Training Ideas to Get End Users Understanding SharePoint
February 2, 2012
EndUserSharePoint.com’s Kat Weixel worked with the SharePoint community to build a certification test for team site administrators. The plan details can be read in, “End User Certification: A Test for the Rest of Us.” The community-generated test is not an official Microsoft certification, but it may give just as good insights because it was built by the end user community. Weixel’s goal:
I’m hopeful this will allow IT professionals or others in SharePoint management positions to feel far more comfortable handing out the coveted “full control” of a site. We can ask people to attend training or watch tutorials or read materials…but we can’t easily measure their absorption of all that learning. I think a certification test can really help fill that hole, and I can’t wait to develop it!
It is no doubt that end user training is heading to another level and taking cues from the social and collaboration trends. A certification test could be a handy tool for site administrators looking to get newbies up to speed. However, to really turn your users into power-users in the SharePoint system, you may need more than a Q and A.
To bypass the need for some expensive or time-consuming training, consider a third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, which extends the capabilities of your SharePoint system. Their Web Parts based information pairing capabilities give you powerful searches and a complete picture of your business information, allowing you to get the most out of your enterprise search investments. And your end users will benefit from the fast and intuitive search with clearly displayed results and simple navigation.
Mindbreeze’s intuitiveness means less training required. They also have tutorials and wikis that are easy to use and more efficient. Here you can browse Mindbreeze’s support tools for users, including videos, FAQs, wikis, and other training options. Check out the full suite of solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, February 2, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Brainware Receives Rave Reviews
February 2, 2012
According to The Sacramento Bee article “Healthcare Payments Automation Summit (HPAS 2012) to Feature Brainware Customer Success Stories” Brainware Inc. is on display at the Healthcare Payments Automation Summit (HPAS 2012). Charles Kaplan, Vice President of Marketing for Brainware, brings attention to the excessive amount of unnecessary time that the healthcare industry spends pushing papers and states:
The success of providers like Mayo Clinic, Gundersen Lutheran and Resurrection offer resounding proof that intelligent data capture technology is the key to freeing those resources, turning slow, error-prone, manual data entry routines into efficient, transparent, well-oiled machines for generating profit and opportunity in healthcare.
However, Brainware’s technology could be considered backwoods to some. None of Brainware’s software platforms use taxonomies, indexing or any other type of tagging methods. This is in direct contrast to others such as Access Innovations who pride themselves in offering a full range of tagging features to produce more accurate results. Some might wonder if Brainware and trigrams really are a step in the right direction.
April Holmes, February 2, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Craig Norris Leaves Attensity
February 2, 2012
Chiliad has issued the press release, “New CEO Begins Duties at CHILIAD in Herndon, VA.” Craig Norris is leaving Attensity to head that company. Attensity, owned by Aeris Capital, is positioned as a global natural language analytics company. Chiliad seems to be its direct competitor. Interesting.
Chiliad Chairman Patrick Gross noted a couple of challenges his company’s new CEO has already tackled:
The first is the ability to rapidly search data collections at greater scale than any other offering in the market. The second is to allow search formulation and analysis in natural language. This means that no longer is an elite class of analysts required in order to generate meaningful results, thus reducing the personnel training and skills shortages that plague alternative solutions and put timely discovery at risk. The explosion of ‘Big Data’ is real and valuable findings are buried in vast collections for both enterprises and governments. Chiliad has the opportunity to integrate its innovative, massively scalable solutions with emerging open source software to build customized solutions for the largest-scale clients.
It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to this shift.
Cynthia Murrell, February 2, 2012
SharePoint 2010 – Managing File Types and Sizes
February 1, 2012
SharePoint is a broad infrastructure, popular for its ability to handle a broad range of information storage and retrieval needs. However, SharePoint is a business tool and in order to function properly needs to be maintained according to best practices. One such best practice that should be followed in order to maintain efficiency pertains to file types and file sizes. Michal Pisarek with SharePoint Analyst HQ offers his input in, “Managing File Types and Sizes in SharePoint 2010.”
Good SharePoint governance policies will frequently containing operational directives regarding both the type and size of files that can be stored on SharePoint 2010. Being able to control the types of files is essential to any organization to ensure that only the correct type of content is stored within the platform. Many organizations encourage their users to move content to SharePoint, however they do not want users moving their entire iTunes library or video collection to the platform. Another issue is of maximum file size. The ability to control the maximum size of file that can be uploaded to SharePoint is a must for many organizations.
Pisarek goes on to offer helpful suggestions for setting best practices, templates, and standards when it comes to working with end users to set file types and sizes within a SharePoint installation. However, there are third party solutions that make handling files of any type much easier. One solution worth examining is Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is able to search all data sources connected to the platform simultaneously. In addition to data from, for example, Microsoft Exchange or the file system, the Fabasoft Folio Connector allows to query information objects and documents from Fabasoft Folio too.
Read more about the Fabasoft Folio Connector and how it may help your organization handle files of all types.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 1, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Getting the Most out of a New SharePoint Deployment
January 31, 2012
Christian Buckely of Axceler provides some insights on deploying a SharePoint system in your organization, namely what to avoid, for overall collaboration software success. In “Where Not to Begin with SharePoint,” Buckely advises to bypass automating Human Resources activities if you’re looking for big innovation. While automating expense reports or vacation requests is a good playground to learn the SharePoint technologies, getting the most out of your enterprise search investments requires expansion into new business information ground.
Your strategy should be to focus on those areas that will drive value to the business first. Quickly routing expense reports, while wonderful to your accounting team, is not adding tremendous value to your business. Email will work fine for a few more weeks while you focus elsewhere. SharePoint deployments should (like everything else) follow the 80/20 rule: focus your efforts and deliver functionality to the 20% of your organization who will be doing 80% of the workload in SharePoint. Find those teams that **need** productivity solutions, and build to their requirements first.
Identifying the areas in your business that will benefit the most from SharePoint features is a sure way to get the bang for your buck right off the bat. After working on organization needs, you can then focus on providing some ‘want’ features, like automated birthday reminders or vacation request forms.
SharePoint is a powerful platform that continues to grow, but we also know some out-of-the-box features can be lacking. To add rich value to your system while also providing an easier experience for your users, consider an intuitive solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Their out-of-the-box solution gives you information pairing, mobility, and a more powerful search in a user-centered environment:
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise understands you, or more precisely understands exactly what the most important information is for you at any given moment. It’s a center of excellence and simultaneously your personal assistant for all questions. The information pairing technology brings enterprise and Cloud together.
Consider their full suite of products and solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, January 31, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Exogenous Complexity 1: Search
January 31, 2012
I am now using the phrase “exogenous complexity” to describe systems, methods, processes, and procedures which are likely to fail due to outside factors. This initial post focuses on indexing, but I will extend the concept to other content centric applications in the future. Disagree with me? Use the comments section of this blog, please.
What is an outside factor?
Let’s think about value adding indexing, content enrichment, or metatagging. The idea is that unstructured text contains entities, facts, bound phrases, and other identifiable entities. A key word search system is mostly blind to the meaning of a number in the form nnn nn nnnn, which in the United States is the pattern for a Social Security Number. There are similar patterns in Federal Express, financial, and other types of sequences. The idea is that a system will recognize these strings and tag them appropriately; for example:
nnn nn nnn Social Security Number
Thus, a query for Social Security Numbers will return a string of digits matching the pattern. The same logic can be applied to certain entities and with the help of a knowledge base, Bayesian numerical recipes, and other techniques such as synonym expansion determine that a query for Obama residence will return White House or a query for the White House will return links to the Obama residence.
One wishes that value added indexing systems were as predictable as a kabuki drama. What vendors of next generation content processing systems participate in is a kabuki which leads to failure two thirds of the time. A tragedy? It depends on whom one asks.
The problem is that companies offering automated solutions to value adding indexing, content enrichment, or metatagging are likely to fail for three reasons:
First, there is the issue of humans who use language in unexpected or what some poets call “fresh” or “metaphoric” methods. English is synthetic in that any string of sounds can be used in quite unexpected ways. Whether it is the use of the name of the fruit “mango” as a code name for software or whether it is the conversion of a noun like information into a verb like informationize which appears in Japanese government English language documents, the automated system may miss the boat. When the boat is missed, continued iterations try to arrive at the correct linkage, but anyone who has used fully automated systems know or who paid attention in math class, the recovery from an initial error can be time consuming and sometimes difficult. Therefore, an automated system—no matter how clever—may find itself fooled by the stream of content flowing through its content processing work flow. The user pays the price because false drops mean more work and suggestions which are not just off the mark, the suggestions are difficult for a human to figure out. You can get the inside dope on why poor suggestions are an issue in Thining, Fast and Slow.
Inteltrax: Top Stories, January 23 to January 27
January 30, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, how certain industries are gaining a foothold via big data analytics.
One story, “Marketing Analytics Makes for a Wide Open Field,” showcases how smart marketers are getting a better understanding of potential customers with BI.
“Human Resources is Not Helpless With Big Data” acts as a rebuttal of sorts to a spate of news saying HR offices aren’t properly utilizing big data. We think they are and can do even more with a little help.
However, not all the news is positive. “Avoiding Obsolete Analytics” deals with SPOTS, an acronym for obsolete analytics, of which some say are more prevalent than we think. We, though, disagree, and showcase some finely evolving tools.
Big data is storming the castle of industry, changing the way nearly everyone does business. From the cutting edge HR work to stepping around potentially obsolete tools, there is an entire world of news waiting for you. We’re going to give you all you need to stay current in the big data world.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
January 30, 2012
Building a SharePoint Web Site: Three Important Planning Points to Remember
January 30, 2012
In “3 Things to Know Before Using SharePoint to Build Your Website,” Will Saville of BrightStarr makes a few key points to consider before diving in head first. With a SharePoint deployment, planning is imperative.
What does Saville suggest for success? For starters, talk about business requirements and value 80 percent of the time and SharePoint technology capabilities 20 percent of the time. This helps you keep on track with your business goals. Second, know that out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities may not meet all your needs, so plan to customize with Web parts. And last but certainly not least, consider your content:
If content is king, then Content Managers must be pretty important. But, it’s incredible how easily they can be side-lined. A poor editing and content management experience will lead to low user adoption, which will ultimately result in content not being published as quickly (if at all). Because SharePoint isn’t a point WCM solution, it’s really important to consider their needs and make sure it works from a content management perspective as early on as possible.
Getting your content managers on-board early will keep them engaged and encouraging of user adoption. The project success comes down to the people you have working on the project and their drive for innovation.
To customize your SharePoint site with Web parts and to make a user-friendly site that makes for easy adoption, look to a comprehensive solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Having Fabasoft Mindbreeze in your SharePoint system combines on-premise information with Cloud information, connecting your users to what they need. For an enriched user experience, the Mindbreeze InSite capability. . .
recognizes correlations and links through semantic and dynamic search processes. This delivers pinpoint accurate and precise ‘finding experiences.’ And this with no installation, configuration or maintenance required. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite is the website search that your company needs.
Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze’s full suite of solutions.
Philip West, January 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
MediaFunnel: Social on Steroids
January 30, 2012
Formerly known as TweetFunnel, MediaFunnel was founded by serial entrepreneur Andreas Wilkins, and Steve Chipman, president of Lexnet Consulting. The namesake technology, originally developed by Cloud10Apps, is a social media management systems geared towards fostering team collaboration to effectively interact with customers and prospects over social channels. The organization is self-funded but is in the process of looking for additional funding.
MediaFunnel tackles the problem of coordinating the efforts of multiple (each with multiple social profiles), allowing a team of users to synchronize communications with customers and prospects over Facebook and Twitter. On the back end, the technology integrates with applications like Salesforce.com (which turns tweets into sales leads), Zendesk (which creates customer service tickets), Twilio (which allows users to post via SMS for alerts and both internal and external user postings), and YouTube (which lets users concurrently upload videos to YouTube while posting content to Facebook) to extend social interactions into traditional processes. The brand monitoring functionality for Twitter can track conversations based on keywords, mentions, and direct messages and includes search and pre-set alerts for social mentions and brand monitoring.
Adding workflow to managing a corporate social networking presence, MediaFunnel allows anyone across an enterprise to contribute content that can be reviewed, edited and then disseminated to a community via Twitter or Facebook, moving content creation beyond the social media team to everyone within an organization and outside with a guest posting feature. Contributors, who can submit material via e-mail or text, are assigned varying degrees of editorial control. The technology’s editorial review process helps companies control brand imaging and compliance.
MediaFunnel’s current architecture is based on Ruby on Rails, MySql and Amazon EC2 cloud services. Competitors include HootSuite, CoTweet, and Threadsy. Segments that may find the technology particularly advantageous include PR firms, consumer brands, mass media, and retailing.
Rita Safranek, Janaury 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search Only Goes So Far
January 30, 2012
Infocentric Research surveyor Stephan Schillerwein, who presented his findings at the Online Information Conference, released some alarming statistics about enterprise search in his report “The Digital Workplace.” Among the points which jumped out at me were 40 percent of employees use the wrong information when conducting enterprise searches and 63 percent “make critical decisions without being informed,” which results in a 25 percent work information productivity loss.
According to the Pandia Search Engine News Article “Huge Problems for Search In the Enterprise” Schillerwein believes there are a few reasons why enterprise search is problematic. Users don’t account for the fact that enterprise search is different from Web Search, they have unrealistic expectations and there is a clear problem of lack of content. The Pandia article asserted: Schillerwein suggests a solution based on several elements, such as consistent coverage of information flows for processes, bringing together the worlds of structured and unstructured information, and adding context. I would agree as this ability to combine structured and unstructured data while maintaining context is key in our approach. However, when you combine the crowded jumble of tweets, social media and other data that crowd employees’ smart devices the problems with enterprise search could continue to take a downward spiral and “finding a needle in a haystack” could be easier than doing an enterprise search.
These observations triggered several questions and observations.
First, there are a number of companies offering enterprise information solutions. Many are focused on the older approach of key word queries. There are business intelligence systems which provide “find-ability” tools along with a range of useful analytic features. Although search is not the focal point of these solutions, they do provide useful visualizations and statistics on content. The problem is that most organizations are confused about what is needed and what must be done to maximize the value of systems which go beyond key word retrieval. This confusion is likely to play a far larger role in enterprise search challenges than many market analysts want to acknowledge. Instead, many solutions today seem to be making information access more confusing and problematic, not clearer and more trouble free.
Second, the challenge may be more directly related to figuring out what specific business process needs which information. Without a clear understanding of the user’s requirements, it may be difficult to deploy a system that delivers higher user satisfaction. If this hypothesis is correct, perhaps more vendors should adopt the approach we have taken at Digital Reasoning. We make an extra effort to understand what the user requires and then invest time and resources in hooking appropriate information and data into the system. No solution can deliver the right fact-based answers if the required information is not within the data store and available to the algorithms which make sense of what is otherwise noise? We think that many problems with user acceptance originate with a misunderstanding or sidestepping of user requirements and the fundamental task of getting the necessary information for the system.
Third, the terminology used to describe information retrieval and access is becoming devalued. At Digital Reasoning, we work to explain succinctly and without jargon how our next-generation system can facilitate better decision making for financial, health, intelligence, and other professional markets. We have complex numerical recipes and sophisticated systems and methods. Our focus, however, is on what the system does for a user. We have been fortunate to receive support from a range of clients from government and industry as well as the investment community for our next-generation approach. We think our strength is our focus on the customer’s need and not only our unique predictive algorithms and cloud-based solution.
To learn more about Digital Reasoning and our products, navigate to www.digitalreasoning.com .
Dave Danielson, Digital Reasoning, January 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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