The Urgency of the Cloud for Enterprise
January 10, 2012
It seems that moving IT infrastructure to the cloud is no longer an innovative alternative, but is rather becoming the standard, the norm. IT teams need to embrace the change and shift their thinking away from the football team sized IT staffs of the future. This is not just a general trend, but one that specifically applies to large organizations’ enterprise solutions as well. Rob Lamear focuses on the need to move SharePoint to the cloud in, “Why You NEED SharePoint in the Cloud Now.”
Lamear is referring here to the budget crunch pushing the urgency of the Cloud:
C-levels in every country are no longer telling me that the Cloud is something ‘we are looking at,’ but rather have turned the conversation to ‘We need the Cloud!’ They know they need to slash IT budget dollars and use them in other areas of the business. At best, they use the extra money to innovate and differentiate in the global marketplace. At worst, they need to save to survive.
The question we have to ask is how complicated and costly is the initial move to the cloud. Is there a simpler solution that combines efficient enterprise search with functional, affordable cloud services? We think Fabasoft Mindbreeze might be just that solution.
Read a little more about their cloud services:
The Cloud makes your business mobile; Mindbreeze finds its way in the Cloud. This intelligent search is available as a Cloud service. This means that, if you so desire, Fabasoft Mindbreeze can run without any installation whatsoever – we operate the search engine for you. All the data that you manage in the Cloud is made searchable by Fabasoft Mindbreeze. This makes Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise the center of excellence for your knowledge in the Cloud too.
Implementing Fabasoft Mindbreeze in the cloud alongside your existing SharePoint installation is a switch that improves the efficiency of your search as well as your infrastructure. There’s no configuration and no maintenance. If your organization spent less time and money maintaining your enterprise system, in what other areas could you invest those resources? It is definitely worth consideration, and Fabasoft Mindbreeze is worth a second look.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 10, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Perfection in the Details: Enterprise Search Solutions with SharePoint IVP
January 5, 2012
Today we want to focus on a company that offers a great enterprise search solution, one that can stand alone or work alongside the more common SharePoint infrastructure. Fabasoft Mindbreeze is operated out of Austria. Having won the KM World Trendsetting Product of the Year four years in a row, Fabasoft is now getting positive attention from Gartner and its MarketScope Report.
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise Winter 2012 Release is now available for download.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is built on 3 pillars: Simplicity, speed, efficiency. The Fabasoft Mindbreeze 2012 Winter Release stands under the motto ‘quicker to the point.’ Perfection is the sum of the details.
Check out the short and helpful YouTube tutorial videos embedded in the page. Each demonstrates a new feature added to the Winter 2012 Release. One particularly useful feature, especially for those already invested in a SharePoint installation, is the additional efficiency added to the SharePoint connector feature.
A survey by German market analysts has shown that practically every second company uses SharePoint. However, in SharePoint only one facet of a company’s knowledge can be presented. The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise 2012 Winter Release puts an end to this shortcoming.
The video tutorial for this new SharePoint feature shows how easy it is to retrieve search results from every facet of an organization’s network, not just the SharePoint infrastructure. Results are not only efficiently retrieved, but sorted and classified. Retrieve an email address? Just click on the address for immediate embedded usability, unlike many other enterprise solutions that only retrieve. No more cut and paste.
Updates such as this one are rolled out monthly for the cloud and quarterly for enterprise customers. Updates are seamless and require no additional customization. If your organization is seeking an intuitive enterprise search solution, Fabasoft Mindbreeze is worth your attention.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 5, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
New Book on using SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight
January 2, 2012
While it is now too late for Christmas, a new book out by Bob German and Paul Stubbs gets a positive review from Andrew Connell, the Microsoft Developer with a focus on SharePoint. SharePoint 2010 Development with Silverlight is discussed in Connell’s “Great Resource for SharePoint 2010 & Silverlight.”
Connell’s review:
Are you interested in looking for a good resource on doing SharePoint 2010 or Silverlight development with both tools? This is the book for you. Bob & Paul, the two best people to write this book with their deep experience in both technologies, have done a fantastic job in starting with primers on both technologies and then diving in deep on doing various things you’d want to accomplish with both SharePoint 2010 & Silverlight.
The book includes a discussion on both SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight development as well as guidance for setting up your environment and building custom applications. Connell does provide the forward to the new publication, but his knowledge on the topic points to this being a good resource for interested parties.
However, if you do not have the time to read right now while you’re focused on adding value and efficiency to your business information, rely on experts at Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Their suite of solutions provides intuitive access for the right people with the right information at the right time.
Here you can read about their capabilities:
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise offers unified information access to enterprise and cloud resources. It combines and links the information. Information can be grouped and classified. A user can scan the results using search tabs and categories and find a relevant document without having to click through a list of links. The information’s semantic context is recognized and depicted, and navigation elements for drill down are provided; one click and the preview of any result is available. Fabasoft Mindbreeze provides a 360 degree view of your business, customers, competitors, and more.
Find what works for you with Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, January 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
One Suggestion for a URL Shortening Solution in SharePoint
December 30, 2011
We know that communicating SharePoint links can get pretty painful when you copy and paste a link to a document from a Document Library buried deep in a hierarchal list of sites. URL shortening has eased a lot of this pain across a variety of platforms. Jan Tielens discusses URL shortening and provides a suggested solution in “URL Shortening for SharePoint 2010.” The author describes her solution:
So to make a long SharePoint URL short, you can copy the URL to the clipboard, go to a URL shortener, past the long link over there and copy the short URL you get in return back to the clipboard. Works perfectly, but there are quite some tedious steps to go through. Already a long time ago, when SharePoint 2007 was still the rage, I posted some code that automates all these steps. Finally I found some time to update the code to SharePoint 2010 and nicely package it in a Sandboxed Solution, so it works both for SharePoint 2010 deployed on premises as in the cloud on Office 365.
A handy tip for a pesky problem, no doubt. We’ve seen how short URLs allow for convenient messaging and sharing, like in the case with Twitter or Identi.ca. But URL shortening is a tedious process.
If you prefer to focus your time on tasks of greater importance, check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Over there, they really have text processing components in SharePoint down to an art. You can read more here at, “Information Pairing Makes Websites More Intelligent!” to learn about some of the benefits of their information pairing technology. “It 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.” Their great deal of digital know-how takes convenience to a new level with mobility and maintenance-free capabilities; check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, December 30, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Learn from a Cloud Fail with Office 365
December 29, 2011
The Clever Workarounds blog, run by Paul Culmsee of Seven Sigma Business Solutions, discusses mainly SharePoint issues with specific reference to strategy, governance, and return on investment issues. A recent post, “The Cloud isn’t the Problem – Part 2: When Complex Technology Meets Process,” follows an article asserting the need that for adaptive change with Cloud computing. In the current post, these adaptive changes and challenges are discussed.
The author begins with an Office 365 fail story that all can learn from. Lesson learned? Even a typo can take out a large system. From the typo in the Microsoft Online Services Company Identifier came a chain of events that could have resulted in a production E3 service being mistakenly deleted. While no one person or platform is to blame, it shows a flaw in the system. The author reflects:
Now I hope that I don’t sound bitter and twisted from this experience. In fact, the experience reinforced what most in IT strategy already know. It’s not about the technology. I still like what Office 365 offers and I will continue to use and recommend it under the right circumstances. This experience was simply a sobering reality check though that all of the cool features amounts to naught when it can be undone by dodgy underlying supporting structures. I hope that Microsoft and Telstra read this and learn from it too. From a customer perspective, having to work through Telstra as a proxy for Microsoft feels like additional layers of defense on behalf of Microsoft. Is all of this duplication really necessary?
For a stable and reliable system that still provides the benefits of complex technology, consider a third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Their Web Parts based information pairing capabilities leave you with powerful searches and a complete picture of your business information. Here Daniel Fallman discusses the technology, “To put it concrete terms, the current Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite release enable a maintenance-free, always up-to-date conflation of information from different areas. Always relevant. Always interesting. Always to the point. For both you and your website’s users.” Consider Fabasoft Mindbreeze’s full suite of products to find a solution for your system.
Philip West, December 29, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
In-Depth Look at Continuous Integration Benefits in SharePoint 2010
December 28, 2011
We recently wrote about Andrew Connell’s list of suggested resources for your ALM and CI questions. In his post, the first suggestion for a ‘why’ introduction to the topic was Chris O’Brien’s “SharePoint 2010 Continuous Integration – Part 1: Benefits.” O’Brien points out a SharePoint environment adds some additional challenges and involvement to CI implementation contrary to what ease you may find in the .Net world. However, he identifies many benefits and argues that the positive feedback from users is evidence it is worth it. First, he points out where to start with CI:
Let’s be clear though – Continuous Integration (CI) is probably best suited to projects with the following characteristics: Development-oriented – perhaps with more than, say, 3 Visual Studio projects; Multiple developers; Fairly long-running (e.g. > 2-3 months; to give the team a chance to implement CI alongside the actual deliverables)
Some benefits include consistent builds, automated testing, and increased team cohesion through build notifications. The rest of the fairly lengthy article gives a great overview of CI benefits and what an implementation actually looks like. Links are also provided to the subsequent posts in the series which follow up with topics including TFS 2010 Build Processes and Using PowerShell to deploy WSPs from build output.
With ample staffing and ability investments into implementing the CI techniques, you can really make a big difference on SharePoint development projects. However, to add efficiency to your organization without the need for such training and research, consider Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Their out-of-the-box solution gives you mobility and information pairing:
Information pairing unites enterprise information and Cloud information. This results in a complete overview of a company’s knowledge – the basis for your competitive advantage – allowing you to act quickly, reliably, dynamically and profitably in all business matters.
Consider their full suite of products and solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, December 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint 2010 Not Ready for Enterprise
December 19, 2011
SharePoint is broad, powerful and widely adopted, but its drawbacks are also commonly publicized. Not known for its ability to innovate rapidly, Microsoft suffers from a lack of agility, especially in fledging applications. Bjorn Furuknap tackles the drawbacks of SharePoint 2010 in, “SharePoint Server 2010 Isn’t Really Ready for Enterprise Applications–And What Microsoft Should Do About It.”
With SharePoint 2010, there’s a new ballgame, but sadly, it’s riddled with bugs that prevent it from being a great platform for building enterprise or even professional applications . . . It may just be that I’m working with more ‘enterprise’ projects now than earlier, but it seems to me that the issues I see with SharePoint 2010 are more serious and obvious than in 2007.
Some of the specific examples Furuknap lists include Office document formatting and the immaturity of social features. He blames SharePoint’s shortcoming on their (unsuccessful) shift to innovation at the expense of a stable and basic platform. Perhaps he is right. But who do you turn to in order to keep up with fast pacing technology? We think third party solutions are the answer, and one we really like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. The industry must be thinking the same thing, as Fabasoft recently received the KM World Trendsetting 2011 Product of the Year.
’Our focus on agility, quality, usability and style in the monthly shipments of our latest product innovations enables us to integrate and implement client requests into our product development rapidly and sustainably. In addition to our on-premise offering, everyone can now try out our product in the Cloud, immediately. This is a possibility much appreciated by our clients and partners alike,’ says Daniel Fallmann, founder and managing director of Mindbreeze Software GmbH.
Furuknap has a point. Microsoft needs to get back to the main thing, creating a stable and effective enterprise base. However, ease and functionality can be achieved despite the challenges if a smart third party solution is adopted.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Startups Challenge SharePoint
December 15, 2011
Enterprise 2.0 is a term being thrown around the blogosphere to indicate incorporation of social media functionality into workplace software. The leader in enterprise, Microsoft SharePoint, is quite clearly incapable of keeping up in any discussion of enterprise 2.0. Andy McLoughlin, co-leader of the enterprise 2.0 startup, Huddle, offers his insight in, “This 32-Year-Old Entrepreneur is Bent on Beating One of Microsoft’s Largest Businesses.”
McLoughin says,
There’s a huge amount of room to improve upon SharePoint as a content collaboration tool the enterprise. It’s sold as free software, yet any CIO who has tried (and failed) to implement it knows that it’s far too easy to spend many months and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting it ready for deployment. Users generally hate it and most licenses will never be deployed.
We agree. SharePoint at its best is simply a basic platform, or foundation, and functionality is only achieved through potentially costly add-ons for deployment. However, good third party solutions are out there. One is Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise user interface is based on Web 2.0 technology and combines simplicity with elegance. The operation is self-explanatory. Work just as you are used to. Access your data from anywhere. Also on smartphones and tablets. Elegant design, easy operation. With you wherever you are. Find and access your enterprise and cloud information straight away.
To set itself apart from the newer enterprise startups, Fabasoft has been an up-and-comer in the industry for ten years, having received the KM World Trendsetting Product of the Year four years running. With a track record of anticipation and innovation, Fabasoft Mindbreeze will continue to offer solutions that make sense in a changing technological culture. To fix today’s problems, and work toward tomorrow’s solutions, look at a smart installation like Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Thanks Be For A Guide to SharePoint Server 2010 Search
November 24, 2011
To understand SharePoint’s FAST Search Server, it’s smart to work your way up by first understanding SharePoint Server 2010 Search. “Configuring Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010” is a useful guide that covers search features and has lots of screen shots. A handy flow chart visualizes the following:
“SharePoint 2010 search architecture is made up of the Crawler, Indexing Engine, Query Engine and the User Interface and Query Object Model. We now have greater flexibility and expandability with our search design in 2010 and can setup not only multiple Query Servers but can now scale out our Index server and add multiple instances.”
Savvy businesses know the benefits of collaborative content management with integrated search – add access to the constantly growing information in the Cloud, and company knowledge gets a big boost. For those needing a deeper solution that has the ability to answer enterprise search needs in the cloud, you may want to explore Mindbreeze.
Their information pairing technology results in a complete overview of a company’s knowledge, merging enterprise information with Cloud information.
Sara Wood, November 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Mindbreeze Picks Up Where SharePoint Leaves Off
November 17, 2011
SharePoint 2010 is a widely implemented application, but not one that solves every solution. The issue is explored further in, “SharePoint 2010 collaboration ISVs focus on workflow, analytics.” The author, Jonathan Gourlay, reports that users are increasingly relying on a number of independent software vendors to plug the holes in the service that SharePoint provides.
Mark Gilbert, lead analyst for Gartner Research had this to say:
“’Just because SharePoint is a lot of stuff, it doesn’t mean it’s all good stuff, but a lot of it is,’ said Gilbert, who estimates he’s spoken to 3,000 companies about SharePoint. He compares the platform to a Swiss Army Knife that allows the user to add tools. ‘To make [SharePoint] a real enterprise-class tool, you typically have to pay a lot of attention to the care and feeding of it and you have to add a lot of third-party tools.’”
Here’s the main question: if SharePoint is being advertised as enterprise-class, why do so many users need ISVs to bring it up to that level? The article goes on to argue that the opportunity for vendors to build upon the SharePoint platform is huge.
We argue that one smart and agile solution could single-handedly solve an organization’s enterprise and SharePoint woes. Fabasoft Mindbreeze is getting good feedback regarding its suite of solutions.
“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.”
So while experts in the field are saying that system administrators have to hunt and search for several ISVs to supplement their SharePoint implementation, Mindbreeze might save a lot of time and energy with its single easy-to-use solution. It’s definitely worth a second look.
*Disclaimer – Mindbreeze is currently upgrading their website. Links will be checked and if problems arise they will be updated. Thanks for your patience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 17, 2011
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