Social Media can be powerfull - even for Social Media

A rumour started a chain reaction. Yahoo! will shutdown the social bookmark service Delicious. The tag #Delicious ended up as a worldwide trending tag. (however a lot of the tags are just about Delicious). The twitter account @delicious must have noticed, as they are claiming in their profile: The official Twitter account for Delicious from Yahoo!. We listen to people talking about Delicious, and we respond. Yay.

So Yahoo! discovered that their early introduced services is appreciated and responded by placing a blog post : Whats next for delicious. So it looks like this early public folksonomy service will survive.

Still wondering what will hapen to Yahoo! as a company. Early 2007 their was a serious rumour about a take over from Microsoft. In the same period Microsoft took over the highend search technology from FAST. The takeover did not succeed. However mid 2009 Microsoft and Yahoo! ended up with an agreement - Microsoft will power Yahoo! Search.

Now December 17th an article describes how the employees of Yahoo! are reacting on these socialmedia attention.

Is Yahoo! preparing to sell just a little bit more than 'just' their folksonomy service?

Enterprise Search as part of Business Productivity 2 - Seminar Amplexor (B)

Yesterday june 3rd I attended at a Seminar organised by Amplexor in Diegem near Brussels airport Belgium. Amplexor profiles itself as a pure Content Management company and provides their customers wih services on ECM. In the opening presentation of Eric Pieters (CEO). The ECM offering of Amplexor is devided amongst four quadrants: Web Content Management, Document Management, Intranets and COllaboration and Information Architecture and Search. The later was the subject of this seminar.

I was not the only Dutch attendent. Sjoerd de Valk of Winvision, who I met at the Las Vegas SharePoint Conference last year, came to hear the story too.

In my earlier blog I explained that I was triggered by the description of the content of this seminar. First by stating that Enterprise search projects very often are started with a high ambition. In the session of Paul Hermans this was explained on a lively manner.
In my opinion the common mistake to start with a under estimated complexity should be taken even more serious. Before starting to implement a enterprise search infrastrucure, be sure you have a vision and a strategy on information. That's an important start indeed. Next do not start to implement the Search infrastructure before you have a Access and Authentication infrastructure you can use to implement the search upon. True, but not that easy too! Third do not try to implement this huge one interface, this single user experience for all users or rolls in the entire enterprise. Build applications on top of the search infrastructure layer. Last but not least pay attention to the user, manage the change and build trust.

Not a bad apporach. In my opinion it is smart to devide the information demand of the enterprise into smaller chunks. When this is done in the 'envisioning fase' where the vision and strategy of the information access is build, the implementation of different information goals can be split up. More smaller projects, building the total enterprise search ambition over time.

The experience of Amplexor in this field wasn't illustrated with a lot of customer cases. Overall a nice session. Thanks Paul.

The last parts of the seminar the technology and functionality of the search infrastructure was presented by two people of Microsoft. Both former FAST employees; Wolgang Mederle and Hilde Rietveld. Most of the stuf I've seen before on SharePoint or other Microsoft conferences and events. Important to notice is that the promises of Microsoft and FAST in 2008 when FAST was acquired by Microsoft are fullfilled in the new product versions of FAST and Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Important additions as advanced people search as part of knowledge managment, facetted and federated search, ranking and search advise are now available in the new products.

Nice work FAST and Microsoft.

There are some good comparison sheets available on the Microsoft Technet side. For example the poster were the product specs are compared:

• SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Search Server 2010 Express
• Search Server 2010
• SharePoint Server 2010
• FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

 Another nice source in Thechnet is the Getting Started with Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010 Products and  SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Search, FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

So are there some examples that use these technology's. There were some demo's based on real life enterprise search implementations:

Scirus - a scientific database /try flu. By filling in a search query you get results in body. On the left bar there are two main sources for the results: journals and other web. These are facets. You can refine your search by choosing journals or the federated other websources. On the bottom there is another part that can help you to refine your query with advised keywords.
Times online - by opening a topic (search) a newspaper site is composed. A topis is realy a composition of related articles post on the same position of the page. Again you can recognise the facets and federated search results on the left. On the backend of this site Times has implemented a business model. Content of Times itself is sold for further reading.

Some other examples:

• Wolters Kluwer
• Read Elsevier (MOSS and ESP)
• NXP
• Thomson Reuters

Enterprise Search as part of Business Productivity

Tomorrow - June 3th - I'll attend the Enterprise Search Seminar organised by Amplexor in the Pullman Diegem (B). High expectations given the program. I hope they manage to meet my expectation. The first session planned will set the stage. The approach of this session helping businesses to succeed by aiming on a realistic goal is interesting.

The second session however has my biggest attention. Search as part of the Microsoft vision in the field of Business Productivity supported by a single search platform. If they manage to show some cases to support the scenario they will meet my expectation.

Why my interest? Well Business Productivity is key for businesses. In the competence cluster needed to establish the functionality in an organisation that will be able to optimize the productivity, the development of Search will play a very important roll.

The technological developments due to investments are enormous. Microsoft made a big leap forward with the acquisition of FAST in 2008. I remember the session of Zia Zaman (VP Global marketing FAST back then, now CTO LG) at the soldout SharePoint conference in Seattle (2008) where he showed the FAST product that now is incorporated in the SharePoint 2010 platform.

In that session he explained how the market was devided. Google as the biggest one on the internet (the other approach in the Microsoft vision) but more important the field of enterprise search dominated by Microsoft and FAST.

I loved the longtail slide in his presentation back then. I have to look it up and will add it later.

June 3th:

Oké found it. This picture tells us how the market is (March 2008) devided between the big three and the rest. On the left the Big three devide 30% of the information access market. Most of these search query's are based on internet search scenario's. On the right most of the 70% of the search query's are about Enterprise search data access (ESP). This part is dominated by FAST. Now two years later Microsoft has adopted and integrated a lot af the FAST search capability's in there SharePoint 2010 platform. Picture the total of the Microsoft market and the ESP market (the business productivity part) in the long tail together. That's a very big chunk of the total, but more important: the money is on the right side.