Social Media and an Enterprise Strategy
December 9, 2011
Social media is an essential ingredient to the success of any organization hoping to excel in today’s market. However, if not approached intentionally and with a plan, social media efforts can seem daunting and unorganized. Not as linear as traditional IT needs, social media has to be tackled with a different strategy. Jonathan Gourlay gives his insight in, “Effective social media strategy: A must for success in a social world.”
Enterprises large and small are embracing social media as a way for employees, partners and customers to collaborate and communicate, but many are doing so without being fully prepared. It’s an issue that many are finding costly in a number of ways.”
Social media must also be tied in to an organization’s overall enterprise strategy. While the two don’t initially seem to play well together, if combined with a smart enterprise solution, both efforts can be done with more ease.
Gourlay continues:
“The fourth level is described as the stage of enablement. ‘You must get here to scale,’ Owyang said. Enterprises continually measure their use of social media at this stage and are empowering workers rather than constraining them. The more advanced organizations at this level implement their social strategy across corporate functions, ignoring business unit silos.”
Take a solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze and its Folio Cloud. ‘Fabasoft Folio Cloud enables quick, secure and mobile collaboration both internally and between international companies,’ explained Michael Hadrian. ‘Business processes with customers and partners cannot be realized any quicker or more cost effectively.’
Combining internal and external communications is key to social media, ensuring that dreaded social media crises don’t occur. Such a solution allows an overall view of social media communications, inviting participation from a variety of employees, but ensuring all efforts are moving in the same direction. When tackling an overall social media initiative, planning is key, and solutions such as those offered by Fabasoft Mindbreeze can help.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 9, 2011
Sponsored by: Pandia.com
SlideShark Seamlessly Brings PowerPoint to the iPad
November 27, 2011
If you have struggled with moving content to the iPad, you may want to check out SlideShark. Although PowerPoint continues to lose ground to PDFs of presentation, PowerPoints are used by some search wizards. (If you want to search Google for PowerPoints, you may have noticed that there are fewer fresh files than in years past. To locate presentations, you may want to check out SlideShare or similar services.)
BrainShark, a creator of cloud based software for video presentations, has recently released a new iPad app called SlideShark.
A recent KillerStartups post “SlideShark.com – View Presentations on Your iPad” asserted:
SlideShark is an application that lets you watch PowerPoint presentations on your iPad. This app (which you can download for free) lets you do that by uploading the presentations you want to view to your BrainShark account, or to a SlideShark account. That is, you can log in using your already-existing Brainshark username and password, or sign up for a SlideShark account of its own. It’s all the same in the end, as you upload your presentations online for them to be converted into something your iPad can render more than smoothly.
Since many people use their iPad for both business and pleasure, and many businesses use PowerPoint, it seems only natural that a company would come up with an app to make the transition seamless.
The more mobile we get, we’re often times having to give up some of the activities that we have become accustomed to. SlideShark is solving at least one problem in a way that accessible and fun.
Jasmine Ashton, November 27, 2011
Backup Alternative for IDOL Content Engine
November 17, 2011
WorkSite Zen offers a useful Autonomy tip with “Schedule IDOL Backups with Task Scheduler and PowerShell.” Poster JB Trexler feels the default IDOL content engine backup method can be inconvenient:
The ‘out of the box’ backup method requires you to set a section in each config file with various parameters. This method works well but it does present some challenges around planned interruptions and reporting. What if you want to skip the backups this weekend because of a maintenance window? What if you want a log file of just the backups or an email notification upon completion / failure? In addition to the backups, you also need to copy .cfg and .db files.
Trexler goes on to describe his method for using Windows Task Scheduler and Windows PowerShell to schedule your backups, complete with scripts and screenshots. Doing so can provide more flexibility; you gain the ability to temporarily disable backups, for example, or to send a completion/failure email, or to log to the Windows Event Log. Need more meat? See the source document for more detail.
Cynthia Murrell, November 17, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Softpedia Presents Another All-Encompassing Freeware Clipboard
November 13, 2011
Softpedia now features the Spartan Lite Multi-Clipboard as a free software download. Based on the website’s description, it appears to have some handy features. It reminds me of Evernote minus the graphics editors.
This software sells itself as being more than a clipboard application–it claims to be a complete information center for your computer. Looking at the list it can help you remember a cornucopia of different things: addresses, phone numbers, to-do lists, graphics, recipes, etc. When it boils down to it, basically the program will allow you to see if you’ve typed the same thing before, browse photos and paste them into an email, and other typical clipboard apps functions.
The site description also mentions this version’s shortcomings. It says:
“The Lite version has no time limit and no nags. The only difference between it and the full version is that it can only store 500 permanent clips whereas the full version can store 10,000.”
The purpose of this freeware in theory sounds great, but in reality it is another one of the jack of all trades but master of none applications.
Megan Feil, November 13, 2011
ISYS Has 16,000 Customers. Did I Goof?
November 11, 2011
I covered six vendors of enterprise search systems in my June 2011 The New Landscape of Enterprise Search. An azure chip consulting firm borrowed a key word from my monograph’s title and put out a report covering twice as many vendors.
Today I read “16,000 Organizations Worldwide Now Boost Their Productivity with the ISYS 1-Click FileFinder.” In a write up about AtomicPR’s spam attack on me and the MarkLogic “reinvention of itself as more than a file markup and repository outfit,” I mentioned ISYS Search Software was licensing its connectors, essentially software widgets that allow one system to ingest the files from an incompatible system. So ISYS, ISYS, ISYS.
Years ago I met the founder of ISYS Search Software in Crow’s Nest in a suburb Sydney, Australia. I recall a very interesting lunch in a restaurant that was almost next to the ISYS headquarters. Very interesting those Australian engineers. At the time, I was doing something for some outfit sponsoring the international chief of police conference or some similar intelligence-type event. I was one of the speakers and a guest of the Australian government. In my spare time, I was either watching folks shoot red kangaroos or visiting search and information retrieval experts. After the visit, I did some work for Ian Davies, the founder. His role has changed, and I have lost track of him, his senior sales professional, and the senior engineer whom I met that day. Distance and time I suppose.
I have drifted away from ISYS because I learned that the company–despite a new president, new lines of business like licensing connectors, and introducing file finding utilities—was not hitting my radar with the sort of information I am now tracking. No problem, of course. Quite a few search vendors have changed their spots or at least their marketing pitch faster than a rap star who signs a movie deal. Examples range from Coveo becoming a customer support solution provider to Vivisimo’s puzzling “information optimization.” Other vendors have gone quiet like Dieselpoint, an XML centric search system vendor. Others have found themselves on the receiving end of a dump truck filled with cash. Think InQuira, Autonomy, Endeca, and RightNow to name four vendors who are now happily within giant corporate shells thinking about which island to buy.
My understanding is that ISYS generates about one third of its revenue from the US and the balance from elsewhere. Although the UK is a good market for ISYS, the company’s stronghold is Australia. This raises what I call “the Canadian question.” Ah, you ask, “What’s Canada got to do with Australia and ISYS?”
Here’s my point. When determining how much revenue one of my ventures can generate in Canada, I take the US revenue and then figure that Canada will product 10 percent of that amount. The reason has to do with population, appetite for the sort of products my team produces, and experience. The 10 percent can be five percent, or it could be 15 percent. However, 10 percent is a good rule of thumb.
Therefore, if a company in Australia generates $10 million a year in that country of 23 million people, then it follows that the US with its population of 308 million should produce revenue of about 12 to 13 times the Australian revenue. If we assume that ISYS is generating $10 million from the land down under, I would expect $120 million from the land up above.
I may be off base, but in our research for The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, I did not find data to support that ISYS was generating revenue in this range. Therefore, I decided to exclude the company from my monograph.
The azure chip consulting firm replete with home economics majors, a handful of former journalists, and a couple of failed webmasters sees the world differently. I think the reason is that the azure chip outfit uses its reports as sales collateral. I don’t have any first hand experience with the “real” consultants in enterprise search, but after reading some of these reports, I formed my own opinion. Yours may differ.
To answer the question, “Did I goof by not including ISYS along side Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, Google, Microsoft, and Vivisimo?,” The answer is, “I don’t think so.”
Hoping a vendor is competing with the likes of Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, etc. is one thing. Actually beating these firms in major accounts is a different one. Just my opinion, and I look forward to the push back from the “experts” who know more than I, aggrieved company executives who want me to revisit my conclusions about which companies are altering the landscape of search, and the “real” consultants who will swarm over my view point.
Have at it kids. Sales revenues matter. When someone plops down $1.2 billion as Microsoft did for the Fast Search & Technology system or the interesting $10 billion for Autonomy, I will make another pass over the “big six.” Until then, I need to hear first hand about how non US firms cope with my Canadian rule of thumb. I quite like the ISYS technology. But for Landscape, revenues play more of a role than technology.
Stephen E Arnold, November 11, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Will a Silver Bullet Save Sci-Tech Publishers?
November 11, 2011
I poked around my Overflight service and noticed a recent news release with the meaty title “Scientific Publisher Saving Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars with MarkLogic.” The subtitle was compelling as well: “New Mobile Applications Let Researchers Study in the Field.”
I thought a moment about the logic of the two statements. I am okay with the idea that a scientific publisher faces some significant challenges. The traditional markets for scientific and technical information in traditional journal form are under severe budget pressure. In response to some scientific publishers’ pricing policies, libraries and some not for profit outfits no longer renew certain journal subscriptions. Others have joined consortia in order to get better value for available budgets.
But STM (scientific, technical, and medical) publications have other issues with which to cope as well. First, technology may not be a core competency. Why would it be? Publishers get authors to write. Publishers package and sell. Technology is talked about but even giants like Thomson Reuters buy print publishing companies in Argentina. So much for embracing the digital revolution. Even more interesting is that some STM publishers often ask authors pay the journal typesetting, correction, and maybe some production costs. As headcount comes under pressure in research institutes and universities, some scientific publishers are finding that authors are either not willing to pay or not able to get a third party to pony up the money. In short, STM in the traditional mode is fighting for oxygen.
The mobile angle baffled me as well.
In my experience, many scientists work in what might be called “controlled environments.” In the pharmaceutical sector, certain firms operate the research facilities the way a South African gold mine superintendents monitor workers at the end of a shift. If this type of security does not resonate with you, you need to do some backfilling on gold and diamond mining security protocols. Think naked. Think weighing workers before and after a shift. Think requiring showers and filtering the gray water. You get the idea. Other types of research does require mobile devices; for example, cleaning up a gone-wrong nuclear reactor which is not a job for an outfit like AtomicPR, in my experience. Public relations “experts” write about radiation and often have limited experience with micro-contamination and chemical decontamination. The point? Mobile often has specific requirements which stretch beyond creating an “app for that.”
In a nutshell, here’s the nub of the news release from my point of view:
Taking research into the field has a new, literal meaning with the launch of new mobile applications built on MarkLogic that are helping scientists better understand soil and crops. MarkLogic Corporation, the company empowering organizations to make high stakes decisions on Big Data in real time, today announced the American Society of Agronomy (ASA) launched Science Pubs, developed for iPad, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry devices. Science Pubs utilizes MarkLogic to give subscribers and non-subscribers the freedom to dig deep into ASA’s journals, magazines, and eBooks while conducting first-hand research and observations in the field.
The point is that a markup language makes it possible to do an app. Puzzled I plunged forward:
“MarkLogic will save us at least $150,000 per year. That is a lot of money for any publisher, especially a non-profit like the American Society of Agronomy,” said Ian Popkewitz, director, Information Technology & Operations, American Society of Agronomy. “We originally implemented MarkLogic to cut the cost of providing critical publications to our subscribers, but we quickly realized several intangible benefits such as speed, ease of use, and flexibility. The flexibility allowed us to focus on the deployment of Science Pubs. ASA is very pleased to be able to quickly launch these services for subscribers and non-subscribers, and we expect them to generate revenue.”
I understand. However, I want to offer several observations based on my modest experience in publishing. Note I did work for a newspaper that was once one of the Top 25 in the world, but the paper is a starved dog now. I also worked for Bill Ziff, mastermind of multiple empires and the magnate other New York publishers loved to loathe, which is what I learned when I was escorted from the New York Times’s president’s office when he learned I worked for the interesting Mr. Ziff.
First, publishers absolutely have to reduce their costs and in a big way. Saving $150,00 is great, but my question is, “How much does it cost to implement a cost saving system such as a MarkLogic or JSON solution (the fat free alternative to chubby XML), keep it up, and then running at a scientific publisher such as the American Society of Agronomy?” If a system costs $50,000, 100,000, or even $300,000, the publisher has to pay off the system, its maintenance fee, and whip out some products that sell. With revenues at many scientific publishers flat lining or shriveling, the savings are important and may light a fire under the agronomists to cope with a big expense in the name of cost savings. That type of race can be brutal. And it is one that I would be reluctant to enter.
Second, many not for profit organizations and “charities” in the UK are facing declining memberships. Unthinkable five years ago, professional organizations have to market to their members and then spend money to collect on slow paying professionals. Even the certification angle in the UK is not working as it once did. Unemployment among professionals is making it difficult for some experts to pay to be in a must-have organization. Faced with rising costs across the board and decreasing or flat revenue, some not for profit outfits are looking at a nuclear winter, not AtomicPR with a very short half life.
Third, the notion that scientific research has to be peer reviewed in a lengthy, antiquated manner. Also, the long publication cycles for some STM journals are out of step with the real time culture in fast moving fields. Not surprisingly, the no-cost or low-cost alternatives to traditional journal publishing refuse to go away. In some fields like mathematics and physics, blogs and even social media have become the important channels for dissemination of technical information and making or breaking careers. Even grants can be determined by a Facebook-type of presence. Quite a shift.
My take on this “news story” is that it makes a possibly compelling case that an XML repository can help reduce certain costs. But without the context of total cost burdens, I have a question, “Why not use JSON?” XML is darned useful, but so is JSON. My concern is that for many scientific, technical, and medical publishers, is JSON a viable option?
The ArnoldIT team is finishing a report about the outlook for a major publishing company. With more than $5 billion in revenues, this well known firm may be forced to sell its STM business to generate cash. Not even cost cutting can prevent the dislocations that some publishing companies face. The digital revolution has arrived and is now moving in new directions. Many traditional publishers face stark choices and very difficult financial challenges. Alas, no silver bullets today in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, November 11, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Activating Keyword Search in SharePoint 2010
November 7, 2011
Protected: SharePoint 2010 Assemblies
November 4, 2011
Records Management and Humor: An Odd Couple
October 27, 2011
Records management is a dry topic, not exactly humorless but close. We must admit that one of the goslings chuckles when he hears the phrase “destroy by date.” I just go up in ARMA.
We learned that there was some levity with regard to records management at the recent Legal Information Technology Conference, part of the wider ARMA conference in D.C., it was suddenly newsworthy comedy.
Law Technology News’ article, “Records Management as Stand-Up Comedy” shares a few quips from the conference:
Bryn Bowen, director of records information management at Greenberg Traurig, on establishing information governance in large firms: ‘We are sort of changing the tires while moving the truck.
Stacie Capshaw, associate director of records management at Kirkland & Ellis, said she was able to accomplish records management because her firm is ‘a loose federation of entrepreneurs.’
Rudy Moliere, director of information governance and records management at White & Case, observed that records management is ‘not at all like herding cats — you can see cats.’”
Kudos to those in records management for attempting a form of humor—those legal record managers can be a tough crowd. Did you hear the one about leaving lunch in a banker’s box three years ago?
Andrea Hayden, October 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Bing Offers Airport Map Services: Search Engines Compete Over New Niche
October 9, 2011
For those who travel in today’s lousy economic climate, no need to look beyond your friendly neighborhood search engine; Bing comes to your rescue. Microsoft’s search service Bing has announced the launch of airport maps for 42 major airports across the U.S. with plans for expansion and additions.
We learn more about the feature, which allows users to “see” inside airports to located terminals, baggage claim areas, restrooms and more, in Tech Crunch’s article, “Bing Launches Airport Maps For 42 US Cities.”
The addition comes shortly after Google’s release of its new Google Flight Search feature, made possible through its acquisition of flight data company ITA – a move that Microsoft and others had fought. Flight and travel-related search had been one of Bing’s advantages, thanks to earlier integrations from travel price finder Farecast, acquired back in 2008.
Google already offers a form of airport maps as well as Street View shots inside businesses, but isn’t this a map niche? I find the competition over airports between the two search engines rather odd and surprising. It seems the new norm is to attempt to tackle every possible online niche and abandon the seemingly simple “seek and find” method of search. Search is broken.
Andrea Hayden, October 09, 2011
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