Top 25 Most Influential People in the Microsoft SharePoint Community
November 28, 2012
In “These are the Top 25 Microsoft SharePoint Influencers for 2012,” Mark Fidelman discusses the community around SharePoint and those influencers leading the way. The top 25 were chosen based on the social scoring system outlined in the book, Socialized!. Numbers one and two on the list are discussed:
Joel Oleson (number one on the list this year) created a public facing micro-community on Yammer called SPYam to discuss and support SharePoint and Yammer. The community rallied around the Microsoft acquisition and in an attempt to learn about it – then quickly started using it in a highly visible way. You can’t buy community members like him.
Mark Miller number #2 on the list, helped organize a world SharePoint promotional tour which helped to expand the community base.
The SharePoint community is a major benefit of the software platform. The article points out that the community has grown stronger and more influential given increase in numbers and strength from year to year. Along with using the SharePoint community, you may also want to use a third party tool to fill in any gaps in the software. Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers a proven enterprise search solution with the benefit of a SharePoint Connector. The Connector links systems for enterprise-wide information access with faceted search, a familiar user interface, search results that can easily be processed into actionable information, and more.
Philip West, November 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
PolySpot Speaks More Than 50 Languages
November 27, 2012
Due to the ever increasingly globalized workforce, it is more important than ever that data analytics providers are able to appeal to a multitude of countries and languages and corner the polyglot market. Matthew Aslett of the Too Much Information blog recently reported on this topic in the article, “The Dawn of Polyglot Analytics.”
According to Aslett, the emergence of a polyglot analytics platform exemplifies a new approach to data analytics that is based on the user’s approach to analytics rather than the nature of the data.
The article states:
Polyglot analytics explains why we are seeing adoption of Hadoop and MapReduce as a complement to existing data warehousing deployments. It explains, for example, why a company like LinkedIn might adopt Hadoop for its People You May Know feature while retaining its investment in Aster Data for other analytic use cases. Polyglot analytics also explains why a company like eBay would retain its Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse for storing and analyzing traditional transactional and customer data, as well as adopting Hadoop for storing and analyzing clickstream, user behaviour and other un/semi-structured data, while also adopting an exploratory analytic platform based on Teradata’s Extreme Data Appliance for extreme analytics on a combination of transaction and user behaviour data pulled from both its EDW and Hadoop deployments.
One company that is currently excelling in polyglot analytics is Polyspot. In the recent blog post, “Polyspot is Polyglot” we learned that Polyspot offers its services in over 50 languages. Language is no longer a hindrance to data management success. PolySpot warrants a close look. The company offers high value technology within the reach of most organizations’ budgets.
Jasmine Ashton, November 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
High Performing Enterprise Search Needs Solid Solutions That Work
November 27, 2012
It seems that once a month someone is announcing the latest, greatest development in search optimization software and each new or revamped product gets faster, more accurate or easier to use. The increasing competition among developers has inspired designers to get more creative with their initial designs… or possibly just their marketing.
TechWeek Europe’s article “Start-up InboundWriter Scales Search Optimization For The Enterprise” spotlights a new ‘writer’ targeted search optimizer:
“One of the last miles is having an automated and scalable way to make sure your content is really, really good. That’s what we do, and we do it as simple as a spell-check. When using the service, a writer gets notifications and suggestions on better SEO words and phrases to use as he or she goes along in writing the document. There is an efficiency meter in the upper-left corner of the application to keep the writer apprised as the document is being written about how SEO-ready it is.”
The AI ability to second guess the user is nothing new, although in marketing things can be open to interpretation. High performing enterprise search needs functionality and usability, not more gadgets and gimmicks. That is why Intrafind has been a successful enterprise search provider for well over a decade. They use solid solutions that began in the university environment and scaled out to commercial solutions that work. Their user friendly interface enables customizable connectors which allow enterprise wide access to both structured and unstructured data in a secure environment.
Jennifer Shockley, November 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
EPiServer Adds an SEO Manager Tool to Product Suite
November 27, 2012
In “EPiServer Gets SEO Manager Add-On for Web CMS,” Anthony Myers discusses the recent release from EPiServer to add to its Web content management suite of offerings. SEO Manager as a commercial add-on for EPiServer CMS is now available. The new tool is explained:
URL management in particular can be tricky because it has to be done on the server side for things like changing page names, changing section names and moving pages around a website.
SEO Manager is the tool that optimizes a site’s URL’s, one of the things many Web properties lose sight of while focusing on keywords, headings and content (see: Content Strategy: The Perils of Search Engine Optimization). Those are obviously key to improving on search results, but more is needed to bump that all important Google ranking.
New features include renaming pages without rank loss, URL history memory, and optimized results in Google Analytics. The new tool may be worth looking at for SEO. But it doesn’t take away the need for good content and a user friendly Web site. InSite illuminates all of your information from documents to Web pages to social media networks with the power of semantic search for your Web site visitors.
Philip West, November 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Nextag Troubleshoots Declining Google Web Traffic
November 26, 2012
Relying on Google alone for Web site traffic is tricky business. In the New York Times article, “Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites,” Steve Lohr and Claire Cain Miller look at the comparison shopping Web site Nextag.com’s bout with declining Google traffic. After Nextag engineers tested their side of the matter and found no issues, they doubled their spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months. The move was seen as a necessity considering the amount of Web traffic Nextag received from both free and paid search ads. The issue has also gotten the attention of the US government because of possible antitrust violations. The author’s add this about Nextag’s next move:
His Google traffic now costs more. Two years ago, 60 percent of Nextag’s traffic from Google was from free search and 40 percent paid — people clicking on ads Nextag bought. Today, it is 30 percent free and 70 percent paid.
But his company has also shifted its strategy to become less vulnerable to Google’s charge into commerce. It has invested heavily in its underlying technology to help Web sites attract visitors, especially ones most likely to buy their goods.
The article is a good overview of the pitfalls when relying on Google advertising and what direction the issue is headed. One way to shift strategy from advertising is by enriching your Web site experience for visitors with a powerful search feature. InSite from Mindbreeze is one cost-effective and no-install required option worth looking at. InSite gives a custom searching experience unique to the user with the added benefit of mobile capabilities.
Philip West, November 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Summary November 16 to November 22
November 26, 2012
This week the IntelTrax advanced intelligence blog published some excellent pieces regarding the state of big data and analytics technologies.
“Diversity is the New Key for Analytic Success” looks at how Burberry is using analytics technology to analyze customer buying behavior.
The article states:
“SAP is pushing further in this vein and has this week announced its SAP Customer 360 transactional system which the firm says is being used by fashion retailer Burberry to analyse customer buying behaviour and provide on the floor sales staff with access to big data analytics on mobile devices. This “immediate information” is then (in theory) available to help these same staff personalise fashion advice to customers.
Do we really want this amount of technology in our lives?
SAP’s other Co-CEO Bill McDermott has predicted that by 2030 there will be an additional two billion consumers on the planet by 2030 and … “They want to purchase in the digital world,” he said.”
Another interesting story, “Big Data Moves Continue” announced some impressive news in the big data community.
The article states:
“Cray announced it was awarded a contract to deliver a uRiKA graph-analytics appliance to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Analysts at ORNL will use the uRiKA system as they conduct research in healthcare fraud and analytics for a leading healthcare payer. The uRiKA system is a Big Data appliance for graph analytics that enables discovery of unknown relationships in Big Data. It is a highly scalable, real-time platform for ad hoc queries, pattern-based searches, inferencing and deduction.
“Identifying healthcare fraud and abuse is challenging due to the volume of data, the various types of data, as well as the velocity at which new data is created. YarcData’s uRiKA appliance is uniquely suited to take on these challenges, and we are excited to see the results that will come from the strategic analysis of some very large and complex data sets,” said Jeff Nichols, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.”
“Big Data Expert Overlooks the Obvious” shares some interesting thoughts on the future of big data. However, it leaves out some pretty important things.
The article states:
“The goal of all the discussion around big data and data analysis is, as I’ve argued, not to make the wrong decision faster, but to develop the best decision at the right time and deliver the information to the people that most need the information. In an Information Week column Wednesday, Tony Byrne argued small data beat big data in the presidential election.
Call it business intelligence, data analysis or predictive analytics, IT’s role here is to provide a foundation for your company to make the right decisions. Those decisions might be what to charge passengers for seats on a flight, how much to charge to for a season ticket or how many widgets to create to strike the right balance among manufacturing costs, inventory and availability. These decisions are fundamental to business success.”
When it comes to finding big data intelligence solutions that work for your organization, it is important that businesses find a trusted provider. Digital Reasoning’s Synthesys helps streamline expenses for intelligence, healthcare and finance clients.
Jasmine Ashton, November 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Protecting and Maintaining Web Site Search Rankings
November 23, 2012
Web site search rankings are important. There is no denying that search engine optimization (SEO) is an important and necessary endeavor for those who earn their livelihood on the Web. But getting there is only half the battle when it comes to SEO. Simply achieving the rankings isn’t enough – you must hold onto them. Entrepreneur tells us how in, “3 Steps to Protecting Your Website’s Search Rankings.”
The author begins:
You’ve worked hard to follow search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to earn high rankings for your website in the search engine results pages (SERPs). After weeks or even months of content creation, customer outreach and link building efforts, you’ve finally reached a coveted spot in the rankings. Unfortunately, your hard work isn’t over. To understand why, think about the difficulty of maintaining your ideal body weight. While taking off pounds can be a challenge, keeping the weight off is often an even bigger struggle. Similarly, maintaining high rankings in the natural search results can be even more of a challenge than obtaining them in the first place.
One way to add a level of currency and usability to your Web site (both of which improve SEO) is to add an effective Web site search function like Fabasoft Mindbreeze Insite. Insite comes from a trusted leader in enterprise, Fabasoft Mindbreeze, and its automatic indexing is maintenance free and requires no installation. Insite is just one way to ease the heavy burden of Web site maintenance and the struggle to achieve and maintain high search engine rankings.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 23, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Synata Unveils SAAS for the Enterprise
November 22, 2012
Synata is a San Francisco start-up that is soon to unveil as disruptive search platform for the enterprise cloud. As part of their efforts, they are seeking the opinions of major users of the following services: LinkedIn, Google Apps, and Zendesk. The San Francisco Chronicle gives the full perspective in, “San Francisco Startup Bringing Enterprise Search to the Cloud, Looking to Talk to Salesforce, LinkedIn, Zendesk, and Google Apps Users.”
Patrick White, the founder of Synata, gives his overview of the product:
‘Call it decision-point data, or real-time insight, or anything you want, but we’re going to make it insanely simple to search across your cloud data sources easily and get answers quickly.’ said Patrick White, Co-founder and CEO . . . But, the vision for Synata isn’t just about search – it’s also about giving users a really elegant way view data about a single topic or person, even when that data comes from a lot of different places. Eventually the platform will allow users to answer hard questions and find connections in their data they never knew were there.
It looks like Synata is doing two things: enterprise search and Web site search. We have not had much experience with this new product, but it seems like Fabasoft Mindbreeze might already be tackling both of these tasks. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Insite offers Cloud based maintenance-free Web site search for your public facing sites. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise offers an enterprise search solutions that works as a standalone piece or serves as a compliment to an existing Sharepoint infrastructure. Either way, service is quick, customer-oriented, and cost-efficient. New and exciting names and ideas will continue to pop up in the enterprise world, but sometimes its good to stick to the ones that you know, like Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 22, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Exclusive Interview with Rosoka NLP Developer, Mike Sorah
November 21, 2012
I continue to learn about companies with high-value content processing technologies. The challenge in real-time translation, if one believes the Google marketing, is now in “game over” mode. The winner, of course, is Google. Other firms can head to the showers and maybe think about competing in another business sector.
But some of that Google confidence may be based on assumptions about Google’s language processing expertise, not more recent systems and methods. I know. This is “burn at the stake” information to a Googler.
However, I saw a demonstration which made clear to me that Google’s “kitchen sink” approach to figuring out how to handle speech input and near real time translation may not be in step with other firm’s approaches. The company with some quite interesting translation technology and a commitment to easy integration is IMT Holdings. The privately held company’s product is Rosoka.
IMT Holdings, Corp. was founded in 2007. Our background is in US government contracting. In the course of the firm’s work, Mr. Sorah saw that the existing NLP or Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools were not able to handle the volumes and complexities of the data they needed to process. In December of 2011, IMT began actively marketing its NLP technology.
I was able after some telephone tag and email to interview Mike Sorah, one of the co-founders of IMT and one of the wizards behind the Rosoka technology.
Mr. Sorah told me:
Many of the existing NLP tools claim to be multilingual, but what they mean is that they have linguistic knowledge bases usually acquired from vendors who provide dictionaries and libraries that make NLP an issue for many licensees. But most of the NLP system don’t process documents that contain English and Chinese or English and Spanish. In the world of our clients, mixed language documents are important. These have to be processed as part of the normal stream, not put in an exception folder and maybe never processed or processed after a delay of hours or days.
The Rosoka system is different from other NLP and translation systems on the market at this time. He asserted:
In most multilingual NLP systems, the customer needs to know before they process the document what language the document is so they can load the appropriate language-specific knowledge base. What we did via our proprietary Rosoka algorithms was to take a multilingual look at the world. Our system automatically understands that a document may be in English or Chinese, or even English and Spanish mixed. The language angle is huge. We randomly sample Twitter stream and have been tweeting the top 10 languages of the week are. English varies between 35 to 45% of the tweets. Every language that Rosoka can process is included. Our multilingual support is not not sold as separate, add-on functionality.
You can read the full text of the interview with Mike Sorah in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak series at this link. More information about IMT and Rosoka is available from the firm’s Web site, http://www.imtholdings.com.
Stephen E. Arnold, November 21, 2012
Web Site Redesign Important for Many Reasons
November 21, 2012
When organizations want to redesign their Web presence, reasons like updating content or refreshing the look and feel are often tops. But with the increased news and controversy surrounding the Google algorithm, usability and search engine optimization should be reasons that make that list as well. Search Engine Watch adds SEO considerations to the topic of Web site redesign in, “Website Redesign? Get Some SEO Consultation Before You Launch.”
The author writes that organizations often get to the topic of SEO long after those initial discussions of color, content, and other cosmetics:
It’s typically not until launch is around the corner that folks start asking about SEO. ‘Sometimes’ they have serious discussions about usability . . . Usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. Search engines want to rank websites that provide a quality user experience for the searcher. How that’s defined can be somewhat subjective (every website is unique and its target audience will also be unique).
One way to increase usability and the overall user experience is to incorporate effective search. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Insite offers a cloud-based search service that requires no installation or maintenance and recognizes the semantics that are important to you and your user. Fabasoft Mindbreeze as a company has been an important and growing leader in enterprise services, offering a wide range of enterprise solutions. Consider adding Insite to your Web redesign plans, ensuring the SEO and usability are addressed just as thoroughly as look and feel.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
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