Protected: More about SharePoint and Collaboration
September 9, 2011
When Social and Search Meet in the Enterprise
September 8, 2011
Organizations are embracing Microsoft SharePoint as a platform for collaboration and other social online messaging. “If You Must Have In-House Social Tools, Go with SharePoint” is representative of the flood of information about SharePoint’s utility for collaborative activities.
J. Peter Bruzzese said:
he good news, at least from the SharePoint perspective, is that you have a tremendous amount of control over the amount of information people can share. For example, by deploying the User Profile Service Application in a SharePoint server farm, you can deploy My Sites and My Profile options to your users. They can then enter their own profile information, upload images of themselves for a profile picture, create a personal page with a document library (both personal and shared), tag other people’s sites and information, and search for people within the organization based on their profiles. The SharePoint administrator can control the extent to which the sharing occurs. You can adjust the properties in the profile page, turning options on or off and adding new properties if needed. You can turn off the I Like It and Tags & Notes features, and you can even delete tags or notes your corporate policy disapproves of. You can access profile information and make changes if needed. And you don’t have to turn on My Sites or let people create their own blog and so on: It’s not an all-or-nothing situation with these tools (ditto with third-party tools).
The excellent write up does a good job of explaining SharePoint from a high level.
There are three points which one wants to keep in mind:
First, collaborative content puts additional emphasis on managing the content generated by the users of social components within SharePoint. In most cases, short message are not an issue. What is important, however, is capturing as much information about the information as possible. One cannot rely on users to provide context for some comments. Not surprisingly, additional work is needed to ensure that social messages have sufficient context to make the information in a short message meaningful to a person who may be reviewing a number of documents of greater length. To implement this type of feature, a SharePoint licensee will want to have access to systems, methods, and experts familiar with context enhancement, not just key word indexing.
Second, the social content is often free flowing. The engineering for a “plain vanilla” SharePoint is often sufficiently robust to handle typical office documents. However, if a high volume flow of social content is produced within SharePoint, “plain vanilla” implementations may exhibit some slow downs. Again, throwing hardware at a problem may work in certain situations but often additional modifications to SharePoint may be required to deliver the performance users expect. Searching for a social message with a key fact can be frustrating if the system imposes high latency.
Finally, social content is assumed to be a combination of real time back and forth as well as asynchronous. A person may see a posting or a document and then replay an hour or a day later. Adding metadata and servers will not address the challenge of processing social content in a timely manner. Firms with specific expertise in search and content processing can help. The approach to bottleneck issues in indexing, for example, rely on the experience of the engineer, not an FAQ from Microsoft or blog post from a SharePoint specialist.
If you want to optimize your SharePoint system for social content and make that content findable, take a look at the services available from Search Technologies. We have deep experience with the full range of SharePoint search solutions, including Fast Search.
Iain Fletcher, September 8, 2011
Sponsored by Search Technologies
Study Shows Majority is Less Popular than Believed
September 8, 2011
Now we have a 10 percent rule. Wow.
It is not often that I question the conclusion of credible research, but it happens. I couldn’t be such a self-professed lover of science if I abandoned the whole premise of critical thinking, but I digress.
“Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas” is a fascinating read. For the sake of debate, I will quote the findings directly as stated in the press release:
“Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.”
Intuitively, this makes perfect sense. The idea of the workings of group mentality has been drilled into psych 101 students for decades; it’s textbook human behavior and frequently observed in reality. It is no coincidence that the political rhetoric exhibited on the 24-hr new cycle is unwavering in its repetitiveness. This latest discovery is merely a quantifying extension of an established idea.
Despite this, I am still wrestling with the concept as presented above. Call my complaints overly finicky, but phrasing is important. First, ‘always’ is a dangerous term. Always. Further, I find ‘society’ to be too vague to be meaningful. Another issue I am having is the lack of time-scale definition for the shift to occur, and failure to mention the necessity of consistent communication of the lesser held belief.
An example: after a spot check of polls for confirmation, I believe it is safe to say at least 10% of the world’s population, or any smaller subset, generally is against war engagement in any circumstance. I speculate this has been a consistent viewpoint throughout time, though the ruling majority has yet to bend to the will of the committed minority. On the off chance world peace is achieved in the next two to ten centuries… does that count?
Could the prime proof of validity, the recent turn of regimes in the Middle Eastern regions, have occurred at such a pace without the help of online social media?
Barring semantics, I am behind the underlying principle and look forward to hearing advancement of the theory. Applied to advertising and politics, once again we are shown manipulation of the general public is nearly effortless. All the more reason to stick with critical thinking.
What’s the impact on search? If algorithms have a 10 percent threshold, the results will not reflect popularity but the biases of a minority of users. Black box algorithms are interesting in this context.
Sarah Rogers. September 8, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Will Facebook Go Steady with a Chinese Search Partner?
September 6, 2011
We wanted to document what we think is an important strategic rumor.
Rumors are circulating that Facebook is in talks to partner with Baidu, the Chinese leader in online search. Forbes reports on the latest in, “Facebook and Baidu – Take that Google.” One has to wonder why Facebook is looking to a search company to gain ground in China. Not to be ignored is what Baidu hopes to get out of the deal.
The first and most important factor is that today Baidu commands 75+ percent of all keyword searches in China, and they are still growing. Baidu is expected to be bigger than Yahoo on a worldwide scale within one year, with a global footprint that will rival or exceed Google’s footprint in its key markets, North America and Europe. And everything that Baidu does is just fine with China. Imagine Facebook using Baidu’s compliance technology to put them immediately into the good graces of the Chinese government.
So perhaps Facebook found a loophole around Chinese strict government standards? Will Baidu find that Facebook’s momentum is too difficult to control, even on Chinese soil? We will see, but if the rumored alliance comes to fruition, this could be a very big deal – a very big, very profitable, deal. Worth watching.
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Facebook: Not Necessarily the Root of All Teen Evils
September 3, 2011
Facebook has changed the landscape of teenage socializing, no one would disagree. While it allows people from across the world to keep in touch and share exciting personal news, it also allows highly susceptible teens to be exposed to illegal activities. According the article, U.S. Teens on Facebook More Likely to Use Drugs, on CBC News, although a new report shows that teens who use Facebook are much more likely to engage in drug, alcohol and tobacco abuse, there may be more factors involved.
The article reports of the study and its results:
The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University conducted the back-to-school survey of 1,006 teens who answered questions about their use of social media, TV viewing habits and substance abuse. The findings suggested that compared those aged 12 to 17 who spend no time on social networking sites in a typical day, teens who do were: five times more likely to use tobacco, three times more likely to use alcohol, and twice as more likely to use marijuana.
While these facotids might be accurate, one must ask, “What other factors contribute to the results” The study compared one extreme against everyone else, teens who had no presence on Facebook, and teens who spent any time at all on Facebook. The study also had over 1,000 participants. No information was given on the socioeconomic, age, race, or cultural breakdowns of the group.
These data give one pause. But without more information one should not discount Facebook. The article makes an excellent point of mentioning the role of parents and extra-curricular activities as crucial components in teen abuse of drugs and alcohol. To be fair to Facebook, more information is needed as is a cause-and-effect study of teens, Facebook and alcohol/drug abuse.
What’s the relevance to search? With general purpose research shifting to accommodate social content, we want to understand the “content outputters” before we accept the “inputs” without understanding motivations, provenance, behavior, etc.
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 3, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google Names: How a Mechanical Engineer Sees the Issue
September 3, 2011
I imagine you’ve all been acquainted with the latest social media fuss, as it is becoming old news by now. The corporate policy for Google+ requires members of its networking site to operate under real names. Users signed up under pseudonyms are finding their profiles suddenly deleted. That’s it. Now, enter public outrage stage left.
Maybe it’s too early, or because I’ve worked forty hours in three days, but despite being drawn into “Google+ Punts on Kafkaesque Name Policy” (thanks to the literary reference that ultimately falls flat) I find flaws with each side.
So, to Google. I realize you want your newest product to be as much like Facebook as possible, stopping only at donning a Mark Zuckerberg wig. You also must contend with an insatiable desire to squirrel away as much personal data as possible for future monetary gains, be it by ownership and sales or expanded search capacity. But come on, this is ridiculous. The given argument for civility in online discourse is not exclusively yours to make. Not only are you alienating your burgeoning clientele, but I don’t believe you can legally force people to use their real names in a non-government application. It is, after all, the internet.
And to would be Google+ participants. I agree with you, I really do. But if I could draw diagram to illustrate my point, it would include a fist-sized sphere representing corporations, and twelve miles away would be a single dot representing your interests. Why is this policy a surprise? Or an indignation considering your beloved Facebook’s policy is identical? Couldn’t you use any name in the friendship graveyard that was known as MySpace.com, which the masses abandoned in lieu of a more tightly controlled environment?
Coming from an individual with little to no online presence, I respect anonymity as much as the next mechanical engineer, if not more so. But I can’t even get behind bumper stickers. So I do genuinely understand the frustration of the prospective Google+ user. But I would like to gently remind readers that true personal ambiguity was ushered out with the twentieth century. Google already knows who you are and will continue to build tools that glean even more data from a largely willing public.
What I find intriguing is this most important point that largely seems to go ignored by both sides of the argument:
The biggest problem with Google’s identity policy has always been that it’s essentially unenforceable. You can’t police millions of users with algorithms looking for nonstandard characters in names or reviewing user-flagged profiles with enough sensitivity to handle edge cases without devoting an absurd number of employee hours to review every violation. By all accounts, Google hasn’t assigned such resources.
It is for this reason that perhaps the ‘activists’ feverishly working to overturn Google’s chosen identity policy should turn to more worldly causes?
Sarah Rogers, September 3, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Attensity: to Tweet or Not to Tweet, That Is The Question
September 1, 2011
Social media seems to be the solution to everyone’s problems these days. Even if your tweets don’t actually solve any issues, at least you can get something off your chest. Contact Center Solutions Community reported on how companies can take back the upper hand in their article, “Customer Service Trends: Monitoring and Responding to Social Media Conversations.”
While consumers see their status updates as mere complaints or topics of conversation amongst Facebook friends, Attensity sees this as unstructured data that they can help other companies extract insights from and eventually act based on the analysis.
The article taught us the following about the inner-workings of Attensity’s Analyze and Respond Solutions:
This is done through text analytics capable of feats like analyzing the entire Twitter “fire hose” (fed into the Attensity system as an API) in real time. Analyze 6, Attensity’s latest release, includes a feature called ‘hot spotting,’ which identifies trending conversations as they’re happening, tracks “normal” volume, and alerts companies when that volume goes hot or cold.
What happens when negative tweets about the company who is trying to prevent complaints on social media start infiltrating the “firehose”? Our view is that the “fire hose” is looking more and more like a stream that only a handful of companies can make available and process.
Maybe Nathan Wehner knows?
Megan Feil, September 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
StumbleUpon Finally Moves into Search
August 28, 2011
We wondered why StumbleUpon was dragging its feet in search. We the erosion of Digg.com and the ups and downs of Reddit.com. Then the Yahoo Delicious.com event. StumbleUpon looked like the go to service for curated Web site recommendations.
For anyone with free time sitting in front of a computer, StumbleUpon is the site to go to. Imagine Pandora met Google and had a love child. Welcome to StumbleUpon. Upon registration users check off topics of interests, the brain behind the website cherry-picks websites it believes will be interesting, and then the user can thumb–up it or thumb-down it, improving future recommendations.
A new feature has been introduced to the ‘inquiring minds wish to know’ website: search. While it may look like a search engine, it truly is not. The article, StumbleUpon Starts Exploring, Looking More Like Search, on Search Engine Watch, explains how the new explorer bar is not a search engine, but a marketing genius.
Even the best computer brains aren’t psychic. They cannot know what an individual is interested in at the moment. By adding the explorer bar, StumbleUpon users can point the program in the right direction. Similar to traditional search engines, when one enters a word into the explorer box, suggestions appear. But unlike search engines, StumbleUpon is a Russian roulette of searches; the user gets no say in which website will pop up as a result of the search. What risk!
While cute, many only care about the bottom line. In this case, that bottom line has just added a few digits. As the article explains,
…StumbleUpon is making a move that looks beautiful for businesses. While 60,000 marketers have used the “paid discovery” program to date, the Explore Bar may be able to offer far more targeted advertising opportunities.
This great Web site just got better, in our opinion. We can’t wait to see what comes next and what other similar sites (and search engines) will take away from StumbleUpon’s exercise in usefulness. Now, Beyond Search wants more, more, more.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Attensity and Capgemini Team Up on Social Media Service
August 28, 2011
We see that Attensity is moving beyond its roots. Research reports, “Capgemini and Attensity Partner in Social Media Management.”
Capgemini Group provides a wide range of consulting, technology, and outsourcing services to industries that range from defense to financial services to entertainment.
Attensity has traditionally provided semantic solutions to the intelligence community and now serves Global 2000 companies and government agencies. They pride themselves on the accuracy of their analytic engines and their intuitive reports.
Now, in this partnership with Capgemini, Attensity is branching into the social media game. The write up explains:
The service offers real-time web listening and analysis by feeding results through to the firm’s offshore and onshore centers in Dallas, Guatemala City and Bangalore. Attensity’s text analytics platform is then used to examine content created by social media users. “Feedback gathered and analyzed at the these centers can then be used to modify marketing campaigns or improve overall customer experience, the firm said.”
Paul Cole, Capgemini’s VP for BPO Customer Operations, sees a unique opportunity. While most companies know social media can be valuable, few know exactly how to tap that power. Capgemini and Attensity intend to address that need and, of course, profit handsomely.
Now, is Capgemini ahead of its consulting competitors or lagging? A band wagon is going by. I will consider the question later.
Stephen E Arnold, August 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Protected: SharePoint and the Search for Social Data
August 26, 2011
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
