Webhamer Weblog: Search & ICT-related blogging

Since I am using Wordpress as my blogging tool I wanted to use tags besides the flat-layered Categories. The use of Categories is good and needed because they structure your site and topics in a hierarchical way and offer an easy way to navigate through your posts.

Tags however are more versatile and can contain any subject, word or theme you come up with while writing a post. With tags you can metadata your posts in a more flexible way.

I recommend the use of both ways for structuring your posts because categories are not the same as tags.

I stumbled upon a review from Lorelle on Wordpress on the Ultimate Tag Warrior. That’s the plugin I am going to use from now on. The first tags on this site are below.

Today there was a new issue of the Zeens Media explorer in my inbox. The article about the vector graphic icons was great:

Free Stock Icons and Free Vector Downloads:
A real truckload of icon sets, completely free to use in your webapplications.

Awesome Box:
A javascript that puts a layer on top of the page to show one or more photo’s…

Last week Google anounced their Google Apps for Domains. With that package enterprise can use a hosted application suite that constists of Google Docs & spreadsheets, GMail, Calendar and Google Talk.

In an article on ITNews.com.au I read about the current “jumping on the Google train”  that some companies, including Microsoft, are doing now. Google is breaking open the onlinie application market with mature Web 2.0 solutions. It’s still not as good as “the real thing” like Open Office or MS Office, but it;s there, it’s free and it’s thus cheap for small busineses.

“Docs & Spreadsheets probably sucks,” said Arnold. “But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be very good because it opens up the enterprise. Google Apps is a clear demonstration of Google’s confidence that it can deliver (these applications) online and no one else can say that.”

“This is all part of Google’s strategy to become the Microsoft of tomorrow,” said Arnold, who has written a book on Google and is writing another. “This is the start of Google’s takeover of the enterprise.”

When you consider this, and the fact that the services that Google and other companies are going to deliver are all hosted / online, you can ask yourself what this is going to mean for the enterprise search providers.
When many of the documents and information from those companies is hosted on servers that are not within the LAN-area of the company network, how is this going to effect enterprise search? Consider the security. Consider the possibilities of connections that are now fetching the documents. Will products as FAST, Autonomy, Endeca etc. adapt to this change in hosted products and data that is produced by them?

Google will definitely use this Apps-revolution to expand their share in de Enterpise Search market.

One of the things I wanted from a blogging tool is the abillity to post through e-mail. With Wordpress this is possible. 

This is my first post through e-mail.

Today I stumbled upon the site WikiMedia. What a great site with really beautiful photo’s! The best thing is that the photo’s are also available in original sizes. This makes them very usefull to serve as desktop wallpaper or on a website after editing.

Most photo’s are protected under the creative Commons or other open licensing rules.

Google Apps Professional

With the introduction of the Google Apps Professional, Google gives companies an extra push towards outsourcing parts of their ICT-infrastructure. Why bother about keeping up an e-mail infrastructure when somebody else can do it at more than half the cost?

Big companies are making this step because their ICT-departments are giving them headaches.

Below you find the content of the press release from Google:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., February 22, 2007 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today introduced Google Apps Premier Edition, a new version of Google’s hosted services for communication and collaboration designed for businesses of all sizes. Google Apps Premier Edition is available for $50 per user account per year, and includes phone support, additional storage, and a new set of administration and business integration capabilities.

Google Apps TM, launched as a free service in August 2006, is a suite of applications that includes Gmail TM webmail services, Google Calendar TM shared calendaring, Google Talk TM instant messaging and voice-over-IP, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain. More than 100,000 small businesses and hundreds of universities now use the service. Google Apps Premier Edition now joins Google Apps Standard Edition and Google Apps Education Edition, both of which will continue to be offered for free to organizations.

“Procter & Gamble Global Business Services (GBS) has enrolled as a charter enterprise customer of Google Apps, a successful consumer product suite now available to enterprises. P&G will work closely with Google in shaping enterprise characteristics and requirements for these popular tools,” said Laurie Heltsley, director Procter & Gamble Global Business Services.

“So much of business now relies on people being able to communicate and collaborate effectively,” said Gregory Simpson, CTO for General Electric Company. “GE is interested in evaluating Google Apps for the easy access it provides to a suite of web applications, and the way these applications can help people work together. Given its consumer experience, Google has a natural advantage in understanding how people interact together over the web.”

Google also today announced that all editions of Google Apps now include Google Docs & Spreadsheets TM. In addition, Google Apps now supports Gmail for mobile on BlackBerry TM handheld devices.

“Businesses are looking for applications that are simple and intuitive for employees, but also offer the security, reliability and manageability their organizations require,” said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager, Google Enterprise. “With Google Apps, our customers can tap into an unprecedented stream of technology and innovation at a fraction of the cost of traditional installed solutions.”

Features unique to Google Apps Premier Edition include:

- 10 GBs of storage per user - Offers about 100 times the storage of the average corporate mailbox, eliminating the need to frequently delete email.
- APIs for business integration - APIs for data migration, user provisioning, single sign-on, and mail gateways enable businesses to further customize the service for unique environments.
- 99.9 % uptime - Service Level Agreements for high availability of Gmail, with Google monitoring and crediting customers if service levels are not met.
- 24×7 support for critical issues - Includes extended business hours telephone support for administrators.
- Advertising optional - Advertising is turned off by default, but businesses can choose to include Google’s relevant target-based ads if desired.
- $50 per user account per year - Simple and affordable annual fee makes it practical to offer these applications to everyone in the organization.

In addition to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Start Page, all editions of Google Apps now include:

- Google Docs & Spreadsheets - With this addition, teams can easily collaborate on documents and spreadsheets without the need to email documents back and forth. Multiple employees can securely work on a document at the same time. All revisions are recorded for editing, and administrative controls allow organizations to define limits on document sharing. According to custom analysis of Nielsen//NetRatings MegaPanel released this week, 92 percent of users of online productivity tools last October used Google Docs & Spreadsheets, making it the number one product in its class.

- Gmail for mobile devices on BlackBerry - Gmail for mobile devices provides the same Gmail experience - such as search, conversation view and synchronization with desktop version - on BlackBerry handheld devices for users of Google Apps. Gmail for mobile devices joins a list of other mobile options for Google Apps and BlackBerry users that already includes a Google Talk client and a variety of calendar sync tools.

- Application-level control - Allows administrators to adapt services to business policies, such as sharing of calendars or documents outside of the company.

“When it comes to our email systems, our doctors don’t have the time or the budgets to deal with managing technology or defending against spam,” said Andrew Johnson, chief information officer, San Francisco Bay Pediatrics. “With Google Apps Premier Edition we don’t have to worry about downloading the latest spam filters or navigating unwieldy servers. This is where we let Google do what it does best, so we can do what we do best - help our patients.”

In addition to Procter & Gamble Global Business Services and San Francisco Bay Pediatrics, other early adopters of Google Apps Premier Edition include Salesforce.com and Prudential Preferred Properties in the U.S., as well as Essilor and Mediametrie in France.

To provide more options and value to customers of Google Apps Premier Edition, Google Enterprise Professional partners like Avaya and Postini are developing a variety of solutions based on our APIs, including email gateways, enhanced security, Google Calendar synchronization, third-party integration with Google Talk, as well as offering deployment, migration, and additional support services.

Google hosted applications are available in many local languages, such as French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Please visit http://www.google.com/a for details on the product, local availability, partners and customers.

Alfresco - Open Source Enterprise Content Management (CMS) including Web Content Management

Alfresco is a open source Enterprise COntent Management solution that now also offer a kind of enterprise search.
With the 2.0 version it’s possible to search across multiple Alfrasco implementations and also through RSS, ATOM feeds and wiki’s.

To me this sounds like a basic full-text search engine that can connect to XML-sources.
Enterprise search is more then that. It’combines all the data / information in the enterprise and not just ECM and XML-sources.
Alfresco’s solution is part of the CMS while a ESE normally stands on his own and sits on top af CMS’s, databases, DMS’s etc.

http://www.alfresco.com/products/ecm/fivesteps/discover/

Pipes: Rewire the web

A new product from Yahoo! With Yahoo Pipes you can create feeds from websites and RSS-feeds without any programming knowlegde.
The URL that you find in this posting shows you the creation of a feed that consists of a query to 5 other searches engines / weblogs.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/fELaGmGz2xGtBTC3qe5lkA/edit?opendesc=true

I Find the concept of the URLBuild very strong! Of course it depends on the use of an REST-api but that is used a lot. So after you have (dynamically) build an URL to request, there is the “fetch”-module that gets the content of that URL. The Fetch-module does the sorting or selecting.

The interface is very “desktop-like” and another example of the possibilities that the new web brings us.

Today I read a news article on Yahoo News that stated the choice for Autonomy IDOL software by a company called “EnergySolutions”. This US based company had very much data spread over multiple divisions that thay wanted to structure an make searchable.

In this article there’s also a paragraph describing the activities of Autonomy:

Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L) is a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise and is spearheading the meaning-based computing movement. Autonomy’s technology forms a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data including unstructured information, be it text, email, voice or video. Autonomy’s software powers the full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications including information access technology, BI, CRM, KM, call center solutions, rich media management, compliance and litigation solutions and security applications, and is recognized by industry analysts as the clear leader in enterprise search.

In short thay say that they do everything around data and information. Seems to be a lot of “air”.

What do you think? Is Google really interested in your privacy?

According to this video from 2 German students there’s more behind Google than you think….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zKXCQpUnMg