Records Management and Humor: An Odd Couple
October 27, 2011
Records management is a dry topic, not exactly humorless but close. We must admit that one of the goslings chuckles when he hears the phrase “destroy by date.” I just go up in ARMA.
We learned that there was some levity with regard to records management at the recent Legal Information Technology Conference, part of the wider ARMA conference in D.C., it was suddenly newsworthy comedy.
Law Technology News’ article, “Records Management as Stand-Up Comedy” shares a few quips from the conference:
Bryn Bowen, director of records information management at Greenberg Traurig, on establishing information governance in large firms: ‘We are sort of changing the tires while moving the truck.
Stacie Capshaw, associate director of records management at Kirkland & Ellis, said she was able to accomplish records management because her firm is ‘a loose federation of entrepreneurs.’
Rudy Moliere, director of information governance and records management at White & Case, observed that records management is ‘not at all like herding cats — you can see cats.’”
Kudos to those in records management for attempting a form of humor—those legal record managers can be a tough crowd. Did you hear the one about leaving lunch in a banker’s box three years ago?
Andrea Hayden, October 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Future of Search Not
October 27, 2011
We received an email from one of my one or two readers pointing me to “The Future of Search” by Martin Belam at Enterprise Search Europe. Good points but in my opinion, the functions describe some world which is hostile to search dinosaurs. Maybe the hip crowd is into this particular “expert’s” vision of search. I am not.
In the hyperlinked write up, the author pointed out three “items” which appear to make clear a topic I find quite unclear. My reaction was that these items do not capture search either of the moment or some “to be” world where content management experts, governance specialists, and “real” journalists look for information. The items described a future that underscores a conceptual problems in thinking about information retrieval.
There was the obligatory reference to UX, Microsoft’s horrible compression of the phrase “user experience.” In my parlance, this is the kindergarten, razzle dazzle interface of video games. Angry Birds is great for someone who needs distraction. For search, UX is an issue. The flashy interface may disguise flawed, incomplete, or manipulated result sets. Eye candy is not information by default. Confusing paint with the mechanical soundness of the vehicle may be a problem for some people.
There was acknowledgment that search is going mobile. What is important about mobile is that the user is pulled into what I call “shortcut land.” Forget the codes that whisk one to a Web page. The notion of predictive search involves algorithms and engineers who determine thresholds for smart software. When systems do the thinking, will the Gen X and Gen Y folks make better decisions? Hard to say, but they will be in a more controlled and monitored decision environment. Happy there?
Finally, the future of search will involve touch. Frankly, I don’t want to search using “touch”. Google has already used its usage data to kill off Boolean logic. Without Boolean there are more opportunities to put ads in front of users who get a bigger, fuzzier result set. I want to craft a query and launch it against a corpus of content that has an editorial policy. I do not want to point at a facet. I want to obtain on point information in a “hands on” manner. I want to paw, not touch.
To sum up, if I read the article correctly, search is not just dead. Search has been forgotten. Even more interesting is that the discussion of search has little to do with the need for a person to locate unbiased information with precision and recall.
If this is the future of search, I want none of it. As one colleague quipped, “Don’t fail to miss it.”
Done.
Ken Toth, October 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint Search Best Practices
October 27, 2011
SharePoint search tips are of particular interest to us here at Beyond Search. We strive to sort the chafe from the wheat and sometimes turning to the source material is the best way to do that.
We noted a quite useful series of best practice articles from Microsoft’s own TechNet Web site. Navigate to “Best Practices for Search in SharePoint Server 2010.” The article explains the best methods for enterprise search and it applies to both SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Search Server 2010.
What we like about this article is that it outlines the best methods without beating around the bush. As with many SharePoint plans, there’s a simple to follow list:
- Plan the deployment
- Start with a well-configured infrastructure
- Manage access by using Windows security groups or by using role claims for forms-based authentication or authentication using a Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) security token
- Defragment the search database
- Monitor SQL Server latency
- Test the crawling and querying subsystems after you change any configuration or apply updates
- Review the antivirus policy.
Each step is given its own section with additional information that goes into further detail about how to deploy the ideas.
What we noted about this article is that it is an official Microsoft document.
We want to include our own best practice. When it comes to making findability brings smiles to SharePoint users’ faces, we rely on SurfRay Ontolica to deliver SharePoint 2010 search.
Whitney Grace, October 27, 2011
SurfRay
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:
Oracle Embraces Big Data
October 26, 2011
What search vendor has as many findability solutions as OpenText? Answer: Oracle.
It seems like Oracle finally peered all the way over the virtual white picket fence and caught a glance of HP’s newest splurge on big data, Vertica. Wired reported on this “keeping up with the Joneses” effect with their article, “Oracle Mimics HP with ‘Big Data’ Buy.”
Endeca brings a MDEX analytics engine with a vertical record database instead of classic tables to the table.
“The marketing materials go so far as to espouse MDEX’s value over classic relational databases — such as those offered by Oracle. This new weapon in the Oracle arsenal is designed to compete with such platforms as Hadoop — the open source distributed, number-crunching platform — and the analytics software offered by recent HP acquisition Autonomy, a Cambridge, UK-based company.”
Sounds good. Just one hitch. Endeca is one of those late 1990 search systems, not one of the whizzy NoSQL systems built to scale.
While the competition heats up, it seems that the real story may be what Oracle paid for Endeca’s customer list, its e-commerce technology, and its MBA-style sales approach.
Oracle’s Larry Ellison seems to be on to this in his recent roast of Autonomy. Of course, Autonomy is not really big data–it is multiple well-managed content processing technologies.
Although Oracle has taken pot shots at Hewlett Packard, now Oracle is replicating some of the HP organization’s strategy. HP’s entrance into big data and their latest move has been matched with Oracle’s chess moves.
Have both HP and Oracle lost sight of the fact that their spate of acquisitions may have more to do with one another than with the marketplace’s appetite to buy technology that is a wee bit old?
Megan Feil, October 26, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Hewlett Packard and Semantic Search
October 26, 2011
Semantic search is important trend but we did not automatically link Autonomy with semantic search. Hewlett-Packard owns Autonomy, and it sees more deeply into the Bayesian technology than we do, of course.
HP seems to see Autonomy as a semantic tool which can extract information from unstructured data. HP paid $10.3 billion for Autonomy and is rallying around the notion that unstructured information is a big money-maker.
We learn more about the trend in a MediaPost Blogs’ post, “Semantic Search and Raw Data On Rise”. The article stated:
“Search engines are also looking more toward semantic search. Colin Jeavons, Vertical Search Works president and CEO, said the company will launch mobile voice search for the iPhone and phones running Android operating system next week to support the company’s semantic search engine technology for computers and tablets…
Jeavons said publishers will have an option to support voice-activated mobile Web search. ‘We share the revenue with content producers, so they get paid for carrying it,’ he said. ‘Users also get a faster search experience when using a mobile device.’”
It isn’t just HP. The other search giants are into semantics as well. Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Lots of talk does not make the complex content processing systems semantic. Our opinion? Semantics are best kept under the covers and out of the hands of marketers. Semantic methods are a complement, not the final solution to search woes.
Andrea Hayden, October 26, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint 2010 Is Easy to Adopt for a Reason
October 26, 2011
Amidst the news of Forrester Research’s results of a SharePoint 2010 Adoption and Migration Trends, I thought it would beneficial to take another look at Search Technologies article, “Leading with Search: A SharePoint 2010 Implementation Strategy.”
First, a little bit about the survey: 510 IT decision makers involved with evaluating, specifying, or administering SharePoint 2010 were consulted about their experiences. The article reported:
On the IT side, 79 percent of respondents said that SharePoint is meeting their expectations, with 21 percent giving a negative reply. When asked if SharePoint had met business management expectations, 73 percent said “Yes,” while 27 percent said “No.”
According to Search Technologies article, it’s no wonder that SharePoint has such positive feedback. They are all about engaging their users. It is both transparent data migration and easy enterprise searching and browsing that lead to user’s motivation to adopt to this platform.
Research shows that it takes 21 days to form a habit. With all the perks of SharePoint, I wonder if it takes even that long for users to feel at ease with the adoption. We know that if a SharePoint licensee relies on Search Technologies for engineering support, the speed of adoption accelerates as does user satisfaction. For more information about Search Technologies, navigate to www.searchtechnologies.com.
Iain Fletcher, October 26, 2011
Search Technologies
Voice Search: Getting Siri-ly
October 26, 2011
There is more hostility in the next search interface wars, and this time it sounds vaguely similar to a gaggle of middle school girls badmouthing the one lucky kid who got the newest thing.
At the recent AllThingsD conference, Google’s head of Android, Andy Rubin, made some snide comments about Apple’s Siri interface. Rubin said there shouldn’t be a distinction between tablet apps and phone apps, and he also believes your phone shouldn’t be an assistant. It should be for communicating. He must have momentarily forgot about Android’s apps and Google’s voice searches. Microsoft’s Windows Phone president, Andy Lee, also criticized Siri, saying it “isn’t super useful” and that Windows Phone 7’s voice interactivity uses “the full power of the internet, rather than a certain subset.
Fast Company’s article, “Why Google And Microsoft Are Bad-Mouthing Apple’s Chatty Siri” tells us more about the new interface:
“One thing Siri does that may have both Google and Microsoft quaking in their boots is to act as a first sift “layer” for users trying to query the internet for information. When you speak to Siri the data gets whizzed off by Apple to its cloud servers, where the speech is processed and then interpreted–a process that, we imagine, involves trying to see if the query is answerable via a fact-based query to Wolfram Alpha… or a review-based query via Yelp…”
In my opinion, Google and Microsoft must be nervous. Maybe Siri could interfere with Google and Bing ad revenue? Siri is offering a very novel way of interacting with your device, a program that is just in its beta phase with plans to move to the iPad and the Mac. Looks like Google and Microsoft may be getting a bad rep for falling behind, and my advice is to leave the gossip for middle school and catch up.
Andrea Hayden, October 26, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: More Cheerleading for SharePoint Social Functions
October 26, 2011
Microsoft on Semantic Search
October 25, 2011
We were interested to learn that semantic search is alive and kicking. A helping hand may be needed, but semantic search is not on life support.
Microsoft is making baby steps toward more user-friendly services, particularly in the realm of semantic search. MSDN Library offers information and assistance for developers using Microsoft products and services. I found one reference article while browsing the site that I found particularly useful.
“Semantic Search (SQL Server)” is an write up which is still in its “preview” stage, so it is short and has a few empty links, but it provides quite a bit of insight and examples that are very useful for someone attempting to integrate Statistical Semantic Search in SQL Server databases. This process, we learn, extracts and indexes statistically relevant key phrases and uses these phrases to identify and index documents that are similar or related. A user queries these semantic indexes by using Transact-SQL rowset functions.
The document tells us:
Semantic search builds upon the existing full-text search feature in SQL Server, but enables new scenarios that extend beyond keyword searches. While full-text search lets you query the words in a document, semantic search lets you query the meaning of the document. Solutions that are now possible include automatic tag extraction, related content discovery, and hierarchical navigation across similar content. For example, you can query the index of key phrases to build the taxonomy for an organization, or for a corpus of documents.
The article goes on to explain various features of semantic search, such as finding key phrases in a document, finding similar or related documents, or even finding the key phrases that make documents similar or related. Add in storage, installation, indexing, and we have a good move in “how-to” for Microsoft. With Powerset, Fast Search, and Cognition Technologies, Microsoft should be one of the aces in semantic search.
Andrea Hayden, October 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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