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
Accessing Unstructured Data across Various Platforms of Digitally Published Content
March 23, 2012
One of the key components to successful collaboration is the accessibility of the digitally published content in the information environment, whether it is a wiki, portal, document, blog, etc. In “Communities vs. Portals, Blogs, Wikis, Documents, and More,” the author weighs-in on the issue as it relates to providing relevant and dynamic information to users in an effective way.
The author had this to say:
Communities encourage participation by definition as much as they allow for consumption. And activity streams provide an easy and efficient way to aggregate, consume, share, and engage. With that said, some people like to see a bunch of boxes on a web page in a dashboard / newspaper type view. Fair enough…Of course the value of that information in the portal becomes much less because people can only consume in a traditional portal vs. taking some type of action to collaborate on or share the information & knowledge you have just gained.
The author argues for providing all users, even the ones that don’t yet embrace social business and stick to static publishing, with the ability to subscribe and share. If you have vast amounts of unstructured data in your organization, look to increase the value of your information assets with a third party solution, like Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
No matter where your information is held, on-premise or in the Cloud, Mindbreeze search allows users to easily find and access business knowledge. Here you can read about the user-friendly interface that your tech-laggard users will appreciate.
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.
So while experts in the field continue to discuss ways to increase user adoption through dynamic portals, Fabasoft Mindbreeze is a comprehensive search solution with an intuitive interface out-of-the-box that you can deploy now.
Philip West, March 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
PR Push for Azaleos and Fast Search
March 14, 2012
My email overflowed this morning with descriptions of Azaleos, its expertise in Microsofty stuff, and Fast Search. I am on the ball with regard to Fast Search, its legal back story, and the issues associated with getting the system to deliver useful results to users on time and on budget. You will find the Azaleos blog quite interesting. I noted no recent postings about Fast Search. For some current information about the search system, you may want to check out this Beyond Search write up. I ran a query using the Azaleos search system and got three hits about Fast Search. The coverage of search suggests that Azaleos may be succumbing to a communications expert’s inputs about how to sell search services.
What was new was the statement in MSPmentor’s “Azaleos Cloud Gets Microsoft Fast Search Server 2010”. How does a Microsoft partner “get” Fast Search? I don’t know. Maybe pay a fee? Here’s the passage I noted:
…the company’s Managed Enterprise Search solution addresses a different need. It gives enterprises the ability to remotely design, configure, monitor and manage FAST Search Server 2010. According to Azaleos, the development is big news for its customers because the Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 can perform searches in “an interactive and visual format,” in addition to the basic search functions that the Microsoft SharePoint Server provides. The FAST Search Server is a high-visibility solution, which brings its own set of complex issues to the table for enterprise IT departments. But Azaleos claims its Managed Enterprise Search solution eliminates the challenges associated with high visibility applications and can keep the FAST Search Server available and running at top speed.
My thoughts after reading this included:
- There is an implicit assumption that Microsoft’s cloud search will be Fast centric. My own view of this is that the assumption may be out of kilter. The reasons include performance, extensibility, and customization. Fast Search can be turned into a capable performer, but the “cloud” angle implies a certain standardization of features. So of Fast Search’s vast capabilities what will the core service do? Keywords, clustering, linguistic analysis, entity extraction, sentiment analysis, relationship mapping, etc. My point is that customers may want all of these functions and that suggests the Fast Search from Azaleos may be very different from the Fast Search marketing collateral’s assertions.
- Can Azaleos maintain an “interactive and visual format” when the content throughput increases. The challenge of keeping indexes fresh equates to resources. Resources, in my experience, cost money. The fix may be to gate how much data are processed in order to keep the fees acceptable to customers. Price spikes are not encouraging to some licensees in my experience.
- The assertion of “available and running at top speed” is an interesting one. My thought was, “Relative to what?” Are we comparing a small corpus with weekly index refreshes or are we talking about 100 million documents refreshed in near real time? I am not sure Fast in an on premises installation with original Fast engineers babysitting the hugely complex system with often unexpected dependencies can be a challenge to keep perking along at optimum performance levels.
I want to watch how this business unfolds. After all, a PR blitz which puts several stories in front of me signals some real enthusiasm on the part of the Azaleos stakeholders.
Stephen E Arnold, March 14, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Social Business: Collaboration Trends for 2012
February 27, 2012
Leigh Jasper’s blog series, Collaboration for Grown-ups, reflects a focus on the benefits of enterprise collaboration across supply chains. Jasper, of the ComputerWorld.com Blog, looks at collaboration challenges with big data and the social and mobile forces arriving to the enterprise search world in the first post, “Collaboration Trends for 2012: Part One.”
And as big data becomes a key basis of competition, it will also necessarily become the foundation for new forms of collaboration. In 2012, I believe that more companies will recognize that along with having to deal with storing and analyzing big data, they will need to adopt collaboration platforms capable of capturing, sharing and analyzing it.
With growing data, it is no wonder SharePoint adoption is growing, as well. Of course, 2012 trends could not be discussed without mentioning social and mobile media in the enterprise. With consumer demand for social networking and personal mobile devices driving trends, enterprises are looking to search and analyze this data, such as the conversation between brands and their customers. But the supply chain is also feeling the impact. Jasper suggests that 2012 will see collaboration in the supply chain go beyond email and file sharing and businesses will look to solutions for capturing the many-to-many flow of content.
Business-to-business collaboration development is inevitable as business gets social. To tap into the new possibilities, consider a third party solution to complete your enterprise search system. We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Managing director Michael Hadrian explains the Mindbreeze solution,
Fabasoft Folio Cloud enables quick, secure and mobile collaboration both internally and between international companies. Business processes with customers and partners cannot be realized any quicker or more cost effectively…This enables worldwide connected collaboration and secure data exchange in protected team rooms.
For a complete search solution with the power of information pairing, check out the full suite of solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, February 27, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Lucid Imagination: A Look Ahead
February 24, 2012
Enterprise search can be over simplified in many people’s mind because it is so intuitive. However, while understanding the concept may be relatively simple, orchestrating it proves to be more difficult.
IT World’s Brian Proflitt recently reported on Lucid Imagination’s new enterprise search product in the article, “Enterprise Search is a Valuable, and Growing Component of Big Data.”
According to the article, enterprise search allows users to treat data as they would fields within a relational database. It is excellent for examining large sets of structured or unstructured information. Documents that are structured uniformly like weblogs do particularly well with this technology.
Many enterprise search software providers, including Lucid Imagination, use Apache Lucene and Apache Solr products.
The article states:
“Lucid is to Lucene and Solr what companies like Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical are to Linux. Like a Linux distribution, Lucid Imagination’s LucidWorks Enterprise product pulls together the best features of Apache Lucene/Solr, adding a few more features along the way, such as search connectors to SharePoint, Web, and Active Directory data. This is not an open core company: like Red Hat, versions of LucidWorks are provided free of charge, with a support subscription required for production use.”
Lucid Imagination’s new product promises the functionality of enterprise search but is delivered from the cloud. We’re looking forward to seeing how this develops. The generator is humming at Lucid Imagination we believe.
Jasmine Ashton, February 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Exogenous Complexity 2: The Search Appliance
February 15, 2012
I noted a story about Fujitsu and its search appliance. What was interesting is that the product is being rolled out in Germany, a country where search and retrieval are often provided by European vendors. In fact, when I hear about Germany, I think about Exorbyte (structured data), Ontoprise (ontologies), SAP (for what it is worth, TREX and Inxight), and Lucene/Solr. I also know that Fabasoft Mindbreeze has some traction in Germany as does Microsoft with its Fast Search & Technology solution. Fast operated a translation and technical center in Germany for a while. Reaching farther into Europe, there are solutions in Norway, France, Italy, and Spain. Each of these countries’ enterprise search and retrieval vendors have customers in Germany. Even Oracle with its mixed search history with Germany’s major newspaper has customers. IBM is on the job as well, although I don’t know if Watson has made the nine hour flight from JFK to Frankfort yet. Google’s GSA or Google Search Appliance has made the trip, and, from what I understand, the results have been okay. Google itself commands more than 90 percent of the Web search traffic.
The key point. The search appliance is supposed to be simple. No complexity. An appliance. A search toaster which my dear, departed mother could operate.
The work is from Steinman Studios. A happy quack to http://steinmanstudios.com/german.html for the image which I finally tracked down.
In short, if your company operates in Germany, you have quite a few choices for a search and retrieval solution. The question becomes, “Why Fujitsu?” My response, “I don’t have a clue.”
Here’s the story which triggered my thoughts about exogenous complexity: “New Fujitsu Powered Enterprise Search Appliance Launched in Europe Through Stordis.” The news releases can disappear, so you may have to hunt around for this article and my link is dead.
Built on Fujitsu high performance hardware, the new appliance combines industry leading search software from Perfect Search Corporation with the Fujitsu NuVola Private Cloud Platform, to deliver security and ultimate scalability. Perfect Search’s patented software enables user to search up to a billion documents using a single appliance. The appliance uses unique disk based indexing rather than memory, requiring a fraction of the hardware and reducing overall solution costs, even when compared to open source alternatives solutions…Originally developed by Fujitsu Frontech North America, the PerfectSearch appliance is now being exclusively marketed throughout Europe by high performance technology distributor Stordis. PerfectSearch is the first of a series of new enterprise appliances based on the Fujitsu NuVola Private Cloud Platform that Stordis will be bringing to the European market during 2012.
No problem with the use of a US technology in a Japanese product sold in the German market via an intermediary with which I was not familiar. The Japanese are savvy managers, so this is a great idea.
What’s this play have to do with exogenous complexity?
Checklist: Before you Escalate a Ticket to Microsoft Support
February 6, 2012
Joel Oleson of SharePoint Joel blog recently published a list of “7 Things You Should Do Before You Escalate to Microsoft Support” when troubleshooting a system issue. Oleson’s in-depth list goes beyond the obvious troubleshooting that Tier 2, Tier 3, and Engineering should do and includes checklist items such as reading up on your service pack and cumulative update level, rebooting, working with the entire team to isolate the issue, and reviewing code. First on the list:
You know one of the first things Microsoft support will want to know is what version and patch level you are at. If you’re way back, they are going to ask you to upgrade. At a minimum you should be on the latest service pack to address the majority of bugs they will point to. Now understanding that there are different tolerances to patching, this will be something you will need to decide. My recommendation is you don’t install a CU unless you need it. Well, when you’re dealing with what you think is a bug, there’s a chance it’s fixed a CU rollup or more recent CU.
Oleson also suggests reaching out to social solution forums, such as Twitter or the Microsoft Newsgroups.
Steps to help prevent long man hours on the phone with tech support while your system is not functioning properly are, of course, welcome. But this checklist sure sounds like a lot of trouble. Depending on your organization, you may not want to devote the time and effort for extensive troubleshooting prior to calling tech-support. We think it would be easier to go with a simple third-party solution like Mindbreeze, cutting down on the costly man hours.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise provides consistent and comprehensive information access to both corporate and Cloud sources. The seamless Cloud solution makes sure you find the right information you need at any time. Check out the full suite of solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, February 6, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Spam Attack from Info360 and Real Story
January 30, 2012
I am fascinated with the machinations of conference organizers adapting to the iPad era.
I was invited to Info360? The name did not resonate, so I browsed the spam message, a portion of which is included in this blog post.
So what’s an Info360? On the surface, it seems to be mostly about an azure chip (maybe a very pale azure?) consulting firm and a gaggle of jargon. Here’s an example of what’s on tap in June, which the spam assures me is amazing:
- Big data and analytics
- Cloud infrastructure.
- Content management basics, records management, and Web content management (presumably different from “basic” content management and not a subset of content management)
- Data capture
- Enterprise collaboration
- Mobile business
- SharePoint
- Social business
In short, this is an umbrella conferences covering a multitude of topics. The Info360 program is, I believe, the Association of Image and Information Management’s event.
These “one size fit all” conferences contrast with more focused start up showcase events or focused technical events such as the Lucid Imagination Lucene Revolution program.
More and more umbrella conferences are “pay to play” talks. Programs are often little more than product and marketing pitches.
What should a person do who is seeking information about a specific topic in the laundry list in the spam message sent to me? My suggestion is to look for a specialty conference close to home.
Email marketing, at least for me, spam is a turn off. When the spam uses words like “amazing” and “real”, I tune out. I may be taking steps toward a certain blindness by ignoring spam about conferences, so your mileage may differ. Search is not on the program. That’s probably a plus because search is certainly no buzzword like “big data” or “mobile business”, whatever that means.
Stephen E Arnold, January 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Synaptica Independent Taxonomy Resource
January 27, 2012
Synaptica started out as Synapse Corporation under founders Trish Yancey and Dave Clarke. The company offered taxonomies, software solutions, and professional lexicography and indexing services for businesses and organizations based on its Synaptica product, a knowledge management and indexing software application, which enables enterprises in managing taxonomies, thesauri, classification schemes, authority control files, and indexes. In 2005, the company, renamed Synaptica, was acquired by Dow Jones and placed in its Factiva unit. Clarke has subsequently regained control of Synaptica.
The company has also has revamped its informational website, Taxonomy Warehouse – a free online resource that has answers enquiries about taxonomies. Named as one of KM World magazine’s “Trend-Setting Products of 2011,” Synaptica is an editorial tool designed for use by professional taxonomists. In 2011, the company added a complementary suite of front-end publication tools that make it easy for any taxonomy or ontology to be presented to end-users. The Ontology Publishing Suite gives administrators better control over which parts of a master ontology are exposed to end-users, as well as how they are laid out on-screen. Other parts of the Synaptica product suite include Synaptica Enterprise, the behind-the-firewall solution for larger organizations; Synaptica Express, a cloud-computing solution for individuals or small-business users; Synaptica IMS, a complementary suite of tools designed to support the human indexing of content using taxonomies stored in Synaptica; and Synaptica SharePoint Integration, an add-on module enabling taxonomies being managed within Synaptica to be applied as meta-tags to content being stored in SharePoint document libraries, as well as allowing for those same taxonomies to be used for search.
The technology has found a home in corporate, pharmaceutical, government, and e-commerce markets. Clients include Verizon, ProQuest, the BBC, and Harvard Business Publishing. Competitors LexisNexis, Dun & Bradstreet, and InsideView. (I would not include Concept Searching or Ontoprise in this short list due to exogenous complexity factors.)
Stephen E Arnold, January 27, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
JackBe: Data Fusion
January 17, 2012
Founded in 2002 by brothers Luis and Jacob Derechin, JackBe was originally an AJAX widget company. At the demand of its customers, the company centered its product offering around an enterprise mashup server that supports the user-driven ad-hoc integration of data. The company was cited as a “Next-Gen BI” technology by Forrester Research, Inc. in its March 2011 “Trends 2011 And Beyond: Business Intelligence” report.
JackBe’s real-time business intelligence platform, Presto, allows users to combine data from any enterprise application, as well as data from the cloud to compose apps and dashboards that are publishable to portals, the web, spreadsheets, and mobile devices. The platform is organized around Presto Hub, which provides a single point of sign-on for JackBe’s mashup development editors, governance tools for administrators, and application storefront.
The company’s Presto Enterprise Mashup Server provides service virtualization that solves business problems and allows users and developers secure and consolidated access to disparate data from internal services, external services, and application databases. Presto Mashup Composers and Presto Mashup Connectors feature tools that enable business and technical users to create mashups. JackBe also offers Transparency 2.0, a solution for data feeds and data widgets for state and local government’s citizen-facing websites, and Mashup Sites for SharePoint, an intelligence solution that provides SharePoint 2007/2010 business users with real-time visual web-part-based apps and interactive dashboards.
To help users store, organize, and share mashups and apps, JackBe developed an app store framework in the third iteration of Presto. The apps are portable and can feed data into Excel and run standalone, on dashboards, on mobile devices, or in SharePoint.
Customers include the US Air Force, the US Army, NASA, Elsevier, Random House, Qualcom, GE Energy, and Accenture and illustrate the broad appeal of the platform. Competitors include Zapatec, IBM, and mashup tools provided by online service providers such as Google and Yahoo.
One observation: Our efforts to contact the company have been routinely ignored or pushed to a telemarketer. Your mileage may vary.
Rita Safranek, January 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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