• Materials being presented by Smartlogic, with product Semiphor — a taxonomy product integrated with FAST search.
• Why are taxonomies needed? Terms have different meanings, is contextual. Expert vocabularies may not match search terms.
• Terms may be in documents that are really irrelevant to the overall focus of the piece and would be meaningless results.
• Taxonomy: Allows for capture of a domain knowledge, vocabulary and topical relationships. Ontology is multiple taxonomies.
• Content as an asset should be organized/managed. Ontologies help with this (what’s missing, what are the relationships).
• Ontologies can help support records management policies.
• [Professional services firm Ascentium now presenting their experiences doing implementations w/2010 including inside MSoft
• 2010 has a utility Term Store Manager for facilitating taxonomical activities.
• Concerns: Rely on users for taxonomies? Preferrably not, but allow them to add their own folksonomies.
• Concerns: If you build a taxonomy, many companies are not willing to add staff to maintain and they must be maintained.
• The manager is extensible, but there are challenges (running into while inside Microsoft via 'eat own dogfood' effort).
• One primary goal: improve findability. Architecture of Term Store: Group, Term Set, Term
• [search for blogs that deal with Term Store Manager -- they offer great advice]
• [BTW Term Store Manager is still in beta and not yet generally released. Great steps forward, but one step back.]
• [Showing UI. Have created two groups: fruits, vegetables. Adding tomato to both. Can 'borrow' but also have multi-terms]
• [Have talked to Microsoft about the issues with disambiguation when multiple meanings are presented for a term.]
• Added Term Set “vine” to house “tomato”. But have different Term Sets of Vine under Fruit and Vegetables. Different GUIDs
• [Issue: Right now anyone with access can change definitions. Governance models needed to manage for disambiguation.]
• [I'm still trying to figure out why they're going to all this effort when FAST does most of this automatically.]
• [I'm guessing this is still 'brute force' version of SharePoint, which still requires 'brute force' search management
• [The dropdown lists can get unwieldy because there is no description in the dropdowns, no way to know which term is which]
• [Back to Smartlogic staff] Small or Large Ontology? Small: Easier to maintain, buckets larger, results less granular.
• Asking users to self-tag against a really large taxonomy requires considerable effort (requires understanding of whole)
• Companies restructure, change clients, add lines of business — all effects the total taxonomy (and existing content base)
• In 2007 there were no real taxonomies available. Keywords are not the same thing. Results can be tuned via taxonomy.
• Smartlogic now demoing Semaphore. The taxonomy is only half the equation. The content itself must have relevant metadata.
• [Semaphore is totally integrated as an add-on to the SharePoint UI, as if it were simply utilities in SharePoint.]
• Adding a document to SharePoint brings up the Semaphore UI for taxonomical additions, via ‘assisted’ tagging.
• That is, there are recommendations made to which edits can be made. Effectively ‘automated’ with overrides.
• This UI is useful for existing SharePoint stores to be reviewed and classified as well. [Again, only relevant w/o FAST]
• [With this level of effort, I'm still trying to figure out why a company wouldn't pay for the FAST licenses instead?]
• [Interesting navigation of topic maps and managing the 'collection' from the whole rather than the discrete elements.]
• Semaphore Architecture: Allows for imports of existing structures and reorganized. Text mining and classification.
• Rules-based approach used for classification server to make recommendations (rules can be tweaked).
• Now talking about the FAST Server and explaining the greater control over the results, multi-content results, etc.
• May 11th there will be another event to cover the FAST Server in more detail.
• Q&A raised issues of cross-cultural-language issues for global taxonomies. See Motorola study http://twurl.nl/f3crub
• Bottom line, assuming that you can get meaningful search results out of the box from SharePoint is erroneous.

Got to hang out at the first Toronto SharePointCamp and have a bunch of developer friends ask me, “What are you doing here, you’re not a developer”

Voice is Back!!! I was invited to see the launch of Microsoft Unified Communications. Looks pretty cool, really it does. I think that this is just one of those technologies that will quickly become part of our everyday lives.

I hope we get it at the office soon.

This is from Lawrence Liu’s Report from the Inside. It was posted a few months ago but it is one of those things I really like.

I’m enjoying Mix this year and the keynote was pretty cool. The conversations are there but there are still some good old fashion whiz Bang demos. Silverlight looks amazing. I really hope it takes off.

At lunch today I talked Ian Muir and he felt the same way. All the marketer are like “videos with skateboards, AW YAH” and all the developers in the room are groaning.

[tags]mix07, microsoftmix, silverlight, MixKeynote[/tags]

I need a quote now.

wow, a whole swarm of harleys!

Sandy Kemsley

I hope that the code is not total shit.

UPDATE. The Code is not bad but my indent was not rendered as a quote as I would like it to have been. Maybe next time I should give it something hard

Implementing SharePoint is a lot like building a house. It’s like a friend of yours says, “I know exactly what to do.” And, he drives you to a Home Depot, drops you off at the front door and says, “Everything you need is here.” Then, drives off.

- Jared Spool (paraphrased from his closing keynote at Web Directions North by Joanna)

I think the important thing to take away from this is that installing SharePoint is not a enterprise strategy. Using SharePoint as the tool to enable you Enterprise Strategy Vision is a much better approach.

[tags]MOSS2007, MOSS, MicrosoftOfficeSharePointSystem, JaredSpool[/tags]

from the Toronto .net Users Group site

As one of the major focus areas for Microsoft, competing with Google in the enterprise space is taking centre stage. Not only will Office SharePoint Server 2007 launch with an optional, cost-effective “search only” SKU, the company is also launching an upgrade to its Windows Desktop Search that searches the user’s desktop, the Internet and any intranet indexes using SharePoint’s indexer. We’ll look at the different components of this strategy and examine some of the architectural opportunities opened up by them.

Mr. Knoch is the Principal Consultant at Navantis responsible for supporting the sales team and overseeing software requirements. Before Navantis, Carsten worked at Microsoft, in Canada and South Africa, where he was responsible for launching Africa’s first MSN portal.

I recorded his presentation and have videos posted below

Download this video in High Quality Windows Media or in High Quality MP4

[tags]MOSS, MOSS2007, SharePointSearch, EnterpriseSearch[/tags]

For Mac users who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full-screen, distraction-free writing environment. Unlike the cluttered word processors you’re used to, WriteRoom is just about you and your text.

Lifehacker likes it, Factory Joe talks about it, and 43 folders… well acknowledges it. I can’t find many people who hate it and I myself think that the idea of distraction free writing is a great one.

There has been cloned versions made; DarkRoom for Windows with the .NET framework and JDarkRoom for computers running Java.

I’m not really interested in installing more software on my computer so i decided to see what i could do by tweaking Word 2007. I could have used UltraEdit or possibly even OneNote 2007 but I thought that Word would be the easiest because I could create a template instead of changing my preferences.

This is what I came up with.

Continue reading for instructions how how to set it up. Obviously you’ll need Word 2007 to do this.

Faking (sorta) WriteRoom in Word 2007

The first thing I did was to make my default Office 2007 interface Black, well really shades of grey. To do this you go into the word preferences you those under the Customize Quick Access Toolbar > More Commands

Once the options dialog opens up choose Popular on the left and find the Color Scheme option. Change the color scheme to Black. This is the one setting that will effect all your office programs so when I said I didn’t want to change any preferences i guess i kinda lied. Luckily I have my Office set to Black all the time because I like it that way.

Next under the View Tab i set the document view to Web Layout.

Then under the Page Layout tab I set the Page Color to a very dark grey almost a black.

Then I removed a bunch of the default styles of the document and modified the remaining ones to be a good contrast on the dark grey background. So I changed Normal text from black to white.

Then I wanted to hide the office ribbon so I double-clicked on a tab. So when I am working with my text I can right-click and get all the formatting options I really need including document styles.

So I think that this will work out for me when i try to start writing, God knows I need the help. I have a DOTX template that may help you skip some of these steps that you can download. I hope this can help some people.

So what do you do when your company is about to tear up an old telemarketing office to make way for a new floor of developers… you hold a BarCamp that’s what.

We are going to do a more specialized BarCamp this time one whose focus is on enterprise development and solutions.

So if you are in the Toronto area and are sick of holiday cheer come out and join us for some inperson knowledge sharing.

Check out the wiki to sign up and for more details.

… oh and ok-cancel rules.

I have already talked about SachaC at the first TorCamp enterprise 2.0 gathering but I have finally got of the perch and editted together the presentation that Bryce & I did with lots of help from Carsten.

The presentation is about development methodologies that are associated with Web 2.0 and how they can relate to the Enterprise, the experiences of the Navantis team on developing enterprise application with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and a good discussion on the good and bad points of all the methods

Windows Media Version (63megs) or MP4 version (66megs)

Referenced Materials:

• Getting Real by 37Signals
• Corporate Intranets Best Practices Report – A User-Driven Web 2.0 Perspective by Avenue A / Razorfish
• Turn The Project On Its Head – Navantis SharePoint White Paper

Looking forward to the next time we get together for EnterpriseCamp Enterprise2.0. I really want to show SharePoint enabled collaboration with OneNote.

Now everything I had seen in Microsoft demos around their new wikis did not impress me. It was always shown to me as a WYSIWIG webpart in a webpart page, which made me think that MSFT didn’t understand the nature of a wiki.

So Martin and I created a new Wiki site in SharePoint and started to try out some of the features and I’m glad to report that is actually fairly promising.

WebParts, WYSIWYG and WikiCode

Open a larger annotated image

Edit View

Open a larger annotated image

Wiki Pages Library

Open a larger annotated image

View All Site Content

Open a larger annotated image

It is great, although expected, that Wiki Sites can also contain other types of Lists and Libraries (Documents, Picture, and Form)

Page History

Open a larger annotated image

Moving/Copying Pages

Open a larger annotated image

So I think that SharePoint wikis look pretty promising. Hopefully they will make some more improvements and bug fixes before the release but I’m sure that the SharePoint community will quicky extend the functionality or improve the product just as they have with the SharePoint Forums Web Part.