SharePoint Revealed
September 23, 2015
Microsoft SharePoint. It brings smiles to the faces of the consultants and Certified Experts who can make the collection of disparate parts work like refurbished John Harrison clock.
I read “Microsoft SharePoint ECM Suite for Content Management.” The write up explains that SharePoint became available in 2001. The write up does not reference the NCompass Labs’ acqusition or other bits and pieces of the SharePoint story. That’s okay. It is 2015. Ancient history in terms of Internet time. Also, what is content management? Does it include audio, video, and digital images? What about binaries? What about data happily stored on the state of Michigan’s mainframes?
Jack Benny’s Maxwell reminds me of Fast Search’s 1998 approach to information access. With Fast Search inside, SharePoint delivers performance that is up to the Maxwell’s standards for speed, reliability, and engineering excellence.
The write up reveals that SharePoint evolved “gradually.” The most recent incarnation of the system includes a number of functions; specifically mentioned in the article, are:
- A cloud based service
- A foundation for collaboration and document sharing
- A server. I thought there were multiple servers. Guess not.
- A designer component for creating nifty looking user experiences. Isn’t Visual Studio or other programming tool required as well?
- Cloud storage. Isn’t this redundant?
- Search
I prefer a more modern approach to information access. The search systems I use are like a Kia Soul. The code often includes hamsters too.
Here’s what the write up says about search:
Microsoft FAST Search, which provides indexing and efficient search of content of all types.
I like the indexing and “efficient” description. The content of “all types” is interesting as well.
How well does Fast Search in its present incarnation handle audio and video? What about real time streams of social media like the Twitter fire hose? You get the idea. “All” is shorthand for “some” content.
I am not captivated by the whizzy features in SharePoint and its content management capabilities. I am not thrilled with building profiles of employees within an organization. I am pretty relaxed when it comes to collaboration. Phones work pretty well. Email is okay too. I work on documents alone and provide a version for authorized individuals to review. I need no big gun system necessary needed. Just a modern one.
What about Fast Search?
Let me highlight a few salient points:
- The product originated in Norway. You know where Trondheim is, right? Oslo? Of course. Great in the winter too. The idea burst from academia prior to 1998, when the company was officially set up. That makes the architecture an agile, youthful 17 years old.
- In 2008, Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for a company which was found wanting in its accountancy skills. After investigations and a legal proceeding, the company seems to have had revenues well below its reported $170 million in 2007. Until the HP Autonomy deal, this was a transaction that helped fuel the “search is a big payday” belief. At an estimated $60 million instead of $170, Microsoft paid about 20 times Fast Search’s 2007 earnings. After the legal eagles landed, the founder of Fast Search found himself on the wrong end of a court decision. Think lock up time.
- Fast Search is famous for me because its founder told me that he was abandoning Web search for the enterprise search market. Autonomy’s revenue seemed to be a number the founder thought was reachable. As time unspooled, the big pay day arrived for Google. Enterprise search did not work out in terms of Google scale numbers. Fast Search backed out of an ad model to pursue an academic vision of information access as the primary enterprise driver.
- The Fast Search solution which is part of SharePoint has breathed life into dozens of SharePoint search add ins. These range from taxonomy systems to clustering components to complete snap in replacements for the Fast Search components. Hundreds upon hundreds of consultants make their living implementing, improving, and customizing search and retrieval for SharePoint.
Net net: SharePoint has more than 150 million licensees. SharePoint is the new DOS for the enterprise. SharePoint is a consultant’s dream come true.
For me, I prefer simpler and more recent technology. That 17 year old approach seems more like Jack Benny’s Maxwell than a modern search Kia Soul.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2015
Baffled When Choosing Business Intelligence Analytics Tools?
September 23, 2015
Most of the professionals whom I know use one software package for most of their business intelligence needs. What do you use? SAS, SPSS, raw algorithms from Mertler’s and Vannatta’s Advanced and Multivariate Statistical Methods, Diffeo, Mathematica, or some other tool?
The answer, gentle reader, is Excel. Yep, the son of 1-2-3 by way of ruled ledger paper.
I read “Which BI Analytics Tool Does My Company Need?” and figured out the angle of attack after a couple of paragraphs. Here’s the tip off:
BI analytics tools. No one-size-fits-all.
Excel, however, comes pretty close to the horseshoe stake. The reasons include:
- It is not particularly intimidating. Anyone can plug in numbers, select a numerical recipe, and get an output
- Excel is available widely
- Students get some exposure in school, usually before high school, even in rural Kentucky.
The write up does not identify specific vendors or products. The article is a useful collection of jargon:
- Visual oriented analytics. Translation: graphs
- Packaged applications. Translation: Excel
- Limited exploration. Translation: Canned reports set up for the user by the developer
- Operational snapshots: Translation: More canned reports.
My thought: Isn’t analytics based business intelligence easy? I have observed Excel users’ selecting numerical recipes from the “formulas” provided with Excel and seeing what happens when applied to a collection of data. How does that work out in your experience?
Business intelligence may be considered an oxymoron by some.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2015
Quote to Note: Halevy after 10 Years Before the Ads
September 23, 2015
If you track innovations at the Alphabet Google thing, you will know that a number of wizards make the outfit hum. One of the big wizards is Dr. Alon Halevy. He is a database guru, has patents, and now an essayist.
Navigate to “A Decade at Google.” The write up does not reference the ad model which makes research possible. Legal dust ups are sidestepped. The management approach and the reorganization are not part of the write up.
I did note an interesting passage, which I flagged as a quote to note:
It is common wisdom that you should not choose a project that a product team is likely to be embarking on in the short term (e.g., up to a year). By the time you’ll get any results, they will have done it already. They might not do it as well as or as elegantly as you can, but that won’t matter at that point.
I interpreted this to underscore Alphabet Google thing’s “good enough” approach to its technology. If you have time, think about the confluence of Dr. Halevy’s research and Dr. Guha’s. The semantic search engine optimization crowd may have a field day.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2015
Microsoft Upgrades Test New Search Feature
September 23, 2015
It is here at last! After several years, Microsoft has finally upgrades its SharePoint and it comes with an exciting list of brand new features. That is not all Microsoft released an upgrade for; Microsoft’s new cloud hybrid search also has a beta. PC World examines the new Microsoft betas in the article, “Microsoft Tests SharePoint 2014 And Enterprise Cloud Hybrid Search.”
SharePoint, the popular collaborative content platform, is getting well deserved upgrade that will allow users to finally upload files up to ten gigabytes, a new App Launcher for easier accessibility for applications, simplified file sharing controls, and better accessibility on mobile devices. As with all Microsoft upgrades, however, it is recommended that SharePoint 2016 is not downloaded into the product environment.
The new cloud hybrid search will make it easier for users to locate files across various Office 365 programs:
“On top of the SharePoint beta, Microsoft’s new cloud hybrid search feature will allow Office 365 users who also run on-premises SharePoint servers to easily access both the files stored in their company’s servers as well as those stored in Microsoft’s cloud. This means that Microsoft Delve, which gives users an at-a-glance view of their team members’ work, can show files that are stored in a company’s servers and in Microsoft’s servers side by side.”
The new search feature will ease server’s workload for creating and maintaining search indices. Microsoft is encouraging organizations to switch to its cloud services, but it still offers products and support for on-site packages.
While the cloud offers many conveniences, such as quick access to files and for users to be able to work from any location, the search function will increase an ease of use. However, security is still a concern for many organizations that prefer to maintain on-site servers.
Whitney Grace, September 23, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Funding Granted for American Archive Search Project
September 23, 2015
Here’s an interesting project: we received an announcement about funding for Pop Up Archive: Search Your Sound. A joint effort of the WGBH Educational Foundation and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, the venture’s goal is nothing less than to make almost 40,000 hours of Public Broadcasting media content easily accessible. The American Archive, now under the care of WGBH and the Library of Congress, has digitized that wealth of sound and video. Now, the details are in the metadata. The announcement reveals:
“As we’ve written before, metadata creation for media at scale benefits from both machine analysis and human correction. Pop Up Archive and WGBH are combining forces to do just that. Innovative features of the project include:
*Speech-to-text and audio analysis tools to transcribe and analyze almost 40,000 hours of digital audio from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
*Open source web-based tools to improve transcripts and descriptive data by engaging the public in a crowdsourced, participatory cataloging project
*Creating and distributing data sets to provide a public database of audiovisual metadata for use by other projects.
“In addition to Pop Up Archive’s machine transcripts and automatic entity extraction (tagging), we’ll be conducting research in partnership with the HiPSTAS center at University of Texas at Austin to identify characteristics in audio beyond the words themselves. That could include emotional reactions like laughter and crying, speaker identities, and transitions between moods or segments.”
The project just received almost $900,000 in funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This loot is on top of the grant received in 2013, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, that got the project started. But will it be enough money to develop a system that delivers on-point results? If not, we may be stuck with something clunky, something that resembles the old Autonomy Virage, Blinkxx, Exalead video search, or Google YouTube search. Let us hope this worthy endeavor continues to attract funding so that, someday, anyone can reliably (and intuitively) find valuable Public Broadcasting content.
Cynthia Murrell, September 23, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
HP: Management Insight from Michigan
September 22, 2015
I love HP. I used to use the firm’s laptops. Sure, the hinges broke, but the gizmo was pretty good. The misstep with Autonomy, however, is more significant than a poor hinge design. The management methods of the company are exposed with the Autonomy matter in my opinion. Perhaps HP should bring back Carly Fiorina. Dual CEOs. Whitman and Fiorina. What could be better.
I read “Michigan Sues HP over $49 Million Project That’s Still Not Done after 10 Years.” My thought was that the Whitman-Fiorina duo would have this resolved quickly.
According to the write up:
A new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a $49 million project the state says is still not completed after 10 years. The contract dates back to 2005 and called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s that is used by more than 130 Secretary of State offices.
Now Michigan allegedly has paid HP about $33 million. The state, in a moment of wisdom, wants the source code for the project.
The write up includes this statement:
“I inherited a stalled project when I came into office in 2011 and, despite our aggressive approach to hold HP accountable and ensure they delivered, they failed,” said Secretary of State Ruth Johnson in a press release. “We have no choice but to take HP to court to protect Michigan taxpayers.”
How does a project drag on for 10 years?
My hunch is that governments, whether national or state level, have a tendency to create Healthcare.gov type situations. Also, large services firms which also sell printer ink are likely to find the mainframe thing sort of challenging. Toss in other variables like staff turnover, and the result can be darned exciting.
Again. Maybe it is time for dual HP CEOs. One can sue Autonomy. The other can manage Michigan’s state government, make the University of Michigan number one in computer science, and probably fix Detroit at the same time. Seems reasonable to me.
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2015
Forest Service: Let Leaves Cover the Content
September 22, 2015
I read “The US Forest Service Is Trying to Bury a Crucial Journal Article.” Who knows if this story is accurate. I find the idea of keeping content away from readers interesting.
According to the write up:
…Science magazine published a crucial and overdue commentary lamenting the current state of wildfire management on US public lands. Among the authors was Malcolm North, a plant ecologist at the US Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station in California.
Now the interesting passage:
…the USFS was none too pleased about the piece or North’s name being attached to it. According to Valley Public Radio, the central California NPR affiliate, the agency has barred North from discussing the paper and had even attempted to prevent Science from publishing it.
It is difficult to search for something if the content is not online or discussion of the content is encumbered.
Perhaps the Forest Service is anticipating seasonal change. Leaves fall. Leaves cover up the ground. You know. Spring is just around the corner.
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2015
Enterprise Search: Search No Longer Big Enough
September 22, 2015
I read the news on LinkedIn. (Registration may be required, gentle reader.) A post by a forum moderator raised the question, “Should be expand enterprise search?” There are other signs of trouble in search land as well. The Paper.Li enterprise search curated newsletter is about Big Data, analytics, education, and—almost as an afterthought—enterprise search in the form of endlessly recycled references to mid tier consulting reports based on what are in my opinion subjective criteria.
Is the implosion of enterprise search complete? Has the shockwave of the Fast Search financial charade caught up with today’s vendors? Is the shadow of the billion dollar bust that was HP’s acquisition of Autonomy/Verity been the straw which broke the camel’s back? Was it the mid tier consulting firm’s enterprise search report which ignored the major player in open source information access? Was it the constant repositioning, faux news releases, and posturing on webinars the karate chop across the throat of search marketers?
I don’t know.
From my point of view, there are high value solutions to the challenge of providing employees with access to certain types of content. One can use the appliance approach of Maxxcat? There is Elasticsearch? The Blossom Software solution is pretty darned good. Specialist solutions are available for parts. There are even semi automated systems to help a user make sense of the noise filled streams of social media content. Think Recorded Future.
Gentle reader, starting in 2003 when I began work on the Enterprise Search Report, sponsored by, of all things, a content management specialist, there were some brand leaders. But these have fallen into disgrace, been absorbed into larger firms with little incentive to invest in research, or crashed and burned as a result of failed implementations.
What remains today are some grim facts:
- Search is perceived by many information technology professionals as a problem. Enterprise search implementations are often doomed from the git go because few want to hook their careers to projects which have for decades failed to keep users happy and been unable to provide useful results without constant infusions of money, computing cycles, and whiz kids.
- Open source solutions are available, and they are pretty good. Large companies have the time, staff, resources, and incentive to get away from the proprietary solutions which limit what the licensee can do with the system.
- Search is an inclusion in the most advanced systems. Consider Recorded Future, Diffeo, or any other cyber centric, next generation system. System is available, but these systems solve specific problems. Search is sort of an apple pie, mother, and love type solution. These generalizations are tough to apply in a business like manner in organizations struggling to pay their bills. Most organizations just use what’s available? Even AutoCAD includes a search function. Oracle, bless its proprietary heart, provides a database licensee with a good enough solution. For those wanting a more robust solution, the Secure Enterprise Search system is available without charge. Yikes.
In my own experience, the sins of the earliest enterprise search vendors like Fulcrum Technologies and Verity have bulldozed a highway built on quicksand. Today’s vendors talk about search in terms of buzzwords like these:
- Customer support. The idea is a variation of ClearForest’s pitch that one can find answers to customer issues by indexing text.
- Big Data. I am confident that when I look for information in a Big Data set, I want to use search as a secondary tool. Enterprise search vendors offer analytic routines as add ons or as spin on counting terms which have been extracted.
- Taxonomy. I love this concept. A company needs to index its content. Nothing improves search, which has not been improved too much in the last 50 years, like machine indexing. Just don’t pin down the vendor on the amount of human intervention that is required to keep the automated system on track.
- Natural language processing, semantics, and artificial intelligence. The idea is that a search system with smart software can figur4e out what a human generated document means and make it available to a user easily or, in some cases, BEFORE the user knows she needs access to the information in that document.
There are three problems which vendors and their customers have to wrestle into submission.
First, vendor and customer have to agree on exactly what the information access system is supposed to do. In my experience, this is an important step which is usually given modest, if any, attention. The reason is that instead of narrowing the focus to a specific problem, the problem gets defined in ever widening circles of functionality. The result is cost overruns and disaffected users.
Second, the vendors’ marketing argues that certain functions and benefits are a consequence of installing their software. The flaw is that marketing is easy; implementing a search system which the customer can afford to maintain is very hard. Add to this disconnect the characteristic of some vendors to sell software which is half baked, or, in some cases, not even completed. A certain vendor was kicked off a government procurement list for getting caught with software that did not work.
Third, the customers know that finding information is important. Most enterprise search vendors cannot provide access to the type of content which is growing rapidly and gaining importance with each passing day. I am talking about indexing audio, video, social media generated by employees and contractors, and digital images. The focus has been for a half century on text. That does not work particularly well if one does not select a solution from a handful of vendors with solutions that actually work. Need I repeat Blossom, Elastic, and Maxxcat?
What about today’s flagship vendors? If one embraces the analysis of the mid tier consulting firms, the solutions are ones that are proprietary and have some profile and money due to the ministrations of addled venture capital players looking for the next Google.
There are solutions. Until the LinkedIn pool of job hunters and consultants comes to grip with software that works in a reliable manner, it is unlikely that the enterprise search discussion on LinkedIn will rise above thinly veiled marketing.
Search, gentle reader, is important. There are solutions which work. The problem is that in today’s go go world, those with a veneer of knowledge and expertise are guided by individuals who may be failed webmasters, unemployed journalists, English majors, and self appointed experts.
I have no solution to the crisis in enterprise search. Google muffed the bunny. Microsoft has its Powerset and Fast Search technologies. IBM offers Watson.
Maybe these solutions will work for you. They won’t work for me. Search experts, crisis time. My vantage point is from rural Kentucky. The experts in Manhattan and San Francisco have a much better view. What they see, however, is quite different from what I observe. Just make search bigger. The problems will just fade away, right? Grass is easy to grow in scorched earth, correct?
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2015
Exalead Gets a New Application
September 22, 2015
Exalead is Dassault Systems’s big data software targeted specifically at businesses. Exalead offers innovative data discovery and analytics solutions to manage information in real time across various servers and generate insightful reports to make better, faster decisions. It is the big data solution of choice for many businesses across various industries. The Exalead blog shares that “PricewaterhouseCoopers Is Launching Its Information Management Application, Based on Exalead CloudView.”
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) analyzed the amount of time users spent trying to locate, organize, and disseminated information. When users spend the time on information management, they lose two valuable resources: time and money. PwC designed Pulse, a search and information tool as a solution to the problem.
“The EXALEAD CloudView software solution from Dassault Systèmes facilitates the rapid search and use of sources of structured and unstructured information. In existence since 2007, this enterprise information management concept was integrated initially in other software applications. Since it was reworked as EXALEAD CloudView, the configuration of the queries has become easier and they are processed much faster. Furthermore, the results of the searches are more precise, significantly reducing the number of duplicates and the time wasted managing them. PwC has deliberately decided to roll out Pulse on an international scale gradually, in order to generate plenty of enthusiasm amongst users. A business case is prepared for each country on the basis of its needs, the benefits and the potential savings. PwC also intends to make the content in Pulse accessible by other internal systems (e.g., the project workspaces), to integrate the sources, and to make the search function even smarter.”
Pulse is supposed to cut costs and reinvest the resources into more fruitful venues. One interesting aspect to note is that PwC did not build the Pulse upgrade, Exalead provided the plumbing.
Whitney Grace, September 22, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
New Search System for Comparing Companies
September 22, 2015
There is a new tool out to help companies compile information on their competitors: RivalSeek. This brainchild of entrepreneur Richard Brevig seeks to combat an issue he encountered when he turned to Google while researching the market for a different project: Google’s “personalized search” filters
keep users from viewing the whole landscape of any particular field. Frustration led Brevig to develop some tools of his own, which he realized might appeal to others. The site’s homepage explains simply:
“Find your competitors that Google can’t. RivalSeek’s competitor search engine looks past filter bubbles, finding competitors you’ve never heard of.”
More information can be found in Brevig’s brief introductory video on YouTube. There’s also this “quick demo,” which can be found on YouTube or playing quietly on RivalSeek’s home page. While the tool is still in Beta, Brevig is confident enough in its usefulness to charge $29 a month for access. You can find an example success story, for the Dollar Shave Club, at the company’s blog.
This is a great idea. While Google’s filter bubbles can be convenient, it is clear that confirmation bias is not their only hazard. Perhaps Brevig would be interested in expanding this tool into other areas, like science, literature, or sociology. Just a suggestion.
Cynthia Murrell, September 22, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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