More Efficiency for SharePoint with Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite
January 24, 2012
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Winter 2012 Release gives lots of good reasons to consider their third-party solution for any organization’s enterprise needs. Founder and managing director, Daniel Fallmann, highlights some of the most innovative features of the newest release in, “Our 2012 Winter Release – More Efficiency for SharePoint.”
Fallmann provides some highlights:
The Microsoft SharePoint search is replaced by Fabasoft Mindbreeze, with the added value of information pairing, which extends the search to the entire connected company knowledge – all on one page. So-called search-driven dashboards can also be created. What does this mean? All information of a page is displayed by Web Parts made available by Mindbreeze. A simple configuration is all that’s needed. The displayed content is always up-to-date and to the point. And after the initial configuration, this takes place automatically and maintenance-free. Furthermore, our 2012 Winter Release is the link between the Cloud and Microsoft SharePoint. Data from the Cloud can thereby be integrated just as easily into Micrososft SharePoint.
The Mindbreeze functionality as an add-on, connecting an existing SharePoint infrastructure to the cloud, is a good solution for companies currently struggling with the decision of moving to the cloud. Another major feature worth highlighting is Fabasoft Mindbreeze Insite.
Fallmann continues his discussion:
A further example . . . is Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite. The software achieves what would normally only be possible with intensive maintenance – to keep internet sites constantly up-to-date. Imagine you want to post a current blog article on your internet site. This is normally only possible via the use of personnel resources . . . What if search results could appear without anyone realizing that a search engine is working in the background. In other words: Always up-to-date, without anyone needing to take care of or dedicate working time for it. For example the updating of blogs, news or whatever else you want to post on your site.
The InSite feature seems to be an effective way to maintain a current web presence without devoting extensive work time to the project. So whether your organization is searching for an enterprise solution for the first time or is simply looking for a way to improve a current SharePoint installation, Fabasoft Mindbreeze has many features that definitely warrant a second look.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
So Where Are You? Come Here! Hello, Hello
January 24, 2012
Maybe it is I, but fatigue washes over me each time I read about Lucene-based Watson. Quite a bit of PR chatter and very little online demo.
All Things D recently reported on IBM’s new super computer Watson in the article “Seven Questions With IBM’s Manoj Saxena About Watson and Cancer.”
According to the article, IBM is planning on using Watson as a reference tool to assist human physicians in the treatment of breast, lung and colon cancer.
The write up provides readers with the text from an interview between All Things D and Manoj Saxena, general manager of the Watson program at IBM, to talk about what Watson will — and won’t — be doing in helping doctors treat humans with cancer, and what that might mean for the future of medicine.
In response to the question, will Watson be directly involved in treatment? Saxena replied:
Watson doesn’t make the decisions. It’s a physician’s assistant. But before it becomes that, it has a lot to learn. Out of the box, Watson has the knowledge of a first-year medical resident. That is where it’s at today. With Cedars-Sinai and Wellpoint, we’re going to teach it all about cancer during the next six months.
A couple of observations:
- NLP on a medical corpus is a piece of cake compared to colloquial blog posts in Arabic
- Talk is not search; talk is baloney
- Wrapping layers of code around Lucene does not inspire confidence in high speed throughput on large content collections.
- Updates? And what about updates?
Watson still has a lot to learn to be able to be utilized to solve the problem of cancer. After utilizing the super computer in the medical field, IBM plans to apply Watson to financial services.
Jasmine Ashton, January 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Looking Toward SharePoint 2013
January 23, 2012
In the constant conversation surrounding SharePoint, the next SharePoint release seems to always be on the horizon, ever present in the blogosphere. SharePoint 2010 is still relatively new, and yet some experts have already moved on to the yet unknown SharePoint 2013. Mike Walsh discusses this and more in his piece, “End of year look at SharePoint.”
Walsh offers:
SharePoint 2010 came out in May 2010 so we are now just over halfway through the usual three year cycle before the next version of the product . . . Also while clearly most of the developer team have been working on the new version since they virtually left the SP 2010 forums in summer 2010, people from the team such as Bill Baer seemed to have stopped writing anything on SP 2010 and there was even a Microsoft SP 2010 blogger who recently announced the end of his SP 2010 blog articles because he had moved to working with the next version of the product. Whether this means that they are already informing people . . . about what the next version will include is something that I don’t know . . . I do however suspect that if that stage hasn’t been reached yet it will be by maybe May 2012. That would be followed by the first private betas (end summer 2012?) and in time by the first public beta . . .My own guess is that we’ll be back to the October (2013) release date we had for the 2007 products.
It seems to me that Microsoft is stuck in an old-fashioned update routine. Instead of making updates, improvements, and patches a constant fluid process, SharePoint is confined to a rigid three-year release cycle. We wonder if users might be getting a bit tired of the three-year redesign schedule. It is a bit like a lame duck presidency – if something is on the way out then it gets no further attention. Everyone is looking forward to the next thing.
For this and other reasons, we like the flexibility and agility of third-party enterprise solutions. Fabasoft Mindbreeze, for example, releases updates quarterly for on-site installations and monthly for the cloud.
From their web site:
Continuous quality assurance and performance optimization ensure extremely short release cycles. We release a new Mindbreeze Cloud update every month.
If you are looking forward to a day when SharePoint is no longer hindered by the three-year cycle, consider a third-party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, and enjoy the added agility that it brings to your organization’s enterprise needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Social Media Analytics: What are Industry Leaders Doing?
January 23, 2012
Social media analytics are vital in today’s business world because it allows companies to provide personalized customer service and improves brand and reputation in easy-to-find profiles.
Text Analytics News recently partnered with Useful Social Media to publish a series of interviews with experts in the field of Social Media Analytics. The first installment focuses on digital research and what leading organizations are doing in the area of social media analytics.
Social Media Analytics Expert Interview Series: Part 1” is conducted by the Chief Editor of Text Analytics news, Ezra Steinberg. The interview panel includes: Dana Jacob, Sr. Manager of Social Media Insights & Analytics, Yahoo!; Judy Pastor, Principal Operations Research Manager, American Airlines; Tom H. C. Anderson, Managing Partner, Anderson Analytics (OdinText); Usher Lieberman, Director Corporate Communications, TheFind; and Marshall Sponder, Founder, WebMetricsGuru. A couple of intriguing questions and responses from the interview follow:
“USM: What parts of the business (CRM, Research, CS, HR etc.) do you think can benefit most from social media analytics?
Jacob (Yahoo!): ‘Every part of the business can benefit from social media analytics, but the needs and focuses vary. For marketing, social media analytics provide measurement of campaign effectiveness, brand image and association, and reactions to marketing messages. For product teams, social media could provide insights into users’ mindset as to why they use one brand or type of product versus another, and could help uncover unmet needs in the market place. For the research function, social media is becoming an important data source to compliment traditional market research.’
USM: What skillsets do you feel are most critical in a social media analytics department?
Sponder (WebMetricsGuru): I think having an industry knowledge is important to the social analytics department within an organization and here’s why: Social Data, by its nature, is mostly unstructured (some have said that 90% of the social data is ‘unstructured’) and it takes a lot of additional work to provide meaning to the data in context to what a client actually needs.’
The interview focuses on the importance of social media analytics and how to integrate, and many organizations would be benefited by considering the ideas and opinions provided by these industry leaders. The full interview can be found here and can give insight on developing a social media analytics department and leveraging social media for clients. Before gobbling the social media analytics Cheetos, be sure to check out what constitutes a valid data set.
Andrea Hayden, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Glassbeam: Fusion and Analysis
January 20, 2012
Formerly known as Orchesys, Glassbeam, Inc. provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) based solutions for product analytics. Its namesake technology lets organizations view a continual stream of data regarding product use and configuration. In 2009, the company was included in Gartner Inc.’s “Cool Vendors in BI and Performance Management” report. In 2011, it was a winner of TiEcon’s TiE50 award, which recognizes leading start-ups, and received $6 million in funding from TiE Angel investors. The firm was one of six on IDC’s “2011 Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100M to Watch” list.
Glassbeam’s technology enables users to gain insights from large quantities of product operational semi-structured data, such as log data, contained in any intelligent device. The solution converts the product operational data into actionable information using the company’s patent-pending Semiotic Parsing Language (SPL) technology, which scales to analyze terabytes of data using next generation data warehousing techniques.
The firm’s Glassbeam Server includes a parsing engine and an extraction and load engine that process information from terabytes of raw unstructured data. The Glassbeam Support Portal, provides data to departmental portals using information from its data warehouse. The company also provides Glassbeam Workbench, an analytics toolkit that enables users to build and run queries, share saved queries and results with other users, and publish the queries as dashboard widgets embeddable into other applications. Glassbeam Views provides a reporting toolset and infrastructure to design and build reports and insights from its data warehouse. In addition, it offers SPL maintenance, business analytics, enterprise application integration, and report management and delivery. Glassbeam’s Product Analytics solution uses OpSource Inc.’s OpSource Cloud to process large amounts of unstructured data.
Potential clients include those in the server, storage, network, software, telecom, medical, and industrial sectors. While there are no established players in its market, Glassbeam faces competition from firms wanting to build their own solutions.
Rita Safranek, January 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Considerations in SharePoint Hosting
January 20, 2012
Finding an enterprise search solution that works for your organization is no longer just about securing the best solution, it now extends to securing the best hosting option as well. SharePoint is obviously the most widely implemented enterprise solution, but even after choosing a SharePoint installation, a decision must be made whether to host on-site or in the cloud. More and more customers are moving toward cloud hosting for reasons including security and access.
A blog entry, “SharePoint Cloud Hosting Explained,” emphasizes the need to secure an appropriate and smart cloud hosting solution:
When searching for Sharepoint Cloud hosting, companies should be sure that whatever hosting company they choose to work with, is willing to create a system that is tailored-made to their particular needs, if necessary. Some hosting companies will allow businesses to pay as they go or give them the option of purchasing a license. It will also be extremely important that all of a business’ data is stored on servers that are secure.
One third-party solution that has received accolades for its work in the cloud is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. While working as an alternative to SharePoint, or as a compliment to an existing SharePoint infrastructure, Mindbreeze is a smart enterprise solution that works seamlessly on the cloud. Read more on their “Search in the Cloud” page.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise and the Cloud fit together perfectly. The Cloud makes your business mobile; Mindbreeze finds its way in the Cloud. This intelligent search is available as a Cloud service. This means that, if you so desire, Fabasoft Mindbreeze can run without any installation whatsoever – we operate the search engine for you. All the data that you manage in the Cloud is made searchable by Fabasoft Mindbreeze. This makes Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise the center of excellence for your knowledge in the Cloud too.
If you desire to cut down on installation and maintenance time and cost, hosting your enterprise solution on the cloud is worth looking into. Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze and see if their solution and cloud hosting opportunities will work for your organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Customization Best Practices for SharePoint Users
January 19, 2012
SharePoint customization has become a whole world, a whole community unto itself. The reason is simple, almost every feature of SharePoint is customizable. Furthermore, many specialists defend that SharePoint is only useful when it is fully customized. Out-of-the-box, SharePoint is simply a blank slate, an infrastructure.
Gale Pomper offers her insights on the topic in “SharePoint Customization Best Practices.” The piece is a white paper offered through Global Knowledge. While written before the SharePoint 2010 release, many of the principles still stand.
Pomper gives an overview of what can and cannot be customized in SharePoint:
It might be easier to define what cannot be customized because almost every aspect of the SharePoint implementation can be customized, including applications, look and feel, and web parts. Some of the more commonly implemented customizations are identified in the table below. But first, let’s discuss one element of SharePoint that cannot be customized – the SQL Server database.
Pomper goes on to offer her top ten suggestions for customization, as the case has already been made for the need for customization. However, the overarching question is why so much customization is needed in the first place. With SharePoint being such a highly used enterprise solution, shouldn’t developers have a good grasp on what is desired and strive to implement those changes?
This brings us to the discussion of third-party solutions. One we particularly like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Mindbreeze implements smart features out-of-the-box, saving administrators and end-users time and energy. One smart feature that we will highlight is the Fabasoft Mindbreeze query language.
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Query Language is a powerful query language by itself. Users can intersect document hits using an AND expression, join hits with an OR expression, restrict queries to metadata, and much more. Despite our powerful query language, sometimes you need to customize the query language to your own domain specific requirements. Because of this Fabasoft Mindbreeze provides an API extension point, which makes it possible to transform a given query. The possibilities are manifold: transformations can replace, extend or even remove parts of query expressions.
This is an example of a smart customization option. What SharePoint offers as customizable features are often features that should be included out-of-the-box. However, with a smart third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, customization is optimized for an enhanced user experience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint: Document Access Versus Storage
January 18, 2012
SharePoint is an information management tool, focused on organization and retrieval. However, the “storage” element of SharePoint is one often critiqued. Is SharePoint the best place to store documents, and if so, which ones? The SharePoint Pro blog takes on this question in, “Access All of Your Content Through SharePoint, Yes. Keep All of it There, No.”
The author states:
All content may be created equal, but it certainly doesn’t exist equally throughout its lifecycle. Some content is business critical, some is purely personal, some is connected to a series of workflows in a process and some is destined to get pushed directly into an archive, some files have a large footprint and some are measured in bytes. And in some cases content can share a number of these attributes all at once. My point is that we need to think about the content we’re putting into SharePoint, as in a number of cases above, it might not actually be the right place to store it.
While the author makes a good point about some documents being more pertinent to workflow than others, sorting documents based on their relevance is a time-killer. With a third-party solution, users do not have to worry about where items are stored in order for them to be accessed by SharePoint or by an accompanying third-party enterprise search. One solution that we like, Fabasoft Mindbreeze, pays particular attention to this topic in its “Winter 2012 Release Notice.”
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise 2012 Winter Release . . .enables all information that is connected to Mindbreeze to be displayed in Microsoft SharePoint . . . In this way not only information contained within Microsoft SharePoint, but also all other information that is available within the respective company, can be consolidated within one “platform.” Mindbreeze, therefore, delivers real additional value to Microsoft SharePoint in the form of an add-on. The Microsoft SharePoint search is replaced by Fabasoft Mindbreeze, with the added value of information pairing, which extends the search to the entire connected company knowledge – all on one page. So-called search-driven dashboards can also be created . . . All information of a page is displayed by Web Parts made available by Mindbreeze. A simple configuration is all that’s needed. The displayed content is always up-to-date and to the point. And after the initial configuration, this takes place automatically and maintenance-free.
With more intuitive and agile third party enterprise solutions being developed, less attention needs to be paid to sorting and organizing. Saving the end-user time equates to saving the organization time and money. Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze and see if its solution might be beneficial to your organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 18, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
JackBe: Data Fusion
January 17, 2012
Founded in 2002 by brothers Luis and Jacob Derechin, JackBe was originally an AJAX widget company. At the demand of its customers, the company centered its product offering around an enterprise mashup server that supports the user-driven ad-hoc integration of data. The company was cited as a “Next-Gen BI” technology by Forrester Research, Inc. in its March 2011 “Trends 2011 And Beyond: Business Intelligence” report.
JackBe’s real-time business intelligence platform, Presto, allows users to combine data from any enterprise application, as well as data from the cloud to compose apps and dashboards that are publishable to portals, the web, spreadsheets, and mobile devices. The platform is organized around Presto Hub, which provides a single point of sign-on for JackBe’s mashup development editors, governance tools for administrators, and application storefront.
The company’s Presto Enterprise Mashup Server provides service virtualization that solves business problems and allows users and developers secure and consolidated access to disparate data from internal services, external services, and application databases. Presto Mashup Composers and Presto Mashup Connectors feature tools that enable business and technical users to create mashups. JackBe also offers Transparency 2.0, a solution for data feeds and data widgets for state and local government’s citizen-facing websites, and Mashup Sites for SharePoint, an intelligence solution that provides SharePoint 2007/2010 business users with real-time visual web-part-based apps and interactive dashboards.
To help users store, organize, and share mashups and apps, JackBe developed an app store framework in the third iteration of Presto. The apps are portable and can feed data into Excel and run standalone, on dashboards, on mobile devices, or in SharePoint.
Customers include the US Air Force, the US Army, NASA, Elsevier, Random House, Qualcom, GE Energy, and Accenture and illustrate the broad appeal of the platform. Competitors include Zapatec, IBM, and mashup tools provided by online service providers such as Google and Yahoo.
One observation: Our efforts to contact the company have been routinely ignored or pushed to a telemarketer. Your mileage may vary.
Rita Safranek, January 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of SharePoint Hosting Options
January 17, 2012
A SharePoint installation is a grand undertaking, with two basic options: on-site installation or the cloud. Both options have pros and cons, and Gina Montgomery weighs them all in, “SharePoint Decisions: To Host or Not to Host?”
Montgomery sums up the issue:
Have you been scratching your head over the potential infrastructure investment that you’ll incur with your upcoming SharePoint Farm deployment? Are you feeling a sense of bewilderment over how you’ll have full control of your SharePoint environment if it’s not on premise? Or, perhaps you’ve been perplexed with how you’ll manage the around-the-clock IT support and overhead costs that come with the 24/7 monitoring and the recapitulation of OS upgrades and patches in your on premise environment. Well, the good news is that you’re not alone.
Montgomery does a good job of sizing up both options. While an on-site hosting for one organization might be best, another organization might choose to go with the cloud. She urges that each organization’s decision will be unique, based upon what suits their needs most effectively. However, we would like to throw out another option. There are third-party vendors that can meet an organization’s enterprise needs while also simplifying their hosting needs.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers different scalable options depending on an organization’s size and needs. Read more in, “Three Configurations for Dynamic Scalability and Deployment.”
In enterprise search, quality, usability and style are as important as relevancy of results and performance to engage your users right from the start. Let’s take a look at typical scale-out scenarios that become relevant when implementing enterprise environments with Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
The entry goes on to describe the customization options available via Fabasoft Mindbreeze depending upon the scale and scope of the client. Ranging from an installation that utilizes one single Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance, all the way up to a cloud installation, every organization will be able to have their storage needs met. The most useful part of this type of third-party installation is that Fabasoft will work with you to ensure that your bases are covered, while also planning for the future.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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