Nov 082007

Microsoft's Search Server 2008...very cunning plan

This was announced at the DevConnections event last night in Las Vegas. Basically they've rolled out the MOSS search in a free Express version and a Enterprise version. Check out the blog announcement and the product page.

Entry market

This will drive businesses to install WSS 3.0 with the new Search Server 2008. It can map to many content sources and also create various Search Scopes. The intention is that if a business puts this in to search their existing repositories they may then go and use the other features of WSS 3.0 and then potentially move up to MOSS 2007.
I have had many clients on a small budget that I have had to talk to about MOSS because the search features they want just weren't up to scratch in the base install of WSS 3.0. Now with Search Server 2008 I can lead them down this path which will be cheaper to start with. Tim W concurs with this.
I can see this being sold a lot where people have the big Document/Records Management products but don't necessarily want to pay the big bucks for Enterprise Search or are not happy with the existing vendors search product.

Features Comparisons

The feature set of the Express version appears to be what was present in MOSS 2007 search. The full version feature set looks very similar and for some reason they don't have a comparison chart. I did a quick comparison and it appears that Express has an extra Out-of-the-box Indexing Connectors and the full version has High Availability and Load Balancing.

The marketing material couldn't be less clear on the differences and even the headers are different between the two pages even though the major parts of the the content are the same! SharePoint Buzz has a good feature chart. CMS Watch has a very similar view to me on the new announcement.

CNet also has some good coverage on this and points out that it is capable of searching not only internal files but external databases such as web sites, Google news, Wikipedia and BusinessWeek. It also integrates with Microsoft Live.com search engine and will include results from other search providers.

Mary Jo Foley added to this by stating that the Express version won't map into the BDC that MOSS 2007 does.

One thing to reiterate is that Search Server does not include Wildcards, read this post for a further explanation of this.

Federated Search

It is also interesting to see which partners are getting behind the federated search too. With the big ECM players such as ECM, OpenText and Vorsite's connector for IBM FileNet.
This is a clear move to put Google in its targets with their Google Search Appliance technology which has recently been upgraded to include support for federated searches across Cisco Systems, Cognos, NetSuite, Oracle, SalesForce.com and SAS. A few of these are noticeably missing from Microsoft Federated Search partners.

The S2 Codename

Also, it was code named S2...which people had got their wires crossed with the Records Management enhancements for DOD classification that I blogged about recently - including Mary Jo Foley.

One thing to remember though that this is not a 'new' thing as IBM have offered a tool since April. It's like all the noise made around Atlassian working with SharePoint even though SocialText had last year!

Published: 11/8/2007 2:38 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Nov 062007

SharePointPedia, great for community, but not groundbreaking

There's a lot of noise out in the SharePoint space around SharePointPedia which is something that Lawrence Lui has been championing within Microsoft. There is screencasts here and here.

Personalization

I've created my profile and have added some content to various tagged areas. Be interesting to see if I get recommended ;-) The My Tags feature is very clever in terms of showing you the tags you've used when submitting content.

Authentication

It uses Windows Live ID integration which is great, because the last thing I need is another username and password to look after!

Recommendations

It also has a Digg like recommendation and comments feature. It's great to be able to see what each user has submitted also to get an idea of what they are focused on.
The most recommended and recent posts are a good way to keep track too. With the Most Recommended there are only 2 on there, they must have capped it to over x amount of recommendations, I wonder if they'll have to keep incrementing this manually or whether there's some smarts in there. There's also some nice work done with the RSS feeds too.

Bill does point out that this is really what SharePointKicks was all about! And to be perfectly honest, why didn't they just use a social bookmarking site (del.icio.us/diigo) or something like Digg anyway? I guess it does just focus on the SharePoint community, lets see how it goes. I'll try and keep up with submitting content here as well as on Diigo for now to share with the community my findings.

Community involvement

I must admit, it would be great if someone like Steve Pietrek picked up this and started using it as his links are an awesome resource. I've tried emailing him in the past with no joy, does anyone else have better connections with this guy?

Recommendations

Firefox

One criticism I have is that it doesn't work fully in Firefox. For instance, the UI looks different in both and the Recommend button and Paging does not work in Firefox.
This is a typical issue with SharePoint functionality in general and does highlight one big failure of the product in the Web Content Management Space against it's competitors such as RedDot CMS and Interwoven TeamSite.
I tend to prefer to work in Firefox than IE because the tabbing is quicker and also I have the Diigo and Google toolbar all set up how I like it. The only reason I use Internet Explorer is because of SharePoint sites and I find that when IE crashes it can cause all sorts of issues for the Operating System whereas in the unlikely event Firefox crashes it doesn't.

Tags

There don't appear to be any tags for development type activities. Looking at my diigo tags I have a heap more, but again, everyone classifies things different so not sure how they've come up with these exactly. Only "Tier 2" users can create new tags so it will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Submitting content

When you try and add a URL that is already added, the validation just throws up saying that it already exists. It would be nice if it linked you to this item and allowed you to have the option to recommend it and make a comment. Rather than having to go find it yourself.

Recommendation link

It would be great to be able to hook in the recommendations straight into the linked content like Digg for example. Or even just provide a Recommendation quick link as most authors who are keen will already submit their content straight into SharePointPedia.

Profile information

It would be great to have more information on the SharePoint experts out there. I mean everyone knows who Joel Olsen, Andrew Connell, Bob Mixon, Arpan Shah and Isahi Sagi are but there are plenty out there for specific areas that are worth keeping up with.

Published: 11/6/2007 5:03 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Nov 062007

SharePoint hotfixes

I subscribed to the OzMoss.com listserve, reluctantly at first because I am so used to RSS feeds for managing my content and not my inbox. So far I've found it very useful, especially as GMail groups the emails together as the thread builds which makes it easier to manage.

The RSS feed available for the listserve does not do any grouping of threads which can make it hard to follow especially if you leave it for a few days and then try to catch up! Be nice if there was an option in Google Reader to group the posts ;-)

Anyway, a great thread has kicked off around deployment issues with SharePoint 2007 and the main message coming across is that it was so much easier in Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) days!

One other thing that got my attention was Sammy Jankis blog article that lists all the Hotfixes available for SharePoint 2007 already. Every bit of software has bugs on release and considering how buggy the Beta 2 release was that I played in March prior to the official release in November 2006 they've done a great job of ironing a lot of the issues out. It still does concern me that these are an issue and that there is no mention of a service pack for SharePoint 2007 so far. If they are thinking of releasing the next full release in 2009.

Published: 11/6/2007 4:57 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Nov 052007

SalesForce.com - Force Platform

Rather than me go into it too much, this video covers what SalesForce are doing in the SaaS space with a new Platform called Force. The blog also covers this is some detail and the press release covers it also.

They've really thought it through in terms of scalability, security and performance. It's something managed by them, my biggest question is what Enterprise companies will pick this up or will it be the SME's? WIth their reputation in CRM space and their early start in the AppExchange program. A good coverage of AppExchange is covered at the O'Reilly Network.

SalesForce have also joined the OpenSocial bandwagon and demoed at the BaseCamp webcast I mentioned in my previous post. Will be interesting to see what integration that bring in...whether they'll be happy to open up to LinkedIn or not...

Published: 11/5/2007 3:53 AM | 1 Comment | 0 Links to this post

Nov 052007

Google OpenSocial storm brewing

The OpenSocial site went live on Thursday and I'm sure will cause quite a stir once the whole blogging community starts discussing this. I've already subscribed to the OpenSocial blog that has some good coverage of who was at the launch event last week. The video of the launch is a good introduction to it all.

Features

TechCrunch talks about it in some detail after attending the event. They sum up the integration by saying it covers:

Profile Information (user data)
Friends Information (social graph)
Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Platforms

Marc Andreessen's company Ning has supported the cause and puts together some good reasoning behind it as well as how Facebook can deal with it.

This will be a huge change for the Social Networking space on the Internet in the coming months as developers who were storming to build on top of Facebook now will probably be putting some money on OpenSocial growing rapidly. All it takes, as Marc mentioned, was for one big horse to start running with it e.g. MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5, SalesForce.com, Plaxo, Oracle etc.

The ball is rolling

Being on the front of this train and running with it will get you a lot of publicity and potentially a huge user base. There is a feed that shows what sites are taking this up for instance PayPal, FunWall, MY NewYorkTimes, Go4It, Shelfari, Where I've Visited as just some that are already taking this up.

Orkut push

Google have been very clever with this, although it is open source, there social networking platform Orkut (wikipedia info) which to date has not been very successful in comparison to Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc. This will open up that user base as word gets around of the support of OpenSocial and the advantages of having a platform that supports multiple networks without being locked in like Facebook. It will be interesting to see how Facebook responds. For any new networking platform, they need to work out how they will retain users on their platform.

Developers, developers, developers

The main push is how easy it is for developers to integrate this with other social networks such as MySpace, Ning and Hi5 for example. Interestingly a few of the announced partners didn't present at the Base Camp presentation such as Plaxo, but the following did:

Flickster

The video demos how Flickster grabs profile information from a Ning community site and uses it within their own application.

iLike

It was also very possitive for iLike who used the same codebase for Facebook that they now use in Ning, MySpace and Hi5. They demonstrated the AJAX style interface in various different network platforms and the integration with the activities integration.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn demoed a strong rich interface calendar that recommended events relevant to the profession of the user logged in and also coloured it differently depending on whether their connections were attending the event or not. It extended the paradigm around 3rd degree (know through friends) connections, where you can see which are attending the event and contacting them to meet at this event.

SalesForce

SalesForce demonstrated the connections and relationships with clients in their CRM. It uses a tag cloud type method of showing how your relationship is with that client. They have introduced a new 'make friend' button that also integrates with it.

MySpace + Flixster

They demoed integration with Flixster pulling interests from MySpace's profiles to show Movie posters on their profile. Clicking on the posters then put them in a framed Flixster app within MySpace about that movie and the comments that were made within Flixster but that user.

Blogger Opinions

Jeremiah Owyang

Already it has kicked up a lot of talk. Jeremiah Owyang makes some good points. Key things include:

Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook are not part of this (yet)
It's basically the same as what Facebook offered four months ago, but includes other platforms not just app developers.
More efficient development
Easy way of harnessing existing communities
Extend your existing apps with social features

Jeremiah also establishes some key challenges to this approach. Will the Google name be strong enough to encourage people to move onto this platform?

Charlene Li - Gartner

Charlene Li also wrote about this recently and highlighted that the real winners were the developers. But also in the long run potentially the smaller social networks could be too. She did highlight that although it could potential make the water rough for Facebook, that for now Facebook in the consumers eyes will see Facebook as the place to be.

Dogster

Dogster makes some great points too. Again, security issues and Google advantages on chairing this were brought up and policies to be put in place around this.

SixApart

Six Apart also took time to stand up on this one too. An interesting angle was not from platforms, not from developers, but the advantages it will give end users.

Gabe Wachob

Gabe Wachob makes some great points around the fact that it encourages Silos and unlike, as I've discussed before, the OpenID approach that centralises one identity. OpenSocial will still encourage lock-in with the social network platforms.

From the users point of view apps like iLike could be confusing because you could potential have this viewed on multiple sites and this will make it hard for users to manage all their apps.

Master of 500 hats

Dave McClure makes some big key points around not getting too excited by highlighting that the usage of Facebook compared to all the partners lined up is minimal. He also asks whether Google themselves will jump on the train and start integrating this stuff into GMail, GTalk etc. He does point out that the big integrators RockYou, Flixster, Slide etc. are all on board which is a big plus for OpenSocial.

TechCrunch

TechCrunch posted up something similar to Dave McClure with the OpenSocial Partners and their unique monthly visitors. One key point was that if this become the advertising platform of choice, it could really hurt Facebook and Microsofts' new agreement. Michael has also put up some screenshots! The Flixster screenshots are a great example of only showing your friends who've reviewed the movies in context of MySpace User profile. It would be great if it would grab friends from MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and show all your connected friends that way....

Jack Schofield

Jack has a very critical view of it claiming that it really doesn't encourage Openness and that all this can be done from within Facebooks API so why does Google releasing this make it any different. It does highlight that when Google beat their drums people listen and trust it unlike when Microsoft do.

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall also goes to town on asking the curly questions around the announcements. These are all valid concerns and things I'm suprised others haven't blogged about around these announcements.

Josh Catone

Josh also points out that Facebook need not worry...users join a social network because their friends are already there. All the apps in the platform just enhance their experience once they're there. He states that Google is the real winner here...and that it wouldn't really hurt Facebook to get on board. Facebook could get unstuck if a killer app is developed on OpenSocial but not for Facebook (unlikely).

And some more over at my diigo tags.

Published: 11/5/2007 3:52 AM | 1 Comment | 0 Links to this post

Nov 042007

Links for 4/11/2007

Published: 11/4/2007 5:26 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Nov 042007

Social Bookmarking tool - Diigo

Ok, I've been a big user of del.icio.us for the last few months and found a great add-on service called Diigo that allows you to extend the detail stored in social bookmarking but has backwards compatibility with del.icio.us with new features such as note taking etc. It allows you to not only bookmark the site but also for it to remember any sticky notes you add to the page etc. which is awesome for researching areas!

Group sharing function

It allows extra functionality over del.icio.us such as sharing bookmarks with groups in a better way than just referring like the del.icio.us. The comments you make are also visible and when you add a bookmark you can also see other users comments also enriching the experience further. The notes are in full rich text editor as well which is a bonus!

The group functionality allows you to add bookmarks to a group to share it around and also has a forums section also. There is a SharePoint group already out there but to date there is only 4 members!

It allowed me to select the SharePoint tag in diigo and then share these links with the SharePoint group which is an awesome way to share your links in a community.

Integration with del.icio.us

There are over 28,336 links in del.icio.us on SharePoint tag and from my experience with diigo I can see a lot of people moving to it and the great thing is it imports all your del.icio.us bookmarks in natively as well as when you adding them to diigo adding them to del.icio.us! Note it is not a synchronising tool.

Unread function

It even adds a check box to tag the link as unread to go back to it later...whereas to date I've been adding a tag called unread and deleting it at a later date. It's an excellent enhancement to the social bookmarking space!

Notification function

I really like Steve Pietrek's feed which is a posting of his links directly in his blog. The problem I found is that his links are basically already shown in my RSS feed that I've subscribed to already, but I always seem to find that he has a new blogger that I haven't found already...this group facility is another way to expose this information.You can subscribe to the link feed on an immediate basis, daily or weekly to receive an email OR subscribe to the RSS feed. Now all I need to do is convince Steve to use diigo ;-)

The collaboration group is also very interesting with over 220 members aleady!

Published: 11/4/2007 5:21 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Nov 042007

Facebook Enterprise 2.0 community

I'm a big believer in 'eating your own dog food' and I'm a heavy user of RSS feeds, forums and social networking sites to keep up with my areas of interest.

I've just been reading a forum thread on 'Do Enterprises WANT social networking?', there are plenty of experts in the field putting their views across which is excellent. The thread is part of the 'Social Networking in the Enterprise' Facebook group. There is just over 1000 members and it's growing rapidly, originally headed up by Mike Gannotti who's SharePoint blog is well within the top 10 feed reads for me with some amazing content around this space and also SharePoint.

There is a lot of related links included around web3.0 and the semantic web. Notably the SIOC project which interlinks blogs, forums, wikis and mailing lists into one database and an alternative here at OpenLink Virtuoso.

This article on 'Enterterprise Expertise Management Systems and Organisational Reality' also offers some great scenarios of the use of Enterprise2.0 in real life situations.

The key takeaway was that is seems to revolve a lot around getting Generation Y engaged within and organisation in a collaborative way in large scale enterprises across globally separated locations.

Another key point was that a lot of organisations have this on their road map but other requirements take priorities such as upgrades etc.

A suggestion was to attack it from a problem focus rather than a product focus where the key is to getting it in the door. So from a problem focus, introduce Enterprise2.0 by resolving the current internal issue of finding an expert in 'x' field.

Another strong link explained enterprise2.0 in a good way covering a few key areas also:

Integration between enterprise2.0 applications such as wikis and web content management systems. There is a big stream of decisions being made around what integrates with what. So announcements like SocialText and Atlassian integration with SharePoint are key moves for these vendors.
It also indicates all the vendors that are out there in the enterprise2.0 space and the main market they are targetting e.g. Media Industry, SME, Intranet, Extranet, Education etc.
It mentions what the big players are doing such as IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Oracle and SalesForce are doing.
It highlights the clear link between Instant Messaging and Enterprise 2.0 and therefore the drive for Unified Communications being pushed by Cisco and Microsoft among others. Cisco is definately playing catchup compared to the application integration that Microsoft can show at this point in time, but it won't be long before acquisitions and internal development keep them in the game in this UC race.

It also links to this article on facebook in the enterprise and where it's going. Key points of interest were:

There are lots of business focused groups already out there on facebook
Employees think that others give out too much information about themselves on line openly
LinkedIn has issues around employees using it for job searches as well as for connections with internal and external people.
Some online enterprise2.0 providers are creating controlled hosted closed networks to prevent links to external sources and to save hosting them internally which is increasing rapidly. Google Apps and Microsoft Office Live Workspaces are good examples of this also.

Published: 11/4/2007 5:20 AM | 4 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Nov 042007

Using SharePoint 2007 to implement Enterprise Social Networking

I presented to a group of our Alphawest client base on Friday in Perth at QV1 this morning. Thank you for everyone who attended, it was a great turn out and I got some valuable feedback.

Some great questions were asked:

Should we wait for Microsoft to enhance SharePoint 2007

In terms of whether it is worth backing Microsoft to enhance existing functionality in SharePoint 2007 or whether to go out there and buy add-ons from other companies or even use open source from CodePlex.

I used Atlassian as a good example of a wiki with rich integration into SharePoint. Clearly these guys are pretty huge in the wiki space, as are MediaWiki as one guy there mentioned but MediaWiki currently has no integration.

On CodePlex I was hunting for an enhanced wiki like the enhanced blog and found the project under the same banner of CKS. So work is definitely being done in this area but there is no indication of how quickly this is happening.

From the Microsoft point of view, I think they need to leave some space for the open source community and the partners to develop enhancements.

If Microsoft continue to do enhancements, like they have done to the Records Management piece for DoD certification, they will find that Partners won't spend the time developing these enhanced features to package up and sell themselves. It's hard to know what areas they can concentrate on without Microsoft throwing some developers at it to copy cat the functionality or just acquire them.

Most companies won't want to sweat out a solution to be bought out for a quick lump sum when there could potentially be years of sales and support renewals give a more stable return. And the open source community won't want to spend that time either if Microsoft release an official version conflicting with theirs later down the track.

I believe Microsoft need to be a bit clearer in where they are heading with this so that Partners can make some decisions without knowing they are not going to get rubbed out of the market.

If we use SharePoint wiki to build our Handbook, can we output the results to PDF?

For this answer, I guess I described the architecture of wikis and the fact that a wiki is just a SharePoint list made up of wiki pages which are SharePoint List Items. Therefore, potentially, you can write an application to navigate through each wiki page in a particular way using the SharePoint API.

I guess the only problem with this approach is that technically wiki's are not structured like documents in a hierarchical way and are more like a web of pages where one page can be linked from various others. SO you could end up in a recursive loop when doing it this way. You could just output the wiki page the first time the page is linked off to and this may work, I guess there would have to be guidelines around the approach on the use of the wiki.

Published: 11/4/2007 5:17 AM | 4 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Nov 042007

OpenID bandwagon and SharePoint

Based on discussions I've been reading in my social networking feeds I've decided to get on the OpenID bandwagon, mainly because I don't want someone else to steal my user name that I always use of 'jthake' ;-) It's my branding!

There are heaps of sites already supporting OpenID which can be seen at the OpenID Directory.

WikiTravel

On my travels I found wikitravel.org and decided to check out my home town of Perth, Western Australia. Good to see how much content is in there! And it even mentions the worlds best pub...Little Creatures in Fremantle! "Mine's a pint of pils!"

OpenID Blogs

Anoather great addition is the fact that there are some many subject based blogs out there which support OpenID so you can go and submit articles there.

Poking about

There's also some not so useful, "poke" like apps out there such as "I make Mistakes". I guess it's very similar to facebook in terms of having one registration but access to multiple apps, it's just they are not all in one walled garden like facebook.

Google OpenSocial

Google's rumoured OpenSocial has been released although the link on the Zdnet article gives a 404 error. I'm dubious to the information based on this. But if so it's a hard facebook killer if MySpace and LinkedIn get on board and share their connections.

OpenID and SharePoint

Another great plug in for OpenID is to allow users to login and add comments on WordPress blogs with their OpenID. Very very awesome! This is very much like Windows Live and where they are going. Angus Logan is the guy making the biggest noise about this after making serious noise around SharePoint from Sydney last year. Now I'm sure if they can release an WIndows Live authentication for SharePoint, they can create an OpenID one too...guys?

There is a CodePlex project called DNOpenID that looks like it could be used as a provider for SharePoint.

Social Graph

I guess it does lead into the direction Brad Fitz was getting to around a Social Graph for all application platforms to see connections for all your apps such as facebook, myspace, linkedIn without having to add the same person to each app.

Published: 11/4/2007 5:17 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

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Microsoft's Search Server 2008...very cunning plan

SharePointPedia, great for community, but not groundbreaking

SharePoint hotfixes

SalesForce.com - Force Platform

Google OpenSocial storm brewing

Links for 4/11/2007

Social Bookmarking tool - Diigo

Facebook Enterprise 2.0 community

Using SharePoint 2007 to implement Enterprise Social Networking

OpenID bandwagon and SharePoint