EPiServer May Embrace Forward Search
October 21, 2010
My recollection fogs with time, particularly when autumn settles on the goose pond. I thought that EPiServer (a Swedish content management system) relied on Mondosoft search. If the story in “The News of the Forward Search 2.0” write up is accurate, EPiServer (which could control as much as one third of the Swedish Intranet market) may be embracing Forward Search. I don’t know what happened to Mondosoft which I think is now owned and operated by SurfRay, a Danish firm.
Search results from the www.annefrank.org Web site.
What’s a Forward Search? The firm says:
Forward IT is a dynamic, flexible and committed supplier of Enterprise Search. Based on our own product solution – Forward Search we deliver search projects through our partners, covering different needs, from Website Search, Corporate Secure Search, eCommerce Search or Custom Search Solutions. Forward Search is Enterprise Search for enterprise solutions including Content Management Systems, intranets, databases, document repositories, OEM software etc. Forward Search appears to be a Danish firm. CMS Wire wrote about the company in its “Forward Search 2.0 for Enterprise and Web Includes Web CMS Integrations.”
What’s the search DNA? Here’s what the company says:
Forward is a Danish based and privately own company that was founded in 2004 by Thomas Jensen and Henrik Bach. Forward received capital for further growth mid 2009, when entering into cooperation with two Danish technology venture companies to ensure speeding up further development of the Enterprise Search product platform Forward Search, together with continued sales expansion that Forward has experienced since the second half of 2008, successfully delivering solutions to large customers in the Nordic and in Benelux.
Prior to the establishment they both worked with Enterprise Solutions based on technology from Open Text, at Ni Ansa IT Solutions ApS, from the year 2001.
The Kundo.se write up said, “A platform for web and enterprise search, it [Forward Search] works with a range of .NET Web CMSs, including EPiServer, Sitecore and Umbraco to collect a wide range of data including index content, crawler logs and visitor searching behavior from within the Web CMS, helping editors improve the search experience.”
I don’t have any pricing data at this time.
In Kundo.se, I located a list of Forward Search clients. These appear as:
- Addskills
- Anne Frank Foundation, www.annefrank.org
- Hotel & Restaurant Carone, www.hrs.dk
- Luminus SPE, www.luminus.be
- Mascot International, www.mascot.dk
- Niras A/S.
The write up lists these firms as Forward Search partners:
- Gengu, Netherlands
- LBi Lost Boys, Netherlands
- Magnetix, Denmark
- Nansen, Sweden
- Omega Point, Sweden
- Suneco, Netherlands
- Tuen Web, Denmark
- WWWins Consulting, China.
My take is that Forward Search is a snap in for Microsoft SharePoint search. The EPiServer outfit is pretty savvy. My opinion is that Forward Search delivers the needed functionality without the hassle and weirdness required to get SharePoint search in its various incarnations to walk, talk, roll over, and bark on command. I don’t want to push the canine metaphor too far, but Forward Search may be one of those animals discriminating buyers will want to take home for a weekend.
I have not updated my list of European search vendors recently. Yep, on the to do list. The old list is at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2009/09/18/european-search-vendors-additions/. I see that I need to add SurfRay, Fabasoft, Forward Search, and Exalead Dassault.
Gartner killed off its subjective, almost-an-infomercial search quadrant thingy. Maybe one of the enterprise azurini in Europe will jump into this empty marketing space? One can only hope.
Stephen E Arnold, October 21, 2010
Freebie and worth every penny
What Yahoo Is All About
October 21, 2010
I thought Yahoo was a portal based on a directory that was relevant in the mid 1990s. Wrong again. “Yahoo! Boss Blames Revenue Dip on Better Bing” set me straight:
“Yahoo! is an innovative technology company that operates the largest digital media content and communications business in the world,” Bartz [top Yahooligan] said. “The key words here are innovative technology, media, content, and communications. That’s what we’re all about.
Let me think this statement through. Yahoo reported flat revenues and a profit jump. The pump up came not from “innovative technology, media, content, and communications.” Nope. Yahoo sold HotJobs.
The categorical affirmative “all” can be stretched to cover the sale of assets, but I would prefer something more in line with the phrase “innovative technology, media, content, and communications.” And search? Outsourced. Just a thought from rural Kentucky.
Stephen E Arnold, October 21, 2010
Freebie
Google Waffles Backwards
October 21, 2010
Canada is annoyed at the Google. My view is that Google is mostly indifferent to legal hassles from countries. I mean when an enterprise can blow off the world’s largest market, what’s the difference when the likes of maple leaf lovers get annoyed. But there is an interesting item in the story “Google Ditches All Street View Wi-Fi Scanning.” Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
Google has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the location of Wi-Fi networks, a practice that led to a flurry of privacy probes after the company said it unintentionally captured fragments of unencrypted data. The disclosure appeared in a report on Street View released today by Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, who said that “collection is discontinued and Google has no plans to resume it.” Assembling an extensive list of the location of Wi-Fi access points can aid in geolocation, especially in areas where connections to cell towers are unreliable. Instead, Stoddart said that, based on her conversations with headquarters in Mountain View, Ca., “Google intends to obtain the information needed to populate its location-based services database” from “users’ handsets.”
No problem in my opinion. My thought is that the Math Club had a plan, a rogue engineer’s code, and some surprised customers. Now the GOOG seems to be doing the type of thinking one expects from a mere MBA. Is this progress? Depends on one’s point of view, right?
Stephen E Arnold, October 21, 2010
Freebie
SAS a Visionary in EMM. EMM?
October 21, 2010
Enterprise Marketing Management. Yep, the workhorse of statistics majors who dabble in oil field exploration, political polling, military intelligence, and cancer researchers are ready for their next job move. Enterprise marketing management. Now that’s going to be a shock to the MBAs who rely on Excel’s math functions to determine a sample size or calculate a rate of return.
Applications of heavy duty stats can wander over the entire landscape of business problems. But one of the azure chip consulting firms has killed off a dog (enterprise search) and created a Frankenstats. Navigate to “SAS Positioned in Visionaries Quadrant in Leading Industry Analyst Firm’s 2010 “Magic Quadrant…” and make up your own mind about this market positioning.
For me, this was an interesting passage:
According to Gartner enterprise marketing management “encompasses the business strategies, process automation and technologies required to effectively operate a marketing department, align resources, execute customer-centric strategies and improve marketing performance. This includes functionality for campaign management, lead management, MRM, loyalty management, event management, industry-specific functionality, marketing performance management and analytics.”
Frankenstats?
Stephen E Arnold, October 21, 2010
Upgrade SharePoint, Know the Cost Maybe
October 20, 2010
A reader sent me a link to “Announcing the SharePoint 2010 Price Calculator, a Free Tool to Estimate SharePoint 2010 Licensing Costs.” If you are have a Microsoft logo tattooed on your arm, you will need this calculator. Bamboo Solutions’ engineers have created a tool that makes it possible to estimated the licensing costs for SharePoint or a SharePoint upgrade. Of particular interest to me was this passage:
Of particular note for existing SharePoint customers is that there have been a few changes to the license types available with SharePoint 2010 from the WSS/MOSS model of 2007. Of the three license types available for SharePoint 2010 (defined by Microsoft as Foundation, Standard, and Enterprise), here’s the quick ‘n’ dirty lowdown: Foundation is a free download, though companies using it must be properly licensed for Microsoft SharePoint Server; Standard and Enterprise both require the purchase of SharePoint Server 2010 and licensing of the requisite feature set; the Enterprise CAL is additive (i.e., you must already have the Standard CAL), and the Enterprise license also provides the opportunity to add on a license for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. Microsoft makes available a handy feature-comparison list between the three license types, allowing you to compare at a glance just which features are available (or unavailable, as the case may be) with each license type.
Several observations.
First, the calculator will provide “rough cut” numbers. I have heard that Microsoft has been increasingly aggressive in its pricing when Alfresco has been under consideration.
Second, Microsoft’s own pricing approach continues to confuse me. The notion of client access licenses and bundles is difficult for a goose to deconstruct.
Third, the inclusion of the Fast ESP technology makes pricing particularly difficult. The reason is that the Fast technology must be tailored, tuned, and configured. In most cases, this work requires patience, engineering expertise, and a solid knowledge of the “dark side” of precision and recall.
I recommend the pricing calculator. I would use the numbers as part of a negotiation process. You may find other uses for the tool. Whatever happened to a basic price list? Access the Bamboo widget gizmo here.
Stephen E Arnold, October 20, 2010
Freebie
Hadoop and Business Intelligence
October 20, 2010
InfoWorld’s Data Explosion Web page ran a destroy “Hadoop Pitched for Business Intelligence.” The Hadoop World 2010 conference was a big deal. I spoke with a start up company’s senior business development manager on his way to the event. What surprised me was this passage in the InfoWorld story:
Hadoop offers a unique tool in some circumstances, said Curt Monash of Monash Research. “Hadoop is a great tool for organizing and condensing large amounts of data before it is put into a relational database,” he said. It is also a good tool for companies to analyze relationships between people or things, a practice often known as “social graph analysis,” Monash said. “Traditional relational databases have a difficult time with this, because each hop along the graph exponentially increases the amount of work that needs to be done,” he said. But there are tradeoffs with the technology. For one, you may not want to use it for real time data analysis. Cornelius admits Hadoop has latency issues. Because of its distributed nature, Hadoop is not as fast as other BI systems. But, Cornelius and others argue that Hadoop should not be considered as an alternative to a transactional database system or a data warehouse, but rather something that can do tasks that these technologies would struggle to execute. “It’s not a database. It’s a different kind of data storage and analytics platform. If you have a relational database problem, you should go buy Oracle or DB2,” agreed Mike Olson, Cloudera CEO. To better pursue the BI market, Cloudera has forged partnerships with Pentaho and data warehouse provider Teradata.
I suppose in the interest of balance, InfoWorld has to point out the flaws of Hadoop. The only problem, in my opinion, is that there are firms which have been able to use Hadoop, deliver low latency functionality, and push into territory where once the proprietary vendors ruled.
The reality of open source software is that it is available, it works, and is improving. The “problems” are not those of Hadoop. Plenty of commercial solutions have latency problems and the licensee cannot make fixes or work arounds due to licensing restrictions.
What’s this mean? Once again, the received wisdom overlooks the key strategic flaw in traditional solutions from Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. The fact is that Hadoop-type software offers a path forward, not a path to the lock in of the past. Just my opinion. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, October 20, 2010
Freebie
Attensity Scans Media for High Value Information
October 20, 2010
Every customer opinion and voice matters. In fact the comments, chats, and conversations scattered all over the Internet in the form of unstructured text are pieces of information that can be converted into useful metrics, proving valuable to any company or organization. Attensity, the leader in Customer Experience Management software applications made a press release “Attensity Announces Respond for Social Media,” asserting its new offering does this task, and together with Attensity360, “allows organizations to better listen, analyze, relate, and act on customer conversations.”
“Organizations seeking a marketing edge must digest, interpret, and assess huge volumes of user-generated content (UGC) from social media sites,” reports the PR, and stresses the need to “analyze and classify them using advanced semantic technologies to identify what is actionable,” and route them to appropriate departments for response. We think listening that carefully to the customers could be the best thing happening to any company.
Our view is that scanning open source content is a very crowded sector. Predictive analytics and other next generation functions will be required to allow a company to leapfrog the pack.
Harleena Singh, October 20, 2010
Freebie
The New IntelStream Podcast Series
October 20, 2010
ArnoldIT.com and Land SDS have teamed up for a new podcast series. IntelStream will discuss important news in business intelligence where professionals and technology intersect. The podcast, which is now available for download, features Dr. Tyra Oldham, an expert in operations and information management.
Dr. Tyra Oldham, featured expert on the Intel Stream podcast. Her Web site is at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, publisher of Beyond Search. His Web site is at this link.
Also appearing on the program is Stephen E Arnold, publisher of the Beyond Search Web log. The program is available from the ArnoldIT.com podcast page at http://arnoldit.com/podcasts/. Dr. Oldham and Mr. Arnold agree on the importance of information, but the two colleagues disagree on specific issues related to policy and implementation. The purpose of the program is to address topics that are important to business professionals in commercial, not for profit, and governmental entities. The specific subjects discussed are those which are often overlooked by traditional media.
One of the basic premises of the IntelStream podcast is to explore different sides of an issue. One thing is certain when Dr. Oldham and Mr. Arnold engage in a discussion, no holds are barred. Each of these professionals articulates a viewpoint so you can get a sense of how complex issues can affect business and policy decisions when business intelligence systems and methods are in use.
Intel Stream is business intelligence without marketing lipstick.
Stuart Schram IV, October 20, 2010
Freebie
Doctor Google, Emergency
October 20, 2010
I don’t know much, if anything, about the fancy electronic medical information world. I do know that when I go for my annual check up at the veterinarian, I get a big folder stuffed with documents. I think this goose’s medical file is going to need wheels in 2011.
I think my doc is pretty typical of most medical professionals in rural Kentucky. There are computers for scheduling and billing. We can’t overlook billing. But the notion of moving decades of data to a cloud service seems to be far in the future. My hunch is that the US government wants that future to arrive quickly, maybe in the next two or three years. However, there is the problem of money or the lack of it.
“What If Google Stored All Our Medical Records?” caught my attention. The article runs down some of the problems with the brave new world of digital instances of medical information. If you care about health data and have an interest in Google, you may find the write up suggesting that the Google may not be the ideal place to park the data. The article then references Facebook. Now that’s a place to store medical information.
I think I agree with Monday Note. We have a problem, but right now there seems to be no easy solution.
This goose’s view is that one must not overlook Microsoft. That’s another outfit that has ideas about cracking the digital medical information code. Out of sight and out of mind are some companies that avoid publicity as they stand in the river of medical information flowing around the US of A.
I like this write up, and it raises some interesting questions, including:
- What companies are in a position to deal with digital health information?
- What is the US government doing to manage these data?
- How can US citizens access their medical information in the event a doc’s office stuffed with paper burns in a weekend conflagration?
- Who will control cloud utilities’ use of medical information?
I don’t have any answers, but I still have that big folder when I hit the veterinarian’s office.
Stephen E Arnold, October 20, 2010
Freebie unlike health care
Endeca Beats Other Search Vendors to Finish Line
October 19, 2010
“Why Finish Line ran with Unbound Commerce for Mobile” reported that Endeca beat other eCommerce search vendors for a juicy retail job. The story said:
By choosing Unbound Commerce, which offered pre-integrations with these applications, the retailer was able to get its mobile site, m.finishline.com, up and running in six weeks from the date it signed on with Unbound…
That’s the good news. The story added:
Although the mobile site hasn’t yet produced the high conversion rate that Finish Line had expected, it has been effective at driving significant volumes of visitors to its e-commerce site and stores…
For more information about Endeca, navigate to www.endeca.com.
Stephen E Arnold, October 19, 2010
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