People Search in SharePoint
March 24, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to phonetic search in SharePoint. I must have overlooked this function which I think of as a variant of fuzzy functions or what I once heard described as “soundex” functions.
“A Quick Look at Phonetic People Search in SharePoint 2010” provides a run down of this feature. The author is Corey Roth, and he is moved to tears of gratitude with some of the new Microsoft SharePoint search features. We are pleased, but geese do not weep.
For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
To work with People Search, you must first have successfully configured user profile synchronization, set up a connection, and then done a full crawl on your Local SharePoint Sites content source. If your user profile synchronization service isn’t working, do yourself a favor and just reinstall because you will never get it to work. The content source still uses the sps3 protocol to crawl user profiles. If no people are returned when you search make sure you have a content source setup using that protocol handler. I’ll probably write another post on how to set this up pretty soon.
Consultants love SharePoint. Some vendors’ systems deliver this feature, no coding required. Microsoft’s approach is to allow others to create “glue” code. My view is that this approach creates more opportunities for slips twixt cup and lip. Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2010
Free, free, free. I will report this writing for free to the National Archives. I think that access to most documents is free as well. Might be wrong about this in the present economic climate, however. Reporting done anyway.
IBM and Its Do Everything Strategy
March 24, 2010
I read an unusual interview with Steve Mills. The story was “Q&A: IBM’s Steve Mills on Strategy, Oracle, and SAP.” What jumped out at me was that there was no reference to Google that I noticed. Odd. Google seems to be ramping up in the enterprise sector and poised to compete with just about everyone in the enterprise software and services market. When I noticed this, I decided to work through the interview to see what the rationale was for describing companies that are struggling with many “push back” issues from customers, resellers, and partners. The hassles Oracle is now enduring with regard to open source and the SAP service pricing fluctuations are examples of companies struggling to deal with a changing market needs.
Please, read the original interview because I am comfortable highlighting three comments in a blog post.
First, Mr. Mills said:
Our technology delivers important elements of the solution, but there are often third-part application companies that add to that solution. No one vendor delivers everything required. The average large business, if you went into their compute centers around the world, runs 50,000 to 60,000 programs that are part of 2,000 to 4,000 unique applications.
Yes, and it is the cost and complexity of the IT infrastructure in those companies today that are creating pressures on the CFO, the users, and stakeholders. IBM’s engineers helped created the present situation and the company is now in a position where those customers are likely to look for lower cost, different types of options. If I have a broken auto, would I go to the mechanic who failed to make the repair on an earlier visit? I seek a new mechanic, but perhaps IBM’s cash rich customers don’t think the way I do.
Second, Mr. Mills offered this “fact”:
But in the enterprise, for every dollar invested in ERP, there will be five dollars of investment made around that ERP package to get it fully implemented, integrated, scaled and running effectively.
My view is that the time value of the dinosaur like applications are likely to be put under increasing pressure by new hires. The younger engineers are more comfortable with certain approaches to computing. Over time, the IBM “factoid” will be converted into a question like, “If we shift to Google Apps, perhaps we could save some money?” The answer would require verification, but if the savings are accurate, the implications for Oracle and SAP are significant. I think IBM will either have to buy its way into the cloud and “try to make up the revenue delta” on volume or find itself in the same boat as other “old style” enterprise software vendors.
Third, Mr. Mills stated:
It’s money. That’s the No. 1 motivator. And money is not a single-dimensional factor because there’s short-term money, long-term money and money described in broader value terms versus the cost of a product. The surrounding costs are far in excess of products. Every month, customers convert from Oracle to DB2. Why do they do that? Well, Oracle is expensive. Oracle tries to use pricing power to capture a customer and then get the customer to keep on paying. Oracle raises its prices constantly. Oracle does not provide a strong support infrastructure. There are many customers who have decided to move away from Oracle across a variety of products because of those characteristics.
I agree. The implication are that IBM is a low cost option. Well, maybe in some other dimension which the addled goose cannot perceive. My view is that time, vale, and cost will conspire to create a gravity well into which the IBM-like companies will be sucked. IBM’s dalliance with open source, its adherence to its services model, and its reliance on acquisitions to generate revenue may lose traction in the future.
And finding stuff in IBM systems? Not mentioned. Also, interesting.
I don’t know when, but IBM’s $100 billion in revenue needs some oxygen going forward. The race is not a marathon. It’s more like a 200 or 440. Maybe Google will be in the race? Should be interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2010
No pay for this write up. I will report this to the GSA who has tapped IBM to build its next generation computing infrastructure. I think IBM will be compensated for this necessary work.
Vamosa and SchemaLogic
March 24, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who took me to task for not covering SchemaLogic more diligently. I check out my Overflight service and I can tell quickly if a search and content processing vendor is making some marketing tracks. Autonomy is on the ball; many of the vendors I track are either lacking in marketing savvy, marketing resources, or marketing energy.
I want to point to SchemaLogic’s tie up with Vamosa. SchemaLogic makes a controlled vocabulary server. The company has other technical capabilities, but I want to highlight the server product. With it, an organization can tame the wild ponies of uncontrolled tagging. SharePoint offers this users-can-do-it approach, and I think that uncontrolled tagging creates some interesting retrieval challenges. SchemaLogic’s server is a traffic cop, authority file, and repository. The software enforces some order on indexing or metatagging as the 20-somethings prefer.
Vamosa is a services firm and it is one of the many companies that offer consulting and information governance expertise to organizations. The idea is that in a SharePoint environment, people learn pretty quickly that there are problems “finding” information. Vamosa to the rescue.
The tie up allows Vamosa to offer a solution and SchemaLogic to get some marketing support. You can get details about the deal in the write up “Vamosa Adds More Content Governance Capabilities via MetaPoint.”
For information about Vamosa navigate to the firm’s Web site, www.vamosa.com. For information about SchemaLogic, you can find information at www.schemalogic.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2010
Coveo and GEICO Host Webinar on March 23, 2010
March 21, 2010
Fierce Media has asked Beyond Search to facilitate a discussion about “how GEICO thinks about leveraging its data-rich enterprise systems to generate real-time business value and intelligence.” The participants are GEICO and Coveo as well as Stephen E Arnold.
Topics include how the Coveo system can:
- Enable improved business intelligence and decision making through dynamic dashboards and information mashups that provide actionable business information
- Access structured and unstructured data from across enterprise systems and repositories without complex integration or data migration, improving efficiency and cost effectiveness through a unified indexing layer
- Lower the cost of legacy system integrations and upgrades, and reduce time-consuming data migration
- Optimize social networks and incorporate the value of collaboration and just-in-time information exchange into the knowledge ecosystem
The audio program will be on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 beginning at 11:00am Eastern/8:00am Pacific. More information about Coveo may be found at http://www.coveo.com. You can register here.
Ben Kent, March 21, 2010, Beyond Search
This is a sponsored post.
Autonomy and Customer Relationship Management
March 21, 2010
I learned when I read “Autonomy Delivers the First Meaning-Based Multichannel Customer Interaction Analytics Application” that:
- Autonomy was at the Gartner Customer Relationship Management Summit. (Gartner is, like Ovum, an azure chip consultant with aspirations to define the information technology world. I believe everything both firms output too. Well, almost, I suppose.)
- Autonomy is a player in customer relationship management.
According to the write up:
Autonomy Explore gives businesses a much more insightful and valuable view of their customers. For instance, the same customer that submitted a complaint to the contact center, searched for products on the company’s Web properties, and then commented about the company on Twitter, may have expressed different levels of satisfaction and used different terms through each channel. Autonomy Explore detects the evolving sentiment of that customer by analyzing the concepts and patterns communicated across each touch point, in order to more effectively engage with that customer as well as other customers from the same segment.
The Autonomy system includes a range of functions, including concept understanding and automated reporting and workflow. For more information, navigate to www.autonomy.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2010
An unpaid write up. I will report this to the agency with the best customer support in the Federal government, the Office of Citizen Services.
Microsoft Fast Customer Support
March 20, 2010
Short honk: Got your Microsoft Fast installation up and running but have a wee question? You will want to keep this information handy:
- FAST standalone technical support assistance, navigate to http://support.microsoft.com/oas
- FAST telephone support: +1 866-922-5260 (8:00 AM – 8:00 PM Eastern Time)
Enjoy!
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2010
A freebie pure and simple.
Interdependency: Why IT Costs Are Tough to Control
March 20, 2010
Network World ran a very interesting article which, in my opinion, helps explain why search and content processing applications are characterized by sky rocketing costs. The story is “Is IT Keeping Up with a Changing Infrastructure? “ When I read the write up, I realized that most IT departments are like buggy whip manufacturers who did not want to manufacture automobile seat covers. Bad move but understandable. Buggy whips were comfortable just like silos of on premises applications and users who did not know that data could be mashed up and displayed in an actionable format.
For me, the most interesting segment of the article was:
A new study from Forrester Research Inc. shows that application developers and their project managers are not keeping up with the times…. [a] senior analyst…, said IT pros aren’t necessarily adjusting to what is the new reality of a tough economy and the popularity of certain technology trends.
I think I would have inserted the word “some” so that the statement would have stated: “some IT pros aren’t necessarily adjusting.”
In San Francisco earlier this week, I talked with a New York consulting firm. One of the interesting throw away remarks was that this outfit has found a number of new customers among the consulting firms in New York. I probed but was unable to get the names of this company’s consulting firm clients, but I recall the comments made during out chat.
One message that came through was that consulting firms are struggling to manage their information technology operations. The challenges range from cost control to finding information that someone in the consulting firms knows is on a server.
The Network World has hit the nail on the head. I wonder if the clients of the firms who purport to point out IT problems have the expertise, money, and time to fix their own IT problems.
My hunch? No. But talking about the flaws in companies is much easier and more fun than fixing one’s own problems.
Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2010
A freebie. No one paid me to write this. I will report information technology cost issues to the General Accountability Office, an outfit with responsibility for tackling such issues. I don’t think the GAO works for free as I do, but perhaps the entity will sympathize.
WAND and Layer2 Team for SharePoint Taxonomy Functions
March 19, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Jump-Start Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Knowledge Management Using Pre-Defined Taxonomy Metadata”. The Microsoft Fast road show is wending its way among the Redmond faithful. In its wake, a number of companies see opportunity in the Microsoft demos. But with Microsoft making some tasty offers to incentive those looking for search systems, Microsoft may be doing third-party add-on vendors and Fast ESP consultants a big favor.
The Earth Times’ article said:
In cooperation with WAND, Inc – one of the leading providers of enterprise taxonomies – Layer2 now offers pre-defined Taxonomy Metadata for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, a robust and expanding library of taxonomies covering a wide variety of domains to help jumpstart classification projects. Taxonomy Metadata for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is currently available in 13 languages, e.g. English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese.
WAND has developed structured multi-lingual vocabularies with related tools and services to power precision search and classification applications. The company asserts that WAND makes search work better. WAND Taxonomies are used in online yellow pages and local search, ad-matching engines, business to business directories, product search, and within enterprise search engines. The firm’s library contains more than 40 domain specific taxonomies. WAND’s taxonomies are available in 13 languages.
Layer 2 GmbH is a specialist for creating custom components and solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Based in Germany, Layer2 offers products and solutions that add additional features to portals based on Microsoft SharePoint technology.
My view is that Microsoft may be creating opportunities at the same time it leaves some SharePoint customers wondering why their systems do not work as expected. If taxonomy management was a priority, Microsoft should have included a system to perform this type of work within the SharePoint package. Third party vendors now have an opportunity to sell a “solution,” but customers may have to go through a learning process and then spend additional money to get the functionality required to make SharePoint more useful.
Perhaps another mixed result from SharePoint? Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2010
Freebie. No one paid me to point out that talking about “taxonomies” is much easier than implementing a high value taxonomy and then enforcing consistent tagging across the processed corpus. I know that the IRS is good at indexing by social security number, so I will report non payment to that agency.
Are You Ready for Enterprise Search? Nope
March 19, 2010
A reader sent me a link to a white paper from Silicon.com. I clicked the link and was presented with a download request form. I apparently filled a similar form out years ago because I was asked to update my information. I did so. I was then given another page from which to click a link to download a white paper from MobilVox, Inc.
The title? “Are We Ready for Enterprise Search.” The subtitle? “Text analytics and intelligent agents cannot be overlooked.” No problem with the title but the text of the white paper was two pages. This is more of a flier or a fact sheet. A white paper is in my opinion somewhat more substantive. The last one I wrote was about 12 pages long, had diagrams, and included some hard metrics about the performance of a search system.
The white paper pointed me to www.irissearch.net, which through me.
The point of the white paper by MobilVox is to boil down what took me 300 pages to explain in three editions of my Enterprise Search Report to a publisher who, like a chameleon, changed its appearance, and Martin White and I filled 125 pages for Successful Enterprise Search Management, published by Galatea in 2009.
I don’t disagree with the information in the two page write up, but it is a bit short on detail. Here’s phase II of a search implementation:
Strategically select information repositories most critically important to the organization. Deploy the enterprise search solution with these core repositories. Scale up initial roll-out by adding more repositories and connectors to other legacy systems.
Martin and I explained the steps and some of the constituent nuances in 16 pages, and we chopped quite a bit of detail to meet the stipulations of our publisher in the UK.
If you want a white paper that gives you enterprise search on two sheets of paper, have at it. After you end up in a bit of a technical, managerial, and budget bind, drop me an email. seaky2000 at yahoo dot com. I won’t be able to help, but I like to keep track of potentially interesting case examples.
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2010
No one paid me to write about search challenges. I will report this sad state of affairs to the Department of Energy, an outfit with deep experience is search systems that are often interesting challenges to senior managers.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze and Its Lotus Connector
March 18, 2010
I was able to read a white paper prepared by Fabasoft Mindbreeze about its updated Mindbreeze IBM Lotus Connector. The document is “Configuration of Mindbreeze Enterprise Search for IBM Lotus” and is available from the company. When I worked at Ziff Communications in New York City, I had an early exposure to the product. Since that time 20 years ago, Lotus Notes has found its way into many commercial and governmental entities. Those who love the product cannot live without it. People like me tolerate some of the system’s peculiarities exemplified by this question, “Why can’t you restore my email?”
Fabasoft is the successful Austria-based enterprise software and integration company. Mindbreeze is its search, content analytics and content processing subsidiary. The Mindbreeze engineers have developed a solution for organizations with Lotus Domino/Notes as well as a lot of other types of content systems. You can get Mindbreeze and its Lotus Domino/Notes support, snap it into your environment, and search for Notes content, even in mobile environments, including the RIM Blackberry, Apple iPhone, and Google Android devices.
In January 2010, I got a preview of the system and I received a copy of the white paper. I followed up with Daniel Fallmann, founder and managing director of Mindbreeze. Here’s what I learned in an email exchange on March 14 and 15, 2010:
What is the main focus of the IBM Lotus Domino/Notes support you offer?*
What is very important for us is that that the Mindbreeze Connectors run with a minimum of required configuration, even to very large scale. So Notes items and even complex Lotus Domino object models are very easy to adapt to fulfill the need of the customer/users. So Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise makes it easy to search-enable any line-of-business application based on IBM Lotus Domino within a minimum amount of time with great results for the knowledge workers, even with their mobile information needs. Of course our customers get all the needed social search and federated search features built-in. We have a lot of Lotus partners that love the ease you can now search-enable IBM Lotus line-of-business applications.
As we offer an appliance as well you can buy the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance or you can install Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise and run the IBM Lotus Connector on a Linux environment which totally saves you the money of the operating system and enables you to even support our customer’s users with IBM Lotus line-of-business-application in the cloud with a modest and easy to calculate investment.
What is the method for indexing Lotus Mail which has been moved to an archive?*
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise follows the “link-information” (for example, a link to an archived mail for example in a Fabasoft iArchive for IBM Lotus Notes) left in the remaining item stub and index the archived information by applying the rights based on the stub object that’s left in the IBM Lotus installation.
How are emails across Lotus Notes installations indexed so that only the authorized person can see a single email or a group of emails?
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise uses the rights based on an IBM Lotus object information to evaluate if a user has the right to read information based on the document level or even extensible to the field level. Things like inherited rights and user name fields are as well taken into account. As Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is based on a modern distributed service architecture, it is easy to spread queries against several instances and respond to a user’s query. Thanks to our innovative technology and architecture we typically are up and running at customers in between 30min and 2 days, of course this highly varies on the customer’s needs.
When Lotus Notes is used with an IBM collaboration tool like Lotus Notes Traveler, how are the indexes federated so a single query retrieves the content across the Notes’s components?
First: It typically makes sense that Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise crawler, filter, index services are located where the information is, so the best practice is to use the distributed architecture of Mindbreeze Enterprise Search to bring together information from several IBM Lotus databases. Second: As Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise connects against the IBM Lotus web services it is even trivial to get information from different locations and index it in a central location.
How does your system’s pricing work?
We have a per named user pricing model as well as a concurrent use model that is very easy to calculate and use. Moreover the Mindbreeze IBM Lotus Connector supports custom object models as well and you can host the whole product on a Linux platform. As far as I know there is no other IBM Lotus Connector and search product, that can so easy adapt to IBM Lotus Domino object models for your specific line-of-business application. This of course has to be taken into account.
Do you support the Notes – Cisco Unified Meeting Place?
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise allows you to index all the calendar information for all meetings that you are invited to by Cisco’s Unified Meeting Place. This information can be updated in the index during the meeting place notification mechanisms. You could even index the audio content streamed via a Cisco MeetingPlace Audio Server by using speech to text functionality.
If you want to index Lotus content, we think the Mindbreeze solution warrants a test drive. Contact the company at http://www.mindbreeze.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2010
When I am next in Linz, Mindbreeze promised me a pastry. Until then, this is an uncompensated post.
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