Microsoft’s aggressive pursuit to own your enterprise intranet business just dramatically jumped. Redmond has offered pay $1.2 billion for Norway-based search vendor Fast Search & Transfer.

During a conference call for press and analysts, MS needs Fast’s search experts for  large, enterprise search capabilities for “queries involving billions, not just millions, of sources” said Jeff Raikes, MS President of Business Systems, as quoted by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley in Microsoft looking to Fast for scale, Web search help. Mary Jo states in her analysis that Fast has a more sophisticated development platform, but wonders why MS paid so much for a search platform… 

“Fast also has a “more sophisticated” and granular development platform from which Microsoft will benefit, in terms of honing domain-specific Intranet and Internet searches, Raikes told press and analysts.

Additionally, Microsoft will be looking to Fast for help with Web search. Raikes declined to get specific about exactly how Fast’s technology will dovetail/complement Microsoft’s Live Search, claiming that the proposed merger still needs to pass regulatory scrutiny.

(Help can’t come a moment too soon on the Web search front, as Microsoft continues to lose share to Google, at least according to new data released by Hitwise on January 8.  Microsoft dropped from 9.8 percent of Web searches to just over 7 percent in December 2007, Hitwise is reporting.)

Although Fast has a solid customer and partner list, some market watchers are questioning why Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for a company that is in financial distress. (Fast may end up restating its 2006 and 2007 financial results, and three of its board members resigned at the end of last year).”

What’s curious about this decision is that Google owns search on the external Web, and they and Autonomy and Endeca are dominating the enterprise intranet search arena. In short, MS has paid 3-4 times what they invested into Sharepoint 2007.

Microsoft owns the employee desktop and Sharepoint has made big strides to bolster this. But they are losing the search battle and this latest move looks quite desperate. FAST give MS some serious, heavy-weight search technology that is sorely lacking by Sharepoint, a point of weakness and criticism highlighted by Forrester’s Leslie Owens and Ken Poore in Microsoft Buys Into High-end Enterprise Search With FAST:

“With this acquisition, Microsoft leapfrogs IBM and Oracle, who have both been rolling their own nascent search initiatives -or doing small acquisitions. Microsoft is now in a strong position to offer a full menu of search products, from basic implementations that compete directly with Google’s appliances to high-end, massively scalable media and commerce systems. They also significantly extend into features like auto-categorization, entity extraction, and clustering. 

For Microsoft, FAST makes a lot of sense. Microsoft’s current search strategy was centered on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and its spin-off Microsoft Search Server Express. SharePoint’s search has consistently been criticized by high-end search providers as too lightweight – its SQL Server-dependent engine never proved to scale massively, and its search across unstructured content was superficial when compared to the deep semantic algorithms of market-leading search vendors. FAST’s strong search technology delivers Microsoft needed credibility outside the firewall and among major media outlets. And the acquisition saves Microsoft the cost and time of completely re-architecting its own search house. In addition to scalability, Microsoft buys itself into the big leagues with an enterprise-savvy connectivity solution in FAST’s Unity search federator.”

This is a great deal for FAST, but at $1.2 billion, can MS really turn this investment into positive ROI with competition such as Google and Autonomy staring them down? I’m not so sure…

Continue the discussion by posting a comment below or join us at Intranet Global Forum.

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Not all search engines are created equal… but they mostly are.

“New search appliances claim to be uniquely adapted to meet enterprise needs,” writes Ben Dupont in Analysis: Enterprise Search for Network Computing magazine. “We tested eight enterprise search products and analyzed the technology's security and architectural implications. Our take: The math just doesn't add up.”

As I’ve written many times before, an ineffective search engine has less to do with the technology, and more to do with people and process and the ways and means by which content is categorized and tagged (see Fixing the sucky search problem and The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part I : Search and The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part II : Intranet Search & Taxonomy). This won’t however discourage the search engine companies from selling you.

I love the "live search" capability of the Plone search engine that we use on www.PrescientDigital.com. It starts to display results before you hit the "search" button.

Search results are automatically refined or updated in a drop-down menu as you type words into the search query box.

Insurance group Royal & SunAlliance has replaced its intranet search engine with Google's Search Appliance, which according to Silicon.com (see Royal & Sun Alliance Googles the intranet) has dramatically reduced search times on the corporate intranet.

“According to Royal & SunAlliance knowledge manager Tony Brierley, the replacement has reduced search times from between five and seven minutes to between 0.2 and 0.4 seconds.

The intranet is used by the company's underwriters to pull up information when dealing with brokers' enquiries. Underwriters require information such as rates or company policy guidelines that is stored on the intranet.

 

Brierley told silicon.com the company had a legacy of different search tools within the intranet, which is based on a Lotus Notes backbone. Interoperability problems between these systems slowed searches to an unacceptable level.” 

I’ve never heard of an intranet search engine taking 5 – 7 minutes to process a search query, but this is good salesmanship.

Ironically, Dupont in his analysis of the search engines is very complimentary of IBM’s OmniFind search engine, which is completely free, and obviously works well in a Lotus and Domino environment.

One engine Dupont didn’t review is the highly impressive Autonomy, which now eschews the search engine term as a simplistic label for its powerful IDOL server. Autonomy IDOL features “hyperlinking, agents, summarization, taxonomy generation, retrieval, channels, clustering, eduction, profiling, collaboration and alerting.” It denotes the difference between it and traditional search engines as “meaning-based computing.”

Autonomy distances itself from lesser search products by underscoring the key difference:  “keyword search engines for example cannot comprehend the meaning of information; these products were developed simply to find documents in which a word occurs.”

“Some of the key functionality of Meaning-Based Computing such as automatic hyperlinking and clustering are simply not available in keyword search engines,” states the Autonomy home page. “For example, automatic hyperlinking which connects users to a range of pertinent documents, services or products that are contextually linked to the original text requires that the meaning of the original document is fully understood. Similarly for computers to automatically collect, analyse and organize information computers have to be able to extract meaning. Only Meaning-Based Computing Systems can do this.”

All search engines were not created equal. However, notwithstanding some great marketing, salesmanship and the “Meaning-Based Computing” approach of Autonomy, they are remarkably similar.

RELATED READING:

Intranet vs Internet Search 

The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part I : Search

The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part II : Intranet Search & Taxonomy

Well Beyond the Search Box

Next generation inference engines

Analysis: Enterprise Search

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"The Long Neck is where the business case of your websites lies. It is the small, crucial set of tasks and content that your customers really come to your website for," writes Gerry McGovern in Do you know your long neck?

"Intranet or public website, government or commercial-every website has a Long Neck. It is crucial that you know what your Long Neck is so that you can deliver maximum value with scarce resources."

Gerry’s bang on. Although, on an intranet, the long neck representing the most commonly accessed content or tools, is probably stretched longer.

The following seven areas likely represent between 60-80% of all requests on the vast majority of intranets I’ve worked with:

• Search
• Employee directory
• Job postings
• News
• Forms
• Policies

If an organization can master these seven areas, with the proper planning and governance as a supporting foundation, then the resulting intranet will be dam good. Easier said than done of course…

Read Gerry’s full article Do you know your long neck?

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: I’ve been remiss in welcoming new clients as of late… but I’ve been too busy looking after many of them and others! A big welcome (would a hug be inappropriate?) to Thomson Financial, GMAC, Intrawest (Playground), the Municipality of Halton, Degussa, and I know I’m missing someone… I’m sorry I’ll make it up when my memory returns.

In addition to running the business and trips back in forth between Vancouver, Detroit, Toronto and Calgary, with multiple speaking engagements in the past couple of weeks, my wife is away for a few days so I’m running the house and assumed the role of interim COO of the girls… must sleep soon…

But first I have to get something off my chest: Gary Bettman almost ruined the league with over-expansion and soaring salaries and then had to force an acrimonious year-long lockout of players (the longest of any professional sport) to fix the dam mess he made. Now the owners have rewarded him with a 5-year extension. Not to mention his amazing ability to always sound like an ass while belittling almost every reporter that interviews him. (Someone on a local talk show today called-up to say, "I finally figured out who he sounds like! That rabbi from Seinfeld!")  For more check out: Gary Bettman Sucks

Finally, I send my sympathies to Rex Grossman for quarterbacking the Bears to their first Super Bowl appearance in 21 years in his first full season as a player. Yes, he made a couple of mistakes, but the Bears losing had little to do with his play, and a lot to do with the Bear’s brutal defense and a stellar Colts offense.

I’m not a big fan of predictions and soothsaying, but I still read those that are well thought.

Tony Byrne has developed his Predictions for 2007 which include:

• Google de-googles its appliance
• AJAX UI backlash
• Web managers embracing the delete key
• Falling seat prices
• Rediscovery of workflow
• Portal platforms will diversify

I agree with most of Tony’s predictions, but I think there are bigger ones at play. I know I said I don’t do these predictions but since my company is called ‘Prescient’ I feel compelled to become a hypocrite.

The year 2007 will see:

• Microsoft crank-up the marketing of Sharepoint leading to more and more customers buying without seriously examining alternative solutions
• Standalone portal products will continue to be considerably out-done by CMS solutions
• More vendors delivering a complete all-in-one solution that includes robust content management, search and portal functionality
• Continued market consolidation with many more CMS vendors being bought, merged or disappearing
• Dramatic growth in open source implementation and increased profile and functionality for bigger name solutions such as Zope, Alfresco, OpenCMS, and Plone
• More and more organizations will convert PDF and MS-Word forms to online submission forms with a mixture of in-house and outsourced solutions
• The search engine market will experience less growth than previous years as more organizations realize their current engine suffices and instead focus on content tagging, categorizing, process and policies
• Discussion and focus on Knowledge Management (KM) will continue to decline as more organizations instead narrow their attention to specific tools such as Web 2.0 applications
• More organizations will implement blogs and wikis, but they will still be part of a minority group; social bookmarking and podcasting will still remain little more than a fad on the intranet

Agree? Disagree? What other predictions will come true? Post your comment or question below.

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For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong, according to results of an Accenture study.

The proliferation of different information sources within organizations was revealed by the survey as the most important reason why managing information is proving difficult.

Among the key findings:

• WASTED TIME:
• Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information
• 42% said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week
• 57% of respondents said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing information for their jobs
• NO VALUE:
• More than 50% of the information managers obtain has no value to them
• 53% said that less than half of the information they receive is valuable
• POOR MANAGEMENT:
• Only half of all managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information distribution or have established adequate processes
• 59% said that as a consequence of poor information distribution, they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day
• POOR FUNDING:
• Only 11% of finance and accounting managers — less than for any other function — said they believe that their company has invested enough in the right technologies to help them get the information they need

The amount of wasted time and money is staggering.

Every year there are several studies touting the same thing: employees are wasting too much time searching for information. But no one in senior management (few) believes these studies. However, I and the staff at Prescient spend hundreds of hours a year inside medium and large size corporations and not-for-profits and find the same thing from the many hundreds of managers and employees we talk to: “we can’t find anything.”

Staff at all levels are wasting far too much time searching for information and the intranet is often a cruel hoax; often touted as the ‘one-stop’ source or gateway to ‘all your information needs’ the intranet almost always fails the unreasonable expectation. The problem is part planning, part information architecture, part process, part people, and part funding.

If corporations would spend more money on their intranets, instead of treating it as a cost center, these same corporations would have more productive employees. Ironically, CEOs and senior management are absolutely obsessed with employee productivity. Employee productivity, along with competitive advantage and shareholder return, is a major priority. But little is done aside from cost cutting.

The onus is on you, you the intranet manager or consultant. You have to build the business case that sells the benefit for rebuilding or redesigning the intranet in such a way that employees spend less time searching, and more time doing their jobs.

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

Read more…

Intranet redesign: building a business case

Intranet Business Case (back issue)

Measuring Intranet Value: Proving & Delivering ROI

Fixing a broken intranet

Intranet Business Case (back issue)

Google wants to give you free communications applications (chat, e-mail, calendar, etc.) for your intranet – free but at a price.

Before you jump at this ‘free’ offer, ZDNet blogger Donna Bogatin writes that “When it comes to an organization's applications hosting, Google's "free" comes at a heavy cost.”

"Google Apps for Your Domain" beta test is now taking requests for participation. Fellow ZDNet blogger Dan Farber reports on Google's latest initiaitve in "Google Office 'version 1.0' debuts":

Google doesn't yet have an Office 2.0–a full suite of hosted productivity applications aimed at the Microsoft Office crowd, especially the small- and medium-sized firms–but starting tomorrow companies or organizations can deploy Google email, calendar, chat and Web page (Page Creator) hosting for free (ad supported). The set of Google communications applications is an extension of Gmail for Your Domain, and has some limited UI customization and administration features. Later this year, Google will offer a subscription service with additional storage and support options.

For more information read Google's not so fine print: Google Apps TOS put Google first.

I don’t begrudge Google becoming the most powerful information broker on the planet (and, in my opinion, the most powerful company in the world). However, consumers and corporations alike do need to know what they’re getting into when using Google and their assorted applications. I do wish however they were more forthright about how much of people’s personal usage and information they track and store because it’s significant. Scary significant.

RELATED READING:

Big Brother Google

Google Talk disappoints

Google Mini for intranet

Will Microsoft rival Google for intranet search?

The Center for Media Research reports that professional workers are spending more and more time searching for information. The survey, HotTopics: 2001 vs. 2005: Research Study Reveals Dramatic Changes Among Information Consumers, commissioned by Outsell, reveals that professionals on average spend 11 hours per week gathering information – up from 8 hours per week in 2001.

Professionals are also looking to alternatives to the Internet with the corporate intranet being one of the winning alternatives.

As reported on V-Fluence, the survey reveals “67 percent of professionals now go to the open Web for information, versus 79 percent in 2001. Fifteen percent rely on their corporate intranets (up from 5 percent), and nine percent consult their colleagues (up from 5 percent). In addition when seeking information fewer now prefer to get it themselves (51% down from 68%) preferring to rely on regularly scheduled updates, members of their team, or their library.

Today's professionals spend 53 percent of their time seeking out information. Collectively, the time spent gathering and looking for information translates to an estimated. 5.4 billion lost hours per year for US corporations.”

The trend underscores a long held and regularly repeated belief that our ability to create information has outstripped our ability to accurately find and effectively use this information.

While search engines can help, they can also be a hindrance. As I wrote two years ago in The Search Isn’t Broken, We’re Broken, “One of the major and universal frustrations heard from Internet and intranet users alike is that corporate search engines "suck". But, are search engines the real problem, or is the issue more complex?

Despite "leaps and bounds" progress in search technology, which is quite advanced, compared to other Web technologies, inaccurate and irrelevant search results continually defeat users performing search queries. Though some search engines may be sub-par, the more likely problem is an absence of people processes and rules for managing information. 

How many times have you been to a website where the title heading is either the URL or is missing altogether? And, how often have you searched a corporate site for product information only to be given endless results that link to press releases that are three or four years old? Poorly organized and often out-of-date information frustrates users and erodes productivity.

“I think searching has become a more difficult process for everyone; this has less to with the quality of search engines and more to do with the meteoric growth in data,” says Josh Mugele, Director of Product Management at Semio, a California-based indexing and categorization technology company. “With more to search through, it's difficult for search engines to maintain high levels of both precision and recall.”

Happy Independence Day! And for those Canucks that have a long-weekend hangover, Happy Canada Day!

One of the great things about growing a company is hiring a talented staff that also has areas of expertise and keeps an eye on trends, etc. I still keep up on the trends, but now I have a bigger cache to draw on with the staff in the office as well.

One trend in particular gets a lot of attention, and yet so many companies have little understanding of it: search engine optimization.

For example, many readers of this column would know the value of proper page titles. However, so many organizations fail miserably in creating an effective page title so that their pages are ranked accordingly on the major search engines (namely Google). Just a quick search of some big name organizations that don’t have effective page titles include Hyundai, the Government of West Virginia, and National Car Rental to name a few. (Did you know that Hertz wouldn’t let me on their site because I didn’t have ‘cookies’ turned on? They won’t let me on the site. Can you imagine turning away business because your customer has their cookies turned off? Extraordinary!!!).

So we should all know by know that search engine optimization is the process and activities of ‘optimizing’ your web pages so that they’re effectively indexed and therefore retrieved and ranked as high as possible by not only your own search engine, but also the big search engines. The same goes for intranets.

Did you know… “62% of users click on first page search results with an accumulative 90% clicking on results from the first three pages of returns. And 87% of results clicked on were from the organic (non paid) portion of the search results – which are totally dependent on their ranking by ensuring they follow the optimization techniques.”

Prescient Digital Media Business Consultant Catherine Elder gives us a complete refresher with a look at the latest trends for search engine optimization in Get discovered – understanding search engine optimization.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE: A welcome aboard to our new client CANA Group! A congratulations to our consultant Claude Malaison who will be leading the project. I enjoyed the long weekend – and worked very little for a change! After logging almost 50,000 kms in the past 7-8 weeks I was just a little tired. We celebrated my Dad’s birthday (happy b’day!) with a day at the beach, took my daughter swimming in the ocean, and did a lot of gardening. Watching with great interest my five month-old daughter grow and evolve. I think she’s a bright one.

I did manage to watch only some of the soccer including the very last bit of the – Germany match. What a game – thrilling stuff! I must admit I’m one of the chronic under-believers in Italy but I’m a believer now! I’ve been watching with interest all the free agent hockey signings in the NHL. Wow. How interesting the ‘game’ has become… particularly with the big defensemen musical chairs. We’re gonna miss Ed Jovanoski here in Vancouver – and big Bert too… but am looking forward to seeing Roberto Luongo and Willie Mitchell in action!

Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Google is making it easier to search for U.S. government information on the Internet – and inside government on the intranet.

Google has launched Google U.S. Government Search (http://usgov.google.com), a new search product that will make it easier to find U.S. government information and keep up to date on government news.

With Google U.S. Government Search, millions of U.S. government employees, various contractor organizations, as well as the general public can easily search across content on official federal, state and local government sites from a single search box. They can also keep current on government-related news with constantly updated content from government and commercial news sources, including the White House, Department of Defense, The Washington Post, and Google News.

Google U.S. Government Search allows people to customize the layout of the page and add content to the site from an easily searchable directory that includes information on government and general topics such as sports, business and technology. News from other websites can be added using RSS feeds (technology that makes it easy to subscribe to content).

Google U.S. Government Search is the newest Google search product for government agencies. Google's enterprise group already counts hundreds of government agencies as customers for Google enterprise search and geospatial products.

To expand Google's ability to serve federal government customers, Google also recently added Mike Bradshaw, as head of federal sales. Bradshaw, who has more than 20 years experience selling technology to federal agencies, will be located in Google's office in Herndon, Va., where he will focus on helping federal agencies benefit from Google enterprise products, such as the Google Search Appliance, Google Mini, Google Earth Enterprise and Google Maps for Enterprise.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Google Goes Federal with New Search Site

Google Mini for intranet

Will Microsoft rival Google for intranet search?

Microsoft owns your desktop and your browser (well, most of you). Google is the almighty search god. Who will win the battle for intranet search?

According to an iTWire poll, most think Google is the winner. However, Microsoft fans are significant (see Microsoft no threat to Google? Think again):

“An, which had 1111 respondents, asked the question: "Will Microsoft be a serious threat to Google in the search space?" 645 respondents answered no (58.1%), while 466 answered yes (41.0%). Microsoft, which is running a distant third behind Google and Yahoo, has been making a serious assault on the search engine business in recent times, with a massive rebranding and search product strategy exercise.

The launch of the Windows Live Search brand, the imminent launch of Microsoft's new browser, Internet Explorer 7, which will include Live Search as the default search box (despite protests from Google), and the announcement of an enterprise desktop intranet search facility integrated with the upcoming Windows Vista operating system are all evidence that Microsoft intends to be a dominant force in the search space.”

Bundling the search with Windows Vista is a massive blow for Google. Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into improving their search engine. The 1000 pound gorilla is not down for the count.

For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com