Perspectives on Information Access

InternetNews.com interviews BA-Insight

Martin Muldoon — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:07:20 GMT

"When enterprise databases scale to terabytes and individual documents grow to megabytes, the basic Google-like search result page is no longer enough. Enter BA-Insight, based in the U.S. with software development in Russia and India, whose Longitude product improves Microsoft's SharePoint by adding several key features."

http://blog.internetnews.com/agoldman/2009/06/ba-insight-longitude-sharepoint-search.html

Leading Search Analyst Interviews BA-Insight CEO

Martin Muldoon — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:47:49 GMT

Leading search analyst, Steve Arnold, recently interviewed BA-Insight's CEO about the company's future prospects working within the SharePoint Search market, and in dealing with FAST and Microsoft in general.

The interview can be viewed HERE.

Lotusphere 2009

Martin Muldoon — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:50:31 GMT

BA-Insight and Axceler just announced a partnership and the availability of the Lotus Notes Search Connector. The Lotus Notes Search Connector, co-developed by both firms, enables SharePoint Search, and Microsoft Search Server to index Lotus Notes and will be unveiled for the first time at Axceler’s pedestals 327-329 during Lotusphere 2009, January 18-22 in Orlando, FL.

Details of the partnership announcement can be found here.

Hope to see you there!

FAST Forward 2009

Martin Muldoon — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:10:26 GMT

BA-Insight will be at the FAST Forward conference in Vegas. The conference is from Feb 09 thru Feb 11. Please stop by our booth. We'll will discuss how we will be extending the FAST platform, and will be running live demos of our product.

Naturally, for those sitting on the fence between FAST and SharePoint, we'll present the pros/cons of each solution.

More details to follow.

Happy New Year!

Holiday Gift from BA-Insight - Free SharePoint Search WebPart

Martin Muldoon — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:18:07 GMT

Happy Holidays All!

We've had a great year here. To thank our customers, partners, and friends, BA-Insight is giving away a gift. One of the shortcomings of the Advanced Search Page in SharePoint is the fact that users have to manually enter values when they select a particular property. This source of frustration (as well as others) is one of the reasons why the Advanced Search Page is not used more often.

BA-Insight is giving away a free date picker webpart. Simply drop the webpart onto the Advanced Search Page and users will be able to pick values from a calendar anytime they are entering dates.

The webpart can be downloaded here:

http://www.ba-insight.net/datepickerregistration.aspx

Best to all!

Martin

Extending SharePoint Search

Martin Muldoon — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:32:49 GMT

Those companies embarking on an Enterprise Search initiative should be aware of the fact that the majority of search initiatives fail. According to a study conducted by Accenture, 65% over users are completely dissatisfied with their search tool. The first step in avoiding a failed search initiative is recognizing that unlike other infrastructure projects, delivering a project on time and on budget does not mean the project was successful. The key to search is getting people to use the system, because unlike an email or Active Directory, users don’t have to use the tool you provide if they don’t like it.

The second step to a successful search project is recognizing that one size does not fit all. Companies and organizations produce and consume data in different ways. In many cases, this is the source of an organizations competitive advantage. Yes, you certainly can get SharePoint Search up and running quickly out of the box, but without considering how the search system can be optimized for the unique requirements of your company, much of the potential benefit of the system will never be truly realized.

The good news is that SharePoint Search is a platform. Microsoft designed it to be extensible. As a Microsoft partner, BA-Insight has developed a product called Longitude which extends the platform to provide features that one finds in best of breed competing solutions. Longitude is an add-on to SharePoint Search that provides enhanced usability, relevance, and connectivity.

Usability or user experience is a challenge for all enterprise search technologies. Users are so accustomed to searching on the Internet, that they expect enterprise search to be the same. The challenge here is that Office documents, PDF’s, etc, are much larger than simple web pages. As such, users must download, open, and manually search through them. Users find this experience to be arduous. To improve the user experience, Longitude provide a unique preview technology that enables users to preview the most relevant page in the document in the same amount of time that one would view a web page. This saves employees hours of time per year. The short video demo below showcases this functionality.

Usability Video Demo

Relevance is another challenge for enterprise search technologies. While most people think of relevance as being a relevance ranking issue, often poor relevance is related to poor connectivity. If SharePoint is not indexing the data in a system that is important to you, you will never get a relevant search result from SharePoint. This is another aspect of SharePoint Search that is highly extensible. SharePoint’s Protocol Handler Framework is what enables SharePoint to index different types of content sources such as file systems, SharePoint Sites, etc. While SharePoint can index the most common data sources out of the box, Microsoft leaves connecting to other systems and custom applications to partners such as BA-Insight. BA-Insight’s Longitude provides a connector framework that enables SharePoint to index ECM systems such as Exchange Private Mailboxes, Documentum, Hummingbird, WorkSite, and Symantec’s Enterprise Vault. Longitude is also capable of indexing ERP, CRM, and custom database applications. The short video demo below highlights some of the key functionality that the connectors provide.

Connector Framework Video Demo

Whether you use BA-Insight’s product to extend SharePoint Search, or do it yourself, doing so dramatically improves the chances that your search initiative is successful and SharePoint Search becomes a mission critical application in your organization.

Please join BA-Insight for a Live Webcast on KMWorld

Martin Muldoon — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:14:46 GMT

Hello everyone,

Please join BA-Insight on Tuesday September 30th at 2 pm EST for a live webcast on KMWorld.

Our focus will be on Ehancing the SharePoint Search platform. We'll be covering everything, from Microsoft's FAST acquisition to why most companies are dissatisfied with Enterprise Search implementations and what can be done about it.

Please register here:

http://www.kmworld.com/Webinars/Details.aspx?EventID=101

Hope you to see you there!

Google, Microsoft, and the power of brand.

Martin Muldoon — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:18:53 GMT

A friend of mine is in the process of interviewing at Google and asked me for assistance in prepping for the six or seven interviews that Google is known for. As a Microsoft partner, BA-Insight is often called by Microsoft into competitive situations with Google so as part of my job, I'm more knowledgeable about Google than most. Our conversations led us in different areas, but kept coming back to the power of Google's brand. Clearly the Google brand is what is keeping users loyal and coming back. Google continues to focus on simplicity, usability, and relevance.

Apparently staying focused is not as simple as it seems or sounds. Take Microsoft Live for example. I was taking a quick look at how BA-Insight was being ranked by Google, Yahoo, and Live this morning. When I went to the Live Search page (http://www.live.com) , I was presented with a beautiful picture of what turned out to be Kagoshima Japan. The image was vivid and took up the entire screen. After a few seconds, three boxes appeared and then disappeared. On a mouse over each box, a text box would pop up giving more detail about the picture.

I sat there for a few minutes thinking about what just transpired and regardless of how I framed it, I concluded that this was a usability nightmare. When people search, they are trying to solve a problem. Anything that gets in the way of that can only be negatively perceived. After hitting the page, I sat there for 20 seconds looking at the image before I remembered why I had come to the site in the first place.

So what does Microsoft want the Live brand to represent? I thought about this over breakfast, but I'm afraid I still haven't a clue. I did decide, however, that I would like to visit Japan one day.

Please Join BA-Insight at Enterprise Search Summit West

Martin Muldoon — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:33:41 GMT

BA-Insight will be attending ESS West in San Jose taking place September 23rd and 24th.

Please stop by booth #318 for a demo of newly released features which extend the usability, relevance, and connectivity of SharePoint Search, and Microsoft Search Server.

Hope to see you there!

Join BA-Insight at TechEd this week.

Martin Muldoon — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:10:31 GMT

For those of you attending TechEd this week, please stop the the BA-Insight booth (#1151).

Our team will be presenting several new features that provide SharePoint Search and Search Server with powerful capabilities. One of these features is called Parametric Search which offers significant improvements on your standard Advanced Search page. I'll leave the team the rest, so as not to steal their thunder.

Hope to see you there!