Archive for the ‘Vendors’ Category

Caroline Abrahamsson

Search and Business Intelligence?

juli 9 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

BI and search is a never ending story.
A number of years ago Gartner coined “Biggle” – which was an expression for BI meeting Google. Back then a number of BI vendors, among them Cognos and SAS, claimed that they were working with search strategically (e.g. became Google One-box partners). Search vendors, like FAST, Autonomy and IBM also started to cooperate with companies such as Cognos. ”The Adaptive Warehouse” and “BI for the masses” soon became buzzwords that spread in the industry.

The skeptics claimed that Enterprise Search never would be good at numbers and that BI never with text.
Since then a lot a lot has happened and today the major vendors within Enterprise Search all claim to have BI solutions that can be fully integrated (and the other way around – BI solutions that can integrate with Enterprise search).

The aim is the same now as back then:  to provide unified access to both structured (database) and unstructured (content) corporate information. As FAST wrote in a number of ‘Special Focus’: “Users should have access to a wide variety of data from just one, simple search interface, covering reports, analysis, scorecards, dashboards and other information from the BI side, along with documents, e-mail and other forms of unstructured information”.

And of course, this seems appealing to customers. But does access to all information really make us more likely to take the right decisions in terms of Business Intelligence. Gartner is in doubt.
Nigel Rayner, research vice president at Gartner Inc, says that ” The problem isn’t that they (users) don’t have access to information or tools; they already have too much information, and that’s just in the structured BI world. Now you want to couple it with unstructured data? That’s a whole load of garbage coming from the outside world”. But he also states that search can be used as one part of BI: “Part of the problem with traditional BI is that it’s very focused on structured information. Search can help with getting access to the vast amount of structured information you have”

Looking at the discussions going on in forums, in blogs and in the research domain most people seem to agree with Gartner’s view: search and BI makes a powerful combination, but the integrations needs to be made with a number of things in mind:

Data quality
As mentioned before, if one wants to make unstructured and structured information available as a complement to BI it needs to be of a good quality. Knowing that the information found is the latest copy and written by someone with knowledge of the area is essential. Bad information quality is a threat to an Enterprise Search solution, to a combined BI- and search solution it can be devastating. Having Content Lifecycles in place (reviewing, deleting, archiving etc) is a fundamental prerequisite.

Data analysis
Business Intelligence in traditionally built on pre-thought ideas of what data the users need, whereas search gives access to all information in an ad-hoc manner.
To combine these two requires a structured way of analyzing the data. If the unstructured information is taken out of its context there is a risk that decisions are built on assumptions and not fact.

BI for the masses?
The old buzzwords are still alive, but the question mark remains. If one wants to give everyone access to BI-data it has to be clear what the purpose is. Giving people a context , for example combining the latest sales statistics with searches for information about the ongoing marketing activities serves a purpose and improves findability. Just making numbers available does not.

BI and search dashboard

BI and search in a combined dashboard - vision or reality within a near future?

So, to conclude: Gartner’s vision of “Biggle” is not yet fulfilled. There are a number of interesting opportunities for the business to create Findability solutions that combines BI and search, but the strategies for adopting it needs to be developed in order to create the really interesting cases.

Have you come across any successful search and BI integrations? What is your vision? Do you think the integration between the two is a likely scenario?
Please let us know by posting your comments.

It’s soon time for us to go on summer vacation.

If you are Swedish, Nicklas Lundblad from Google had an interesting program about search (Sommar i P1) the other day, which is available as a pod

Have a nice summer all of you!

Caroline Abrahamsson

Search in SharePoint 2010

maj 15 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

This week there has been a lot of buzz about Microsoft’s launch of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Since SharePoint 2007 has been the quickest growing server product in the history of Microsoft, the expectations on SharePoint 2010 is tremendous.

Apart from a great deal of possibilities when it comes to content creation, collaboration and networking, easy business intelligence etc.  the launch also holds another promise: that of even better search capabilities (with the integration of FAST).

Since Microsoft acquired FAST in 2008, there have been a lot of speculations about what the future SharePoint versions may include in terms of search. And since Microsoft announced that they will drop their Linux and UNIX versions in order to focus on higher innovation speed, Microsoft customer are expecting something more than the regular. In an early phase it was also clear that Microsoft is eager to take market shares from the growing market in internet business.

So, simply put, the solutions that Microsoft now provide in terms of search is solutions for Business productivity (where the truly sophisticated search capabilities are available if you have Enterprise CAL-licenses, i.e. you pay for the number of users you have) and Internet Sites (where the pricing is based on the number of servers). These can then be used in a number of scenarios, all dependent on the business and end-user needs.
Microsoft has chosen to describe it like this:

  • ”Foundation” is, briefly put, basic SharePoint search (Site Search).
  • ”Standard” adds collaboration features to the ”Foundation” edition and allows it to tie into repositories outside of SharePoint.
  • ”Enterprise ” adds a number of capabilities, previously only available through FAST licenses, such as contextual search (recognition of departments, names, geographies etc), ability to tag meta data to unstructured content, more scalability etc.

I’m not going to go into detail, rather just conclude that the more Microsoft technology the company or organization already use, the more benefits it will gain from investing in SharePoint search capabilities.

And just to be clear:  non-SharePoint versions (stand-alone) of FAST are still available, even though they are not promoted as intense as the SharePoint ones.

Apart from Microsoft’s overview above, Microsoft Technet provides a more deepdrawing description of the features and functionality from both an end-user and administrator point of view.

We look forward describing the features and functions in more detail in our upcoming customer cases. If you have any questions to our SharePoint or FAST search specialist, don’t hesitate to post them here on the blog. We’ll make sure you get all the answers.

Caroline Abrahamsson

FAST goes Microsoft for real– drops Linux and UNIX versions

februari 8 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

‘Innovation is at the heart of our enterprise search strategy, and a commitment to innovation is what brought FAST and Microsoft together’ says Bjørn Olstad, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, in his blog post published this Thursday. And further more ‘As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX’.

(Läs mer…)

Ludvig Johansson

SPC09 Day 3 – Say bye bye to Python and say hello to .NET

oktober 22 - 2009 | Ludvig Johansson

Today the focus of my sessions have been content indexing and content processing in both SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint. Bur first I started of with a session covering the new meta data focus in SharePoint 2010.

Meta data is information about the content and is of key importance for making a good search experience. In SharePoint 2010 the focus and this has increased drastically. New features is Term store which a service that can contain taxonomies, folksonomies, social tagging and keywords. Through this feature they make meta data to accessible through out the whole system on all levels of item creation. Having a structured way of working with meta data will drastically increase the quality of the search result.

Now back to the fun technical geek side of these sessions. In SharePoint 2010 Microsoft have introduced a lot of improvements to the indexing side search. First of they have aliened the two versions of search into using the same connectors. Both FAST Search and SharePoint use a common set of connectors and a common way of building new ones. With this you can use systems as BDC to create connectors even from the application SharePoint Designer which is an extremely simple to use application. BDC, which was found in 2007 as well, has though been enveloped  with new features like full security support and support for creating connectors in .NET. This making it easy and streamlined to create new connectors for indexing all kinds of systems.

One of the strengths in FAST Search for SharePoint has always been the document processing. This is a feature that SharePoint search is lacking and is probably an important thing why Microsoft bought FAST. In FAST Search for SharePoint they have taken this in to SharePoint to be easily managed and streamlined. Processing as for example entity extraction, lemmatisation and advanced language detection is now done automatically and can be configured through adding for example inclusion/exclusion words for entity extraction straight in UI (can be manged through PowerShell as well).

But what about all those custom pipeline stages that was used to be a large part of en ESP configuration before? This is a function that is not done as before. No python coded pipeline stage can be added however what you now can do is that you add a ”extensibility pipeline stage”. This stage can then be configured to call an .NET application with a set of input properties and then a list of returning properties. In this way you can basically do what ever you want with the text content and then do it with the full power of .NET. Some nice side effects of this for us developers is that creating pipeline stages in the past has always been a hussel. Both since it has bin done in python and that testing it had either demanded an hard to setup instance of Eclipse and ESP or to try it out live in ESP. In the new system since it actually are small console applications that is running this can easily be tested stand alone with good debugging through Visual Studio.

Tomorrow is actually the last day of this conference. That they will for me focused on partner events that covers more the sales perspective on all the new things in SharePoint and FAST.

But now its time for some relaxing and then its time for Enterprise Search evening by the pool event.

Ludvig Johansson

SPC09 Day 2 – FAST Search for SharePoint made "SharePoint Easy"

oktober 21 - 2009 | Ludvig Johansson

After a great evening with Microsoft Sweden touring around Las Vegas, having dinner at the Stratosphere and a good night sleep today’s session started of. Today’s focus has been deep dives in to the different areas. For me it has been deep dives in Sharepoint Search and FAST Search for Sharepoint.

First of was sessions about Sharepoint Search functions and depolyment. This was more or less going through the different functionality that I wrote about yesterday. A thew new things did thou come up, things like crawler policy’s, avoiding that your index is empties just because the web site that you crawl is on service during crawl time, connector framework that now supports developing connectors in .NET and configuration of the whole search service through PowerShell.

But now to the more exiting thing, FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. This something that it has been really quite about. It has gone 18 months since the acquisition of FAST and during that time not much information about the upcoming version has leaked out. But from yesterday everything is made public. There is even gona come a public beta of FAST Search for SharePoint in November for everyone to test it out.

The most exiting thing about this new version of FAST is that it’s almost completely integrated within SharePoint. With almost is that the installation of FAST is still done on separated servers and has it’s own installation program, though simplified. But after completion of installation and node setup (done in a deployment.xml config file) everything is done in the SharePoint central administration interface or through PowerShell. There is not even the possibility any longer to make configurations through config files in the installation of FAST. Some more advanced configurations and extensions can be made through .NET libraries and PowerShell, for example document processing steps. I will know more about this after tomorrows sessions.

Connectors in new FAST are no longer used as before. They are integrated into SharePoint instead. It’s even the same connector for SharePoint search and FAST Search for SharePoint. Setup is done in the same way to ease the transition from SharePoint Search to FAST.

People search in SharePoint 2010 will, even though you use FAST Search For SharePoint, be handled by SharePoint search. And as Jeff Fried sad ”why try to set this up in FAST Search for SharePoint when the people search in SharePoint already is amazing”.

Now it’s time for one of the biggest beach parties that Las Vegas ever has hosted here at Mandal Bay Hotel. Over 7000 crazy SharePoint geeks are going to rock there pants of to the sound of the 80’s.

Ludvig Johansson

SPC09 Day 1 (Las Vegas) – A new Choice in Search

oktober 20 - 2009 | Ludvig Johansson

Today the initial key notes and session on the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 has begun here in Las Vegas. The conference is fully booked with over 7400 registered attendees and is hosted at the Mandala Bay Hotel. There are over 240 different sessions covering everything within the new version of SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 is schedules to be released during the first half of next year however a public beta will be available now in November.

I will try to cover the Enterprise Search perspective of this conference and summarize new features and functions in this blog.

The conference was started up through two key notes held by among others Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) and Jeff Teper (VP). They introduces new features in SharePoint 2010 on all levels from both really deep technical to end user perspective. Showing a lot of new cool features, where one feature was especially sticking out and that was Search. They all pointed out over and over again the importance of search as the core functionality of everything.

My first sessions during this conference was on Enterprise Search and the overview of this. A lot of new concepts and functions are introduced. I will try here to summarize some of the new functions in a list.

Sharepoint 2010 and Search Server 2010 (Not all is supported in Search Server):

-Wildcard search support
-Phonetic Spelling on person name searches
-Partitioned index/query (for scaling purposes)
-Support for up to 100 Million documents
-Zero query search – Used for using search as navigation
-Query Suggestion
-Refinement from meta data (Shallow navigators)
-Related Searches
-Federate Searches with Desktop
-Rating/Language used for relevance tuning
-View related content in people search
-Multiple crawler

FAST Search for SharePoint:

-All above from SharePoint searches (some times they are even supposed to work together like people search is still done through SharePoint search)
-Visual preview and thumbnails
-Same APIs as SharePoint
-All administration is done through SharePoint administration
-Similar results
-Deep refinement navigators
-Entity extraction
-Visual Best bet
-Contextual Search
-No index profile any more. Everything is set through SharePoint administration even Navigators and meta data mappings.
-Can use BCS for connecting to other systems
-User context searching. Promote/denote documents and changing relevance after users context
-New search interface

That was a summary of the new features that is to come. I will come back every day to post updates and more detailed information about these features.

To finish of I want to quote Microsoft: This is a quantum leap in Enterprise Search

Caroline Abrahamsson

Roadmap FAST Search: for SharePoint and Internet Business

februari 13 - 2009 | Caroline Abrahamsson

In view of the fact that it has been a year since Microsoft acquired FAST, there has been a lot of hush-hush about the Enterprise search roadmap. However, at the yearly FAST forward conference, Microsoft’s press release Microsoft Unveils New Enterprise Search Road Map reached the public.

There are no big surprises, but a lot of interesting details to come.
Briefly speaking Microsoft is focusing on two areas: search to enhance business productivity and search to earn money online.

Here at Findwise we have been working with customers integrating SharePoint and FAST ESP for some time, and ESP certainly adds a lot of value by extending SharePoint’s main strengths: content management and collaboration. Office 14, which will probably see the light early next year, will hopefully add more flexibility to their infrastructure solutions out of the box.
More information about the licensing models are yet to come and even though FAST will continue to develop ESP as a standalone (to run on both Unix and Linux), the roadmap ties existing and potential Microsoft customers closer by presenting search as an integrated part of their business productivity offering.

As for FAST Search Internet Business Microsoft’s target group are companies looking for earning money online. During FAST forward 2007 there was a lot of talk about the future search driven portals and during the 2008 event about the ability to understanding user intent.
Today online consumers have higher expectations when it comes to search and the ability to show related information (such as Amazon’s “people that bought this product also bought”..) as well as showing contextual advertising (related to search terms, geographical location etc) and recommendations will create loyal customers. FAST has quite a few customers using search for strategic online business so one should keep an eye on the release of the new beta version during 2009.

If you read Swedish, Helge Legernes, one of the founders of Findwise is giving his comment in Computer Sweden.

Caroline Abrahamsson

Autonomy extends its business model with compliance

januari 28 - 2009 | Caroline Abrahamsson

On January 22:nd, Interwoven entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Autonomy, for a total transaction value of approximately $775 million.

Ever since Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST there have been quite a few discussions in blogs and forums whether any of the giants such as Oracle, IBM or even Google would make an attractive offer for Autonomy. The company has, during the last few years, always been a clear leading candidate within Enterprise Search and its range of offerings within Multimedia, Digital Asset Management and Information management solutions has made the customer base grow faster than ever.

However, the acquisition of Interwoven shows that Autonomy is serious when it comes to growing on its own premises. The product portfolio now contains a strong offering for legal and compliance and Autonomy has, once more, proven that they prefer to extend and strengthen their business model.

According to the press release the companies ‘share a vision to fundamentally change the way organizations discover, analyze and manage information’.
Beyond the buzzwords, there seems to be a clear vision and it will be interesting to see how this affects Enterprise Search in general and Autonomys future direction in particular.