Goodbye Goole Wave, Hello Voice, whither the Enterprise ?

Once again apologies for the absence of posts, well I am settling into a new job and had a weeks vacation too......


So its "Google Wave is dead, long live Google Wave (technologies)" ?

 

Yes Google killed off Wave as a consumer product, but really did anyone ever think it was going anywhere as a tool for general purpose use by Joe public ? As Google note, they have foldded elements of the Wave technologies into other products, other elements have been open sourced and thus the protocols and other underlying elements of Wave continue to live on. In fact here is an interesting statement from Novell who built their Pulse collaboration product ontop of Wave: Novell perspective on Google Wave announcement and what it means for Novell Pulse.

 

Most of the articles I have read since Wave's demise was announced seem fall into 3 major groups:

• It was too complicated for Joe Public / it was ahead of its time
• It was a really good enterprise collaborative project management tool
• "I never understood it anyway"
   

I guess I might be in the second camp, although I never got to thoroughly test in an 'internal' context. Interesting though Novell do seem to agree with my point of view,  that it was never going anywhere as publicly available 'consumer' tool. Generally consumers don't need so much in the way of collaboration power or flexibility. They also stress that they have a lot more enterprise knowledge and know how than Google do. I  agree with Novell on that point.

All hail Google (free) Voice !

 

As soon as we digest Wave's demise we are offered Google's Voice VOIP capabilities newly integrated into Gmail. Cool, but as someone who lives outside of U.S. borders, when can I get 'standard' Google Voice...... ? (yes I know there are ways to get it in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, but I want the official tool). Apparently millions of free or very cheap VOIP calls have been made already within days of its release. I am never sure whether Google is trying to shake up the telephony market, or if it really wants to be as evil (and wealthy) as the other Telco's - Android, Nexus and then a straw man on net neutrality co-authored with Verizon - uh ? Well lets stay clear of that for now.

 

Google Enterprise Tools and Private Clouds

 

In non Google but related news, RedHat is pushing its cloud offering, as is Cannoncial (Ubuntu), Microsoft continues to wander somewhat blithley towards the clouds, and is EMC going to compete against HP to bid for 3PAR ??? What does any of that have to do with Google - well its a circuitous route, but stay with me dear readers........

 

As I have written before I would like to see Google make a concerted effort to get its technologies into the Enterprise market. I am not talking about Universities using Gmail and Apps accounts, or even the SMB market. I want them to package thier often innovative offerings in a mannger that would truly make them an enterprise IT player, because some of their stuff is really quite good.

 

Of course they do have agreements in place with consulting companies such as CA to offer Google Apps, but come on why not just buy a CA, or a Novell, or both !

 

Seriously though, as I have said before, while they can offer Gmail (and Buzz) and Google Voice for private use as 'cloud' computing, not all enterprises like the privacy or security implications of that. Google have experience of bundling their search engine into an Appliance, so why not bundle up a serious enterprise offering as a number of physical appliances or virtual appliances which large enterprises could run on their "private clouds" with storage from the likes of EMC and 3PAR behind it ?

 

Google Sites has had a recent upgrade, not enough to make it even a simple corporate intranet in my opinion, but the product is there to be developed, but what other products could be "applianced" - well probably all of them......

 

• Messaging / communications - Gmail, Chat (with voice and video) Google Voice (your PABX), YouTube (internal communications like using video as much as anyone!) etc
• Collaboration - Wave, Google Docs
• Social collaboration / E2.0 - Buzz, Google Profiles, the mythical GoogleMe (think SharePoint MySites ?)
• Intranet - iGoogle and Sites
• Document management - Google Docs, but preferrably with a CMIS plug in
• Search - erm' that big Yellow GSA........

  

I am sure your starting to get my drift, and I am sure you can come up with additional examples of your own. With Googles experience in scaling their services for public consumer use, scaling for a global enterprise should not be too difficult.

 

 So what's missing - well support and consulting, and the razor sharp customer focus. That's why I think they need to buy an existing organization to provide the basis of an "enterprise division", an organisation with the experience and right ethos.

  

There you go then, the Google-verse for Enterprise Information Management - what do you think ?

SharePoint, Intranets and webinars, oh my......

Apologies for taking so long to write about this, but last Thursday (18th of June) I took part in an Intranet Benchmarking Forum webinar as a panelist.

The webinar was an "open to the public" event of the IBF SharePoint Special Interest Group (SIG) and it was timed to coincide with the release of a new IBF report on SharePoint 2010. The report was written by my good colleague Martin White of Intranet Focus Ltd, and myself and the other panelists, Michael Sampson and Richard Harbridge and varying degrees of input. It's an excellent report (IMHO) and you can purchase a copy from the IBF.

Michael posted his thoughts about the event on his blog much more promptly, finishing his article with this statement: "Don't get pushed into doing unnatural acts with SharePoint because Microsoft or your Business Partner thinks you should. It will take time ... and money ... and thought. Spend it now, or spend it repeatedly over the next few years."

Truly excellent advice that I agree with wholeheartedly ! However I want to return to a question which Martin does address in the report, but which was also asked by attendee's:


Where does SharePoint 2010 fit with my intranet ?

Well its a good question, but unfortunately there is no one size fits all standard answer (oh come on now, there never is !). The question has to be examined in context, and reflected upon by asking follow up questions about your current intranet, and what your aspirations for further development of your intranet are.

For a start, what is your organisations definition of 'intranet' ? I have tackled that question before in this posting: What is an intranet anyway?

There are various intranet maturity frameworks available, but this is a good one based on original Avenue A | Razorfish work from some years ago: The Intranet Maturity Framework - so where does your current intranet sit with respect to this framework ? And perhaps more to the point, where do you want to be ?

I ask this question because its a good way of mapping your requirements to SharePoint 2010 feature sets. So for example if your a:

• Stage 1 Communications & Information sharing intranet - then you probably need to be interested in SharePoints Sites features (the Web Content Management or "Publishing" features)

• Stage 3 Collaboration driven intranet - then your focus maybe on the 'communities' features, i.e. Team Sites and other collaboration features

• Stage 5 Digital Dashboards - if your at this stage then its all about the 'insights' features for you, maybe with a dash of 'composites' added too
  

However in some ways this is an overly simplistic view of things. When I was working as an intranet consultant for Prescient Digital Media, I had clients that did not take an holistic "intranet ecosystem" view of things. To them the 'intranet' was the internal corporate web site, run by Communications, with a focus on news articles, and maybe navigation and search. Their MOSS2007 installations were often run by a different department and were under a different governance structure and day to day management regime because they were "collaboration". Finally they may well have had small scale digital dashboards already, based on web tool kits provided by their data warehouse or Business Intelligence product vendors.

This is what I mean by "it depends on your context" ! So we are back to what do you define as the intranet, and what do you want to do with it ? (See this excellent presentation on SlideShare by James Robertson of Step 2 Designs "The four purposes of an intranet" for some ideas!).

As I have said many times before on this blog, start with your requirements - this links to Michael's closing comment which I quoted above, don't let IT push you into using SharePoint 'Sites' WCM for your 'corporate intranet' layer just because SharePoint has been procured to fulfill the collaboration requirements, or the dashboard-ing requirements. One size does not fit all, and shoe horn-ing parts of your intranet into SharePoint "because we have it" is no recipe for success.

However to be pragmatic, SharePoint might meet 75% to 80% of your requirements, in other words it may be "good enough" even if its not perfect. You may find an integration with an existing WCMS, or a third party add on takes you up to the 90% to 100% mark !

So to summarize - "how does SharePoint fit with / fit into my intranet" - I don't know, nobody does actually. It's up to you to do your requirements analysis and then decide upon the fit based on research or the help of vendor neutral consultants.

Evaluating ThoughtFarmer 3.7 as a social intranet platform - Updated

UPDATE - please look in the comments to see new info from Chris McGrath of the ThoughtFarmer team.

I have owed the ThoughtFarmer team a blog posting since version 3.6 of their product came out. Now 3.7 has been released, and I have had the morning at home before heading out for the weekend for the Medieval Fayre, I though I better write something !

I have recently written a post for CMS Wire evaluating MS SharePoint 2010 as an Enterprise 2.0 platform by using Prof. Andrew MacAfee's original SLATES model. I gave it a pretty good score, but then used this months article to explore how some of the gaps could be filled by NewsGators Social Sites product. I noticed at some point that my old boss, Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media had written an article on Intranetblog.com about Intranet 2.0 versus the 'social intranet' - he discounted 'Enterprise 2.0' as term, stating it means too many things to too many people, despite the availability of the original SLATES model and Dion Hinchcliffe's later FLATNESSES model.

So where is this leading us ? Well personally I think the ThoughtFarmer product gives you all the basic requirements of a 'social intranet' in one "out of the box" package, they have been calling themselves "social intranet software" for a long time ! The version 3.7 features pages is available here: http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/features/ so take a read for yourself. Even better, if you fill in the form on this page, they will send you the generic log in information to a live test site, so you can have a real play and see what you think. Anyway, I decided that I would do a quick evaluation of ThoughtFarmer 3.7 (TF from now on) against the larger and later FLATNESSES model, within the context that it might provide the Intranet 2.0 element of your greater Enterprise 2.0 strategy:

TF demo Intranet home page

Freeform - egalitarian user experience: "no barriers to authorship (meaning free from a learning curve or from restrictions)"

TF at its most basic level is an enterprise wiki. All users can add and re-organize pages, they do this through their web browser via a Rich Text Editor interface or by simply typing content into an email and sending that to a specific address, see details of that feature here. So I think that TF gets 10 out of 10 for this element. For those who are worried by the idea of 'wiki' meaning everyone can edit everything, you can be this wide open if you want, but you don't have to be , TF is a .Net platform and it integrates with MS Active Directory and you can manage security permissions and groups to provide a more traditional and less "open" experience if you wish.

TF create new page form

Links - using URI's to forge deep connections between content

Everything in TF is links, pages, attachments (documents), peoples profiles, metadata tags, etc. Even better these links are persistent URI's not just web server URL's, if you move a page, it does not break the links, allowing you to create those deep linkages between content. Again, I think a full 10 out of 10 for this element of the model. TF has different page layouts you can choose but it auto-generates navigation and hence the links for you.

TF personal profile page, top left area for adding and managing your links

Authorship - ensuring every worker has easy access to E2.0 Platforms

Allowing every worker access to your TF Intranet 2.0 platform as part of your E2.0 strategy is indeed easy. New in TF3.7 is forms based authentication that allows remote users to log in (and remain logged in) from outside of your firewall. Other elements of authorship include the ability to add pages, add comments to pages, create threaded discussions, even capture email discussions etc All of this easy to do in TF. I am going to be a little cheeky and rate this a little lower because there is no mobile app for easy authoring (i.e. no iPhone / iPad, Blackberry or Android app - you can still log on via your mobile browser though) so 8 out of 10.

Adding comments to a page

Tagging - allowing natural, organic on-the-fly organization of data from every view point

In other words, facilitate the 'folksonomy' approach of 'organic' tagging. Well TF definitely does this, but it also allows administrators to build what they call "tag bundles'. This can be closed, in other words a traditional taxonomy, or it can be open, which allows users to add new tags to those already provided - this is a hybrid folksonomy / taxonomy approach. Metadata tags can be used to filter search results, and using the new 'browse' feature can be used for 'guided navigation' - so again I will give TF a high score of 8 out of 10 for this element.

Adding tags to a page

Network Oriented - web based, resizable, addressable, small chunks

Well TF is obviously web based. It does allow you to author content in small chunks, and to arrange and re-arrange the hierarchy, all of which lends itself to content reuse. Although I am not sure the "network effect" is what Dion was driving at back in 2007 when he designed the model, I think TF facilitates the both the inherent and network oriented effects of allow users to link between their own and others content, to easily discover other users content and to examine the relationships between groups via the 'staff directory' functionality. I am going to be cautious and give TF a 7 out of 10 for this element of the model.


Extensions - extend knowledge by mining patterns and user activity

TF provides extensions such as rating content, activity streams, adding pages as favorites etc all of which is now pretty standard "social computing" features. I am not sure about the ability to do analytics, but while there are particular tools built in that I can see, I am sure there would be nothing to stop you running tools such as Google Analytics or WebTrends or some such. Hopefully the TF team will comment on this below. However I still give TF a conservative 7 out of 10.


Search - discoverability of information driving re-use

Search is I believe powered by the .Net version of Lucene. In my testing on the demo site results seemed pretty good (go play with it your self and see). Search scopes can be set, such as people, groups, or current section, and all metadata can be used for faceted search filtering. Of course I am sure there is nothing in the TF architecture that would stop you indexing the TF content with an existing Enterprise Search application, but I will give search 7 out of 10.

People search results

Search results

'Browse' by tags - Guided Navigation replaces the traditional site map ?

Social - non-hierarchical and transparent: "stressing transparency (to access), diversity (in content and community members) and openness (to structure)"

Well as Dion noted when he wrote this model, the original SLATES was more about assessing technology, and the 'social' element here is more about how you use a product than the product itself. However I will give TF a high mark for this element because it can provide simple and transparent access to corporate information in the form of a collaborative intranet. Being wiki based, there is nothing to stop you creating diversity in your content by opening up authoring permissions to a wide range of user communities. I think transparency is provided by the activity streams, and by rating other users content. By as noted before, this is an organizational culture thing, to paraphrase an anecdote passed onto me by someone working with a US Army Knowledge Management community "who is going to rate the General's content with only 1 star ?" Anyway, 10 out of 10 I reckon, for facilitating the possibilities…….

The Relationship explorer, part of the People Directory, has been in TF for sometime,
and is much better than the new one in SP2010 (IMHO)

Emergence - facilitate complex interactions between information from simple building blocks - "requiring the provision of approaches that detect and leverage the collective wisdom of the community'

Again, one of Dion's less technology platform specific elements. Again I would suggest easy authoring of content, discussion forums, comments, email discussion capture, rating of content etc all add up to the provision of an approach that facilitates the detection of collective wisdom, and allows it to be levered to generate fortuitous outcomes. However, there is no survey tool, no easy capability for pulling in data from elsewhere to create mashups or dashboards, so I may not be being fair here, but 7 out of 10 ???

Signals - make information consumption efficient by pushing out signals

The recent activity part of each pages shows the user what has been going on. You can add links and RSS feeds to your profile page etc, but this is not really pushing out signals. Each page appears to provide an RSS feed of recent activity, but I could not successfully add feeds foam pages to the reader on my profile page, or to Google Reader, but this maybe an artificiality of the test server and generic count set up ? Until the TF team tell me otherwise, only 5 out of 10.

Summary and Conclusions
I am not being paid by the TF guys for giving them a good review. I have worked with the product since we evaluated version 1 for use at an organization in the UK. I currently work with SharePoint 2007 day in and day out, and have had lots of briefings and demos of SP2010. I am not going to say the TF is the 'best' product to build a social intranet, there is never a best product (despite what various marketing people may tell you) - you must evaluate products properly to see if they meet your particular needs, for your specific context.

But I will state that I think TF is an excellent social intranet platform, better than SharePoint in many respects, because it is not a "jack of all trades and master of non" development platform like SharePoint. You could certainly use the two products together, levering the strengths of both. Bottom line is, go play with the free demo, and make your own mind up :-)

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 summary - day 2

This is my second summarizing post on the excellent Enterprise Search Summit 2010 conference. See my earlier post for a summary of the workshop day, and first full day of the conference.
Day 2 kicked off with an excellent keynote from Peter Morville of Information Architecture (for the WWW), Ambient Findability and Search Patterns fame. I have seen Peter speak before, and I am a bit of a 'fan boy' of his work, but I will not summarize his keynote here as Peter put his slides up on SlideShare.net, so I will just embed them below:

Search & Discovery Patterns

View more presentations from Peter Morville.

Next up after Peter was a panel discussion "In search of search" led by Sue Feldman of IDC. The panel consisted of:

• Haroon Suleman, Lead Enterprise Search Architect, Mercer
• Jim Cassella, Manager, Global Application Architecture and Strategy, Colorcon, Inc
• Michael Mills, Management Consultant, Kraft & Kennedy, Inc

This was an excellent discussion, but with a representative from a large professional services firm (Mercer), one from a law firm, and one from a large supplier to the pharmaceutical industry, I felt that they we were definately representing the high end of enterprise search, i.e. industries which "get it" and which make my poor old retail organization pale into insignificance where it comes to information management in general and search particularly. Takeaways from this discussion on running a search procurement and implementation included:

• the tension between user requirements for a single point of access to all information and the reality of 12 major repositories with 15 different search applications (!)
• The problems with security and the new search engines allowing 'un-secured' content to be found in inappropriate circumstances
• The importance of getting a preferred vendor to do a Proof Of Concept with your data (not their own test sets), but acknowledging that you should pay for such a POC
• Sue noted that is not really about "digital natives versus digital immigrants" but its more about the value proposition and ease of use, especially for the very busy senior execs
• Pervasive search analytics - search meets BI
• Social networking in many enterprises is EMAIL ! Therefore be prepared to search it, and 'social graph' it.
• E-discovery is now a bigger industry sector than enterprise search, but work on e-discovery tools soon works its way back into mainstream enterprise search technology

Security came up again and again in this discussion and in the questions asked by the audience. In sophisticated environments, such as law firms where 'security by exception' is the norm, the search vendors tools are often lacking in their ability to provide security trimming of results sets that can cope with the requirements.

Next up was Jeannine Bartlett presenting Early and Associates 'SIX' Metrics frameworks. SIX stands for Search Integration eXperience. I am not going to expand much on this session as its their proprietary methodology - but it was a very interesting session, so if your interested, give them a call !

After some more networking at lunch time, and I have to tell you the networking with fellow practitioners is an excellent reason to attend this conference, my first afternoon session was one being presented by my very last consulting client, Statistics Canada. Kathy and her colleague Andrea presented on the StatsCan journey, on how they have gained senior stakeholder buy-in and executive sponsorship, how they undertook a phased program of analysis and tactical upgrades to their search environment, and how this has paid off for them. Their user community is now reporting much greater 'customer satisfaction' and that is not just based on their small improvements to their Ultraseek environment and their user interface work. It also based on their back end work on sorting out metadata and content collections etc. Check out the StatsCan specialized search tools page and note that they include considerable help content and e-tutorials. Just one question though Kathy - how come Martin got his name on your slides but I didn't ? .......... :-)

My final session of the conference was "Sustainable search at Du Pont" by Alicia Shortlidge. Alicia has been involved with search at her company for ten years, and described herself as search team manager, project manager , search sys admin and developer ! Out of a central App Development Consulting Group team of ten, only Alicia and one colleague are full time dedicated to search, and yet they have built 18 specific 'search applications' on the same search tool platform (my notes seem to suggest Recommind again, but they are a bit scribbled !) which all use the same index. They are basically specific search applications for single major business units, developed to meet special customer requirements (under a charge back model). They also use a Google GSA for their intranet. Currently they have Librarians manually tagging content with metadata, but hope to move to an auto-classification model, freeing up the Librarians to do more effect QA / QC on the automated tagging.

Security was a big issue again, with the use of the search engine as a 'security audit tool' - turning it on and finding stuff in unsecured and inappropriate repositories.

I missed the closing keynote, having to set off for La Guardia, but I have the slides from "The future of Enterprise Search' by Leslie Owens of Forrester. To qoute from her very first slide:
"The broad category of enterprise search is dead. Today's knowledge workers demand role-specific, contextual search, wherever they work."

So, there you go: 'Enterprise search is dead, long live, erm..... enterprise search...?"

No, seriously, I see her point and I understand. Nothing stands still in enterprise informatics, and the nature of enterprise search is morphing. I think Forrester will let me show you a graphic from one of Leslie's slides showing their interpretation of Unified Information Access:
OK, so I like the general concept here, structured data and unstructured content brought together by connections and processes of search and retrieval. However I will have to do some more reading of Forrester's content before commenting further, but what do you think of this ? Use the comments section to let me know.

So, in summary Enterprise Search Summit 2010 was an excellent conference with good sessions and even more so, some excellent networking opportunities with very intelligent practitioners; Ed, David, Jami and Christina, amongst others, thanks for improving my knowledge ! Lets not forget the vendors who attended, who were all very happy to discuss their products and search in general. I have to say, based on the other attendee's I spoke to, Microsoft if your reading, you missed an opportunity by not having any FAST people attending (although there seemed to be a surfeit of ex-FAST people !).

If you interested in the subjects around enterprise search and missed last weeks conference, take a look at the Enterprise Search Summit Fall, taking place in mid November in Washington DC, I can thoroughly recommend it :-)

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 summary - day 1

I am 'back at the ranch' after an excellent trip to New York for the Enterprise Search Summit 2010 which was a lot of fun and very informative.

A big thank you to my friend and colleague Martin White of Intranet Focus Ltd, a true search expert, who got me involved, and to Michelle Manafy, editor of eContent Magazine and conference chair (and her colleagues) for her excellent job organizing everything.

So even though I had to go buy an old fashioned note pad, due to failure of both my Asus Netbook batteries to take a charge, I made copious notes, so this could be a long post........ Actually I won't give too much detail, as I am sure Michelle would rather you sign up for ESS Fall, the autumnal version of the conference being held in Washington D.C. !

I will start with some observations, before diving into the details:

1. Security is a really big deal for enterprise search implementers !
2. There is no "one ring to rule them all" in enterprise search - most attendee's seem to have more than one search engine / application, and they are OK with this
3. Google Search Appliances and SharePoint 2007 are the poor children compared to the products from more 'established' enterprise search technology vendors

I will examine each of these issues as we work through the conference chronologically. I will break my summary into two posts to keep it more readable. I ran a workshop on Monday morning, on making the most of the search facilities of SharePoint 2007. I should have been a double act between Martin and I, but he could not make it due to a family emergency. I had a great audience, who were very participative and happy to share their experiences, and there was some serious expertise in the group, so a great big thanks to you all !

In the afternoon I attended a deep dive into SharePoint 2010 and FAST 2010, and it was a long and very useful workshop provided by:

• Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering, Inc
• Mark L. Bennett, CTO, Software Engineering, New Idea Engineering, Inc.
• Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
• Natalya Voskresenskaya, Co-founder, Arcovis LLC

They have all just co-operated on a new book: Professional Microsoft FAST Search: Customizing, Designing, and Deploying Search for SharePoint 2010 and Internet Servers and they are a thoroughly great set of people.

Tuesday, the first day of the full conference saw excellent keynotes from Dr Marti Hearst from UC Berkley and David White a senior analyst at Aberdeen Group. Marti put her presentation on SlideShare, so I have embedded it below:

Designing Search For Humans

View more presentations from marti_hearst.

What I liked about Marti's message was that emotional response to User Interfaces is important, and that small details matter when your trying to design an "interrupt free engagement". She also made the excellent point that humans are very social beings, and computers are not, so "don't try to personalize search, socialize it". An excellent keynote.

Google's Rajat Mukherjee had a quick 15 minute slot between the keynotes, and although his focus was obviously on Google's products, a very nice point, which seemed to surprise some attendees, was one about organizational or corporate culture. Within Google, everything is considered open and accessible, unless there is a very good reason to lock it down, so by default all content is shared with everyone. When you consider that they do a lot of 'dog fooding' (i.e. using their own products) that makes sense when you think about the features of Google Docs and Wave.

David Whites keynote was based on Aberdeen group survey of enterprise search implementations and presented in a 'best in class' versus, well lets be polite and say "less than optimal". One thing I would like to draw out from this presentation is the following, all the leaders in implementing best in class enterprise search have a dedicated team. Got that ? Let me shout it again, a dedicated team !

First of the breakout sessions for me was Searching the Past, as session on search and Digital Preservation by Christine Maxwell. I have some experience in long term digital preservation while working for the Open University, and with ESA and NASA on the Mars Express / Beagle 2 space missions, so I found it fascinating ! I will simply pass on some links to interesting projects that Christine brought to our attention:

• CHESHIRE - XML search engine
• CHILIAD - "distributed discovery / alert"
• SHAMAN - multivalent digital preservation framework
• The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access

My next session was 'Remembering and using the information you have got' by Ayelette Robinson. My favorite soundbite from Ayelette was "better business through better information access" - yep, amen to that sister..... :-) Ayelette is in Knowledge Management for a law firm, where search is seen as a key decision support tool. Her company uses Recommind as their search tool, and is also using Lexis-Nexis tools for auto-classification (generating metadata from the contents of a document, and classifying the document appropriately). They are big fans of the auto-classification and it is working well for them (but my take on this is that lawyers have very structured documents).

Next up was Avi Rappoport of SearchTools.com on enterprise search architectures specifically Federated versus Aggregated search. If you don't know, Federated (also called 'brokered') search sends the queries to existing search engines / indexes, whereas Aggregated search attempts to construct a single large index, even though it maybe indexing multiple content sources / systems. As per usual, there is not one size fits all, and different approaches fit different contexts. You can always drop Avi a line if you want to know more on this one.

'Improving Findability behind the firewall' was next on my agenda, presented by Bob Boeri, and ECM consultant with considerable expertise (!). Bob sees enterprise search as an element of Enterprise Content Management, and noted the importance of standards, for metadata, taxonomy and other elements of content management strategies, and the positive impact they can have on both precision and recall of your search results.

My last session was a three handed affair, so my notes are bit all over the place, but we can break it down to:

• The Tribune Company (as in the news papers) using tools for Ontology Management
• Raytion on search analytics
• Vivisimo on 'information optimization: efficient searching reduces expert training costs"

Wow, so that's the first day written up for you. Just to summarize, many of the attendee's of my workshop and many other presenters touched on the complexity of their search environments, with multiple search engines / products in use, and nearly everyone noted some issues with security - be it 'early binding' / 'late binding' or security filtering against LDAP directories and how to present results to users. More on these topics, and notes from day 2 in the next posting.

CMIS steps away from being officially ratified.

Irina Guseva writing at CMS Wire tells us that the CMSI draft has passed a critical milestone, getting 15% of votes, in the journey to become an officially ratified OASIS standard, read her article here:

CMIS Makes it as an official standard.

She has some quotes from Alfresco, Nuxeo, IBM and Day Software, and its an interesting little read.

This is very important for the ECM industry, but actually from my perspective even more important from an ECM / content management end user perspective. Official ratification of the standard, all out support from the industry, and baking the interoperability features into as many products as possible are a very good thing.

This will make it much more easy (and elegant ?) for SI's or internal IT departments to build systems which work exactly as the business requires, not as the vendor which meets 75% of the requirement wants them to. As you will know if you have read my blog before, the important part of ECM to me is the 'strategy' - not the vision of an ECMS as a monolithic, one size fits all solution to all your unstructured information management problems. Yet I have led procurements where ECM 'suites' from the big vendors have seemed a better solution than trying to fit together disparate pieces to build something from "best of breed" products.

CMIS promises to provide the best both worlds, a middle ground where "plug and play" comes to content management, so lets keep our fingers crossed for the continued development by OASIS and all those who have put in such a great amount of effort so far :-)

More SharePoint 2010 seminars and learning

It's been a busy couple of days ! Yesterday morning the Toronto AIIM Chapter held a MS sponsored event on the 'future of productivity' - mainly Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. This morning was a longer session held by EnvisionIT at the Microsoft Canada offices in Mississauga. Strangely enough it was EnvisionIT who brought two early adopter SP2010 clients to the AIIM seminar as case studies too !

The opening part of the AIIM session was presented by Sam Fung and Savash Alic from Microsoft. It was a very high level overview of what's coming in the near to mid term. I have to say I was slightly disturbed by Savash' constant references to 'ease of use' for end users, how they could build this and build that. We all know how easy it is to build SharePoint sites, and it one organization I had as a consulting client, the resulting chaos of over 1,400 teams sites and portal sites was a vivid example of why unmanaged / ungoverned 'ease of use' can be a bad thing !

Anyway, new things that I had not seen before including the LookingGlass project, which appears to be social media analytics served up to the user via a customised SharePoint portal. There is also a data visualization tool from Live Labs called Pivot - you can check it out at www.getpivot.com.

There was also mention of an Office Labs project called SISR - Social Inranet Search Ranking, but it does not seem to be mentioned on the Labs site at the moment. Basically it appears to be an enhancement to the SharePoint intranet search engines ranking algorithms to include social ranking (an OOB feature in SP2010).

Today at the EnvisionIT seminar it was the turn of ECM or the 'content' slice of the SP2010 'pie chart'. You can check out the Content section of the SharePoint 2010 site to see what Microsoft includes under this heading.

Interestingly the AIIM definition of ECM was used to set the scene, but if you have ever read this blog or my articles elsewhere, you will know that I do not consider MOSS2007 as an 'ECM platform' in any shape or form ! As far as I am concerned MOSS2007 is a Portal platform (similar to IBM WebSphere for example) with built in simple content, document management and collaboration features (and for developers it is of course a .Net development platform). It is simply missing too much functionality compared to EMC Documentum or OpenText ECM Suite (ex-LiveLink) for example, to be considered an ECM platform. Which is why the term 'Basic Content Services' was coined by Gartner to describe SharePoint (and other similarly limited products).

Which of course does not mean that MOSS2007 has not been a successful product ! It has it's niches in divisional level portals, collaboration workspaces (Team sites) and document centric collaboration. But as I work with it day in and day out, I find I am constantly frustrated by its limitations. Often those limitations can be overcome with a large dolop of cash for a third party add on, or custom development work, but in my organization (as in many I suspect) - "out of the box" is the current mantra.

So, what does SP2010 bring to the party ? Is it truly an ECM platform on a level playing field with the 'big boys' now ? Well, no, not in my opinion, but its got a lot of features that were required, and so its much better than it was - and therefore it might well be 'good enough' to meet your requirements.

New OOB Content Types for rich media have been added. So instead of the old 'picture library' you can now have a 'Digital Assets' library, but from what I have seen the Content Types do not as standard have the fields required by any of the industry standard digital asset metadata schemas (such as XMP), so I am guessing uploading an asset does not including removing any metadata from the file and auto-populating the SharePoint 'columns' with it. However, as I noted this is an improvement over MOSS, and elements such as being able to stream video from within the library (via built in SilverLight) will go over well in many intranet scenarios I suspect.

The new Unique Identifier feature, pretty much does what it says on the tin. Set up at the site collection level, you can provide some characters yourself for the beginning of the ID string, and then SP2010 will give each new content item its unique ID, which also happens to be a persistent URI, or 'permalink' able to point to the document wherever you move it within the SharePoint site.

Metadata management is much improved (thank goodness !). The new Managed Metadata Service allows structured hierarchical taxonomies to be created and shared across site collections. This CMS Wire article: "Overview: SharePoint 2010 Metadata and Taxonomy Management" by Stephanie Lemieux of Early and Associates, is an excellent introduction, so I don't need to repeat its content here. However as well as the 'managed' metadata features described by Stephanie, SP2010 allows 'user tagging' or a Folksonomy approach to metadata to be used as well. Finally, it provides a bridge between the two, allowing often used tags to be added to the official taxonomy. So, all of this is good, and much better than what was previously available, but even better in my opinion is the ability to set metadata at the folder level and have any content item uploaded into the folder inherit that metadata. Why is this such a good thing you ask ? Well because even though we information management professionals understand the importance of metadata, your average end user just see's it as an extra impediment to actually getting their work done. So if you can set it up so that as much metadata as possible can be inherited without human intervention - that is a good thing !

Records Management is also much improved, with possibly the biggest change being the 'manage in place' facility, which means you no longer have to send the potential record to a separate Records Centre (but you still can if you want to). Interesting on this front, at the AIIM seminar I bumped into a contact who used to be an RM specialist for the big Canadian consulting firm CGI. Tim has got together with some colleagues to create a start-up called OceanRoad Software, and they are developing a product which further extends the RM functionality of SharePoint. I wish them a lot of luck in their new venture.

In summary, SP2010 is still missing a lot of features of the big ECM suites. That might be countered with the argument that it is simpler to deploy and use, but I don't think that is always true either. However I am not actually intending this to sound like a negative review. I have a SP2010 demo disk, but I don't have enough memory on my iMac to install it on a Windows 7 VM, so it will be a while before I get to thoroughly kick the tires, and get under the hood. Meanwhile, my bottom line is what it has always been for MOSS2007 - don't blindly believe the SP2010 hype, sort out your requirements first, then talk to MS or its partners, and see if SP2010 will be a good fit for your requirements - you will either be slightly disappointed, or pleasantly surprised :-)