Microsoft and Yammer: Extending SharePoint Functionality
July 31, 2012
Yammer is what an enterprise social network tool; organizations implement it to spur collaboration between users. On the Yammer homepage we found a new application which permits Microsoft SharePoint Integration. After reading the specs, we found on the Microsoft blog about “Yammer-The Next Step for Social Networking In Schools?”
According to the post, Microsoft recently purchased Yammer. The post explains Yammer’s basic functions, the dashboard mirrors Facebook’s design with hints of Twitter. The post digs into how Yammer would be used in schools, basically the same way it would for any company: staff would use to communicate between departments, share content, etc. It can also be a boon for students too:
“We know that group work is a great way to encourage students to engage with their peers, but this isn’t easy when they all use different social networks, clouds and systems. By joining Yammer, students can create secure groups via which they can communicate their ideas, ask questions and share files, as well as allowing for their competitive side to come out through ‘Leaderboards’, which show data about who has received the most likes, replies and much.”
Students can perform group work, receive studying help, share content, and even praise each other within Yammer. While it can be a tool of food for students, it can also make cheating and plagiarism easier if not monitored. Yammer should install an app that will be able to detect plagiarism.
The surge of interest in social content is growing in government agencies, commercial organizations, and educational institutions. However, indexing and making this content
findable can be a challenging task. The tools an organization uses require tight integration with
a search system. Mindbreeze provides capabilities to make social content easily findable within a SharePoint environment. A Yammer style can enhance productivity. Mindbreeze offers a range of social and collaborative features and has the engineering expertise to resolve almost any search and retrieval issue. Check out the Mindbreeze social collaboration Web page for more information.
Whitney Grace, July 31, 2012
Sponsored by Mindbreeze
Governance Listed as Top Challenge in Enterprise
July 25, 2012
A new Gartner report shows that more SharePoint users are failing in the category of governance than in any other. SharePoint Joel gives his opinion on governance in, “Governance the #1 Challenge to Managing SharePoint.”
SharePoint Joel begins:
According to Gartner 66% of SharePoint Customers do not believe they have adequate governance. (Based on a recent Gartner survey) Governance can be defined as a set of defined roles, responsibilities, policies, and procedures that will help your company to proactively manage your information technology resources in a way that maximizes business value.
But governance does not have to be an ongoing struggle or an agonizing process. Third party solutions like Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise can work with an existing SharePoint installation to add efficiency and functionality. Fabasoft Folio Connector works with Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise to specifically address the issue of governance.
Fabasoft Folio is the standard software product for Enterprise Content Management, Collaboration, Compliance Management, agile Business Processes and Information Governance. The solution provides uniform, reliable and controlled management of digital content in the enterprise. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise links Fabasoft Folio for uniform enterprise-wide information access.
Do not continue to struggle with governance issues, allow Fabasoft Mindbreeze and their suite of smart solutions to ease your enterprise troubles.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 25, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
IDC Open Source Search Reports Announced
July 23, 2012
IDC has released the first of a series of analyses of open source search vendors. The subject of the report is LucidWords Platform. Lucid Imagination has become one of the key open source search vendors. Data for the IDC “situation overview, future outlook, and essential guidance” is a result of a painstaking process. The IDC research team interviewed principals of Lucid Imagination, conducted a technical analysis of the Lucid technology platform, and used a range of data analysis methods to pinpoint key information from open source content. In addition to detailed, jargon-free information about the Lucid Lucene/Solr approach, the report provides an unvarnished analysis of the firm’s business model.
Order the full report at tp://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=236086.
One of the important facts uncovered in the course of the research is the strong uptake of Lucid technology in specific market sectors. Also, Lucid, unlike some proprietary and other open source search vendors, has strong venture backing, revenue growth, and a full-time professional open source search technology team. Each of these issues is explored in the IDC report number 236086. You can get additional information about the for-fee report from IDC’s “Get Doc” online service.
The team working on this project included Sue Feldman, who specializes in research on information access technologies including, including search engines, text analytics, categorization, unified access to structured and unstructured information, Big Data, visualization, and rich media search. Her research analyzes the trends and dynamics of the search and discovery software market and also quantifies the costs of information work to the organization. Ms. Feldman won IDC’s James Peacock Research award for her work on modeling and forecasting the search and retrieval technology markets, and an Innovation Award from IDC in 2007 for developing a new research program on the digital marketplace. She is a frequent speaker at industry events, and has won several national and international awards for her writing. She wrote the chapter on search engines for the 1999 volume of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science and was the first editor of the IEEE Computer Society’s Digital Library News. She is currently writing a book, The Answer Machine concerning the future of technology for information access. Before coming to IDC in 2000, Ms. Feldman was President for twenty years of Datasearch, an independent technology consulting firm, where she consulted on new retrieval technologies such as natural language processing, search engines, usability of online systems, and digital libraries.
One Vision of the Future of Enterprise Architecture
July 22, 2012
SYS-Con Media recently published an article detailing the impact of Cloud, big data analytics and mobility on enterprise architecture in the article “The New Enterprise Reference Architecture.”
For those who do not already know, the term Enterprise Architecture refers to the process of moving business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating and improving the key requirements, principles and models that describe the enterprise’s future state and enable its evolution.
This article is based on the assumption that a lot has changed over the past couple of years regarding the ways that enterprises chart their enterprise architecture. It provides readers with a diagram of “the new enterprise reference architecture” along with accompanying text providing a detailed explanation of the role of each layer.
When discussing the enterprise search layer, the article states:
“While the data virtualization layer provides a common layer to access all the disparate data sources, we still needed robust searching capabilities on top of it and hence this layer is important. Some of the attributes of this layer are :
- Keyword based search
- Auto Correction
- Thesaurus expansion
- Relevance Ranking
This layer works closely with the context aware content layer. Products like Microsoft FAST Search Engine, Google Search Engine will fall under this category.”
While the new enterprise architecture is more complex than the old one, it also is filled with more possibilities. Our only question is what happened to enterprise search as a platform?
Jasmine Ashton, July 22, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
Useful Graphics Explaining SharePoint 2013
July 19, 2012
SharePoint developers are eagerly waiting for SharePoint 2013. A blogger at the Microsoft Blogs wrote “SharePoint 2013-Initial Take On Changes To Search” and he has been viewing a lot of slideshows on the new version. His favorites are at SharePoint 2012: Presentation: IT Pro Training and all are easy to download. He takes a look a the Module 7: SharePoint Search 2013 that takes an in depth view into enterprise search, including architectural changes to physical and logical topologies and configuration details on crawling, content, and query.
Fast Search functionality is behind much of the SharePoint 2013 enterprise search capability:
“ From the SharePoint 2013 slides, it’s pretty clear that the rumors have played out and core components of SharePoint Search (particularly the Indexing pipeline) effectively got replaced by the Fast Search pipeline… although it will maintain the ‘SharePoint Search’ moniker (Disclaimer: I’m not a marketing guy and have no idea what the licenses will be, so this is just my observation).”
There is a lot of content to digest in from the presentations, but the article pulls out the very detailed and informative diagrams to understand how Fast Search has and will change the search architecture for SharePoint. With more than 30,000 consultant days of Fast implementation experience at Search Technologies, we will be gearing up early to support SharePoint 2013 Search Rollouts.
Iain Fletcher, July 19, 2012
Sponsored by Search Technologies
A SharePoint Search Refiner
July 12, 2012
The SharePoint Blog contained a very informative explanation of SharePoint “refiners.” A “refiner”, according to Microsoft is “enable end-users to drill down into their search results based on managed properties that are associated with the indexed search items, such as creation date, author, and company names.”
Custom SharePoint 2010 Search Refiner – Displaying Range of Choices is a presentation of information which originally appeared in the ShareMuch blog. The write is, in my opinion, quite useful. The information provides a streamlined explanation of how to implement a refiner in a SharePoint 2010 installation. The write up provides an XML snippet which makes the addition of a refiner quick and easy.
The article explains:
MappedProperty maps to an actual managed property that you must define or is already defined in search service application. The SortBy defines, in this case, a custom filter right below the category. The CustomFilters node’s MappingType property means we’ll have a custom filter. In our case, we’re using a range mapper, meaning that whatever value are going to be in the managed property, our filter will display UI based on the range of those and let user toggle the display based on that range. I hope this makes sense. The DataType has only 3 types, so please don’t make the same mistake I did and try to guess the value, it’s limited to “Numeric”, “DateTime”, “String”. The CustomValue inside CustomFilter specifies the user friendly value and the OriginalValue defines the range. In our example, the “Size” property is measured in Bytes so “..1? means range anywhere from 0 bytes to 1 byte. It happens that list items and lists in search results are less than 1 byte in size which means that we can refine by list items and lists results by capturing items with size less than 1 byte. Everything else is a document.
Search Technologies implements “refiners” as well as other advanced features of SharePoint. If you want to extend SharePoint and make the system deliver even greater value to your users, contact Search Technologies.
Iain Fletcher, July 12, 2012
Exclusive Interview: Franz Kogl, Intrafind
July 10, 2012
Germany is a hot house for search, semantic, and content processing vendors. Most of them are not widely known outside of Germany. Intrafind, based in Munich, has been in business for more than a decade. The company is anchored in search solutions. I had heard about Intrafind, but I did not have much first-hand information about the company. In London in June, I spent some time with Franz Kögl and found that the firm has a number of high profile clients and, like a number of other companies, has found success with open source technology.
I asked Mr. Kögl about his view of search in 2012. He said, “The future every modern application will be ‘search enabled.’”
The company’s approach is refreshing. He told me:
Our approach is, “Think big, start small.” Many of our customers start with an application like an internal search. We then can extend the service piece by piece. For example, a new requirement comes from another department or business unit. It is pretty typical for us to start work in a single department. Then the client decides to use our iFinder as corporate search solution. What is special about our approach is that we combine computer linguistics within information retrieval. It’s not the idea itself which is unique, but the way we have implemented it.
On the subject of big data he said:
Huge amounts of data are frequently discussed at client meetings. We can handle almost any volume of data. We have different methods to match specific client situations. If updating the index is a key consideration, we work with the client to make clear that the update time of the full-text index is largely dependent on the connected sources and the attendant system.
To read the full text of the interview, navigate to “IntraFind AG: An Interview with Franz Kögl.” The ArnoldIT Search Wizards Speak subsite contains more than 60 interviews with professionals in the search and content processing sector. You can find the index to the interviews on the Wizards Index tab. A complete listing also appears on the Search Wizards Speak subsite.
Stephen E Arnold, July 10, 2012
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
AccessData and dtSearch Team Up for Connectors
July 9, 2012
Market Watch recently published the news release “AccessData and dtSearch Announce New AccessData Offering of Connector Libraries for Developers Using the dtSearch Engine.” The article discusses a new text indexing solution that repackages eDiscovery product lines with robust and flexible data connectors.
According to the article, these connectors are currently available for Microsoft Exchange – any user mailbox; Symantec Enterprise Vault (Exchange) – archived Exchange user mailboxes; Oracle URM – all documents. There are also plans to include other content repositories in the near future.
When discussing the new data connectors, Devin Krugly, VP of Marketing and Business Development at AccessData explains:
“These data connectors are purpose-built to integrate with dtSearch technology and allow for full text indexing of a repository’s content. These indexes can then be used to support a wide variety of business solutions including records management, information governance, internal investigations, audit and e-discovery. The harmony of the AccessData connector packages along with the broad data and fielded search options of dtSearch make this OEM offering a malleable addition for solutions of all sizes.”
Based on the expertise that both companies independently bring to the table, I am excited to see what this product brings to the enterprise search industry.
Jasmine Ashton, July 9, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Google Mini? Loser in the Search Appliance Game
July 3, 2012
Navigate to “Google Shutdowns Continue: iGoogle, Google Video, Google Mini & Others Are Killed.” Among the products and services “killed” is the Google Mini. That was the entry level Google Search Appliance. Our question: When will the Google Search Appliance walk the plank? Competitors point out with glee that it lacks some of the functionality of the next generation systems from vendors ranging from Attivio to Polyspot. The General Services Administration’s price list for the GSA 9009 takes my breath away. The write up asserts:
Note that Google isn’t exiting the enterprise by any means, it’s just that Mini’s functionality is now offered by other products like Google Search Appliance, Google Site Search and Google Commerce Search, the company blog post reminds us. Google will honor its existing contracts for Mini customers, though.
Doesn’t cloud based search make more sense as Google continues its push for cloud based services in the enterprise?
Stephen E Arnold, July 3, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
Enterprise Search Has a Back Seat Driver
July 3, 2012
Once again, the technology road behind enterprise search is being questioned and some are mapping out a new route for a company road trip. According to Norm.al’s article, ‘Search vs. Findability vs. Information Retrieval’ findability is the new buzz word of today, but utilizing a back seat driver seems questionable.
The self-appointed tour guides have determined:
“What Findability should be, and what the Semantic Web promises is a new approach. Order first and then the rest will be easy. By using Faceted Search or other Information Retrieval interfaces findability is achieved. Computer Search is based on indexing a junk of data, while Findability should be a process defined at the moment when the data are created.”
“If we could note the order, is Junk of Data, to Order by a third party who analyzes your content based on keywords, NLP and some other great metrics.”
No one really likes a back seat driver and now they are trying to hop in and bark out directions. Sometimes the search engine road may get a little bumpy, but utilizing the right landmarks will get you where you need to go without the interference of detours.
The pavement on this new road seems to still be a bit wet, so one might yet find themselves spattered with debris. Will these distinctions stick? We think not. Search is dead. Long live the next set of buzzwords from self-appointed experts, “real” analysts, and failed Webmasters.
Jennifer Shockley, July 3, 2012
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