Concept Searching Enrolls University of California
September 25, 2012
We learned that the University of California has selected Concept Searching technology to process content, automatically classify content, and provide taxonomy management software to the Office of the President. “University of California, Office of the President Using Concept Searching’s Smart Content Framework™” said:
The University of California, Office of the President is the system wide headquarters of the University of California, managing its fiscal and business operations and supporting the academic and research missions across its campuses, labs and medical centers.
The Office of the President is the system wide headquarters of the University of California, managing its fiscal and business operations and supporting the academic and research missions across its campuses, labs and medical centers.
conceptClassifier for SharePoint has enabled the University of California, Office of the President to realize search improvements in SharePoint 2007 and in the recent deployment of SharePoint 2010. The university has integrated with the Term Store and taken advantage of the full support of managed metadata properties provided by conceptClassifier for SharePoint.
Martin Garland, president of Concept Searching said:
Using the first two building blocks of the Smart Content Framework™, Metadata and Insight, the University of California, Office of the President was able to rapidly deploy enterprise taxonomies and build the framework to improve search outcomes. This adoption of Concept Searching technologies continues to show our platform is an important component for any organization that places high value on content assets.
Concept Searching provides software products that deliver conceptual metadata generation, auto-classification, and powerful taxonomy management from the desktop to the enterprise. Concept Searching, developer of the Smart Content Framework™, provides organizations with a method to mitigate risk, automate processes, manage information, protect privacy, and address compliance issues. This information governance infrastructure framework utilizes a set of technologies that encompasses the entire portfolio of information assets, resulting in increased organizational performance and agility.
Concept Searching asserts that it is the only platform independent statistical metadata generation and classification software company in the world that uses concept extraction and compound term processing to significantly improve access to unstructured information. The Concept Searching Microsoft suite of technologies runs natively in SharePoint 2010, FAST, Windows Server 2008 R2 FCI, and in Microsoft Office applications.
A June 2012 white paper explaining conceptClassifier is available at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
New Acquisition Pressures Newsgator
August 14, 2012
A recent Microsoft move may be bad news for NewsGator, ComputerWorld reveals in “Microsoft’s Yammer Buy Raises Questions About NewsGator’s Future.” Yammer and NewsGator are competitors in the SharePoint enterprise social add-on market. Does Microsoft’s acquisition of one spell trouble for the other?
Social Sites is the name of NewsGator’s SharePoint add-on. Since it launched in 2007, it has accumulated an impressive roster of clients. If Microsoft integrates the similarly successful Yammer into SharePoint, that could change. NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston remains optimistic, though, insisting that the two products attract different types of customers. Writer Juan Carlos Perez explains:
“While Yammer is a multi-tenant, cloud-based software, Social Sites is designed for on-premise and dedicated hosted environments, offering IT more controls, [Holston] said.
“‘The fact that Microsoft now owns Yammer doesn’t change the reasons why our clients came to us originally,’ he said, adding that most NewsGator customers aren’t comfortable using this type of software in a multi-tenant cloud. ‘Our customers are hyper-focused on security, governance, scalability and privacy.'”
Not only that, but NewsGator stands out as a developer of applications for specific industries. Will these unique qualities be enough to protect the company? We won’t know for a while, Perez says, since it would take a couple of years for Microsoft to mimic Social Sites with Yammer functionality. If it even chooses to do so at all; Holston thinks Microsoft only loves Yammer for its successful “freemium” business model. Hey, he can hope.
Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, NewsGator proclaims a passion for customer satisfaction. The company asserts that they are (so far, I’d add) the social software vendor most deeply integrated into the Microsoft stack.
Yammer launched in 2008, and seems to be very proud to be joining the Microsoft universe. They assert that, with former Facebook innovators on their team, their social products have the advantage of “Facebook DNA.” Interesting.
Cynthia Murrell, August 14, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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
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
Mindbreeze Satisfies Users Need for Findability
November 15, 2011
Stephen Fishman of CMS Wire discusses the problems that arise from Microsoft SharePoint’s desire for broad appeal in, “SharePoint is Crack and Microsoft is the Pusher.” Although a humorous title, Fishman makes some valid points about Microsoft’s attempt at reeling in the masses only to leave them yearning for more. Much like the touted panacea of Microsoft Access or Lotus Notes, SharePoint does not deliver on its promises.
Fishman drives home his main point after rolling out a list of smaller issues:
“But the worst thing about SharePoint by far is that it recreates the problem it was intended to solve, only on a much larger scale. What starts out as a hierarchically organized file share ends up as a hierarchically organized file share with a web interface on top of it.”
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze solution is clear in their latest update: “With the new release, Fabasoft Mindbreeze displays search results clearer and more structured. Index tabs break down search results in specific groups and topics. That way, users see immediately what documents contain the search term and in what context it is mentioned. With this structured overview, users find what they are looking for much faster.”
Fishman also finds fault with SharePoint’s disregard for sound implementation and taxonomies: “SharePoint is constantly rolled out in a slipshod manner with little thought to governance or developing scalable and maintainable taxonomies . . . The resulting organic growth inevitably results in buried content with no easy mechanisms for ambient findability.”
Mindbreeze accounts for synonyms and taxonomies in its search, features that are in place out-of-the-box, but also customizable. To solve SharePoint’s lingering issues of findability and a poor user experience, explore an efficient solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Built with the user in mind.
*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 15, 2011
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.)
The Perils of Searching in a Hurry
November 1, 2011
I read the Computerworld story “How Google Was Tripped Up by a Bad Search.” I assume that it is pretty close to events as the “real” reporter summarized them.
Let me say that I am not too concerned about the fact that Google was caught in a search trip wire. I am concerned with a larger issue, and one that is quite important as search becomes indexing, facets, knowledge, prediction, and apps. The case reported by Computerworld applies to much of “finding” information today.
Legal matters are rich with examples of big outfits fumbling a procedure or making an error under the pressure of litigation or even contemplating litigation. The Computerworld story describes an email which may be interpreted as having a bright LED to shine on the Java in Android matter. I found this sentence fascinating:
Lindholm’s computer saved nine drafts of the email while he was writing it, Google explained in court filings. Only to the last draft did he add the words “Attorney Work Product,” and only on the version that was sent did he fill out the “to” field, with the names of Rubin and Google in-house attorney Ben Lee.
Ah, the issue of versioning. How many content management experts have ignored this issue in the enterprise. When search systems index, does one want every version indexed or just the “real” version? Oh, what is the “real” version. A person has to investigate and then make a decision. Software and azure chip consultants, governance and content management experts, and busy MBAs and contractors are often too busy to perform this work. Grunt work, I believe, it may be described by some.
What I am considering is the confluence of people who assume “search” works, the lack of time Outlook and iCalandar “priority one” people face, and the reluctance to sit down and work through documents in a thorough manner. This is part of the “problem” with search and software is not going to resolve the problem quickly, if ever.
Source: http://www.clipartguide.com/_pages/0511-1010-0617-4419.html
What struck me is how people in a hurry, assumptions about search, and legal procedures underscore a number of problems in findability. But the key paragraph in the write up, in my opinion, was:
It’s unclear exactly how the email drafts slipped through the net, and Google and two of its law firms did not reply to requests for comment. In a court filing, Google’s lawyers said their “electronic scanning tools” — which basically perform a search function — failed to catch the documents before they were produced, because the “to” field was blank and Lindholm hadn’t yet added the words “attorney work product.” But documents produced for opposing counsel should normally be reviewed by a person before they go out the door, said Caitlin Murphy, a senior product manager at AccessData, which makes e-discovery tools, and a former attorney herself. It’s a time-consuming process, she said, but it was “a big mistake” for the email to have slipped through.
What did I think when I read this?
First, all the baloney—yep, the right word, folks–about search, facets, metadata, indexing, clustering, governance and analytics underscore something I have been saying for a long, long time. Search is not working as lots of people assume it does. You can substitute “eDiscovery,” “text mining,” or “metatagging” for search. The statement holds water for each.
The algorithms will work within limits but the problem with search has to do with language. Software, no matter how sophisticated, gets fooled with missing data elements, versions, and words themselves. It is high time that the people yapping about how wonderful automated systems are stop and ask themselves this question, “Do I want to go to jail because I assumed a search or content processing system was working?” I know my answer.
Second, in the Computerworld write up, the user’s system dutifully saved multiple versions of the document. Okay, SharePoint lovers, here’s a question for you? Does your search system make clear which antecedent version is which and which document is the best and final version? We know from the Computerworld write up that the Google system did not make this distinction. My point is that the nifty sounding yap about how “findable” a document is remains mostly baloney. Azure chip consultants and investment banks can convince themselves and the widows from whom money is derived that a new search system works wonderfully. I think the version issue makes clear that most search and content processing systems still have problems with multiple instances of documents. Don’t believe me. Go look for the drafts of your last PowerPoint. Now to whom did you email a copy? From whom did you get inputs? Which set of slides were the ones on the laptop you used for the briefing? What the “correct” version of the presentation? If you cannot answer the question, how will software?
Search May Be Flawed, but Maybe Content Management Is Worse?
September 14, 2011
I pay some attention to search and content processing. I take a dim view of content management because it is a weird business. Unlike records management, CMS as the “real” experts label the systems, CMS has few rules. In the tidy world of records management, there are document retention policies. Even when one ventures into the murk of legal content, there is a body of information about how documents must be tattooed before the legal eagles get to add value to the results of a discovery process. And CMS? Most of it is a Wild West rodeo on broken down horses and amateurs trying to distract the wild bulls and kicking stallions of content creators. I find CMS amusing to watch, but I steer clear. The “governance” experts are swarming over the mess CMS vendors and system users create. Need an example? How about the chaos of many Lotus Notes or Microsoft SharePoint systems. Software just does not impose an editorial policy on employees with degrees in business administration and home economics engaged in writing marketing collateral, proposals, and reports.
I read “Inefficiencies in Collateral Management Cost the Financial Sector More than EUR4 Billion Annually, According to Accenture/Clearstream Survey” and reached two working hypotheses:
First, some information functions may be unmanageable unless rules are set up before the users start cranking out digital outputs. In my experience, this pristine state is tough to achieve. Consequently, most CMS implementations are not going to deliver what users and chief financial officers want. In short, the cost excess is likely to persist. How much money is blown with lousy CMS? Here’s what the article asserts:
The financial services sector could save more than EUR4 billion annually in collateral management costs by addressing operational inefficiencies, according to a survey by Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Clearstream.
Assume the estimated cost is inflated. Then do a back of envelope calculation that says Manhattan and Tokyo are probably as inefficient. Bingo. We have a nice fat six billion euro number. Not quite like the PIIGS’ debt, but a respectable number which CMS vendors should have kept more manageable.
Second, what about XML. I thought that Extensible Markup Language and systems which whip this file type around would have reduced content costs. I am not sure that has happened. I have formulated a notion that XML has become its own worst enemy. There is not single XML and the costs of pushing verbose objects to and fro, the expense of the humans who must work with systems designed for coding rock stars, and the bewildering diversity of XML tagged content look like deal breakers.
I don’t want to name any XML search and content vendors. I don’t want to highlight vendors who talk about XML and then slap big price tags on content transformation services. I do want to mention that Exalead is XML friendly and does a good job in my opinion with XML in many different forms. To Exalead’s credit, it handles XML quietly. Tooting the XML tuba has not sunk a musical hook in the financial institutions mentioned in the survey.
I am generally suspicious when I read a giant consulting firm and a smaller consulting firm have mined their contacts for data. However, in this case, I think that CMS and XML help me understand the persistent problem which exists in certain market sectors. How do you fix the problem? My hunch is that one should hire Accenture. Given the mess that exists, Accenture may buy better lunches for clients than the “real” poobahs, the art history majors, and the self appointed experts have delivered. Wait. I want to restate this. The problem may be unmanageable. Content is increasing too rapidly and few outfits have the appetite to spend good money after bad. Just my opinion formed in a land fond of beets.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search: An Information Retrieval Fukushima?
May 18, 2011
Information about the scale of the horrific nuclear disaster in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex is now becoming more widely known.
Expertise and Smoothing
My interest in the event is the engineering of a necklace of old-style reactors and the problems the LOCA (loss of coolant accident) triggered. The nagging thought I had was that today’s nuclear engineers understood the issues with the reactor design, the placement of the spent fuel pool, and the risks posed by an earthquake. After my years in the nuclear industry, I am quite confident that engineers articulated these issues. However, the technical information gets “smoothed” and simplified. The complexities of nuclear power generation are well known at least in engineering schools. The nuclear engineers are often viewed as odd ducks by the civil engineers and mechanical engineers. A nuclear engineer has to do the regular engineering stuff of calculating loads and looking up data in hefty tomes. But the nukes need grounding in chemistry, physics, and math, lots of math. Then the engineer who wants to become a certified, professional nuclear engineer has some other hoops to jump through. I won’t bore you with the details, but the end result of the process produces people who can explain clearly a particular process and its impacts.
Does your search experience emit signs of troubles within?
The problem is that art history majors, journalists, failed Web masters, and even Harvard and Wharton MBAs get bored quickly. The details of a particular nuclear process makes zero sense to someone more comfortable commenting about the color of Mona Lisa’s gown. So “smoothing” takes place. The ridges and outcrops of scientific and statistical knowledge get simplified. Once a complex situation has been smoothed, the need for hard expertise is diminished. With these simplifications, the liberal arts crowd can “reason” about risks, costs, upsides, and downsides.
A nuclear fall out map. The effect of a search meltdown extends far beyond the boundaries of a single user’s actions. Flawed search and retrieval has major consequences, many of which cannot be predicted with high confidence.
Everything works in an acceptable or okay manner until there is a LOCA or some other problem like a stuck valve or a crack in a pipe in a radioactive area of the reactor. Quickly the complexities, risks, and costs of the “smoothed problem” reveal the fissures and crags of reality.
Web search and enterprise search are now experiencing what I call a Fukushima event. After years of contentment with finding information, suddenly the dashboards are blinking yellow and red. Users are unable to find the information needed to do their job or something as basic as locate a colleague’s telephone number or office location. I have separated Web search and enterprise search in my professional work.
I want to depart for a moment and consider the two “species” of search as a single process before the ideas slip away from me. I know that Web search processes publicly accessible content, has the luxury of ignoring servers with high latency, and filtering content to create an index that meets the vendors’ needs, not the users’ needs. I know that enterprise search must handle diverse content types, must cope with security and access controls, and perform more functions that one of those two inch wide Swiss Army knives on sale at the airport in Geneva. I understand. My concern is broader is this write up. Please, bear with me.
Anti Search in 2011
November 1, 2010
In a recent meeting, several of the participants were charged with disinformation from the azurini.
You know. Azurini, the consultants.
Some of these were English majors, others former print journalists, and some unemployed search engine optimization experts smoked by Google Instant.
But mostly the azurini emphasize that their core competency is search, content management, or information governance (whatever the heck that means). In a month or so, there will be a flood of trend write ups. When the Roman god looks to his left and right, the signal for prognostication flashes through the fabric covered cube farms.
To get ahead of the azurini, the addled goose wants to identify the trends in anti search for 2011. Yep, anti search. Remember that in a Searcher article several years ago, I asserted that search was dead. No one believed me, of course. Instead of digging into the problems that ranged from hostile users to the financial meltdown of some high profile enterprise search vendors, search was the big deal.
And why not? No one can do a lick of work today unless that person can locate a document or “find” something to jump start activity. In a restaurant, people talk less and commune with their mobile devices. Search is on a par with food, a situation that Maslow would find interesting.
The idea for this write up emerged from a meeting a couple of weeks ago. The attendees were trying to figure out how to enhance an existing enterprise search system in order to improve the productivity of the business. The goal was admirable, but the company was struggling to generate revenues and reduce costs.The talk was about search but the subtext was survival.
The needs for the next generation search system included:
- A great user experience
- An iPad app to deliver needed information
- Seamless access to Web and Intranet information
- Google-like performance
- Improved indexing and metatagging
- Access to database content and unstructured information like email.
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