites.
The idea is that Microsoft’s native SharePoint is not the tiara that a corporate princess is likely to wear to a shareholde4r meeting. To fix that highly visible problem, a third party solution is required.
The company’s newest product is a “cloud classifier”:
The new product allows SharePoint 2010 users to tag and classify multiple items directly from the SharePoint user interface. By integrating directly into the SharePoint Web Interface, Cloud Classifier appears seamlessly in the SharePoint ribbon… SharePoint 2010 provides tagging and classification technology but is limited to individual items…MetaVis Cloud Classifier allows users to select multiple documents from SharePoint sites, libraries, lists or search results and classify in bulk. Users can also create templates to help classify content for specific projects or activities further simplifying the process. By making classification easy for the user, content becomes more findable and accessible.
The company offers word lists, taxonomy and classification tools, and glue code to make SharePoint work. The company offers some videos that make clear the features and functions of the firm’s different software solutions. You can access these at this MetaVis location.
There is little doubt that SharePoint supports a thriving ecosystem. Now what about Alfresco?
Stephen E Arnold, October 18, 2010
Freebie
Microsoft SharePoint Videos
October 13, 2010
A reader sent me a link and it pointed to a framed page on StumbleUpon.com. For the life of me, I can’t figure out who wrote what, when, and why. Here’s the StumbleUpon link.
When I shaved the url, I got a 404, so you are on your own. What interested my reader a lot and me not so much were two new videos in an article called “Microsoft’s Internet business Vision: SharePoint for Internet Sites & Fast Search.”
The two videos which I watched as I was writing this post are:
- Microsoft’s Internet Business Platform Vision Part 1. This is a seven minute video featuring a person in the Technology Solutions DPMG unit. I don’t know what the acronym means. The video is a voice over PowerPoint. The first video explained market trends.
- Microsoft’s Internet Business Platform Vision Part 2. The second video includes a nifty graphic about Redmond’s business vision. The diagram shows an “integrated platform”. Yes, another integrated platform which one hopes connects to the other platforms in an enterprise and in cloud space.
What’s this have to do with search? Well, one has to be able to find things in this integrated space. The Fast search detail was, in my opinion, thin. But there is a nifty diagram showing how Fast Search Server can deliver reach, retention, and revenue.
If you are into Microsoft, you will enjoy the voice over PowerPoint presentations. I anticipate that certified partners selling a snap in replacement for Fast Search Server may find the videos helpful with regard to their product marketing and positioning.
Stephen E Arnold, October 13, 2010
Keyword Query for Microsoft SharePoint
October 12, 2010
Short honk: Want to build a custom application with search using SharePoint as plumbing? If yes, navigate to “SharePoint Search Using KeywordQuery.” The write up provides a trick. You will want to use the new Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Query object model. There are some twists and turns along the way. The good news is that the author of the article incluides some useful commentary and a chunk of code that could save a SharePoint search wonk a big chunk of time. Take a look.
Stephen E Arnold, October 12, 2010
SharePoint Dual Feature Bonanza
September 13, 2010
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has more social and search features, which are intertwined to create an enticing platform for users. This and more is revealed in the Able Blue blog post “The MOSS Show Interview”, which takes you to The MOSS show site’s interview “Enterprise Social (and Search) in SharePoint 2010”.
The two part podcast interview of Matthew McDermott, who is a Microsoft SharePoint expert and MVP, talks about the new improved social features like improved My Sites, Activity Feed, tagging, rating, managed metadata, taxonomies, and folksonomies in SharePoint 2010. Matthew talks about the importance of having a search strategy, and leverage the search applications by making the search actionable and refined.
SharePoint 2010 can help create a knowledge base that benefit over a long period, and can be shared amongst users. Matthew points out, “What makes SharePoint 2010 special is its ability to gather feedback from people participating in the content consumption,” which enhances the value of the content, making it more important to the enterprise. This is enterprise social, which gains more relevance if “made more findable by tagging and using proper metadata.”
Matthew explains that SharePoint 2010 adds great enterprise social capabilities, and facilitates to integrate third party external applications like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter outside the firewall from SharePoint 2010. These social tools can be used to create a business value. The new SharePoint 2010 allows the internal as well as external URLs in the browser to be tagged, and enables the list of all the tagged URLs to collect on a tag profile page.
The managed metadata store of SharePoint 2010, allows people to create a central repository of data through service applications. There is also a feature to make the data translatable into multi-lingual forms, and even deny the use of tags for various reasons. “Activity feed is a feature through which you get your news or tips of the day by just following the tags,” Matthew reports, “and you get the ability to consume content around the organization.” He believes that this helps the employees to connect with each other, nurture cooperation, and makes them productive by improving the culture of the workplace.
The beauty of SharePoint 2010, as per Matthew McDermott is that users can themselves decide upon the governance of the data, and thus get complete control of this powerful enterprise social platform, with highly developed search techniques.
Now, how expensive is it to maintain a proprietary system that requires hands on fiddling to make work as advertised? The answer to this question is not in the movie. Maybe the sequel?
Harleena Singh, September 13, 2010
Freebie
SharePoint Search Migration Tool
July 25, 2010
Lucky you. You now have a Microsoft tool to make migration as easy as snapping one’s fingers. The tool is available to help you with the following migrations. No, I did not make a mistake when reporting that you need the tool to migrate from SharePoint Server 2010 to SharePoint Server 2010. I don’t really want to know.
First, navigate to http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/odcsp2010searchmigra to the get the run down on the components which include these components:
- Common
- Search Migration
- O12Layer
- O14Layer
- FS14Layer.
Job security as long at the budget supports this sort of stuff. My approach would be quite different, use a third party tool, and focus on keeping the cost down, the system up, and the users happy. I am not sure some folks share these simple ideas.
Stephen E Arnold, July 25, 2010
Freebie
Concept Searching Offers Taxonomy Management
July 13, 2010
SharePoint just got better thanks to Concept Searching. They’ve just announced the addition of a Distributed Taxonomy Management feature that will work within the conceptClassifier for SharePoint.
The experts all agree this is a good move, but one that should have been adopted by SharePoint as a foundation for their product. Nevertheless, it’s here now and will be a boon to companies with large document libraries and taxonomy needs.
Transparency for the end user is one of the special features of this application and a central server coordinates all the locking and unlocking of the nodes.
The whole idea that Concept Searching offers Taxonomy Management is of little surprise to an industry familiar with their work. When it comes to statistical metadata generation, this is the only classification software company in the world using concept extraction and compound term processing to provide access to information. The company founded in 2002.
Rob Starr, July 13, 2010
Freebie
BA Insight Announces Longitude V4
June 15, 2010
I get quite a bit of information about snap in search and content processing systems designed specifically for Microsoft SharePoint. Many organizations find SharePoint and its components, add ins, and third party enhancements exactly what is needed to crack tough information management problems.
Make your SharePoint search as quickly as a Bugatti Veyron accelerates.
BA Insight – along with Fabasoft Mindbreeze, SurfRay, Coveo, Exalead, and other vendors – offers a search solution for SharePoint licensees. You can read about the “state-of-the-art search features” in “BA-Insight Announces Next-Generation Search Technology for SharePoint and FAST Search 2010 at Microsoft TechEd 2010 Conference. BA-Insight’s Longitude Version 4 Provides Automatic Optimization of Microsoft’s 2010 Enterprise Search Products.”
Among the state-of-the-art features are, according to the write up:
- Highly scalable performance, superior to Flash/Java in speed of rendition
- More efficient engine for rendering complex pages and 3D animation
- Linking of structured and unstructured data
- Text recognition within an image format, where OCR is executed on the fly
- Translation from foreign languages
- Strong .Net integration – customer ability to embed existing custom .Net extensions into the Silverlight viewer
- Full use of all existing Longitude Search Connectors
- Indexing of email including attachments
- Parametric search.
The description of this product might bring tears to the eyes of BA Insight’s competitors and smiles of joy to SharePoint licensees who struggle to get a distributed SharePoint system humming like a Bugatti Veyron.
You can get more information about the BA Insight “state of the art” system at www.ba-insight.com. Each time I read about a search solution for SharePoint I wonder what creates such a thriving business in SharePoint search now that Microsoft owns the Fast Search & Transfer technology.
Stephen E Arnold, June 15, 2010
Property Mappings or Why Microsoft Enterprise Search Is a Consultants’ Treasure Chest
May 31, 2010
First, navigate to “Creating Enterprise Search Metadata Property Mappings with PowerShell.” Notice that you may have difficulty reading the story because the Microsoft ad’s close button auto positions itself so you can’t get rid of the ad. Pretty annoying on some netbooks, including my Toshiba NB305.
Second, the author of the article is annoyed, but he apparently finds his solution spot on as something germane to open source search. Frankly I don’t get the link between manual scripting to perform a common function and open source search. Well, that’s what comes from getting old and becoming less tolerant of stuff that simply does not work unless there is a generous amount of time to fix a commercial product.
What’s broken? Here’s the problem:
One of the things that drove me absolutely nuts about Enterprise Search in MOSS 2007 was that there was no built-in way to export your managed property mappings and install them on a new server. A third party utility on CodePlex helped, but it was still less than ideal. With SharePoint 2010, well you still really can’t export your property mappings to a file, but you do get a lot of flexibility using PowerShell.
And the fix?
You use the baker’s dozen lines of code in the write up, substitute your own variable names, and presto, you can get access to that hard won metadata. Here’s the author’s key point:
It seems like a lot but it really isn’t. I create two managed properties (TestProperty1 and TestProperty2). In the case of TestProperty2, I actually map two crawled properties to it.
In my opinion, this type of manual solution is great for those with time to burn and money to pay advisors. Flip the problem. Why aren’t basic functions included in Microsoft’s enterprise search solutions? Oh, and what about that short cut for reindexing? Bet that works like a champ for some users. Little wonder that third party search solutions for SharePoint are thriving. And the open source angle? Beats me.
Stephen E Arnold, May 31, 2010
Freebie
SurfRay: Catching the Crest of the SharePoint Wave
May 31, 2010
Editor’s Note: I participated in an email exchange with SurfRay’s management and technical team. I have been tracking the company’s technology for many years. First, I provided some competitive background to the team largely responsible for the Mondosoft product five or six years ago. Then, the Speed of Mind database acceleration and search technology became part of the SurfRay company. I have been tracking vendors who have addressed some of the needs that some Microsoft SharePoint customers discovered. My interests concern content processing, metatagging, and search and retrieval. Today’s SurfRay includes the Ontolica technology as well as the Web site search, analytics, and structured data technologies from Mondosoft and Speed of Mind. I wanted to make certain I was up to speed on what the Copenhagen-based company was doing. The following summary highlights the information I gleaned in my in-depth conversation with SurfRay executives.
SurfRay A/S, based in Copenhagen, has captured significant buzz for its Ontolica product. Microsoft offers many functions, but when it comes to making information easy to access, “basic” SharePoint falls short. Ontolica delivers search and content processing as a snap in. One day, SharePoint content is tough to find. The next day, after Ontolica has been installed, SharePoint content becomes available to users. In fact, installing Ontolica 2010 involved little more than clicking Next, Next, Next… Quite a different approach from the Lego block, assemble-it-yourself approach taken by other vendors.
Highlight shows one click filters for the user’s query.
Torben Ellert, my SurfRay contact point, told me:
Ontolica delivers a powerful solution that clicks into standard SharePoint without any difficulty and typically installing in minutes. Few companies are so focused on being pure Microsoft that they are willing to live with problems when a simple and effective solution exists.
Simple. And SurfRay is growing at a double digit pace.
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