Elasticsearch Appeals to Its Core Audience with New Move
April 9, 2014
The open source search wunderkind, Elasticsearch (www.elasticsearch.org) is in the news again. In the crowdsourcing spirit that has helped propel it to the top of many lists, it is sharing more insider information as we learned in the post, “Elasticsearch: The definitive Guide.” http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/elasticsearch-definitive-guide/ The book helps users of all stripes better understand the engine.
Our favorite part was how the guide is aimed at a particular audience:
“We expect you to have some programming background and, although not required, it would help to have used SQL and have some database experience. We explain concepts from first principles, helping novices to gain a sure footing in the complex world of search.”
There is no watering-down here to appeal to everyone. We like that attitude. The firm has never been one to pull punches regarding tough topics. Just recently they made more headlines by improving their ability to perform log analysis. http://betanews.com/2014/03/20/elasticsearch-makes-log-analysis-faster-and-simpler/ Most search engines would avoid this topic and leave it for programmers, but Elasticsearch understands its audience and gives them tricky tools to play with. We love the things they are doing and eagerly await their next move on the search engine chess board.
Patrick Roland, April 09, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Bloomberg Overcomes Its Own Irrelevance
April 9, 2014
It’s easy to overlook the dinosaurs of another era, but just as Jurassic Park taught us, old things can still be fierce. Case in point came from a recent Matt Turck article, “Can the Bloomberg Terminal be Toppled?” http://mattturck.com/2014/03/19/can-the-bloomberg-terminal-be-toppled/ The answer isn’t as simple as you might imagine.
The article starts off by mentioning the obvious uphill battle Bloomberg (www.bloomberg.com ) is fighting:
“[A]t a time of accelerating “unbundling” across many industries, including financial services, the Bloomberg terminal is the ultimate “bundling” play: one product, one price, which means that that the average user uses only a small percentage of the terminal’s 30,000+ functions. Yet, 320,000 people around the world pay about $20,000 a year to use it.”
But Turck, a former employee, goes on to extoll the true benefits of such an old fashioned model. He leaves us convinced, frankly. Changing formats isn’t as easy as every startup would have us believe. Bloomberg has the track record, which speaks volumes in this world. Just ask production giant, Unilever, who just launched a Bloomberg terminal specifically for marketers http://www.campaignasia.com/Article/373285,Unilever+activates+Bloomberg+Terminal+for+marketers+live+at+Mobile+World+Congress.aspx. That doesn’t strike us as the image of a sinking ship. Rather, it strikes us as the image of a ship that has been sailing so long and well that we doubt it will ever run aground. Good for them, we say.
Patrick Roland, April 09, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Highspot Earning Fans of Enterprise Search
April 9, 2014
Enterprise search is like the weather, it never stays the same for very long. Case in point, upstart Highspot (www.highspot.com) making some serious waves regarding money producing content. We learned more from a recent eWeek story, “Highspot Brings Machine Learning to the Enterprise.” http://www.eweek.com/cloud/highspot-brings-machine-learning-to-enterprise-search.html/
According to the article, which quotes the company’s CEO, Robert Wahbe:
“’We spent a ton of time and money producing content, and what came clear to me was that people are not able to find the content they are looking for when they need it,’ Wahbe told eWEEK. Wahbe cited a Forrester study that says there is a knowledge gap where the failure rate for not finding the information users are looking for is 56 percent, while the process of looking for the information wastes up to 12 percent of users’ time.”
Clearly, they have their head on straight. Thankfully, we are not the only ones noticing. No less than PC World praised Highspot recently http://www.pcworld.com/article/2109160/meet-highspot-a-service-to-find-all-the-knowledge-that-slips-through-the-cracks.html raving about how the company helps find all the meaty data that slips through the cracks for most people. We are big fans and the world seems to be catching on that enterprise search has a new high water mark with Highspot.
Patrick Roland, April 09, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Avoiding SharePoint Governance Mistakes
April 9, 2014
SharePoint governance is a big topic for most organizations. A panel of experts from Avanade, HiSoftware, Portal Solutions and Metalogix tackled the issue in a recent webinar. CMS Wire gives all the details in their article, “How to Avoid SharePoint Governance Mistakes.”
The author writes:
“If you’re wondering what your SharePoint governance plan should look like, look around you. It should probably look a lot like your organization.
There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach, even if you’re in an highly regulated industry like healthcare of financial services that imposes strict regulations on information sharing.”
Stephen E. Arnold knows all to well the difficulty surrounding SharePoint governance. He is a longtime search expert, and often covers SharePoint issues on his Web site ArnoldIT.com. Webinars, training, and services like ArnoldIT.com are important resources for enterprise managers as they seek to balance the needs of their organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 9, 2014
Apple Takes Action to Improve Map Search
April 8, 2014
I don’t have an iPhone. I do have an ageing Mac notebook. It is reasonably reliable, and I have learned to save my high value content to another storage device. When I need to locate a document, I use more robust and less flakey information retrieval tools to retrieve my information.
I have had to help a couple of people look for information using an iPhone. One notable example was locating Cuba Libre restaurant in Washington, DC. A colleague and I were standing in front of Cuba Libre and we wanted to figure out whether to turn left or right to reach a destination. No luck. The restaurant was not findable.
In my opinion, not only was the Apple map search system inadequate, the system did not acknowledge the fungible existence of the restaurant in which I had eaten a pretty good sandwich.
When I read “Amazon A9s VP of Search Heads to Apple to Fix Up Maps Search,” it dawned on me that Apple seems to have taken action to fix at least one of its search systems. The other thought I had is that Apple, like many other big names, is likely to take a look at open source search technology.
I wonder if Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Oracle will be able to convince Apple to go with Autonomy or Watson or Endeca technology. Landing Apple would be a plus for these three enterprise search vendors.
A question: What happens if Apple embraces a hot open source search solution from an outfit like Elasticsearch or Searchdaimon?
The one striction associated with this alleged personnel shift is that I don’t think that Amazon’s search systems are helpful to me when I run a query. I struggle to NOT out books that are not yet available, and I have a very tough time locating some of Amazon’s lists. But in today’s findability swamp, Apple has to begin its long journey with a single step.
Is it the right one?
Interesting to think about I believe.
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2014
Content Management: A $12 Billion Market in 2019!
April 8, 2014
Now I enjoy crazy numbers. I recall that someone at Yahoo allegedly said to a New York Times reporter:
Yahoo estimates that it would cost $300 million to build a search service from scratch. [See New York Times, July 10, 2008, page C5) My story about this estimate is at http://wp.me/pf6p2-e9.]
Crazy number. Three hundred million would not buy a Web search system in 2008. Today it may cover the cost of jet fuel for Google’s fleet of airplanes.
But crazy numbers get traction and create “real news.”
I read “Enterprise Content Management Market worth $12.32 Billion by 2019.” Now that is an interesting estimate. The calculation surprised me for three reasons:
- The outfit promulgating the good “news” is selling a report, presumably to those in the content management sector who need reassurance.
- There was no mention of WordPress- and SquareSpace-type outfits, which seem to be moving ahead of the pack of name brand vendors.
- The assumption that I actually know what content management or CMS means.
Like search, the CMS vendors have been looking for a way to become more relevant. The implementations of Broadvision, Documentum, Interwoven, Vignette, and other well known CMS systems have had some successes and failures.
The “real” news about this report mentions some aspects of CMS that are similar to the scope creep visible in enterprise search. Here are some examples of what CMS embraces:
enterprise document management, enterprise document imaging and capture, enterprise web content management, enterprise records management, enterprise document collaboration, enterprise digital rights management, content analytics, rich media management, advanced case management, enterprise document output management, enterprise workflow management, and other solutions; by type of emerging applications: social content management, mobile content management, big data management, and cloud content management; by type of deployments: hosted and on-premises; by verticals: academia and education, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), consumer goods and retail, energy and power, government and defense, life science and healthcare, manufacturing, media and entertainment, telecom and IT, transportation, tourism, and hospitality, and other verticals; and by regions: North America (NA), Asia Pacific including Japan (APAC), Europe (EU), Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Latin America (LA).
This list is not helpful to me. I think the collection of jargon, buzzwords, and impressive sounding concepts is designed for Web indexing systems and to give a marginalized type of software some strap on muscles.
If information about the magnitude of the CMS market requires this type of verbal legerdemain, how credible is the report, the estimate, and maybe content management itself?
My personal view is that the buzzword content management, like knowledge management, is tough to define and may ultimately lack relevance in today’s business environment. The notion that a specious estimate adds value to those laboring in the CMS sector is amusing. The puffery, apologias, and jargon generated by those trying to sell systems that “manage” content causes me to chortle. Estimates of the volume of Big Data seem to fly in the face of “content management.” Even Google’s robots are struggling to keep pace with content proliferation based on my test queries.
At a time when organizations struggle to figure out what information is in their possession, CMS seems to have failed in its “mission”: Managing content.
CMS’ weakness is the notion of management itself. Since “management” is tough to define, content management sounds like a discipline cooked up by MBA hopefuls in an innovation study group.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2014
Guidance to Sidestep Big Data Failure
April 8, 2014
The article titled The Metrics Missteps to Fix in 2014 on iMedia Connection offers tips to handle the revolution in marketing that has accompanied the big data era. The advice is aimed at marketers unable to keep up with the technology and all it has to offer. Clues such as only present necessary information and double-check your graphs for clarity may seem obvious enough, but the article offers these generic-sounding tips with a clear understanding of where marketers are generally failing. The article states,
“As data progresses and becomes more sophisticated, it is obvious there will be tons more to learn about the field. This means that it will be necessary to stay on the cutting edge, do your research, and constantly evaluate the quality of your information and reporting. It will often be a hard task, but those who dream of being extremely effective marketers will need to do it.”
There is both encouragement and insight to be found in this article, such as the tip headed “Think big…sample size” which goes on to explain that the most effective representation will be the largest collection of data. Both commitment and focus are necessary for a company to maintain a successful use of data.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 08, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Guide to the Upgrades Offered in Altova’s Release 2 of Version 2014
April 8, 2014
The Altova blog article titled Altova’s Latest Release Sets the Performance Bar Even Higher promotes Release 2 of Altova MissionKit desktop developer. The article dives into the latest upgrades, including the XSL Speed Optimizer, which according to the chart offered, is 7.5% faster. The article explains how this works,
“This new technology is a ground breaking approach to speeding up XSLT transformations, providing tremendous increases in throughput with no analysis required by the developer to determine exactly which XSLT or XPath expressions are causing bottlenecks. The XSL Speed Optimizer analyzes an XSLT transformation and derives an optimization strategy that can be saved within the stylesheet as processing instructions (PI). Subsequent transformations with the optimized stylesheet using either XMLSpy or RaptorXML will be executed faster using those optimization hints.”
By skipping the step of classifying and remedying bottlenecks, the XSL Speed Optimizer enables designers to zoom in on the transformation logic of their stylesheets. Other upgrades included in the new release are additional support for XSLT, XPath, and XQuery 3.0, new Altova extension functions, improved data mapping options and bulk insert for databases. Read the full article for more information on these exciting new enhancements. This new release is available for download through the Altova Download Center.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 08, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
HP Autonomy Lands WestJet
April 8, 2014
The article titled WestJet’s Global Web Presence Takes Off With HP Autonomy on Autonomy News announces the decision of Canadian airline WestJet to use HP Autonomy’s Marketing Optimization suite to manage their online presence. HP Autonomy produces globally recognized information management and analytics technology. Due to an ever-increasing volume of customers, WestJet decided to drop their current platform and adopt HP’s for its reputation of excellent customer service, ease of use, as well as the “open, scalable nature of HP’s suite after looking into several possible vendors. The article states,
“WestJet’s award-winning culture of care is all about providing a great experience for our guests,” said Manoj Jasra, digital director, WestJet. “HP Autonomy’s Web Experience Management solution will enable us to extend this terrific guest experience to the marketing portions of our digital properties, by enabling our team to quickly deliver dynamic and helpful content, promotions, and special offers to our guests.”
HP general manager Rafiq Mohammadi added that HP is also glad at the opportunity to work with WestJet in providing guidance as the airline upgrades its web presence. As Canada’s most-preferred airline, offering 120 destinations in over 20 countries, it is no surprise that HP Autonomy is thrilled at their new client.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 08, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint May Prove Its Worth
April 8, 2014
SharePoint has long been on the defense about proving its worth, even though it is unrivaled when it comes to controlling the lion’s share of the enterprise market. A new report might make Microsoft feel a little more comfortable about its position, and CMS Wire covers the details in the article, “SharePoint: A ‘Formidable Enterprise Collaboration Platform.’”
The article begins:
“Everyone knows SharePoint has had problems. However, the Radicati Group just released a report that contains words new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella must be more than happy to hear. According to the Microsoft SharePoint Market Analysis, 2014-2018, edited by Sara Radicati, Microsoft ironed out the wrinkles in the 2013 edition and now offers a powerful enterprise collaboration platform for business users.”
The article goes on to describe a few of the shortcomings that SharePoint has yet to overcome. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and often turns his expertise to the subject of SharePoint. He delivers content through his Web service, ArnoldIT.com. He has found that there is still progress to be made, but SharePoint 2013 went a long way toward improving the user experience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 8, 2014
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