SharePoint 2013 - Planning a Search Strategy

The Olympic Games and US Presidential Elections come around every four years but SharePoint upgrades come on a three year cycle. There are still organizations using SharePoint 2007 and in the process of migrating to SharePoint 2010 and now we have SharePoint 2013 in all its glory.  

Microsoft also seems to be hinting that in future there could be more frequent upgrades. Before long you will probably be able to major in Microsoft Upgrade and Migration Planning at most major universities.

My particular interest is in enterprise search and here I have to congratulate Microsoft on the progress it has made since the fairly terrible search functionality in SharePoint 2007. The company was also smart enough to go out and buy FAST Search and Transfer in 2008, but not quite smart enough about financial due diligence and building a sensible search technology strategy for itself and for SharePoint.

The Technology Story So Far

The immediate result was the arrival of FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010, abbreviated to FS4SP. This took a lot of the components of FAST ESP 5.3, suitably modified to SharePoint 2010, and offered a substantial enhancement to SharePoint Search 2010 which itself was a significant leap forward from the search offering in SharePoint 2007.

Two issues immediately became obvious. First, many companies were convinced that they now had a licence for FAST ESP 5.3 and had no idea of the real state of affairs. Second, no one in the Microsoft partner community had any idea of how to get the best (or indeed anything at all!) out of FS4SP. My experience says that not that much has changed since launch unless the company has brought in external implementation expertise.

In 2010 Wrox published "Professional Microsoft Search" by Mark Bennett and his colleagues that covered all the Microsoft search products (including FAST ESP 5.3) in 450 pages. It is an excellent book because of the substantial amount of guidance it gives on the skills and management attention needed to get the best out of any search application.

It was not until earlier this year that Microsoft itself published "Working with Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint," which runs to 450 pages just on FS4SP. There are so many omissions from this book that it would take me the rest of this column to list them, but the most notable are no references at all to using search logs to manage search performance and a total absence of any indications of the staffing requirements to support the product. It creates the impression that search implementation is a project, when at the minimum it is a program and in reality it is a journey without end. 

The other significant problem is that (unlike the Wrox book) the book does not tell you what FS4SP does not do. A good example is document thumbnails, which out of the box are only supported for Word documents and Powerpoint files. Certainly there are some good third-party solutions (Documill comes to mind) but that misses the point.

Fortunately there are many excellent search implementation companies (Comperio, Findwise, Raytion and Search Technologies for example) that can really make FS4SP sing and dance but that inevitably adds to the implementation cost. Even then, any company running FS4SP probably needs a search support team of at least 3-4 people full time. A look at Sadie van Buren’s invaluable SharePoint benchmarking service shows search way down the list in maturity of implementation.

 

Continue reading this article:

1 2 Next Page >

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Interview: Badgeville's Kris Duggan on Gamification's Power of Persuasion

If you believe that all work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy, chances are you haven't experienced game mechanics in your workplace. 

Although games have long been part of our daily lives, the application of game design to reward and encourage certain behaviors within the workplace and with customers has been steadily rising in the last two years. 

Badgeville CEO Kris Duggan took some time out to answer a few of our questions on the headway gamification is making in businesses, what this spells for employee and customer engagement and what the future of game mechanics might look like. 

Siobhan Fagan: How did you come to game mechanics?

Kris Duggan: When my co-founder and I first came up with the idea for Badgeville, we were looking at a few key trends that were colliding. First, web analytics had not changed for many years, and there was a missing opportunity for business to get a deeper look into user behavior. At the same time, social gaming companies were rising to success due to their great ability to drive user behavior using game mechanics and behavior analytics.

As a serial entrepreneur and sales executive, I've spent my career learning new ways to encourage performance across many different types of employees. We realized that providing a powerful SaaS platform where our customers could track user behavior and reward this behavior with game mechanics could drive substantial benefits for business.

SF: Do game mechanics work for everyone?

KD: Yes, but different game mechanics work for different audiences. A sales team may be motivated by highly competitive game mechanics, while a product team may be best motivated using collaborative gamification programs with reputation mechanics.

The most important part of a gamification program is to understand which mechanics will work for your audience. If you don't strategically think about this up front, you risk hurting your program versus helping it. Our customers come from virtually every industry, with audiences ranging from youth and teens to senior executives at the world's top corporations.

SF: How are game mechanics effective in ways that other engagement methods aren’t?

There are many different engagement methods available. However, few have such a direct and measurable impact on ROI compared to gamification. Fundamentally, game mechanics and gamification look at the key user behaviors that matter to your business and create programs to incentivize these behaviors. You can offer places for your users to engage, but without a gamification program, it is very challenging to encourage consistent and continued engagement.

SF: Do game mechanics change the way that people work?

KD: Game mechanics do not necessarily change the way people work, but they can very successfully encourage adoption of new business processes. For example, you may have invested in a modern CRM system which offers a wide range of functionality that would help your team become more efficient. However, just because the features exist, doesn't mean your employees will use them.

Gamification enables business managers to create a program that calls out the features and actions that they want their employees to perform and offers an easy way to both track these behaviors and reward them. Using gamification, our customers see adoption of enterprise software increase 20 percent or more. Through our partnerships and integrations with Salesforce.com, Yammer, IBM Connections, Drupal, Jive and Microsoft SharePoint, among other leading enterprise software platforms, we've supported many different audiences within enterprises, and can attest to the value of gamification for all employee and customer audiences.

 

Continue reading this article:

1 2 Next Page >

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Zynga's New Game: A Bet On Real-Money Gambling

As Zynga plans to cut staff and more than a dozen games from its offerings, it's paddling across the pond looking to get lucky with online casino games in the U.K. Can the beleaguered company cash in by letting players cash out?

Zynga's playing a new game, and this time, it's hoping to cash in by letting gamers cash out.

Alongside its third-quarter earnings report yesterday, Zynga announced an interesting but not altogether surprising partnership with bwin.party, one of the largest online real-money gaming operators, to bring users in the U.K. a host of games they will be able to play using (and potentially winning) cold, hard, real cash.

Zynga joins competitors in the space such as Big Fish, which in August announced it would start letting U.K. players cash out on casino games. It's worth nothing that Zynga's old ball and chain, Facebook, also announced in August it would partner with Gamesys, a U.K.-based online gambling operator, to let 18+ players of its Bingo Friendzy app play for cash.

Through the bwin.party partnership, Zynga says its real-money games service across the pond will bring 180 online casino games, including slots, roulette, and blackjack, to the U.K.--where online gambling is legal, unlike in the United States--in the first half of 2013. The company says to also expect a real-money version of Poker, as well as a FarmVille-branded slots game.

"Partnering with an established leader like bwin.party is a strategic and prudent way for us to enter a key RMG market while giving local players the real money games they've been asking us for," Zynga's corporate and business development EVP Barry Cottle said in a statement.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus has made it known for awhile that the social games company would eventually move into the real-money space. In August, the Wall Street Journal reported Zynga was investing in lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., and California to bring real-money gambling stateside.

Zynga's signaled interest in the real-money games space makes sense for its bottom line. According to bwin.party, the global online casino market is expected to reach $8 billion by 2015, while a BI Intelligence report pegs the social gaming market at $5 billion in the same period. When you're raking in more revenue per individual user, versus the pennies-on-the-dollar monthly returns from massively popular social games such as Words With Friends, it's helpful not to have to depend on revenue streams such as advertiser spending, which Zynga reported was down 24% in the last quarter. (Though some industry experts say similar deals tend to drive little revenue for the brand--in this case, Zynga--after both the operator and the affiliates through which it distributes the branded games claim their respective shares.)

The tradeoff is that although each real-money game will be more niche focused--and thus reaching a smaller core group of users than a Words With Friends--they will each drive higher average revenue per user.

"We need to do a better job segmenting our audience and bringing more games to them that may be for somewhat narrower parts of the audience, but that achieve higher [average revenue per user]," Pincus said on the post-earnings conference call yesterday.

Although the news of the partnership prompted some, including investors, to throw Zynga a bone for making a significant first step toward better-monetizing its portfolio, the conspicuous lack of details offered up by Zynga execs during the post-earnings call left more to be desired by others.

"The deal, to be blunt, is not at all interesting. It's a traditional, plain-vanilla, run-of-the-mill branding deal with bwin.party," says Chris Griffin, CEO of Betable, whose platform allows developers to bake a real-money component into their games without having to obtain their own appropriate gaming licenses.

Zynga execs repeatedly declined to share more information about the financial breakdown of the deal during yesterday's call, but a bwin.party rep confirmed the Zynga-branded casino games portfolio "will include both slots that we develop in-house as well as those we license from other developers." The FarmVille-branded casino slots, for example, are being created within bwin.party's Games Studio, which runs on a two-week release cycle for new slot games.

Griffin said the deal's provisions involve little more than Zynga slapping a prominent brand such as FarmVille on a generic casino game created, operated, and distributed to an affiliate network by bwin.party. That's a very different concept than Zynga adding real-money support to games it produces in-house, he says, which stifles the company's ability to play to its strengths: creating and marketing compelling games.

"These are not Zynga games," Griffin says. "These are basically bwin.party games wearing Zynga clothing."

Ed note: We have reached out to Zynga and bwin.party for comment and will update this post when we hear back.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

DAM Lowdown: Gamification for Digital Assets, New Releases from MediaBeacon, CognoSys

Yet another DAM week has flown by. In digital asset management news, there’s some DAM fun (and games), a major upgrade for MediaBeacon’s R3volution 5.1 and a full launch of the CognoSys CogDAM suite.

Game On

You may not be accustomed to seeing “games” and “digital asset management” in the same sentence, but gamification has established major beachheads in CRM, sales management tools, retail websites and training — so why not join the fun?

One example is metadata games created by the Tiltfactor Lab at Dartmouth, under the direction of Dr. Mary Flanagan.

A suite of open source, free, Net-based games were developed to increase the use of archives, initially using the collection at the school’s Rauner Library. Participants in Zen Tag, for instance, simply list descriptors for a random image displayed from the collection. “For some reason, it is a compelling activity,” the Lab researchers note on their website. And, in their Guess What? game, one of two players selects an image (from among several displayed) based on clues sent by the other, networked player.

In a brief essay, "Is Gamification the Next Big Thing for DAM Systems?" AssetBank, a browser-based DAM application vendor, tackles the question that is probably on your mind. It may already be too late to hold back the tide of fun, the essay says, given that research firm Gartner predicts more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes by 2015.

MediaBeacon Unveils 5.1

MediaBeacon has announced a major upgrade to its DAM platform. New features in R3volution 5.1 include real-time predictive search with data mining algorithms and access control rules, theme management of the interface, the ability to quickly publish assets across MediaBeacon instances and an expanded API.

Other upgrades include a “complete adoption” of HTML5 to facilitate using the platform on an iPad, and enhanced support for external applications.

CognoSys Launches CogDAM

India-based VAR and integrator CognoSys Technologies has launched its end-to-end CogDAM Digital Asset Management suite, although arguably it is closer to the Media Asset Management end of the spectrum.

The suite includes a single-click encoding service with live streaming based on Microsoft’s Azure Media Services, and an integrated environment for managing a media portfolio in-house, including images or video. Videos taken in the field can be immediately transferred to the media server, encoded in multiple formats without human intervention, and streamed to any user on any device.

CognoSys envisions such use cases as corporate intranet TV for training or product information for employees, suppliers and clients, or event live streaming.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

In IT's War for Security, Battle-Ready Fighters Hard to Find

IT departments’ war to keep their assets safe resembles one of those alien-fighting video games, where new assailants keep swarming the bunker and you have to carefully — but quickly — choose your weapon.  

But the number of threats, and the tools to combat them, are only part of IT departments’ problems. According to a Forrester Consulting study recently commissioned by IBM, 63% of companies have understaffed IT departments, and slightly more than half cannot find employees with the right skills to keep the intruders out.

CMSWire.com recently spoke with IBM Enterprise Security Executive Davis Puzas about that company’s view of the battle.

“There’s a new threat every single day,” Puzas said, adding that “it’s vastly different from just a few years ago.”

He noted that IT departments “used to be reactive” to threats, but now — given the amount of data being communicated, the rapidly morphing kinds of threats, the widespread use of clouds and social media, and the number and kinds of devices being used — they “have to be pro-active.”

Puzas pointed out that “you can’t just sit there and react — you have to leapfrog in front of the threats.” CIOs are looking for a “better view” of their battleground, he said, and they are looking “to become more intelligent.”

Editor's Note: Read Next Generation Security, Protecting the Cloud and Mobile Devices

Mobile Security Experts ‘Just Not Available’

The Forrester study found that 68% of the surveyed 2400 North American and European enterprise decision makers had “little time for proactive and preventative projects due to existing responsibilities.”

Tools can help a company be pro-active, Puzas pointed out, but the intelligence arises from the people who implement them. “We find that many organizations are struggling to find the skills to take this on,” he said, and security professionals with the needed skills are now in heavy demand and “expensive to find, while budgets are tight.”

As one example, Puzas pointed to experts in mobile security, the most urgent battlefront for many IT departments. “They’re often just not available,” he said.

The Forrester study pointed out that “information security teams exist in an environment where ‘no’ is the wrong answer, yet the existing responsibilities absorb all of their time (68%) and new resources are hard to find (53%).” Given these conditions, the study said “consideration of security-as-a-service appears a clear and reasonable response.”

Security-as-a-Service

A 2011 report by Frost & Sullivan found similar evidence of the skills gap. It said that while half of its respondents reported having private clouds in place and 40 percent were using software-as-a-service, over 70 percent of professionals said new skills were needed to properly secure cloud-based technologies.

These kinds of stats, of course, represent continuing opportunities for IBM, given their strengths in security-oriented professional services and their managed services.

 

Continue reading this article:

1 2 Next Page >

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Putting the Social Media Olympics in Perspective

While the Games of the XXX Olympiad may be over, the analysis of their social media success is underway. Considered to be one of the most “connected” Games of all time, the Olympics were consumed across multiple platforms in various content types. And though more people than ever tuned in to watch athletes compete (with delays), social media activity reached a peak as well.

Social Pomp & Circumstance

The London Olympics were the first Olympics where social media platforms played a key role in marketing and communications. Before you get defensive, consider the following:

• February, 2006 — Winter Olympics begin in Turin, Italy
• March, 2006 — Twitter Debuts at SXSW
• September, 2006 — Facebook opens to everyone
• August, 2008 — Summer Olympics begin Beijing, China
• August, 2008 — Facebook Reaches 100 million Users
• March, 2011 —  Twitter reaches 140 million tweets posted daily
• April, 2012  — Facebook Reaches 900 million users
• July 2012 — Summer Olympics begin in London, England

With Facebook and Twitter alone, a perfect social media storm created the optimal atmosphere to promote and produce Olympic content. Factor in other channels like YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr and it just adds to fuel to an already empowered media.

Win, Lose, Social Media

However, being able to leverage the power of social media worked better for some than it did for others. The International Olympic Committee, for one, wasn’t quite ready for the consequences of the Social Games. Whether it was trying to control the types of information and style athletes and journalists alike tweeted out or trying to keep users from adding to the Twitter stream at all to keep bandwidth at a minimum.

If you were a brand, on the other hand, the social media Olympics helped to bring home the gold. Nike, for instance, was among the brands who excelled at sporting social engagement during the London Olympics. According SocialBakers, who launched its CheerMeter tool for the games, Nike’s Facebook fan base grew by 166,718 — more than double the growth of its sporting rival, Adidas, who netted just 80,761 new fans over the same period. Nike also dominated Twitter with over 16,020 tweets associating the brand with the word Olympic, 6,725 more tweets than Adidas, who were part of just 9,295 Olympic-themed tweets.

 

As athletes won medals, their exposure grew as well. Socialbakers also revealed which athletes trended across social media. Swimmers led the pack as most talked about athletes, with Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte in first and second place respectively and Missy Franklin in seventh place. Meanwhile, British diver Tom Daley just missed the Twitter social podium as fourth most discussed athlete.

Popularity v. Engagement

Of course, being talked about on Social Media doesn't necessarily mean that it's a positive experience or an engaging one. Though many have talked about how social media proved to be a successful outlet during the Olympics, not many have touched on the engagement factor. Despite the excess of Tweets and Likes generated for athletes and the brands they represent, engagement remained low.

While many brands may have gained more fans and followers in the course of two weeks, the trick will be in engaging them so they stay active fans and followers. For the rest of us, we don't have an Olympic-sized event to bring millions of new fans to our door, instead we must attract new users with engaging, useful content and a brilliant customer experience. The lesson learned, is not the active role that social media played during the Olympics, but rather how brands and athletes can use that popularity to further engage their fans after the Olympic flame has burned out.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Mobile and the Era of Fragmented Communication

In the lead up to the Olympic Games this month, London added Wi-Fi to its subway system in an effort to help keep communications among visitors open. But last week it was clear that mobile engagement issues were taking their toll when an increase in social media began interfering with mobile networks on which the games themselves depend.

The International Olympics Committee asked viewers to "use another means" to send texts and tweets because the activity was overwhelming operator networks. Many users turned to over-the-top content (OTT) to offset the networks and streamline communications as a result.

Over the Top and In Demand

These issues may be surprising, considering the advanced infrastructures in place and our increased expectations for faster than fast networks that power our mobility. However, a new study by tyntec, found that US operators are better prepared to more effectively deal with and profit from OTT services compared to European operators.

Previously, tyntec reported there was great opportunity for younger populations to utilize OTT services, which can help users communicate more efficiently and lowers costs associated with traditional SMS technology. This new report continues to emphasize the opportunity available as well as the discrepancies that exist across countries to implement and facilitate these services.

The report by mobileSQUARED and sponsored by tyntec, OTT: How Operators can overcome the Fragmentation of Communication shows a considerable discrepancy in attitude and a huge lag in uptake between Europe and the US:

• 100 percent of US mobile operators are already partnering with OTT providers, while only 18 percent are currently doing so in Europe.
• 25 percent of European operators have already seen losses in revenue by up to 5 percent. The US has yet to see any decline in revenue.
• Almost 75 percent of European operators anticipate OTT will impact revenue losses by up to 11-15 percent in the coming years. In comparison, the US is bracing for losses of up to 30 percent.
• 42 percent of operators believe that over 40 percent of their customer base will be using OTT services in 2016.
• OTT blocking and “walled gardens” are preventing adoption in Europe; whereas, the US is well positioned to profit from OTT, in part, because of our flat rate plans and infrastructure. 

Overall, the study suggests that European mobile operators feel more threatened, with 79 percent of European operators indicating that OTT clients on smartphones are a threat to traditional SMS and voice-based services.

An Era of Proliferation and Fragmentation

When we talk about OTT services, what exactly do we mean? Applications like Skype and What’s App are best known, with Skype leading the OTT charge with over 900 million users spending over 1 billion minutes a day. And while in 2012 20 percent of global smartphone users actively use OTT services, it is predicted to reach 45 percent by 2016.

So why the fragmentation? As OTT services expand and attract more users, it’s expected that more companies and developers will look to capitalize and flood the market with OTT services. Until then however, a majority of the existing proprietary OTT (Over-The-Top) communication service providers do not permit cross-platform functionality, therefore limiting the capability of their services. As the report puts it:

Consequently, the rise of these OTT services has created an era of fragmented communications in which consumers cannot easily communicate outside the ‘walled gardens’ of their respective service/app. This weakness presents mobile operators with an ideal opportunity to adopt a key role in enabling OTT services and associated revenues, as they seek new business models to offset the decline in voice and messaging revenues."

Here, Thorsten Trapp, CTO of tyntec discusses the latest figures and forecasts of the whitepaper and what they mean for Operators.

Global events like the Olympics help to showcase the era of fragmented communications, helping us all better understand the need for more interoperability and the opportunity the industry has to improve mobile communications. But it shouldn’t require such wide-scale events to highlight the lag — anyone who has ever sent a text only to have it arrive hours after, can appreciate the utility of OTT services.
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com