Resources for Your ALM and CI Questions
December 26, 2011
Recently, a SharePoint 2010 Developer instructor, Andrew Connell, posted some suggested sources to turn to for answering your frequently asked questions on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and continuous integration (CI) in “SharePoint 2010, ALM and Continuous Integration Resources.” Andrew Connell is a Microsoft developer specializing in the .NET Framework and content management, specifically Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 and SharePoint. He is also a multiple time recipient of the Most Valuable Professional for SharePoint Server Award. He explains:
When teaching SharePoint 2010 developer classes I typically get at least one question every other class as it relates to ALM. On occasion there is at least one student who is used to doing continuous integration (CI) in their non-SharePoint projects and want to know how to it in SharePoint 2010 projects. For me, the best person you can look to is Chris O’Brien.
ALM, the coordination of all aspects of software engineering, can be of benefit to your work processes. While Connell’s suggested resources are a little older, they have worthy advice on the topic and are a good place to start.
If after reading you find you still need assistance, consider a full-service firm like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. As a third party solution for your SharePoint system, their technology combines your on-premise information with Cloud information, connecting the right people to the right information. Here you can read more about how Mindbreeze adds more efficiency for SharePoint, “It enables all information that is connected to Mindbreeze to be displayed in Microsoft SharePoint. This takes place smoothly via Web Parts. In this way not only information contained within Microsoft SharePoint, but also all other information that is available within the respective company, can be consolidated within one “platform.”
Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze’s full suite of solutions.
Philip West, December 26, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search-Driven Web Content
December 14, 2011
Web content management deserves attention and planning when evaluating your company’s online business model. William Saville at CMS Wire discusses all the angles that need to be evaluated in, “SharePoint 2010 As a Web Delivery Platform.” Search-based experiences are becoming more valuable in the overall online experience. Users want to quickly find the content that is relevant to them, without wading through irrelevant hits.
Everyone is talking about search-driven experiences that enable easier discovery of content and make content personal and relevant to the end user. The business case is quite simple. The quicker people can find what they are looking for on a website, the more likely they are to engage and take an interest one step further. Using the search technology that is baked into SharePoint, as well as FAST search (which can be implemented on top of SharePoint), it is possible to provide end users with powerful search-based experiences.
We think this is one area in particular where a third-party alternative to SharePoint excels, specifically Fabasoft Mindbreeze. The Austrian-based company offers a suite of solutions that serve as alternatives to SharePoint or work alongside a SharePoint installation, improving its performance. Its InSite product adds meaning to website search.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite is our product to empower websites with professional high-end search cababilities. We offer InSite as a Cloud service and for on premise installation. Today, I would like to show how you can adapt the search-experience by defining views. Views allow you to group search results by search queries. It’s a really great and simple concept and you can adapt your search results without any need for server configuration. The following 5 scenarios should get you started on the topic . . .
The Mindbreeze InSite solution offers metadata, filters, grouping by product, and content-based views to name a few options. The search is intuitive and results are relevant and fast. See if InSite might be a beneficial addition to your online business model.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Adaptation Mandatory for Enterprise Teams in 2012
December 13, 2011
The list of Gartner predictions is out for 2012. The theme? Adapt or be replaced. CMS Wire provides all the details in, “Gartner: 10 Predictions for 2012, IT Departments to Adapt or be Swept Aside.”
“According to Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner fellow, the primary characteristic of IT next year will be fluidity, and where that fluidity does not exist, IT departments will be replaced by business managers who see the economy of cloud computing and the value of moving their IT requirements there . . . Devices that are easier to use, combined with more intuitive software, as well as the acceleration towards cloud computing, means that IT will have less responsibility than before.”
Two implications: one, IT teams need to prove their worth when it comes to enterprise, but they need to do it in a way that improves the user experience. Two, they need to find the right solution that ensures that employees maintain high productivity and quality search results. This brings us to another conjecture from the Gartner findings:
“And to add insult to injury, it looks like IT organizations are going to be held responsible when organizations are not able to extract full meaning out of their growing amount of data and when businesses miss out on key opportunities.”
We think that a quality solution is the key to all of the potential IT woes in 2012. One suite of solutions we like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. They excel in assigning meaning to results in a way that others, namely SharePoint, lack.
“There are several ways to connect with standard and even highly customized line of business applications. An effective information access tool needs to facilitate users’ access to all of these content sources while preserving value and context of each information object and knowledge asset.”
Will there be challenges in the new year? Yes, there always are. But choose the right solution and meet those challenges head on.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 9,2011
Sponsored by: Pandia.com
Enterprise Search in the Realm of Social Media
December 13, 2011
Enterprise and social media are two emerging trends gaining ground fast in the world of IT, but how do they work together? Not just fads, they have proven their worth and are here to stay, but how can they both be utilized in order to maximize efficiency? SharePoint is an obvious place to start, as it controls a large segment of the market. Rich Blank gives the pros and cons in, “5 Myths about SharePoint as an Enterprise Social Platform.”
When SharePoint 2010 arrived in the marketplace, the platform included new social capabilities to improve productivity and collaboration. However, as the consumer social web exploded, it became clear that the 2010 platform only provided the basic building blocks of social computing. As many organizations are now making social collaboration a priority, it’s important to dispel myths and provide a reality-based understanding of SharePoint 2010 as a social computing platform.
While SharePoint works as an enterprise foundation, its true potential comes through the addition of third party solutions. A solution that we like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Fabasoft has taken an interest in social media, and is working to maximize its offerings to compliment social media needs.
Here Michael Hadrian discusses their participation in the Content and Collaboration Summit in London:
’With Folio Cloud, Fabasoft has developed a European Cloud for ECM and B2B collaboration. This enables worldwide connected collaboration and secure data exchange in protected team rooms,’ explained Michael Hadrian, Fabasoft Distribution GmbH managing director. ‘As Premier Sponsor at this established conference, we are looking forward to contributing towards the continued advancement and assertion of business Cloud applications.’ In his presentation, Michael Hadrian presented Fabasoft’s latest inter-company business applications live, showing which concrete business advantages companies can benefit from with Fabasoft Folio Cloud based on customer projects.
While there is not yet a single out-of-the-box solution for organizations needing to merge their enterprise and social media needs, there are good solutions out there. Check out the Mindbreeze suite of offerings to see if it might work for you.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 13, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Spotlight: Streamlining Enterprise 2.0
December 6, 2011
As enterprise runs rampant and adoption continues at break-neck speed, the risk is that solutions are becoming more complicated without becoming more functional. In other words, do we need to return to simplicity in order to regain a positive user experience? Molly Bernhart Walker tackles that question in, “The case for stripped-down Enterprise 2.0 tools.”
“Content management systems live and die by requirements, but sometimes even the longest checklist in an RFP won’t deliver tools that yield real results. There’s a lot to be said for simple Enterprise 2.0 tools, said Tim Young, founder of Socialcast and vice president for social software at VMware. ‘Simple tools are incredibly powerful,’ said Young Nov. 15, during a keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. It’s very difficult to solve a complex problem with a complex tool, he added.”
SharePoint 2010 is notably the most widely adopted enterprise solution, but its many quirks require complimentary solutions to increase functionality. Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers an alternative to SharePoint, but also through its Connectors, offers a companion to SharePoint. We like Mindbreeze because of its commitment to simplicity and gracefulness.
“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.”
Choosing an appropriate enterprise solution is not an easy decision. Remember to keep user experience in mind. Locating a solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, that maintains a dedication to simplicity and usability, will pay off long-term dividends in terms of saved time and frustration. The most complicated solutions are often the most convoluted as well.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 6, 2011
The Solution to Email Overload? No Email
December 4, 2011
I enjoy France and the French. The country is essentially an engineering outfit with a soft spot for art, a love of intellectual discussion, and a clever approach to thorny problems. Consider email. At Atos, the senior management has found a solution to email overload, the risks of eDiscovery, and the cost of trying to manage unfindable PowerPoint attachments. (My hunch is that the news report missed some of the story, but, hey, that’s okay.
How? Here’s what I learned in “Tech Firm Implements Employee ‘Zero Email’ Policy.” Let’s assume ABC News has the facts lined up like Napoleon’s army before it did the Moscow in Autumn thing. Here’s what I learned:
The company says by 2013, more than half of all new digital content will be the result of updates to, and editing of existing information. Middle managers spend more than 25 percent of their time searching for information, according to the company. Crouch said Atos is evaluating a number of new tools to replace internal email including collaborative and social media tools. Those include the Atos Wiki, which allows all employees to communicate by contributing or modifying online content, and Office Communicator, the company’s online chat system which allows video conferencing, and file and application sharing.
So “zero” does not mean zero. Social interactions are not email. Okay, ABC News, close enough for horseshoes. I assume the cloud, Gmail, and various on premises solutions along the lines of SharePoint and Exchange would not work.
The reality is that email is going to be tough to eliminate even if one calls the outputs “collaboration” with a “social” twist of lemon. No lemonade here, however. Search vendors can rest easy. Atos is a prospect. Symantec, HP, and Recommind can make sales calls confident that non-email digital information must be searched, made findable, and discoverable by avocats which are lawyers no matter what one calls these fine professionals.
Stephen E Arnold, December 4, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Customer Experience to Take Center Stage in 2012
December 2, 2011
We are post-Thanksgiving—that time of year when the “year in review” articles start emerging and predictions are made for coming trends to meet us in the new year. The world of content management systems is no exception. Marisa Peacock gives us some of her predictions in, “If 2012 Is the Year of Customer Experience, What Will it Bring?”
According to Peacock, customer experience will take center stage in areas such as mobile, social, personalization, and localization to name a few. What does all this mean to us? A need for better content management.
Peacock’s advice:
“Of course, we must wait for 2012 to really understand how and if brands will leverage the customer experience. With only a month left before the new year, companies of all sizes are strongly encouraged to revisit their mobile strategies, customer relationship management tools and social media policies.”
How do you prepare in a smart way, despite what changes the new year may bring? Invest in a smart content management solution, one that can handle information needs on multiple levels. We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze and its suite of offerings.
“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.”
Mindbreeze can handle mobile, email, enterprise, website search, etc. Their Connectors feature works with SharePoint 2010, if that system is already in place at your organization. Regardless of the size or scope of your organization, information needs continue to grow exponentially. Heed the warnings and manage your information in a way that improves the customer experience. Find a smart solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze and you will be able to adapt to changing needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 02, 2011
Sponsored by: Pandia.com
Search Silver Bullets, Elixirs, and Magic Potions: Thinking about Findability in 2012
November 10, 2011
I feel expansive today (November 9, 2011), generous even. My left eye seems to be working at 70 percent capacity. No babies are screaming in the airport waiting area. In fact, I am sitting in a not too sticky seat, enjoying the announcements about keeping pets in their cage and reporting suspicious packages to law enforcement by dialing 250.
I wonder if the mother who left a pink and white plastic bag with a small bunny and box of animal crackers is evil. Much in today’s society is crazy marketing hype and fear mongering.
Whilst thinking about pets in cages and animal crackers which may be laced with rat poison, and plump, fabric bunnies, my thoughts turned to the notion of instant fixes for horribly broken search and content processing systems.
I think it was the association of the failure of societal systems that determined passengers at the gate would allow a pet to run wild or that a stuffed bunny was a threat. My thoughts jumped to the world of search, its crazy marketing pitches, and the satraps who have promoted themselves to “expert in search.” I wanted to capture these ideas, conforming to the precepts of the About section of this free blog. Did I say, “Free.”
A happy quack to http://www.alchemywebsite.com/amcl_astronomical_material02.html for this image of the 21st century azure chip consultant, a self appointed expert in search with a degree in English and a minor in home economics with an emphasis on finger sandwiches.
The Silver Bullets, Garlic Balls, and Eyes of Newts
First, let me list the instant fixes, the silver bullets, the magic potions, the faerie dust, and the alchemy which makes “enterprise search” work today. Fasten your alchemist’s robe, lift your chin, and grab your paper cone. I may rain on your magic potion. Here are 14 magic fixes for a lousy search system. Oh, one more caveat. I am not picking on any one company or approach. The key to this essay is the collection of pixie dust, not a single firm’s blend of baloney, owl feathers, and goat horn.
- Analytics (The kind equations some of us wrangled and struggled with in Statistics 101 or the more complex predictive methods which, if you know how to make the numerical recipes work, will get you a job at Palantir, Recorded Future, SAS, or one of the other purveyors of wisdom based on big data number crunching)
- Cloud (Most companies in the magic elixir business invoke the cloud. Not even Macbeth’s witches do as good a job with the incantation of Hadoop the Loop as Cloudera,but there are many contenders in this pixie concoction. Amazon comes to mind but A9 gives me a headache when I use A9 to locate a book for my trusty e Reeder.)
- Clustering (Which I associate with Clustify and Vivisimo, but Vivisimo has morphed clustering in “information optimization” and gets a happy quack for this leap)
- Connectors (One can search unless one can acquire content. I like the Palantir approach which triggered some push back but I find the morphing of ISYS Search Software a useful touchstone in this potion category)
- Discovery systems (My associative thought process offers up Clearwell Systems and Recommind. I like Recommind, however, because it is so similar to Autonomy’s method and it has been the pivot for the company’s flip flow from law firms to enterprise search and back to eDiscovery in the last 12 or 18 months)
- Federation (I like the approach of Deep Web Technologies and for the record, the company does not position its method as a magical solution, but some federating vendors do so I will mention this concept. Yhink mash up and data fusion too)
- Natural language processing (My candidate for NLP wonder worker is Oracle which acquired InQuira. InQuira is a success story because it was formed from the components of two antecedent search companies, pitched NLP for customer support,and got acquired by Oracle. Happy stakeholders all.)
- Metatagging (Many candidates here. I nominate the Microsoft SharePoint technology as the silver bullet candidate. SharePoint search offers almost flawless implementation of finding a document by virtue of knowing who wrote it, when, and what file type it is. Amazing. A first of sorts because the method has spawned third party solutions from Austria to t he United States.)
- Open source (Hands down I think about IBM. From Content Analytics to the wild and crazy Watson, IBM has open source tattooed over large expanses of its corporate hide. Free? Did I mention free? Think again. IBM did not hit $100 billion in revenue by giving software away.)
- Relationship maps (I have to go with the Inxight Software solution. Not only was the live map an inspiration to every business intelligence and social network analysis vendor it was cool to drag objects around. Now Inxight is part of Business Objects which is part of SAP, which is an interesting company occupied with reinventing itself and ignored TREX, a search engine)
- Semantics (I have to mention Google as the poster child for making software know what content is about. I stand by my praise of Ramanathan Guha’s programmable search engine and the somewhat complementary work of Dr. Alon Halevy, both happy Googlers as far as I know. Did I mention that Google has oodles of semantic methods, but the focus is on selling ads and Pandas, which are somewhat related.)
- Sentiment analysis (the winner in the sentiment analysis sector is up for grabs. In terms of reinventing and repositioning, I want to acknowledge Attensity. But when it comes to making lemonade from lemons, check out Lexalytics (now a unit of Infonics). I like the Newssift case, but that is not included in my free blog posts and information about this modest multi-vehicle accident on the UK information highway is harder and harder to find. Alas.)
- Taxonomies (I am a traditionalist, so I quite like the pioneering work of Access Innovations. But firms run by individuals who are not experts in controlled vocabularies, machine assisted indexing, and ANSI compliance have captured the attention of the azure chip, home economics, and self appointed expert crowd. Access innovations knows its stuff. Some of the boot camp crowd, maybe somewhat less? I read a blog post recently that said librarians are not necessary when one creates an enterprise taxonomy. My how interesting. When we did the ABI/INFORM and Business Dateline controlled vocabularies we used “real” experts and quite a few librarians with experience conceptualizing, developing, refining, and ensuring logical consistency of our word lists. It worked because even the shadow of the original ABI/INFORM still uses some of our term 30 plus years later. There are so many taxonomy vendors, I will not attempt to highlight others. Even Microsoft signed on with Cognition Technologies to beef up its methods.)
- XML (there are Google and MarkLogic again. XML is now a genuine silver bullet. I thought it was a markup language. Well, not any more, pal.)
Enterprise Search: The Floundering Fish!
October 27, 2011
I am thinking about another monograph on the topic of “enterprise search.” The subject seems to be a bit like the motion picture protagonist Jason. Every film ends with Jason apparently out of action. Then, six or nine months later, he’s back. Knives, chains, you name it.
The Landscape
The landscape of enterprise search is pretty much unchanged. I know that the folks who pulled off the billion dollar deals are different. These guys and gals have new Bimmers and maybe a private island or some other sign of wealth. But the technology of yesterday’s giants of enterprise search is pretty much unchanged. Whenever I say this, I get email from the chief technology officers at various “big name” vendors who tell me, “Our technology is constantly enhanced, refreshed, updated, revolutionized, reinvented, whatever.”
Source: http://www.goneclear.com/photos_2003.htm
The reality is that the original Big Five had and still have technology rooted in the mid to late 1990s. I provide some details in my various writings about enterprise search in the Enterprise Search Report, Beyond Search for the “old” Gilbane, Successful Enterprise Search Management, and my June 2011 The New Landscape of Search.
Former Stand Alone Champions of Search
For those of you who have forgotten, here’s a précis:
- Autonomy IDOL, Bayesian, mid 1990s via the 18th century
- Convera, shotgun marriage of “old” Excalibur and “less old” Conquest (which was a product of a former colleague of mine at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, back when it was a top tier consulting firm
- Endeca, hybrid of Yahoo directory and Inktomi with some jazzy marketing, late 1990
- Exalead. Early 2000 technology and arguably the best of this elite group of information retrieval technology firms. Exalead is now part of Dassault, the French engineering wizardry firm.
- Fast Search & Transfer, Norwegian university, late 1990s. Now part of Microsoft Corp.
- Fulcrum, now part of OpenText. Dates from the early 1990s and maybe retired. I have lost track.
- Google Search Appliance. Late 1990s technology in an appliance form. The product looks a bit like an orphan to me as Google chases the enterprise cloud. GSA was reworked because “voting” doesn’t help a person in a company find a document, but it seems to be a dead end of sorts.
- IBM Stairs III, recoded in Germany and then kept alive via the Search Manager product and the third-party BRS system, which is now part of the OpenText stable of search solutions. Dates from the mid 1970s. IBM now “loves” open source Lucene. Sort of.
- Oracle Text. Late 1980s via acquisition of Artificial Linguistics.
There are some other interesting and important systems, but these are of interest to dinosaurs like me, not the Gen X and Gen Y azure chip crowd or the “we don’t have any time” procurement teams. These systems are Inquire (supported forward and rearward truncation), Island Search (a useful on-the-fly summarizer from decades ago), and the much loved RECON and SDC Orbit engines. Ah, memories.
What’s important is that the big deals in the last couple of months have been for customers and opportunities to sell consulting and engineering services. The deals are not about search, information retrieval, findability, or information access. The purchasers will talk about the importance of these buzzwords, but in my opinion, the focus is on getting customers and selling them stuff.
Three points:
HP Acquires Autonomy. Investors Put on a Happy Face
October 4, 2011
A news release whizzed by on October 3, 2011, bearing happy tidings to Autonomy stakeholders. The deal with Hewlett Packard has been consummated. The news release asserted:
The acquisition positions HP as a leader in the large and growing enterprise information management space. Autonomy’s software offerings power more than 25,000 customer accounts worldwide and, as part of HP, will provide high-value business solutions to help customers manage the explosion of unstructured and structured information. Autonomy offers solutions that are complementary across HP’s enterprise offerings and strengthens the company’s data analytics, cloud, industry and workflow management capabilities.
Now with Ms. Whitman at the helm and Autonomy in the HP flotilla, will the company be able to generate the revenue required to pay for the “meaning based computing company.” I don’t have a clue. HP has some interesting challenges, but it has some big money units, including the ink business. I also think the print on demand unit has some potential, and the company desperately needs an improved findability solution for that unit as well as the HP Web site.
Fascinating to consider what HP can do. Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for Fast Search & Transfer. After three years, Fast Search is more or less a freebie for customers who buy oodles of client access licenses and jump on the SharePoint bandwagon. What will HP do with Autonomy? Make lots of money quickly is presumably one goal. We will monitor the trajectory of the deal because we think Mike Lynch could be the person to push out Ms. Whitman and get Autonomy managed effectively. Mr. Lynch is associated with search, but I think he is a much under-rated senior manager. HP could be the platform he needs to allow his skills to be showcased on a larger stage. Some “real” consultants who failed at being Web masters, home economics majors, and students of 18th century poetry will doubt my confidence in Mr. Lynch. Well, that’s why I am a big wheel in rural Kentucky and the “real” experts hang out in the world’s watering holes, not a pond filled with mine run off. Oh, the real consultants are not counting their billions as is Mr. Lynch I surmise.
Stephen E Arnold, October 4, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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