Search Infrastructure Advice from PolySpot
April 11, 2012
We think highly of PolySpot. The open source search experts have published a new white paper titled “How Agile Enterprise Search Infrastructure Can Help CIOs.” The paper is a must-read for any organization working to bridle its data. The summary states:
“Implementing advanced enterprise search applications yields significant and helps solve major technical and business issues:
- Facilitate access to valuable information through a single gateway or profiled pushed content
- Deliver comprehensive information, not fragmented information
- Increase employees satisfaction thanks to higher relevance and findability
- Ease expertise finding
- Enhance access to legacy information systems
- Provide access to time sensitive information such as pricing, regulations, and procedures
- Federate legacy document management content locked in proprietary systems
- Reduce harmonization costs and contain software license fees”
Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Paris, PolySpot designs search and information access solutions that help clients around the world boost efficiency even as big data multiplies at an astounding rate. Their tools offer universal connectivity, covering all business needs and ensuring that organizations can access the data they need, regardless of their structure, format or origin. They handle structured data with aplomb, of course, but pride themselves on their innovative cross-functional solution to unstructured data.
Cynthia Murrell, April 11, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Thetus Rolls Out Multi Int Upgrade
April 10, 2012
Thetus is rolling out multi-intelligence software, we learn in Online PR’s “Thetus Debuts Newest Release of Multi-Int Analysis Solution, Savanna, at DoDIIS 2012.” The application builds on existing intelligence community investments, supporting the development of mission-specific functionality and enabling integration between agencies. Both worthy goals.
Savanna3 was just debuted at the Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems Worldwide Conference in Denver, Colorado. The conference is a place for defense and intelligence IT pros to share current and future capabilities, investigate solutions, and share best practices.
The write up reveals:
“Savanna is a multi-Int, model-enabled analysis solution that builds on customer’s existing investments and programs bringing together multi-source analysis techniques to enable faster, more informed decision-making. Savanna is a solution that provides an integrated user experience for search, visualization, discovery, and output of actionable intelligence all while providing robust, analytic capabilities.”
Founded in 2003 in Portland, Oregon, Thetus focuses on predictive semantic modeling, outcome evaluation, and ongoing development of best practices. They embrace the challenges of complex systems; that’s a very good thing for someone serving the defense/intelligence community! The company also boasts clients in the fields of energy, law enforcement, and environmental services.
Cynthia Murrell, April 10, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Microsoft Watched and Learned as Markets Matured Over the Years
April 10, 2012
There are currently over 125 million SharePoint users and the goal is to reach 500 million with next release of Office. It is clear SharePoint is a ubiquitous system that continues to grow. And with consumers driving social and mobile demands, it is clear that SharePoint, and all of enterprise search, needs to keep up with the growing demand. Jeff Shuey continues the SharePoint mobile and social discussion in his post, “Social SharePoint – An Oxymoron?”
Shuey had this to say,
I wrote a post in 2009 asking — Is Microsoft late to the game? The answer then was yes. However, over the last few years the market has matured and Microsoft has watched and learned. They have taken the long standing Microsoft mantra of Any Place, Any Device and Any Time and have applied some SharePoint salve to it. As the Forbes article states … Microsoft is in a prime position to make it happen.
This is by no means the first discussion on social demands in the enterprise search world, but Shuey does add another interesting level to the discussion by bringing in other sources, like Forbes, and quotes and expert opinions.
Collaboration and social technology development is inevitable as business gets social. To tap into the new possibilities now without having to wait for a new release, consider a third party solution to complete your enterprise search system. We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. The Mindbreeze solution:
. . . smoothly integrates itself into your website so that the user doesn’t even realize that Cloud services are working in the background. Furthermore, InSite always knows what a user is interested in. Navigation behavior on the website serves as the basis for recognizing their interests. If the user finds themselves on one of your sub-pages on the topic mobility for example, even at this level Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite still displays further information such as blogs, news, Wikipedia etc. on the relevant topic.
Check out the full suite of solutions at Mindbreeze to see what works for you.
Philip West, April 10, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Lucid Imagination Lands Government Big Data Deal
April 9, 2012
Give me an “L,” give me a “U,” give me a…well if I ask you to yell out all those letters on the computer screen, people might begin to think you’re a few bytes short of a complete memory drive. The reason for my cheering, though, was inspired by MarketWatch’s article on “Intelligent Software Solutions Partners With Lucid Imagination to Tackle Government Big Data Challenges.”
Intelligent Software Solutions (ISS) and Lucid Imagination have entered into a two-year joint business development deal, where both companies will create big data search and analysis solutions. The government has been having trouble with processing “teraquads” of structured and unstructured data. The article said:
“ ‘Our relationship with Lucid gets us to a higher level of proficiency on this technology by putting experts on our team to work jointly with us to build tailored solutions for our customers,’ said Wes Caldwell, chief architect, Global Enterprise Solutions Division, Intelligent Software Solutions. ‘We are in the business of providing software solutions for our customers that allow them to mine, manage and analyze large amounts of data and to derive critical knowledge from that data. The promise of harnessing big data to deliver actionable intelligence from an often diverse and vast amount of data is quickly becoming a requirement for many of our customers. By leveraging Lucid Imagination’s enterprise open source search platform, we can deliver better value to our customer base. This partnership is a key component to that strategy and further strengthens our position in that area.’”
The main force behind the joint venture is Lucid Imagination’s open source enterprise search technology that allows companies to build their own search products. ISS will add Lucid’s people to their team and together they will deliver training and support services for their government clientele. Lucid Imagination is proving to the world how powerful and useful open source software can be. Is this the start of a new trend or will it pass by quickly?
By the way, “teraquads” sounds big.
Whitney Grace, April 10, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Open Source Analytics Information Service Now Available
April 9, 2012
ArnoldIT has rolled out The Trend Point information service. Published Monday through Friday, the information services focuses on the intersection of open source software and next-generation analytics. The approach will be for the editors and researchers to identify high-value source documents and then encapsulate these documents into easily-digested articles and stories. In addition, critical commentary, supplementary links, and important facts from the source document are provided. Unlike a news aggregation service run by automated agents, librarians and researchers use the ArnoldIT Overflight tools to track companies, concepts, and products. The combination of human-intermediated research with Overflight provide an executive or business professional with a quick, easy, and free way to keep track of important developments in open source analytics. There is no charge for the service.
Stories include:
- White House Orders Big Data Solutions
- Public and Private Sectors Combine for Big Savings
- Analytic Revolution Looks Different from 90s Dotcom Boom
According to the publisher, Stephen E Arnold:
We believe that commercial abstracting and indexing services have become untenable for the busy professional. We have combined traditional indexing, literature reviews, and critical commentary which help reduce the time required to pinpoint the meaningful information in this exploding open source analytics field.
Our business model is to provide high value information without a fee. Individuals, law firms, and private equity firms wanting additional information about the people, companies, and products we cover are free to contact us. Like other professional services’ firms, we rely on motivated individuals with an information need to tap into our full-scale, in-depth research.
What sets TheTrendPoint and other ArnoldIT.com information services apart is that its approach is similar to that used by commercial information services such as Medline and Disclosure, two information services designed to make reference services more useful.
At this time, TheTrendPoint.com is designed to complement the finding services which ArnoldIT.com publishes. ArnoldIT.com is one of the leading sources of information on subjects ranging from search and content processing to next-generation intelligence systems.
New content is added to the service Monday to Friday. For more information about the service, contact the publisher at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Kenneth Toth, April 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Exclusive Interview: David B. Camarata, IKANOW
April 9, 2012
Kapow Aims at the Salesforce.com Ecosystem
April 9, 2012
Kapow is branching out. The company has posted a write up titled, “Kapow Software Announces Katalyst Apex Generator.” The Apex Generator integrates with the Katalyst platform in order to easily deploy Katalyst-built integrated processes directly into Salesforce. Kapow’s CTO Stefan Adnreasen stated:
“By strengthening our integration with Salesforce, we’re making it possible to rapidly automate business processes and deliver real-time information from external web apps directly into Salesforce or any Force.com app. Katalyst empowers Salesforce users to make decisions and take action based on a complete view of the information they need, rather than wasting time searching for critical information trapped in external systems.”
So if you’re a Salesforce user, you should check this out. Force.com is a cloud-based platform for creating and deploying collaborative enterprise applications. Their software can be modified to run on mobile devices.
Salesforce is not the only software Katalyst users connect with. In fact, Kapow Software addresses the growing need to integrate myriad applications within organizations. Katalyst has relieved pressure on numerous IT departments previously hampered by a lack of published application programming interfaces (APIs). Headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, the company also has offices in New York, Austin, Frankfurt, and Copenhagen.
Cynthia Murrell, April 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Inteltrax: Top Stories, April 2 to April 6
April 9, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, lesser known industries falling in love with analytics.
“Safety Analytics Fits Every Industry” showed us how big data is adding major advances in public and private security.
“Small Biz Gaining in Big Data” told more about what we already know: data analytics helps level the playing field for small businesses.
“Customer Service Propels Many BI Companies” delves into the ways in which supporting users is helping vendors succeed.
Analytics is invading our world, often in the most unexpected places. This is just a small sampling of the deep research we provide every day.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
April 9, 2012
Building Community and Improving Search
April 9, 2012
Christian Buckley at AIIM maintains that improving search is not just about improving the methods and the systems, but about improving the community. He lays out his argument in, “Stop Complaining and Improve Your Search.”
As with any successful online or offline community, the SharePoint community continues to grow and evolve as the collective unconscious of its members grows and evolves. As new ideas and community members join, they add to the dialog and to the content of the community. In some cases, old ideas are purged, but in most cases they simply add to the perspectives and content already out there. This makes finding content and identifying expertise more difficult. The wrong thing is to say ‘we need to reduce the amount of content’ or ‘there are too many opinions here.’ Limit the sample size of your query, and you limit the quality of the results you will find.
A strong community does strengthen enterprise search solutions and options. In fact, we would argue that the third-party solutions surrounding SharePoint have done more to improve SharePoint itself than perhaps any other factor. Many of these add-ons can also stand alone, and all seek to increase the efficiency of the search and improve the user experience.
One that we particularly like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze, with its suite of complimentary and smart search solutions. Mindbreeze has built quite a community around its products as well, with numerous customers trading ideas and success stories. Additionally, Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers support through tutorials, wikis, phone assistance, and one-on-one training sessions. You can use these tools to create your own local Mindbreeze community, increasing the effectiveness of this intuitive solution.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Iowa Government Gets a Digital Dictionary Provided By Access
April 7, 2012
How did we get by without the invention of the quick search to look up information? We used to use dictionaries, encyclopedias, and a place called the library. Access Innovations, Inc. has brought the Iowa Legislature General Assembly into the twenty-first century.
The write-up “Access Innovations, Inc. Creates Taxonomy for Iowa Code, Administrative Code and Acts” tells us the data management industry leader has built a thesaurus that allows the Legislature to search its library of proposed laws, bills, acts, and regulations. Users can also add their unstructured data to the thesaurus. Access used their Data Harmony software to provide subscription-based delivery and they built the thesaurus on MAIstro.
“The project differed from typical index and thesaurus creation because the Iowa Legislative Services Agency needed to maintain its existing codes from each back-of-the-book index, rather than starting from scratch and creating new codes. One reference alone, the Blue Index, included 2,300 index terms. To create the thesaurus, Access looked at different methods to apply to each term according to the existing references, tied preferred terms to the existing codes, and added related terms to the preferred terms. The codes covered previous legislation dating as far back as 1953 to legislation through 2010. Also, the custom taxonomy was built with only four levels in order to meet Iowa Legislative Services’ navigation requirements. Typically, thesauri are not limited by a specified number of levels.”
The new legal thesaurus makes it much easier to find new laws and their changes instead of having to browse through pages of book. Access Innovations hopes their project for the Iowa Legislature General Assembly will encourage other government bodies to turn their libraries over to them for indexing. Not only would that make it easier for politicians and their staff to conduct research, maybe it could improve the political situation in the US. Making part of a job easier tends to make people happy.
Whitney Grace, April 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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