Tag Archives: Microsoft

Microsoft is betting on cloud, mobile and social for SharePoint 2013 – Impressions from the SharePoint Conference 2012

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Over 10,000 attendees from 85 countries, more than 200 sponsors and exhibitors, and over 250 sessions. Besides these impressive numbers, the 2012 SharePoint conference in Las Vegas has also marked the launch of the new version of SharePoint. Findwise was there to learn and is now sharing with you the news about enterprise search in SharePoint 2013.

In the keynote presentation on the first day of the conference, Jared Spataro (Senior Director, SharePoint Product Management at Microsoft) mentions the three big bets made for the SharePoint 2013 product: CLOUD, MOBILE, and SOCIAL. This post tries to provide a brief overview of what these three buzzwords mean for the enterprise search solution in SharePoint 2013. Before reading this, also check out our previous post about search in SharePoint 2013 to get a taste of what’s new in search.

Search in the cloud

While you have probably heard the saying that “the cloud has altered the economics of computing” (Jared Spataro), you might be wondering how to get there. How to go from where you are now to the so-called cloud. The answer for search is that SharePoint 2013 provides a hybrid approach that helps out in this transition. Hybrid search promises to be the bridge between on-premises and the cloud.

The search results from the cloud and those from on-premise can be shown on the same page with the use of the “result blocks”. The result block, new to SharePoint 2013, is a block of results that are individually ranked and are grouped according to a “query rule”. In short, a query rule defines a condition and an action to be fired when the condition is met. With the use of the result blocks, you can display the search results for content coming from the cloud when searching from an on-premises site and the other way around (depending whether you want the search to be one-way or bidirectional), and you can also conditionally enable these result blocks depending on the query (for example, queries matching specific words or regular expressions).

hybridsearch

Screenshot from the post Hybrid search of the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog showing how results from the cloud are integrated in the search results page when the user searches from an on-premises SharePoint 2013 site.

Before making the decision to move to the cloud, it is wise to check the current features availability for both online and on-premise solutions on TechNet.

Mobile devices

With SharePoint 2013, Microsoft has added native mobile apps for Windows, Windows Phone, iPhone, and iPad, and support across different mobile devices (TechNet), which provides access to information and people wherever the users are searching from.

Also important to mention when talking about mobile, is that the improved REST API widens the extensibility options and allows easy development of custom user experiences across different platforms and devices. The search REST API provides access to the keyword query language parameters, and combining this with a bit of JavaScript and HTML allows developers to quickly start building Apps with custom search experiences and making all information available across devices.

Social search

In the same keynote, Jared Spataro said that Microsoft has “integrated social very deeply into the product, creating new experiences that are really designed to help people collaborate more easily and help companies become more agile.” This was also conveyed by the presence of the two founders of the enterprise social network Yammer in the keynote presentation. The new social features integration means that the information about people following content, people following other people, tags, mentions, posts, discussions, are not only searchable but can be used in improving the relevance of the search results and improving the user experience overall. Also, many of the social features are driven by search, such as the recommendations for people or documents to follow.

Whether you are trying to find an answer to a problem to which the solution has already been posted by somebody else, or whether you are trying to find a person with the right expertise through the people search, SharePoint 2013 provides a more robust and richer social search experience than its previous versions. And the possibilities to extend the out-of-the-box capabilities must be very attractive to businesses that are for example looking to combine the social interactivity inside SharePoint with people data stored in other sources (CRM solutions, file shares, time tracking applications, etc).

Stay tuned!

It was indeed an awesome conference, well organized, but most of the times it was hard to decide which presentation to choose from the many good sessions running at the same time. Luckily (or wisely), we had more than one Findwizard on location!

This post is part of our series of reports from the SharePoint 2012 Conference. Keep an eye on the Findability blog for part two of our report from the biggest SharePoint conference of 2012!

Presentation: Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2013

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Presented by Paula Petcu and Ludvig Aldrin at Microsoft Campus Days, #cddk12, 31 October 2012, in Copenhagen Denmark.

Learn how easy it is to build powerful search experiences using SharePoint 2013.
The presentation will showcase the Search in SharePoint 2013 and provide a technical and functional walkthrough of what is new.  The presentation will take you through the out-of-box search experience, and you will get tips and tricks on how to extend the search platform to create a great custom experience for your users. Also discussed is the new search architecture and how search plays a central role in the new SharePoint 2013.

The presentation is divided into three parts. The first part will include an overview of search and will walk you through the out-of-the-box search experience, showcasing the new or improved functionalities and discussing how this affects the search experience. This part is all about finding what the users are looking for and getting answers to their questions. The new product revolves around the user more than ever, and you will be able to see this in the new search experience.

Then information about about the new search architecture, and this will make the transition to the second part of the presentation, which is all about extending. And a bit about executing queries under the new architecture and more specifically on how to extend the way they are executed.

Prior to SharePoint 2013, the only way to inspect and manipulate managed property values for items before being added to the search index was by extending the item processing pipeline in FAST Search for SharePoint. Clients using SharePoint search were out of luck as the functionality was not available to them. Now, MS has introduced three new items for content processing and enrichment: parsers, custom entity extractors, and web service callouts. These new features will be featured and one of the demoed.

But what happens next to the search engine? The third part of the presentation will be about the governance of your search solution. More specifically, it will focus on search analytics.

Search Driven Navigation and Content

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In the beginning of October I attended Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, USA. There were a lot of interesting and useful topics that were discussed. One really interesting session was Content Targeting with the FAST Search Web Part by Martin Harwar.

Martin Harwar talked about how search can be used to show content on a web page. The most common search-driven content is of course the traditional search. But there are a lot more content that can be retrieved by search. One of them is to have search-driven navigation and content. The search-driven navigation means that instead of having static links on a page we can render them depending on the query the user typed in. If a user is for example on a health care site and had recently done a search on “ear infection” the page can show links to ear specialist departments. When the user will do another search and returns to the same page the links will be different.

In the same way we can render content on the page. Imagine a webpage of a tools business that on its start page has two lists of products, most popular and newest tools. To make these lists more adapted for a user we only want show products that are of interest for the user. Instead of only showing the most popular and newest tools the lists can also be filtered on the last query a user has typed. Assume a user searches on “saw” and then returns to the page with the product lists. The lists will now show the most popular saws and the newest saws. This can also be used when a user finds the companies webpage by searching for “saw” on for instance Google.

This shows that search can be used in many ways to personalize a webpage and thereby increase Findability.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011: Contributor vs. Consumer

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A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011, Anaheim USA. This turned out to be an intense four-day conference covering just about any SharePoint 2010 topic you can imagine – from the geekiest developer session to business tracks with lessons learned.

To me, one of the most memorable sessions where Social Search with Dan Benson and Paul Summers, in which they showed us how social behaviours can be used to influence the current rank of search. For instance, users interests entered in MySite can be used to boost (xrank) search results accordingly. This was an eye opener as it illustrated what’s possible with quite easy means. Thanks for that!

Another great session was Scott Jamison talking about Findability in SharePoint. The key ingredient in this session was to differentiate between contributor and consumer. Typically we focus on the contributor, building 100 level folder structures with names that make sense to contributor. However, we seem to forget about the consumers, who of course are the other key aspect of an intranet. It is equally important to create a good support system for contributors, as it is to focus on consumer needs. As Jamison said “why have folders for both contributors and consumers? ”. SharePoint includes endless possibilities when it comes to creating logical views built on search, tags and filtering aimed to fill the needs of the consumers.

So, keep the folders or what ever support the contributor needs, but let your imagination float free for delivering best class Findability to the consumer!

Open Source Tools for Text Analytics

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Recently, both clients of Findwise as well as the Enterprise Search community in general are increasingly showing interest in text analytics in order to get a higher business value out of their (often large) volumes of unstructured information.

Text Analytics merges techniques from linguistics, computer science, machine learning, statistics and many of the central algorithms in this field are publically available as open source tools and packages with easily accessible APIs. While many customers of commercial Enterprise Search solutions, such as Automomy, IBM Omnifind, Microsoft FAST ESP, etc., have long benefitted from some sort of Text Analytics (e.g. Entity Extraction, Keyword Extraction and document summarization), the open source components have now come a long way in providing alternative, free of charge solutions with similar performance and feature set.

As every modern enterprise search architecture today has some kind of document processing that is extensible by additional stages or APIs (for example the Open Pipeline with Solr or the pipeline that comes with Microsoft FAST) – the opportunity for plugging new text analytics stages to existing search implementations is open and ready for new innovation.

Among the most popular applications of text analytics that have emerged lately are customized entity extraction, sentiment analysis and document classification – each with a set of open source alternatives (such as Balie, OpenNLP and GATE) readily available for customization and implementation to your document processing.

Regardless of your industry domain, these techniques open up for a wide variety of new ways to interpret the content and discover new trends from your unstructured textual data – be it through sentiment analysis to support the decision making process, trend analysis or relevance model of search, or entity extraction in order to navigate your content by entities (such as company name or person), the enhancement of your texts by meta-data tagging or finding similar and related content.

How are you taking advantage of modern text analytics?

Findability Blog: Wrapping up the 2010 posts

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Christmas is finally here and at Findwise we are taking a few days off to spend time with family and friends.

During 2010 we’ve delivered more than 25 successful projects, arranged breakfast seminars to talk about customer solutions (based on Microsoft, IBM, Autonomy and Open source), meet-ups in a number of cities as well as networking meetings for profound Findability discussions and moving in parties for our new offices.

At our Findability blog we have been discussing technology and vendor solutions (Microsoft and FAST, Autonomy, IBM, Google and open source), research,  conferences, customized solutions and how to find a balance between technology and people.

Some of our posts have resulted in discussions, both on our own blog and in other forums. Please get involved in some of the previous ongoing discussions on “Solr Processing Pipeline”,  “Search and Business Intelligence” or “If a piece of content is never read, does it exist?”  if you have thoughts to share.

Findability blog is taking a break and we will be back with new posts is January.

If you have some spare time during the vacation some of customers run their own blogs, and good reading tips within Findability are the blogs driven by Kristian Norling (VGR) and Alexandra Larsson (Swedish armed forces).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Search in SharePoint 2010

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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 are tremendous. And also great expectations for search in Sharepoint 2010

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 capabilities for search in Sharepoint 2010 (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.

FAST goes Microsoft for Real – Drops Linux and UNIX Versions

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“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.”

The decision to do so is hardly a surprise to those who have been following FASTs development since the acquisition in 2008. Microsoft was last year ranked as no 1 in Gartner’s ‘Magic Quadrant’ for Information Access, an expression for the company’s single-mindedness struggle to remain the customers’ first choice when it comes to information retrieval. A strong focus and fast innovation is essential to keep this position.

Bjørn Olstad blog post holds a promise for non-Windows customers saying

“We will always interoperate with non-Windows systems on both the front- and back-end. Our search solutions will crawl and index content stored on Windows, Linux, and UNIX systems, and our UI controls will work with UI frameworks running on any operating system”

Even so, the decision states a new era and it will be interesting to follow the development. A lot of the larger companies worldwide already have a Microsoft strategy, and this might even be an opportunity to switch towards FAST. For others Björn Olstads blog post is also giving a hint about cloud-support, where a hosted solution might solve headaches.

However, the most interesting statement is the accalerated speed of innovation. Even though the last Magic Quadrant stated Microsoft as a clear leader, others are following right behind and established vendors such as Autonomy as well as new players such as Lucid Imagination are responding to Microsofts offerings with new and innovative solutions. We will continue to report about this and Microsofts roadmap, so visit us from time to time to stay updated.

SPC09 Day 3 – Say Bye Bye to Python and Say Hello to .NET

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

Metadata 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.

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

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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.

Enterprise Search

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.