Considerations before SharePoint Migration
May 30, 2012
The world of enterprise is now humming with news of migration – migration to the upcoming SharePoint 2013 release and also the currently available SharePoint Online. Writer Steven Pogrebivsky on CMS Wire gives his take in, “4 Considerations for Migrating to Office 365 and SharePoint Online.”
Pogrebivsky tackles the first, perhaps most important step, deciding what needs to move:
Chances are your content is not organized well, or tagged appropriately, so what’s the point moving it as is and having a big grey cloud? It doesn’t make sense. What makes sense is to carefully plan what content you really need to move, how it’s going to be used and by whom. Once you’ve done that, then work on your SharePoint Information Architecture. Plan your content types, metadata and keywords. If you are going to make the move to the cloud, move only the content you need and migrate it right from the start.
The author goes on to discuss security issues and having a proper backup system in place. These are all valid considerations. However, choosing a smart third party solution could mean that an organization does not have to address these challenges independently. We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Mindbreeze offers an entire suite of solutions, centering around Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise understands you, or more precisely understands exactly what the most important information is for you at any given moment. It’s a center of excellence and simultaneously your personal assistant for all questions. The information pairing technology brings enterprise and Cloud together.
Additional offerings from Mindbreeze surround the central product and offer features such as Connectors to other solutions. The Mindbreeze suite is now fully mobile and security is guaranteed based on the highest EU standards. Explore the Mindbreeze solutions for yourself and see how it can improve or supplant your next migration.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
WCC Licenses System to Estonia. Enjoy the Cuisine on Your Trip.
May 30, 2012
The Republic of Estonia got on the smart search grid with a new traveler management system utilizing the technology of WCC according to WCC Delivers Europe’s First Automated Traveler Management System for Estonia’s E-Border. The new system will be utilized to ensure for safer air travel. It will process passenger information along with passenger name record data in advance against pre-determined criteria.
Ken-Marti Vaher, Minister of the Interior of the Republic of Estonia stated:
“We feel confident in choosing WCC for this vital work; WCC has demonstrated that it is a very serious partner, with the sole objective of helping Estonia secure the Nation’s borders.”
Peter Went, CEO of WCC commented:
“WCC is pleased to support the Ministry of the Interior of Estonia in this important effort to secure its borders. With our partner, Raytheon, we have deployed a system that will substantially reduce risk while minimizing inconvenience for travelers.”
WCC is a high-end software company that specializes in smart search and match technology utilizing intelligent data for accurate results. WCC utilizes Elise software which goes beyond traditional search criteria and allows for customization per client for specific results to fit individual needs.
Estonia is known for their black bread and homemade jams, jellies and pickles. Now, WCC is helping to ensure you can safely travel there to enjoy some of their delightful cuisine. Estonian country cooking just sounds yummy!
Jennifer Shockley, May 30, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Inforbix to Spark Innovation at Solid Edge University 2012
May 30, 2012
Those in the data management industry wishing to stay up-to-date on innovation and technology are encouraged to attend Siemens’ Solid Edge University, an annual event showcasing the best of the best and tomorrow’s leaders in all things analytics. This year, as announced in the Virtual Strategy article, “Inforbix to attend Solid Edge University 2012” up and coming data management star, Inforbix, will be presenting.
The article explains of what makes Inforbix unique and worth paying attention to:
“Inforbix can access product data within CAD, PDM, and PLM systems and make it available in meaningful ways to CAD and non-CAD users. All Inforbix apps utilize product data semantics technology that automatically infer relationships between disparate sources of data. For example, Inforbix can semantically connect or link SolidEdge CAD assemblies with a related Excel or PDF file containing a BOM table stored on a file server in another department.”
Any enterprise, regardless of size, finding themselves in over their head with data should consider contacting Inforbix for the latest in data management solutions. As Inforbix describes its services, they “(integrate) cloud solutions for manufacturing companies that tackle everyday tasks such as finding, reusing, and sharing product data without the overhead of traditional data management systems.” We are glad to see Inforbix presenting at the Siemens event and hope that their ingenuity sparks innovation in those attending.
Catherine Lamsfuss, May 30, 2012
A Moment of Clarity in the Big Data Hype Noise
May 30, 2012
Which is a more beneficial tool to utilize in business, algorithms or big data? Both are useful, but when put to a test there was a clear winner. You might be surprised by the answers in the article Data Is More Important Than Algorithms.
Netflix offered to pay a million dollars in 2006 to whoever could improve their recommendation system by at least 10%. A year passed and a team improved their system by 8.43%. The company also provided the source code of algorithms utilized. After further evaluation, Netflix decided not to use the codes based on the effort necessary to evolve the code into their production environment.
Their reasoning was simple;
“Algorithms are certainly important but they only provide incremental value on your existing business model. They are very difficult to innovate and way more expensive to implement.”
“Most importantly, you should focus on your changing business — disruption and rapidly changing customer behavior — and data and not on algorithms. One of the promises of Big Data is to leave no data source behind. Your data is your business and your business is your data. Don’t lose sight of it.”
It is ironic that Netflix basically paid a high price for nothing in the end. However they did a service by proving big data to be the most beneficial tool. Netflix paid a million to allow a moment of clarity in the big data hype noise.
Jennifer Shockley, May 30, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
SLI Systems Introduces a Quick View Function
May 30, 2012
The SLI Systems blog recently reported on a new window function for retail websites in the article, “Quick View Windows Evolve to Satisfy Curious Shoppers.”
According to the article, Quick View window is still a rare feature on many online retail sites, however it is gaining popularity. The way it works is Quick View buttons will appear once a shopper hovers over an item on search or category pages. They hover over product images on search or category pages. When they click, a pop-up windows appears that displays more details about that product.
The article states:
“The Quick View window is designed to improve the online shopping experience by making it faster for customers to shop. Anything to reduce the number of clicks to get an item into the cart is generally a good thing. If a Quick View window can satisfy a curious shopper, it will save them a full page load of the product detail page and the click of a back button and another page load to return to their search results. This can save a bunch of time and actually foster more curiosity in customers.”
Some shoppers find the process to be quite cumbersome, since they have to hover over a product for the button to appear, but retailers have tried a variety of different solutions to aid these issues. One solution has been to place the Quick View button below the product image so that it is always visible.
Regardless of the different approaches, adding a quick view button to any online retail website is bound to ensure more informed customers and higher sales.
Jasmine Ashton, May 30, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Low Profile Thetus Knows How to Party
May 30, 2012
Many companies plan work retreats for their employees as a way to get outside the office environment and refocus on the big picture. Thetus Corporation, a semantic technology developer, takes this concept seriously, according to their recent blog post “Thetus Takes on Pacific City for the 2012 Offsite.”
According to post, every year Thetus takes a different company retreat, called a “Thetus Offsite”, to a location within several hours of its downtown Portland office. This year they went to the coastal town of Pacific City.
The article states:
“These group meetings allow us to break away from our normal teams and collaborate with coworkers that we don’t interact with on a daily basis. We’ve found this helps employees see the whole process of product creation and look at our company and product from a different perspective. The offsite is a time for employees to share their ideas, from a new meeting system to the need for a hammock room in the office. It’s also a time to learn more about your coworkers.”
I think more companies should follow Thetus’s example and take the time to step outside of the regular 9 to 5 office environment to foster creativity and fun.
Jasmine Ashton, May 30, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Lucid Imagination Previews Solr 4
May 30, 2012
With the first alpha release of Solr 4 promised to us soon, Lucid Imagination posts a “Solr 4 Preview: SolrCloud, NoSQL, and More.” Solr 4 is full of features that enhance existing Solr applications. It also paves the way for new applications by further muddying the distinction between full text search and NoSQL.
Solr Cloud is the code name for the largest set of features. These promise easy scalability to Solr as well as distributed indexing to boost elements such as real time-get, optimistic locking, and durable updates.
Solr 4 incorporates Apache‘s robust distributed coordination project ZooKeeper. This tool contains the Solr configuration as well as cluster meta-data such as hosts, collections, shards, and replicas. The post describes how distributed coordination works in Solr 4:
“When a new node is brought up, it will automatically be assigned a role such as becoming an additional replica for a shard. A bounced node can do a quick ‘peer sync’ by exchanging updates with its peers in order to bring itself back up to date. New nodes, or those that have been down too long, recover by replicating the whole index of a peer while concurrently buffering any new updates.
“An update can be sent to any node in the cluster, and it’s automatically forwarded to the correct node and immediately replicated to a number of other nodes to enable fault tolerance, high availability, and query scalability. Likewise, queries may be sent to any node in a cluster and they will automatically be routed to the correct nodes and load balanced across replicas.”
Solr 4 is packed with other new features, like pivot faceting, pseudo-fields, and a spell checker that can work from the main index to name just a few. See the write up for more.
Lucid Imagination is the commercial company for Lucene and its search server Solr. The company crafts robust scalable search solutions that make the most of the open source technology. Lucid prides itself on making open source search accessible and easy to learn for clients worldwide, many of which are industry heavyweights. These search gurus recently moved to new digs in Redwood City, CA.
Cynthia Murrell, May 30, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Pingar Analyzes Tweets: Polyspot Integrates Them
May 29, 2012
Pingar set themselves up with a challenge, described in their blog post, “Making Sense of Conversations on Twitter: Lessons Learned.” The business intelligence company wanted to test themselves with some of the most nebulous unstructured data out there—data from social sites like Facebook and Twitter and, an added test, organizations that stash their data behind a firewall. They share challenges and lessons from the project in their post. The write up describes part of the process:
“First, we cleaned the tweets by removing all the duplicates, as thousands of re-tweets and spam tweets can negatively affect the results. From each tweet we removed URLs, hashtags, user names and stopwords such as RT, via, lol, lmao, while keeping the original copy for display later. Once all the tweets are cleaned and categorized into dates and sentiments, we applied the Pingar API Entity Extraction method to determine the keywords for the two sets of positive and negative tweets. The API returned two lists of keywords along with the keyword scores. Sometimes the same keyword appeared in both positive and negative list. In this case, we removed the keyword with the lower score from one of the lists.”
Naturally, though, context free content remains a challenge. A demo of the Twitter results is available here.
Pingar is headquartered in New Zealand with offices in the US, Hong Kong, India, the UK. Their roots are in research, and the company maintains ties with key universities, including the University of Waikato and the University of Swansea. Pingar API launched in 2011; the software is platform agnostic, and currently supports English and Chinese with more languages on the way.
Our question, “When you have tweets, then what?” The answer is to use Polyspot’s insight enabled infrastructure to make the data immediately accessible to users wordwide.
Cynthia Murrell, May 29, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Kyield Aims to Pilot a Big Data BI Revolution
May 29, 2012
Kyield has introduced a newly patented semantic enterprise platform. According to the article, Kyield Announces Pilot Program for Advanced Analytics and Big Data with New Revolutionary BI Platform their inviting others to hop in the co-pilot’s seat and collaborate on the take-off.
Mark Montgomery, Founder and CEO of Kyield stated:
“We are inviting well-matched organizations to collaborate with us in piloting our breakthrough system to bring a higher level of performance to the information workplace. In addition to the significant competitive advantage exclusive to our pilot program, we are offering attractive long-term incentives free from lock-in, maintenance fees, and high service costs traditionally associated with the enterprise software industry.”
Kyield was once a consulting firm but evolved into a small private lab founded by Mark Montgomery in 1995. Initially they dealt with e-commerce, but grew their focus into advanced technology with specific focus on knowledge systems, which they are known for today.
The company executed a CTO search with strong response in 2011, following up with a call for collaborative customers in enterprise prototype technology. In early 2012 the Forrester report recognized Kyield in ‘The Future Of BI’, the Top 10 Business Intelligence Predictions of 2012.
Their ground breaking artificial intelligence system will offer an almost holistic architecture. The plan is to extend advanced business intelligence and predictive analytics to all aspects of an organization utilizing an adaptive approach to data optimization. Kyield is in the driver’s seat for the big data BI revolution, and their graciously accepting co-pilots.
Jennifer Shockley, May 29, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Enterprise Content Management, Beyond SharePoint
May 29, 2012
Going beyond search, SharePoint 2010 is also capable of enterprise content management (ECM). Content management on any platform requires quite a bit of intentionality and planning, a task that can be daunting for any content management specialist. Jennifer Mason at CMS Wire gives users something to consider in, “SharePoint 2010: Enterprise Content Management for the Masses.”
Because there are so many pieces to consider, the best advice that can be given about getting started with the concept of records management is to start by planning. Before you ever look at the technology, you should work within your organization to ensure that you have a good set of requirements and an understanding of the overall management strategy. Once that is created, you can look at the various components required (such as Content Types and Metadata) and plan for the various elements you will need.
As Mason walks readers through various ECM features and how to use them, the advice is valuable. However, many users will benefit from a content management system that is more intuitive, requiring less customization. These smaller more nimble organizations should consider Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise.
Highly efficient enterprise search and specific connectors link together data sources in companies and organizations. They integrate the knowledge of different sections of a company into a uniform, linked whole. The award-winning high-tech product is your personal assistant. 24/7, 365 days a year. Regardless of which data you are looking for and with which system you are working with – Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise answers your questions with pinpoint accuracy.
Enterprise is not the only offering available from Mindbreeze, with an entire suite of solutions designed to connect the information needs of your entire organization. Fabasoft Mindbreeze is a leader in third party enterprise search solutions – see what it can do for your information needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 29, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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