Microsoft SharePoint Videos
October 13, 2010
A reader sent me a link and it pointed to a framed page on StumbleUpon.com. For the life of me, I can’t figure out who wrote what, when, and why. Here’s the StumbleUpon link.
When I shaved the url, I got a 404, so you are on your own. What interested my reader a lot and me not so much were two new videos in an article called “Microsoft’s Internet business Vision: SharePoint for Internet Sites & Fast Search.”
The two videos which I watched as I was writing this post are:
- Microsoft’s Internet Business Platform Vision Part 1. This is a seven minute video featuring a person in the Technology Solutions DPMG unit. I don’t know what the acronym means. The video is a voice over PowerPoint. The first video explained market trends.
- Microsoft’s Internet Business Platform Vision Part 2. The second video includes a nifty graphic about Redmond’s business vision. The diagram shows an “integrated platform”. Yes, another integrated platform which one hopes connects to the other platforms in an enterprise and in cloud space.
What’s this have to do with search? Well, one has to be able to find things in this integrated space. The Fast search detail was, in my opinion, thin. But there is a nifty diagram showing how Fast Search Server can deliver reach, retention, and revenue.
If you are into Microsoft, you will enjoy the voice over PowerPoint presentations. I anticipate that certified partners selling a snap in replacement for Fast Search Server may find the videos helpful with regard to their product marketing and positioning.
Stephen E Arnold, October 13, 2010
Oracle Database 11g Search Features
October 13, 2010
I must admit that I don’t follow Oracle’s search and retrieval initiatives with the assiduity of the past. My goodness there is so much activity in the NoSQL world that I find that the new is driving out the old. A reader sent me a link to a useful write up by Richard Foote. “Oracle OpenWorld Day 5 Highlights.” The article includes a useful summary of search features and I wanted to capture his thoughts and urge you to read his original post. On the other hand, you could navigate to www.oracle.com, use the Web site search function, and locate the information yourself. (It did take me some time to find what I sought, but your mileage may vary.)
I learnt to my surprise that there are a quite a number of new features in relation to Oracle Text in the recent 11.2.0.2 release. New features include Entity Extraction whereby Oracle will automatically find entities in text such as people, cities, phone numbers, etc. a new Name Search facility in which people names with different spelling can more easily be found (such as Stephen and Steven) and a new Resultset Interface capability in which details and data can be nicely summarized. Also mentioned are enhancements in the manner by which frequent and not so frequent accesses to text tokens can be stored and processed. Also had a really interesting look at what new things are being planned, such as automatic partitioning, automatic optimizations of indexes via the use of a staging index, section specific index options, two index levels with better management of common terms in memory, substring index options to name but a few. Looks like there are going to be considerable functional improvements to text indexes on their way soon.
Oracle is a very large outfit, and I must invest some time in figuring out what happened to TripleHop, SES11g, Oracle Text, and the search functions that once were resident within such Oracle acquisitions as PeopleSoft. Soon. Hopefully soon. More rumors about a deal between Oracle and a search vendor. No comments on that, however.
Stephen E Arnold, October 13, 2010
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PolySpot Lands ERAMET Contract
October 13, 2010
PolySpot, an enterprise content processing vendor based in Paris, landed a contact for the French mining and metals group ERAMET. The outfit is a large producer of nickel and ferronickel alloy, essential for stainless steel. According to ERAMET Fédère Sa Connaissance Grâce à PolySpot!:
The system will be used to make technical and scientific literature search more widely available to ERAMET staff. The ability to search multiple databases adds flexibility to the product. The system will also provide access to information from encyclopedias, journals, articles, file systems and document management applications. Features of the system include support for simple and advanced searches, faceted navigation, dynamic mining of authors, tagging keywords, etc.. The user can either conduct research on a specific source, or on all-sources say. Beyond the search functions and navigation, the thesaurus function establishes a hierarchy and semantic equivalence keywords to adapt to different cultural contexts and identify relevant concepts.
Congratulations to PolySpot.
Stephen E Arnold, October 13, 2010
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Clearwell Goes All in One
October 13, 2010
“Clearwell Unveils All-in-One eDiscovery Platform” alerted me that another vendor has shifted from a solution to a platform. Clearwell flashed on my radar with its Rocket Docket system. The company won some kudos because a law firm or corporate legal office could ring Clearwell on the phone, and the company would deliver a ready-to-run box. The system could be plugged in and pointed at the content to be processed. The company has added nifty features that lawyers find quite useful. One lawyer told me a couple of years ago, “I can save my discovery trail and rerun it or show it to a colleague.”
According to the write up in Computer Business Review:
The platform can pull data from over 50 sources, including cloud-based applications, and offers a single dashboard for report generation. Other features of the new platform include an interactive data map, which enables users to navigate through data sources with what Clearwell calls an iTunes-like filter; collection templates, which save commonly-used collection settings, including specific directories, filters and preservation stores; and collection analytics, which provide a portfolio of analytical charts and tables that display the types of data collected.
For more information about this platform, navigate to www.clearwellsystems.com.
My views, before I forget them, include:
- How many platforms does an organization need? In some situations, cloud solutions make more sense. My recollection is that Brainware offered a spin on hosted a few years ago. One could call Brainware and the firm would pick up hard copy and digital data obtained via discovery, process it, and then provide secure access to an authorized user.
- Has the law firm market shifted? My sources tell me that buyers of these eDiscovery systems are corporate legal departments. The hook for these sales is that a CEO wants to know right away if there is an “issue” in the discovered materials.
- Has the number of vendors chasing the legal market forced down prices for basic services? The “platform” sounds like a higher value sale, particularly when connectors are provided to make it easy to ingest popular file types. The platform play, if successful, could draw the attention of a larger, more established platform provider. What happens when platforms collide? Unlikely because lawyers are not diffused widely in most organizations. Maybe the play will lead to a buy out.
Just some questions to which I don’t have answers.
Stephen E Arnold, October 13, 2010
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Linguamatics Joins Up with Accelrys
October 11, 2010
Linguamatics, a nifty content processing vendor in the UK, has formed a partnership for “streamlined, high performance text analytics” with Accelrys. Linguamatics will be giving a presentation at the Smart Content Conference in Manhattan later this month, so you can learn about the company first hand, or you can navigate to http://www.linguamatics.com/. The firm’s Web site has been refreshed and you can learn about the firm’s solutions directly.
Accelrys is a company that produces scientific informatics software. If you got a D in biology, you won’t be using Accelrys’ industrial strength analytics and visualization tools any time soon. Chemistry majors, engineers, and molecular biologists will be quite interested in the firm’s solutions.
What does the hook up mean?
According to “Linguamatics and Accelrys Announce Partnership for Streamlined, High-Performance Text Analytics,”
Mutual customers will benefit by embedding powerful natural language querying within more extensive informatics workflows including access via Accelrys web clients. Organizations continue to face the challenge of filtering ever-increasing volumes of text information to gain actionable knowledge. Linguamatics provides the ability to automate document indexing and querying within the I2E software platform in addition to its interactive information extraction capabilities. Embedding I2E within Pipeline Pilot workflows enables further streamlining of the process for high throughput text mining, and provides access to additional content processing, analytics and output display options.
I would not characterize the new capabilities as search or NLP. The companies are moving, like some others, into a data fusion space. Unlike search vendors who announce that they are now involved in Business Intelligence, Linguamatics and Accelrys have industrial strength technology in place to meet the needs of a specific market category. Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, October 11, 2010
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Vivisimo Now at Version 8 of Velocity
October 11, 2010
The news release fooled me. The title was “Vivisimo Releases Velocity 8.0, New Version of Its Market Leading Information Optimization Platform.” (News release links can go dark. You may have to poke around for the source document.) I continue to think of Vivisimo as a company with an on-the-fly clustering function that makes results from metasearch results useful. No more. Velocity 8,0 is an “information optimization platform”, a phrase that means about as much to me as “taxonomy governance,” about which I commented on Linked In last week.
Terminology aside, the new release of Velocity includes:
- Hit boosting. The idea is that a certain piece of information can be placed at the top of a results list
- Support for Microsoft SharePoint
- Tweaks to scaling
- A query auto complete function.
There are other enhancements. You can find these described at www.vivisimo.com. Hmmm. “Information optimization platform.” Another platform, another interesting way to describe information retrieval. Whatever works is okay with me.
Stephen E Arnold, October 11, 2010
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Oracle and Its Big Stick
October 9, 2010
Giants can be scary, but not necessarily bad. It’s natural to feel intimidated by a company larger than normal, controlling most operations around you, but then most companies vie to be in such a powerful position. Bob Evans presents such reasoning in his article “Global CIO: Oracle’s Success Breeds Fear And Loathing At New York Times,” and counters the allegations made on the tech giant Oracle.
It’s true that Oracle has been on an acquisition-spree in the past five years, buying out 66 companies in a stint to become the most-profitable and biggest tech company, displacing Microsoft. Judging by the pace of Oracle’s conquest some feel that Oracle is flexing its muscles a bit too much, and fear that they would end-up risking everything on one endeavor. However, the author feels this shouldn’t be taken as Oracle’s heavy-handed dominance. We believe it’s time we shed our dogmatic thinking, because to be big and have self-interest is no sin.
Harleena Singh, October 9, 2010
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Flexi-Search from Lucene
October 8, 2010
We have seen and experienced all types of searches, but here’s one simple yet smart search that uses Lucene.NET, a direct port of the popular open source Java Lucene project. It has all the features that you wanted your search to handle; synonyms, misspellings, prefixes, suffixes, result rankings, weighting, and others. John Sprunger discourses on his blog JSprunger.com about, “Getting started with Lucene.NET,” describing Lucene-based search as capable of indexing all types of content, “including files, database records, and web pages.” It can be tweaked as required and used for, “searching on ASP.NET web site, searching within a desktop app, as a web service search, or Windows service, etc.”
Embraced by biggies like EMC and Cisco, Lucene.NET has a highly abstracted class structure that allows ultimate flexibility, making it possible to change the way search works, to satisfy your clients. The article describes the procedure to create a simple search, illustrated with explanatory examples.
Harleena Singh, October 8, 2010
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PoolCorp and Exalead Complete a High Scoring Deployment
October 6, 2010
PoolCorp. has immersed itself in Exalead’s search enabled applications framework, CloudView. According to information from Exalead, in 2009, PoolCorp evaluated its existing e-commerce platform and decided that a complete ground-up rewrite was needed to improve the ability for their customers to find products easier and faster. PoolCorp has always provided value-added tools for its dealers to grow their businesses and saw this as an opportunity to combine the best features of all of those tools into a new solution that would address all of the current customer adoption obstacles. With 35 percent of all
customer feedback surrounding search and search related functions, it was clear that in order for the new e-commerce site to provide an industry-leading customer purchase experience, an enterprise search solution was required.
Before deciding upon CloudView, PoolCorp reviewed a number of enterprise search solutions including Microsoft FAST, Endeca, Autonomy and open source Solr. Exalead told Beyond Search, “PoolCorp chose Exalead because it was cost effective, scalable and much easier to install than competing products.”
Dustin Hughes, the senior software archtect of PoolCorp said:
Great software like Exalead is like a ball of clay. You can easily push and mold it into how you need to use it. We had an extremely tight timeline for installing this software – due in part to Exalead’s fantastic customer support we got our beta up and working within weeks and rolled out to 500+ customers within 2 months. The entire system became generally available to 30,000+ U.S. customers within four months of the start of development and initial customer feedback has been very positive.
Beyond Search learned that since the POOL360 beta test in July 2010, PoolCorp found:
- The Exalead-based system offered remarkable response times, often within 1/50th of a second even when the application was pulling information directly from PoolCorp’s existing ERP system.
- Exalead’s ability to compress data from its original SQL format resulted in a 10:1 compression reduction, significantly reducing the amount of hardware necessary to deploy the POOL360 solution.
- PoolCorp saved more than $30,000 in hardware costs and licensing fees over alternative SQL-based solutions.
- The Exalead CloudView technology would be an ideal system for an internal enterprise search system.
Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead’s worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, WorldBank and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead’s technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. CloudView collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications.
For more information about Exalead visit the firm’s Web site at www.exalead.com. Beyond Search uses Exalead’s technology for its blog indexing demonstration here. Our experience has positive with zero set up hassles and exceptional stablity and performance.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2010
A Linux Warning: Information or Disinformation
October 5, 2010
A reader sent me a link to a story on TechNewsWorld. “Penguins Old, Penguins New, Penguins Battered and Penguins Blue” provides some cautionary words about open source in general and Linux in particular. I am not able to say whether the information in the article is 100 percent spot on, but I did want to capture its main points. The arguments may be germane as open source software continues to chug forward. Later this week I will be at the Lucene Revolution Conference, and I want to make sure I know the pros and cons of the commercial versus open source landscape.
The key point in the TechNewsWorld write up is that Windows 7 is a better option for the use case described in the story. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
The project’s afflictions included implementation delays, immature software and “disgruntled employees whose displeasure allegedly culminated in the creation of a home page dedicated to venting their gripes and who were so busy grappling with Linux that they no longer managed to do their jobs,” explains a special report in The H.
After indicating that there may be a role for Linux in this particular client situation, the author says:
Three “not-so-easy lessons” can be taken away from the Solothurn story, Hudson suggested:
Problem #1: “There will always be a significant minority that will resist any change.”
Lesson #1: “Plan for resistance, and be ready to modify plans accordingly. Giving up a little early on can mean not losing everything later. No battle plan survives the first engagement intact.”
Problem #2: “Trying to change from one computer monoculture to another ignores practicalities.”
Lesson #2: “Be practical. Save ideology for church on Sunday or discussing politics at the family reunion.”
Problem #3: “Nothing was ready on time, and a lot didn’t work as promised.”
Lesson #3: “Don’t over-promise, don’t over-sell. You’re not the 800-pound monkey — you can’t sell vaporware and then fling poo at your customers and hope some of it sticks.”
Yep, without resources, knowledge, and commitment, change is tough. I suppose that’s why 66 percent of Windows users are still running XP.
I am not convinced that this use case is necessarily representative.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2010
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