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Enterprise search: free as in free beer?

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:23:00 -0400

Searching information -- really, how hard can it be? So, why wouldn't you go out and get a search engine that's for free? Well, to stick to the analogy of "free beer," you might wake up in the morning with a headache, only to find your wallet gone.

Of course, I'm paraphrasing the definition of "free software". Richard Stallman's example is used to point out the ambiguity of the term "free" in the English language. With free software, "you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." Nevertheless, you should be warned: both open source beer (now in version 3.3) and free commercial beer have the potential for leaving you with a bit of a hangover.

If you really think enterprise search is a simple commodity -- and I will only comment on that with the obligatory statement that readers of our Enterprise Search Report will probably know better than that -- getting a free product would be ideal to get your feet wet (albeit somewhat sticky). I get invited to BYOB enterprise search parties a lot, and usually come up with Apache Lucene, IBM Omnifind Yahoo! Edition, and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. Let's get a closer taste of each.

Apache Lucene. Lucene is open source, which you are free to use. The problem is, it's not a complete enterprise search product -- it's a "text search engine API." What you get is a Java JAR with the core functionality of a search engine. In typical hardcore Java developer understatement this is described as "you write the easy stuff, the UI and the process of selecting and parsing your data files to pump them into the search engine, yourself." To developers that doesn't sound too difficult -- it's a library they'd be able to use to create search functionality for many applications. As they embark on that journey, however, many will find out they'll have to become experts on enterprise search to get their implementation to perform basic tasks any Google user has come to expect. Index Word documents? You'll have to convert those to text first. Remove stop words or perform spell checking? You'll have to get some more jars to fit that in. And that familiar user interface isn't so easy to replicate, either.

Of course, there's a couple of more "pre-packaged," Lucene-based engines (such as Nutch and Solr), but they'll only take you so far on that long and winding road. There's some excellent examples of what you can achieve with Lucene, but many more of how hard it can be to get there.

IBM Omnifind Yahoo! Edition (or OY!E). The Google appliances have the Google brand behind them, which must have got the IBM people thinking the Yahoo! brand would be excellent marketing for their free-to-use search engine. In fact, it's neither IBM nor Yahoo's technology, but Lucene wrapped in other open source software. A few commercial bits thrown in create a product that's easy to install and run. It will actually do many of the things Lucene will make you work hard to accomplish: it comes with support for several languages and quite a few source content filters. For users, it looks like a regular web search engine; for admins, there's a nicely designed and intelligible interface. In short, it does most of the things a Google Mini appliance will do -- but for free.

So what's the catch? Well, the license (by the way, what license?) limits you to 500,000 documents and 5 collections. After that, you can "upgrade" to other Omnifind products. But since the technology across the Omnifind line-up is completely different, this is the same as starting from scratch, and you'll pay for the privilege. I've been critical of the limitations of Google's appliances in the past, and sure, the 50,000 document limit of the entry-level Google Mini is a lot less than OY!E's half a million. But that comparison isn't really fair, considering the fact the Mini actually comes with the hardware to run the queries on for a mere $2,990. And don't think you'll be able to run IBM's software on an old abandoned test server you have available -- OY!E will need more power than the single blade Google Mini or Thunderstone Appliance to match the performance. Tellingly, I wasn't able to dig up an example of an OY!E implementation to mention while researching the Enterprise Search Report (if you know of one, let me know).

Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. Microsoft's free offering is basically the same software as the non-Express version, but then there's the seemingly innocent limitation: one server only. I wouldn't want to continue the theme of this post by saying this is akin to handing out free samples of beer to get you hooked; suffice it to say that if you start to run the Express version in a production environment, there will, no doubt, come a time when a single server won't be enough anymore. When you've come to rely on the solution, you'll suddenly have to shell out for the licenses. As I've said before, having a free lunch isn't necessarily a bad thing; just remember that you'll probably have to pay for the beer the lunch comes with.

So, this might all start sounding like advice your mother gave you: never take anything from a stranger, and certainly no free alcoholic beverages. Don't forget, however, that I'm Dutch, and I've certainly developed a taste for enterprise search. Free beer sounds too good to be true, but it could certainly get your party started; just remember to drink in moderation, and never, ever, drink and drive.

Facebook: Not just a toy...

jgingras@cmswatch.com(Jarrod Gingras) — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:26:00 -0400

Over the last few years, many people (including us) have asked whether or not Facebook can be used as a enterprise intranet. Many have dismissed this notion by stating that Facebook is really just a time-wasting toy. While that question continues to be debated in enterprises across the globe, there is no question that Facebook has caught the attention of the big boys -- namely Google and Microsoft.

We have been hearing of Facebook as a drain on Google resources for some time. When asked about the biggest challenge to Google's success, one Google employee we talked to indicated that it was the loss of talent to nearby Facebook. It's not surprising that employees would be attracted to move down the street from Mountain View to Palo Alto to find a similar collegiate, yet pre-IPO, culture; but now the defections are becoming more senior, and more strategic. Facebook's COO, VP of Global Communications, Director of Business Development, Director of Platform Product Marketing are all ex-Google employees.

In the midst of Facebook's talent threat to Google, the company has also piqued the interest of Microsoft as a way to challenge Google themselves. As Prescient Digital Media's Toby Ward points out, Microsoft may look to Facebook's platform as a way to tap into the hosted enterprise tool market where Google has found success.

I agree with Toby that the Facebook platform certainly has a ways to go to truly compete head to head with Google's current offerings, but Microsoft's interest should indicate that Facebook has some major strategic value. The platform, the 70 million users, and the ever-growing ex-Google experience, are all assets that would strengthen Microsoft's arsenal in these early stages of a possible showdown between Microsoft and Google. Clearly, Facebook is much more than just a toy.

Next week, I will be moderating a panel discussion on this and other Facebook in the Enterprise questions at the Enterprise3 conference in San Diego. The panel will be comprised of the previously mentioned President of Prescient Digital Media, Toby Ward; Serena Software's VP of Communications, Kyle Arteaga; and the Senior Director of Optaros Labs at Optaros, John Eckman. Please join us for what should be a very lively discussion.

Y! IndexTools...let the games begin

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:19:00 -0400

The announcement to make Yahoo! IndexTools a free service, coming so quickly on the heels of the acquisition, would seem to serve notice to Omniture, Google Analytics, and other market leaders, such as Nedstat, Coremetrics', Unica, and WebTrends' about the seriousness of Yahoo!'s intentions.

Eric Peterson has written a very thoughtful post that delves into the market implications on this latest move.

But from a customer perspective, this could become a bit confusing in the short term. According to IndexTool's Dennis Mortensen, current customers were contacted to let them know they'd be able to continue using the service at no cost if they sign forthcoming agreement from Yahoo!. Details about the agreement and how this impacts current customization projects is still being sorted out, as is how long customers will have to determine if they want to accept the terms.

I'm sure most customers will be inclined to sign the agreement to maintain continuity, unless they have concerns about Yahoo! storing their data, as Google stores Google Analytics data.

Is this a founded concern?

It all depends on your privacy policies -- something you should consider in your requirements for a web analytics tool to begin with. If you haven't figured this out, then you should.

My guess is that for most current IndexTools customers, this will not be a show stopper.

If it does present difficulties for your enterprise, now would be the time to review the vendor profiles in the Web Analytics Report.

In the meantime, current IndexTools customers will surely be asking some important questions, like whether all their current functionality will remain available for free, and if so, for how long. Will data from the pre-Yahoo! days still be available? For how long? How will this affect custom work that you're doing or planning have done by IndexTools, as well as whether there will be a new technical and professional service availability and cost structure? And what about new features and releases, such as Rubix; what will be the cost and support structure?

Yahoo! is moving quickly, and I expect that they will seek to address these issues. However, as a customer, you'll have to make sure that you get these and other questions answered completely before signing on the dotted line.

Yahoo! steps into analytics with IndexTools acquisition

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:06:00 -0400

This past week's announcement that Yahoo! purchased IndexTools puts a new spotlight on the web analytics marketplace.

Yahoo! is clearly looking to compete with Google, but the reasons for this particular acquisition remain less evident. On the one hand, Yahoo! may be assuming that the mass market wants the kind of richer features that IndexTools offers. As you raise your own level of analytics competence, you may prove them right. On the other hand, since there were only a handful of independent, mid-range analytics vendors available out there for a decent price, IndexTools may have come to Yahoo! via more of a process of elimination.

The Yahoo! "party line" is that the technology will be a great boon to its small and mid-sized business (SMB) clientele. Probably true. In many ways, IndexTools resembles Google Analytics in its usable interface, featuring both dynamic drilldown and behavioral segmentation, as well as a nice collection of out-of-the-box reports oriented towards campaign analysis.

However, it is the perceived potential of IndexTools that has many observers hoping for more than just another Google Analytics. The company has been touting its next generation release, called "Rubix," since January. If Rubix lives up to its promise, it could possibly give Omniture's Discover offering a run in terms of functionality and ease of use. This has become the second-most anticipated non-release of a product in web analytics -- after Microsoft's Gatineau.

While Rubix could be a differentiator, without it, IndexTools does not offer the functionality that distinguishes it from Omniture and WebTrends -- for example the ability to analyze unaggregated data from a graphic UI and to perform repeatable Excel reporting. For now, you must use regular expressions to analyze unaggregated data and do manual updates of Excel...just like Google Analytics.

Dennis Mortenson, COO of IndexTools, claimed repeatedly that IndexTools could do 80 percent of what Omniture could do, at a fraction of the price. People also say the same about Google Analytics. This is marketing spin at its best. It doesn't matter which 80 percent or which 20 percent; it matters only how it matches your requirements.

As Web Analytics Report readers know, larger IndexTools customers picked that solution to get good standard reports, plus additional reports customized by the vendor, all at an attractive price. Feature richness and attention to individual customer service are not traditionally the hallmark of mass-market solutions, so Yahoo! has some clear choices ahead here, and IndexTools customers will want to watch carefully which way the new owner takes the service.

Among the questions that remain to be answered:. Will Rubix ever see the light of day? Will the basic technology be morphed to a Google Analytics-type solution? A combination of the two perhaps? Or will all of this become moot if Microsoft acquires Yahoo!? Or perhaps IndexTools becomes the premier analytics offering from Microsoft?

We'll be watching.

More Reasons to Love London

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Tue, 1 Apr 2008 16:51:00 -0400

Great theater. Awesome Indian food. Hyde Park in springtime. As if that and hub-hub over Heathrow's new Terminal 5 (let's hope it turns out better than Terminal 4, once it's out of beta) weren't reason enough for us to book a flight to London, my London-bred colleague Alan Pelz-Sharpe and I will try to take the town by storm later this month at UK Internet World.

Attendance is free and the event offers a huge show floor as well as many educational sessions. I'll be the one with lots of hair and the uncool accent, talking about the current and future state of enterprise search, based on the research conducted for our Enterprise Search Report 2008. I'm planning to highlight what Microsoft's acquisition of FAST means to buyers and existing customers, Google's recent moves, and focus on a few players that are gaining traction in the UK market. Alan, meanwhile, will wittily deconstruct Enterprise Content Management technologies, based on over a year of research he conducted for the ECM Suites Report 2008. But given our time at the podium is short, please send me an email if you'd like to meet up with us while we're there. We both love samosas....

36 Hours at AIIM: Google, SharePoint, Customers

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 5 Mar 2008 22:20:00 -0500

Herewith some random thoughts on the first half of the 3-day AIIM Conference & Expo in Boston, MA, USA.

Google

Day One opened with a double-headed keynote. The first speaker, New York Times consumer technology columnist David Pogue, spoke about how enterprise software vendors could learn from the consumer space, particularly by maintaining a ruthless attitude towards simplicity of design. Two of his more memorable quotes:

If you improve software enough times you will ruin it
Wizards don't make problems easier, they just makes them longer

He concluded with a broadway-inspired repertoire that you simply need to see for yourself some day. Kudos to the conference organizers for inviting him.

A Google exec, Matthew Glotzbach, followed Pogue on the stage and tried to bask in the simplicity glow. I actually thought Glotzbach's keynote (advertorial, really) was a bit, well, off-key. A low point came when the guy boasted that the documents he was editing online in front of the audience would survive a hard-drive crash because they resided in "the cloud." Perhaps unbeknownst to him (since he appeared to have an ethernet connection), the rest of us in the audience having trouble at that time connecting to the "cloud" via the conference center wireless service were probably grateful that any files we were editing resided in the firmament of our local hard drives.

SharePoint

Microsoft in general and SharePoint in particular seem to be a bit less present here than last year. It's not because the MOSS wave has crested (lots of people still asking us about MOSS on the show floor). Maybe it has to do with Redmond hosting a SharePoint conference on the exact same days.

WCM vendor Sitecore showing their wares in the Microsoft Partner Pavilion at the AIIM Expo.

Customers

We have a booth again this year, and the best part about that is meeting report buyers who stop by to say hello. This Expo is particularly nice in this regard because it attracts a more international audience than most North American conferences in this space, and we've met already customers from New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark.

It's great to hear about their technology projects, how they selected vendors, what was successful, and what wasn't. At a professional level, it's quite edifying. At a personal level, it's totally gratifying. Hope to see you somewhere, sometime, in the coming year.

IndexTools and WAA Standards

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:21:00 -0400

Given pervasive confusion around analytics terminology, I lauded the Web Analytics Association's August, 2007 announcement of Report Definition Standards, but was somewhat skeptical with regard to how vendors might use the cloak of compliance to make it harder for you to interpret their report definitions.

Fast forward to March 9, 2008, and IndexTools' COO Dennis Mortensen posted a refreshingly comprehensive, easy to understand, and transparent list of how the IndexTool's solution complies (or doesn't) with the standards.

Critically, Mortensen describes the methodology IndexTools uses to make the calculations, which lies at the crux of using the standards definitions to understand reports generated from any product.

Mortensen's post must also rank as an industry first for a vendor to actually go public that their product cannot produce every metric under the sun, making it far easier for you to potentially draw an "apples to apples" comparison and clearly see what you get, and what you don't, from a basic reporting perspective.

All of the other web analytics vendors...especially those with the largest customer bases, such as Omniture, Google Analytics, Nedstat, ClickTracks, Unica, Coremetrics' and WebTrends should step up and clarify in similar terms how they meet (or not) these standards.

Nobody's really number 1 in Web Analytics

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:27:00 -0400

"Who's number 1?"

It's question people ask a lot in many domains, but especially software, and as such, it regularly pops up within the web analytics community.

You can rank them crudely by number of individual customers. Let's take a look at the vendors we reviewed in the most recent Web Analytics Report and see how many customers they have -- or rather, they say they have:

Google Analytics: ~~5 million~~ "hundreds of thousands" (Enterprise/SMB)
WebTrends: 10,000 (Enterprise/SMB)
ClickTracks: 8,000 (SMB)
Nedstat: 1,200 (Enterprise) 6,000 (SMB)
Omniture: 4,000 plus(includes Visual Sciences) (Enterprise/SMB)
IndexTools: 3,000 (Enterprise/SMB)
Unica: 500 (Enterprise), few thousand (SMB)
Coremetrics: 1,200 (Enterprise/SMB)
Fireclick, : 230 (Enterprise/SMB)
AuriQ: 200 (SMB/Enterprise)
Foviance: 50 (Enterprise)

It's an interesting list, but what does it really tell you? It tells me that some products target different sizes of customers and may be more niche than others. But can you really say who's number 1 or who's winning? I'd say these results only make for good conversation, just as picking who'll win the World Cup or this or that election.

Would you buy a solution because it's perceived to be the market leader? Because the buzz is that "everyone is buying" that solution? You shouldn't. I find that vendor selection is often given short shrift in today's market because of a perception that there are only a few real choices.That's simply not true. You have some very important choices.

Figure out your requirements and manage your vendor selection process. Don't simply favor one vendor over another because it's getting all of the good press clippings, and nods from the Wall St. analysts. In the long run, you'll be much happier with your analytics tool selection. Or, to put it another way, the "Number 1" vendor is always whichever one that's a right fit for you.

PS: Have you signed up for my web analytics class in Copenhagen?

A tale of two search technology selections

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:09:00 -0400

CM Pros organized an event on the topic of enterprise search last week, with two case-study presentations and a fair bit of discussion among attendees. The key takeaways: website search is a lot harder than you'd think, and the attitude of a vendor really matters to your success.

When talking enterprise search, the "multi-repository enterprise" scenario is where all the really complex technology and fancy infrastructures reside today. We shouldn't forget, however, that website search -- powering that tiny form field in the right-hand top corner of your site -- remains one of the most common scenarios. Listening to the experiences of a large membership association was a clear reminder that it's certainly not as simple and straightforward to get right as many would think. (We can sympathize -- trying to get the cmswatch.com search right is an on-going struggle for us.)

The first case was presented someone who works for an integrator involved in the project. He is architect for their CMS and was therefore also put in charge of website search (which is a fairly typical arrangement, as the level of expert knowledge needed for website search is usually underestimated). He explained how it started out the same way many of these projects do -- "why don't we just get Google?" -- and how the organization decided to embark on that journey without much further discussion.

This led to exciting tales of a chase to find the lost Appliance somewhere in the server center when the "try-before-you-buy" clock was already ticking. It then turned out the Google Search Appliance (GSA) didn't actually match the original, rather straightforward 2-page requirements specification. Nor was it really as cheap as originally envisioned (one box wasn't enough). And, to boot, whereas the association imagined itself to carry some major clout with the vendor (their site is a very popular), it turned out to be nigh impossible to get Google to do customization. Before the web search goes live, they will need to bring in outside help to get some things ironed out on top of the Appliance.

Though it would be easy to blame Google for what went wrong, the presenter gave the company credit for delivering good support and a well-performing product. To the audience it seemed he handled it well, the product in itself was fine, but the main mistake the customer made was in underestimating what they were about to implement in the first place. As I overheard someone whisper next to me, "and to think this was a relatively simple site search project."

The second presentation was an account of the selection and implementation at a pharmaceutical company. They had twice before attempted to implement search functionality across multiple disparate repositories, and both times the project was aborted. This time, however, the project was officially declared a "success." As such, there was even an investigation of why the third attempt, almost against all odds, finally turned out right.

We were taken on a text-book product selection tour, but what stood out was there was definitely no one-horse race here. As someone who has uttered the caveat emptor "try against your own corpus of content" more than he cares to recount, I can certainly agree with the thorough proof-of-concept they put three vendors through. If CMS Watch ever awards a prize for heeding our advice, this POC might be nominated.

Though you should never underestimate the importance of how the technology functions, one of the main criteria was the attitude of vendors towards the project. Arrogance doesn't pay off in a well-executed test-drive, and in that respect it wasn't surprising the smallest vendor of the three scored points on cooperation and flexibility.

It was interesting to see the two opposites on one evening. One obviously struggled with what they expected to be a simple project, and wasn't much helped by their vendor. The other, on the other hand, braced itself for the worst but came out on top -- not in the least because they made sure the vendor they picked would be cooperative. So though it is easy to be cynical about the success rate of search projects, it can be done. Just heed the lessons learned, and come well prepared.

Put to the Test: Google Search Appliance

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:06:00 -0400

My colleagues Tony Byrne and Adriaan Bloem recently wrote up a summary of pros and cons, as well as offered sound advice, regarding the Google Search Appliance.

The skinny, as we've written about in bits and pieces before: the Google Mini and Google Search Appliance have long offered solid alternatives for website and departmental search, but security and adaptability still come up short for the demands of enterprise deployments. Learn more here, or look to our full, in-depth evaluation in the latest version of the Enterprise Search Report, where we stack up Google against its main competitors.

La taxonomie est morte! Vive la taxonomie...

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:42:00 -0400

Conference events and tracks are getting nichey-er and more specific, and rightly so, as every year the knowledge we accumulate about content technology gets deeper and more nuanced, which begs more specific presentations and probing questions from implementers. Earlier this week in London, I attended an event on The Essentials of Meta Data and Taxonomy, and despite my having talked about this topic for 10 years now, I admit I was pleasantly surprised that there were over 100 registrants for such a specific event. The conference featured perspectives from implementers, vendors, and yours truly, the token analyst.

The theme set for the day was The Semantic Revolution, which many are already referring to as Web 3.0, when meaningful and relevant information will more readily be exchanged among systems and targeted to people in a very precise and way (without even specifying what you're seeking). Most claim that taxonomies and meta data are necessary to make it happen. As we note repeatedly in our Enterprise Search Report, search technology needs good categorization and metadata to perform well, and finding information is only one small piece of the Semantic Revolution. But, as this event demonstrated, people are still struggling with getting taxonomies and metadata in place: the tagging process and coming to agreements on controlled vocabularies is anything but easy. It requires serious business process modification and change management.

Meanwhile, a week earlier at the AIIM Expo, one of the panelists on the keynote CIO panel said, "don't spend time on a taxonomy. We did, and it was a waste." Twenty questions immediately popped into my head, wondering what they did wrong, wondering if they didn't involve end-users, or had a taxonomist that didn't work with subject matter experts, or tried to bite off too much at once, or perhaps built a relevant taxonomy but didn't know how to put it to good use? Or was it in a system somewhere, but no one bothered to tag the content? One day prior, during a long chat with Steve Arnold, he argued that none of this stuff -- meaning taxonomies and the technology that needs them to function -- will matter pretty soon.

While that may be the case for some future date, it's not the case now for business trying to find information today. Yes, text mining technology is getting better at extracting meaning from content and in turn categorizing or using it in a useful way, and one day my cell phone may just let my doctor know immediately if I'm having a heart attack. The technology exists now to be able to do that. But the car has also existed for over 100 years, and most of the continent of Africa doesn't have roads. Useful technology without infrastructure doesn't go very far.

I'm on the Eurostar train from London to Paris as I type this, thinking: who is Amtrak kidding that the Acela is "high-speed?" Superior technology doesn't always get deployed if there's bureaucracy and restrictions in the way, or when there's inconsistent standards from state-to-state (or system-to-system). The poor English woman next to me is paranoid about getting a Métro ticket out to La Défense during a possible strike, even though she carries a little piece of technology to translate a possible query for her, she's asked for my help. Why? Because the technology she has fails to adapt and handle the semantic nuances she needs to deal with an irregular situation. So does every single piece of content technology on the market today. I use all these examples because the best technology, or the ideal technology, takes a long, long time to be commonplace, and there will always be regulatory, organizational, financial, and personal barriers to their adoption. And this is why we still need taxonomies and metadata for today's technologies function, at least for the immediate future.

For now, content is stove-piped in multiple systems, and search has made people lazy. People think the answer should be as easy as a keyword. But the answers to our biggest findability questions are no more easily found by typing in a keyword than a non-French speaker might get a ticket on a working Métro line during a strike. Getting there is no easier than what Amtrak had to do to get the tracks laid down for Acela, and they still couldn't get the train to go as fast as it could have due to organizational and regulatory disarray.

One thing we often forget about search is that the answer to our question is not necessarily what's literally in the text of the document that answers it. Documents about the Eurostar might never have the words "high-speed train." This is where the technology still falls short, for now, and where taxonomies and metadata strategies fill holes. However, I don't think the technology will fall short for very much longer. Despite many years as a taxonomist, I agree with Steve: some day, content technology won't need taxonomies to function. Someday we will get accurate categorization automatically. Eventually, categorization may not really matter at all. But that time isn't now. The technology we all deal with today has a long way to go.

Omniture's SiteCatalyst 14 Catches Up

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:07:00 -0500

Everybody loves a party, and Web Analytics vendor Omniture is no exception, using their annual summit to announce the release of SiteCatalyst 14 and a truckload of other news, including a partnership with Baidu and the roll out of the combined Touchclarity/Offermatica offering.

If you have SiteCatalyst, you probably are now just getting familiar with the new release. So, what do you think of it?

I received a briefing last week, and certainly the new Ajax interface jumped out as a big improvement...13.5 was getting tiresome to look at, especially when compared to Google Analytics, IndexTools, and Nedstat.

SiteCatalyst's new capabilities in video measurement are also worth delving into. Tagging video is generally labor intensive because tags must be set within the application. Omniture claims to enable a "one tag" fits-all approach for Flash and Flex, along with Windows Media Player, QuickTime, and RealPlayer, which appears to be similar to the approach taken by Google Analytics. And there are improvements to Excel reporting and Forum access that are also noteworthy. To see some video of the new reporting, check out Marshall Sponder's blog.

If you're an Omniture customer, you'd have to be pleased with this upgrade. If you're an HBX customer contemplating whether to stick with the plan to migrate to SiteCatalyst, this will also appear to be fairly compelling from a features perspective at first glance.

Nevertheless, I suggest you take a closer look at what's really important from a requirements perspective...Is video analytics really something critical for your business? Do you use Excel reporting? Could Google Analytics fulfill 90 percent of your requirements and then a video analytics company like Visible Measures fill the last 10 percent? These type of mix and match possibilities can make your head hurt, but finding the right combination of measurement tools is going to get more, not less challenging, in the years ahead.

Google Sites hardly a SharePoint killer -- but that's not the point

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:27:00 -0500

So Google has launched a product to compete with Microsoft's SharePoint, called Google Sites. Even at first glance it is no SharePoint killer and is (as is normal for Google) more of a Beta product then anything that shows real maturity.

The real discussion we need to be having is whether these tools are the "productivity" applications they claim to be. Both Google and Microsoft have the means and depth to produce impressive tools, but just because something is usable and quick to deploy does not mean that by definition it is a good thing, particularly when it comes to managing confidential information.

And this is where things can go badly wrong. As we have discussed elsewhere, one of the major problems with SharePoint is not the technology, but its viral growth. What seems good to one end user, can represent a compliance and auditing nightmare to their employer. With Google we have the added complication that by using their collaboration tools we are also entrusting our information to their care. Google has a strong and valid approach to confidentiality, security, and privacy issues, but it's not one that fully assures everyone else.

We'll be looking more closely at the product as customers begin to provide real-life feedback (upon which all real technology evaluations must depend). But for now, I'll argue that Google Sites primarily represents a toolset to easily build small websites -- in particular departmental or collaborative team sites. As with all Google products it has been made usable by simplifying the features and interfaces (in the main a good thing). It has also been bundled with other Google Apps such as Gmail and Docs -- though quite why, and how well or logically these bundlings work remains open to question. Hence it is clearly positioned as a SharePoint alternative.

No doubt some people will be excited by this news, and enthusiastically start experimenting with it. Other's might take a different approach, a better one we might suggest - in fully figuring out why end users are demanding such a tool, what the retention, compliance, security and privacy implications of such usage might entail, and then undertaking a full evaluation of the product against other options before diving in too deeply.

And there are plenty of other options, SharePoint clearly leads the pack, but Salesforce.Com has a nice looking (if not full-featured) SaaS alternative, along with all the fully-fledged and might we say more serious collaboration tools from IBM, Oracle, and EMC. It's a busy marketplace, and more complex than it first may seem. As always we advise buyers to proceed on any kind of product selection with deliberation and real-life testing, because what may first seem a bargain, may in time prove very costly.

Which comes first: marketing hype or proven search product?

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:41:00 -0500

As my scrupulous colleague Adriaan Bloem pointed out last month about Google, sometimes vendors and their marketing evolve more quickly than products themselves. We're constantly told a product has been updated with this feature or that, only to find from real customers implementing the tools that the so-called "proven" feature hasn't actually been tested outside the vendor's own virtual four walls.

Today we released more detail around the research we conducted for the Enterprise Search Report 2008 update, and as we outline in the accompanying article, we're seeing a lot of marketing hype with not nearly the same pace of product development to match. There's also a lot of vendor shifts happening based on acqusitions and investments.

It will be interesting to see how things shake out in this space in the coming months, and to see how long it takes for customers to realize the promised results of the latest tools on the market. We'll be sure to keep you posted with our analysis of the action.

Enterprise Search Vendor Landscape, Circa 2008

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli and Adriaan Bloem) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:16:00 -0500

You might be tempted to select enterprise search vendors for your shortlist based on their supposed "leadership" status in the market -- status either conferred by analyst firms or assumed by the vendors themselves. However, CMS Watch analyst Theresa Regli argues that you need to look more closely at product and vendor alike -- and understand where both are headed -- to properly evaluate your longterm risks and opportunities in an evolving marketplace...

Google Search Appliance: small step in technology, giant leap in marketing

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 08:51:00 -0500

With every vendor acquisition, and the uncertainty this brings for existing customers, I see self-perceived competitors step in with cut-rate offers to "upgrade" to their technology. But I was still surprised to see Google, in a rather bold move, try to lure some Microsoft and Fast Search & Transfer customers away after the recent announcement that the two would become one.

I remember in a panel discussion I was moderating at cmf2007, Exalead CEO François Bourdoncle mentioned the goal of his company was to create a solution "that allows for quick implementations," but of course, with a nod to his competitors, "we don't say fast." So when an enterprise search vendor does mention "fast," they really do mean "FAST." And when Google introduces the "make a fast switch to Google" program, they really mean to say "make a switch from FAST to Google." To be sure not to miss any opportunity, they offer the same for "customers with a collaboration/portal/cms system in place" which is a pretty good description of Microsoft's SharePoint.

So what would Google have to offer over FAST ESP? Well, of course "continued development of your solution" (the usual direct targeting of customers' main concerns after a merger or acquisition). "Why switch to Google?" the company asks rhetorically, replying that one of the Google Search Appliance advantages is that it "searches all your enterprise content" and "leverages all your existing access control and security mechanisms." As readers of the Enterprise Search Report will know, that's a bit of a stretch, certainly when compared head-to-head in the multi-repository enterprise search scenarios ESP usually competes for.

I hear a faint echo when Google addresses some of the main criticisms of SharePoint, asking "is your vendor's enterprise search strategy clear and sound?" and whether it would add "one more piece to the -already- complex puzzle?" Of course, MOSS Search is not a slam dunk, but compared to the effort it takes to connect an Appliance to SharePoint, I feel Google is hardly in the position to criticize.

Following the links on their website, it is interesting to see how Google's marketing builds upon its own house of cards of previous materials, whereas real progress of the technology has been relatively slow. Google's solutions certainly have their strengths, but you should carefully consider your scenarios before you commit to something that might be rather ill-equipped to deal with your needs. For more details, you can check for yourself in the free excerpt of our Report.