SharePoint Expert Rehmani Talks SharePoint 2016
July 21, 2015
There is enough news regarding the upcoming SharePoint Server 2016 release to keep every tech writer busy around the clock. Users are crafting expectations and experts are analyzing the little bits of pieces that have become known. Now a known expert, Asif Rehmani, is weighing in with his early assessment. Read more in the Redmond article, “Microsoft MVP Talks SharePoint 2016, Deprecated InfoPath and Getting Help.”
The article begins:
“Microsoft plans to improve usability aspects with its forthcoming SharePoint Server 2016 product, but people still will need help when it arrives. And that’s where Asif Rehmani comes into play. He’s tracked SharePoint from the beginning as a lecturer, educator and trainer and is a nine-year Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for SharePoint.”
The article goes on to discuss some of Rehmani’s thoughts on the upcoming release, including user expectations and how the cloud will integrate into the new version. Stephen E. Arnold is another expert who has his eye on the latest SharePoint news. He reports his findings in an easy to follow format on his Web service, ArnoldIT.com. In fact, his SharePoint feed is one of the go-to destinations for SharePoint tips and tricks on the Web.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 21, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Whither IHS Goldfire Search
July 18, 2015
Short honk: I followed the Invention Machine for a while years ago. Developed to display systems and methods which could solve a problem, the Invention Machine was acquired by IHS, a Swiss Army Knife outfit.
The company made a push for Goldfire, the Invention Machine packaged as an enterprise search solution, a couple of years ago.
Curious about its market position?’
I navigated to the Goldfire blog and saw that 13 months have elapsed since the last post. That article was “Unlock Corporate Knowledge to Avoid Repeating Past Mistakes.”
The post stated:
Have you invested a lot of time, effort and money in file management systems yet still can’t find relevant engineering answers?
Good question. Perhaps IHS has come to understand that finding revenues from patent-centric technology can be tricky. On the other hand, the company’s revenues from search may be so massive that IHS does not have time to update its blog.
The individual whom I understood was one of the leaders of the IHS search pack is, according to LinkedIn, responsible for Virgil Visions, which is an independent video company, which according to Vimeo is owned by Mr. Belfiore. I could not determine who the IHS top search boss is. Use the comments section to help fill my addled goose’s brain.
Is IHS another in the long line of non search oriented outfits to gain access to information not available before it owned a search system?
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2015
dtSearch and Encrypted PDFs
July 18, 2015
Short honk: The Little Engine That Could information access system is dtSearch. Long a fave with Microsoft centric folks looking for an alternative for keyword search, dtSearch has added some oomph. “New dtSearch Release Enhances Support for Encrypted PDFs.” According to the write up:
The release expands these document filters to directly support a broader range of encrypted PDFs, covering PDF files encrypted with an owner password up to 128-bit RC4 and 128-bit and 256-bit AES.
For more information about what can be processed, navigate to www.dtsearch.com.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2015
Short Honk: Open Semantic Search Appliance
July 17, 2015
Several people have asked me about Open Semantic Search. I sent a couple of emails to the professional identified on the DNS record as the contact point. No response yet from our inquiry emails, but this is not unusual. People are so darned busy today.
The Open Semantic Search organization is offering an open semantic search appliance. The appliance is not a box like the much loved Google Search Appliance or the Maxxcat solutions. The appliance is virtual.
The explanation of the data enriching system is located at this link. The resources required are modest and based on the information I scanned, the open semantic search appliance is a solution to many information access woes.
I will be able to search, explore, and analyze. Give the system a whirl. We will add it to our list of tasks. We assume it will present the same exciting challenges as other Lucene/Solr solutions. The addition of semantics will add a new wrinkle or two.
If you are into semantics and open source, the system may be for you.
Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2015
Google Patent Search: Wake Up Call for Derwent and TotalPatent
July 17, 2015
Patent documents are not something that high school students read. To be more accurate, patent documents are confections of legalese and engineering incantations read by those [a] paid to read them or [b] folks who have a dog in the fight.
The Google was not into patents in its Backrub days. That changed over time. Now the Google is inventing its way to a Great Wall of China patent fence.
Along the way, the Google hit upon the idea that some patent documents could be scanned and made searchable. The public version of the service became available in 2006. You can explore the collection at Google Patent Search.
After nine years of Google style evolution, the system includes US, European, and World Intellectual Property Organization documents.
The system returns results without ads. I ran a query for Sergey Bring and received this list of results. I noticed that some documents do not show a thumbnail of the document image. In my experience, some functions work; others do not. Glitch or feature?
I read “Google’s New, Simplified Patent Search Now Integrates Prior Art And Google Scholar.”
The write up points out that Google Patents includes information germane to the user’s query from Google Scholar and “results of Prior Art.” I read:
The idea is that the new patent search will be easier to use both by experts in the field as well as the general public to look for patents and related materials. Given the rising interest in safeguarding IP among developers and founders who may have never had to consider patents much before, this could prove to be especially useful.
When I click on a patent, I see additional options:
The “find prior art” button displays:
The service is likely to get some tire kicking by those interested in patents.
My take on the new service is that the Google may have an opportunity to generate some fresh revenues.
Patent searches conducted on the for fee services from Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier can be expensive. There are also some useful “free” services such as FreePatentsOnline.com.
The Google with a bit of effort can add some bells and whistles and charge for them. For the “free” crowd, the Google can continue to integrate open source content, not just books and references to scholarly literature. Prior art often has a generous embrace.
For the for fee crowd, the Google can add the types of entity functions, among other advanced features, that the for fee services offer.
In short, the Google may be looking at the hundreds of millions of revenue available from those with a must have motivation and add some functions that make advertisers sit up and take notice. Maybe the USPTO would consider the Google as a source for its search technology.
I see this development as an important one because the GOOG can make some waves in a market most humans know little about. Think of the ads the Google can run for student debt advice.
My question remains, “Why has Google been so slow to take advantage of market niches in which complacent competitors and providers of free services have been slow to innovate?”
Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2015
On Embedding Valuable Outside Links
July 17, 2015
If media websites take this suggestion from an article at Monday Note, titled “How Linking to Knowledge Could Boost News Media,” there will be no need to search; we’ll just follow the yellow brick links. Writer Frederic Filloux laments the current state of affairs, wherein websites mostly link to internal content, and describes how embedded links could be much, much more valuable. He describes:
“Now picture this: A hypothetical big-issue story about GE’s strategic climate change thinking, published in the Wall Street Journal, the FT, or in The Atlantic, suddenly opens to a vast web of knowledge. The text (along with graphics, videos, etc.) provided by the news media staff, is amplified by access to three books on global warming, two Ted Talks, several databases containing references to places and people mentioned in the story, an academic paper from Knowledge@Wharton, a MOOC from Coursera, a survey from a Scandinavian research institute, a National Geographic documentary, etc. Since (supposedly), all of the above is semanticized and speaks the same lingua franca as the original journalistic content, the process is largely automatized.”
Filloux posits that such a trend would be valuable not only for today’s Web surfers, but also for future historians and researchers. He cites recent work by a couple of French scholars, Fabian Suchanek and Nicoleta Preda, who have been looking into what they call “Semantic Culturonomics,” defined as “a paradigm that uses semantic knowledge bases in order to give meaning to textual corpora such as news and social media.” Web media that keeps this paradigm in mind will wildly surpass newspapers in the role of contemporary historical documentation, because good outside links will greatly enrich the content.
Before this vision becomes reality, though, media websites must be convinced that linking to valuable content outside their site is worth the risk that users will wander away. The write-up insists that a reputation for providing valuable outside links will more than make up for any amount of such drifting visitors. We’ll see whether media sites agree.
Cynthia Murrell, July 17, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Hadoop Rounds Up Open Source Goodies
July 17, 2015
Summer time is here and what better way to celebrate the warm weather and fun in the sun than with some fantastic open source tools. Okay, so you probably will not take your computer to the beach, but if you have a vacation planned one of these tools might help you complete your work faster so you can get closer to that umbrella and cocktail. Datamation has a great listicle focused on “Hadoop And Big Data: 60 Top Open Source Tools.”
Hadoop is one of the most adopted open source tool to provide big data solutions. The Hadoop market is expected to be worth $1 billion by 2020 and IBM has dedicated 3,500 employees to develop Apache Spark, part of the Hadoop ecosystem.
As open source is a huge part of the Hadoop landscape, Datamation’s list provides invaluable information on tools that could mean the difference between a successful project and failed one. Also they could save some extra cash on the IT budget.
“This area has a seen a lot of activity recently, with the launch of many new projects. Many of the most noteworthy projects are managed by the Apache Foundation and are closely related to Hadoop.”
Datamation has maintained this list for a while and they update it from time to time as the industry changes. The list isn’t sorted on a comparison scale, one being the best, rather they tools are grouped into categories and a short description is given to explain what the tool does. The categories include: Hadoop-related tools, big data analysis platforms and tools, databases and data warehouses, business intelligence, data mining, big data search, programming languages, query engines, and in-memory technology. There is a tool for nearly every sort of problem that could come up in a Hadoop environment, so the listicle is definitely worth a glance.
Whitney Grace, July 17, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Tips for Enterprise Search Vendors When They Disappoint Their Venture Pals
July 16, 2015
The video is not about enterprise search vendors. But I found the video via a recommendation from a person who spends endless hours with a dragline for odd ball management advice.
I clicked on the link to “Disappoint Someone.” The video is interesting because it provides the sort of advice that is guaranteed to create some excitement combined with consternation.
The video omits one tip which I have found helpful now that I am retired.
Make a video and send the person whom you wish to disappoint a link.
Works really well, but if you are into the face to face thing with funders who want revenue and profits now. Go for it.
I assumed the creator of the video would have included this tip. Their video delivered the goods for me.
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2015
Microsoft Takes SharePoint Criticism Seriously
July 16, 2015
Organizations are reaching the point where a shift toward mobile productivity and adoption must take place; therefore, their enterprise solution must follow suit. While Office 365 adoption has soared in light of the realization, Microsoft still has work to do in order to give users the experience that they demand from a mobile and social heavy platform. ComputerWorld goes into more details with their article, “Onus on Microsoft as SharePoint and OneDrive Roadmaps Reach Crossroads.”
The article states Microsoft’s current progress and future goals:
“With the advent of SharePoint Server 2016 (public beta expected 4Q 2015, with general availability 2Q 2016), Edwards believes Microsoft is placing renewed focus on file management, content management, sites, and portals. Going forward, Redmond claims it will also continue to develop the hybrid capabilities of SharePoint, recognizing that hybrid deployments are a steady state for many large organizations, and not just a temporary position to enable migration to the cloud.”
Few users chose to adopt the opportunities offered by Office 365 and SharePoint 2013, so Microsoft has to make SharePoint Server 2016 look like a new, enticing offering worthy of being taken seriously. So far, they have done a good job of building up some hype and attention. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and he has been covering the news surrounding the release on ArnoldIT.com. Additionally, his dedicated SharePoint feed makes it easy to catch the latest news, tips, and tricks at a glance.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Algorithmic Art Historians
July 14, 2015
Apparently, creativity itself is no longer subjective. MIT Technology Review announces, “Machine Vision Algorithm Chooses the Most Creative Paintings in History.” Traditionally, art historians judge how creative a work is based on its novelty and its influence on subsequent artists. The article notes that this is a challenging task, requiring an encyclopedic knowledge of art history and the judgement to decide what is novel and what has been influential. Now, a team at Rutgers University has developed an algorithm they say is qualified for the job.
Researchers Ahmed Elgammal and Babak Saleh credit several developments with bringing AI to this point. First, we’ve recently seen several breakthroughs in machine understanding of visual concepts, called classemes. that include recognition of factors from colors to specific objects. Another important factor: there now exist well-populated online artwork databases that the algorithms can, um, study. The article continues:
“The problem is to work out which paintings are the most novel compared to others that have gone before and then determine how many paintings in the future have uses similar features to work out their influence. Elgammal and Saleh approach this as a problem of network science. Their idea is to treat the history of art as a network in which each painting links to similar paintings in the future and is linked to by similar paintings from the past. The problem of determining the most creative is then one of working out when certain patterns of classemes first appear and how these patterns are adopted in the future. …
“The problem of finding the most creative paintings is similar to the problem of finding the most influential person on a social network, or the most important station in a city’s metro system or super spreaders of disease. These have become standard problems in network theory in recent years, and now Elgammal and Saleh apply it to creativity networks for the first time.”
Just what we needed. I have to admit the technology is quite intriguing, but I wonder: Will all creative human endeavors eventually have their algorithmic counterparts and, if so, how will that effect human expression?
Cynthia Murrell, July 14, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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