Real Story Group. Make Better Technology Decisions.

It's a fact of business life that software vendors sometimes go out of business or vendors sunset their products. This actually happens less than most customers fear, but when it does happen, the results can range from damaging to catastrophic. Therefore, a prudent customer will monitor key technologies and suppliers for potential problems. Fortunately, a failing vendor or product will exhibit telltale signs of coming failure. Led by RSG founder Tony Byrne, this webinar will share ten key "early warning signs," so you can conduct your own risk mitigation accordingly.

Back in the 1990s, there were a few thesaurus management tools available, mainly created for librarian types. This was long before taxonomies and ontologies became popular concepts in the business world. However, as corporate requirements for search and content management have intensified, the market has grown for tools that help organizations create, administer, and publish semantic structures. You can now find multiple, fully featured taxonomy tools, and many have expanded over the years to address additional requirements, such as search enhancement and text mining. Taxonomy management tools are now less of a spreadsheet replacement and more of a key player in an end-to-end solution for tackling content organization challenges.

With rare exceptions, most enterprises do not employ business software "out of the box." Rather, they create applications. Applications are a specialized implementation of a piece of software that achieves a particular business purpose, and they are critical to obtaining value in your specific business environment. However, creating applications requires development expertise, time, and funds. Applications also require configuration management: the process of synchronizing and testing multiple concurrent changes. Yet even with testing, bugs and instability frequently haunt them. SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud-based services obviate only some (but not all) of these challenges.

It's been over 10 years since we first came across SharePoint and so much has changed in that time. Changes both in terms of the products, but also in terms of buyers and market expectations. Alan believes that SharePoint is approaching something of a crossroads, one that users of the platform may be more aware of than Microsoft and its partner channel. The times they are a-changing...and SharePoint has evolved in ways nobody could have expected. The competition, meanwhile, is far from rolling over and giving up. In fact it has adapted remarkably well. Who is buying SharePoint in 2011, why are they buying it and when might this Microsoft steamroller of success finally begin to run out of steam?

When you or your software vendors provide mobile access to business applications, there are two broad choices:

1. Create downloadable applications (or mobile apps) that are optimized for different device/operating system combinations.
2. Create web-based applications (web apps) that target a broader mobile population of browser-enabled devices.

Proponents of web-based apps claim that technologies such as HTML5 will make mobile apps obsolete. There is merit to this argument, but it's not completely valid. Both approaches will continue to coexist, and therefore you need to decide which approaches are suitable for your scenarios. This paper helps you make these choices.
Download this advisory paper here.

SharePoint's licensing structure has always been complicated, and with new variants and options, SharePoint 2010 is no exception. Moreover, with the advent of BPOS and its successor Office 365, you have recourse to new deployment options with distinct licensing models.

Depending on which version of SharePoint you deploy, the licensing cost can range from nearly zero to hundreds of dollars per seat. This is because Microsoft sells several versions of SharePoint, but each version is packaged with different capabilities and licensing schemes. If you don’t understand the varieties, you'll only get half the story.

As a buyer, in order to budget for SharePoint accurately, you need to assess the various levels and deployment options carefully.

It's a fact of business life that software vendors sometimes go out of business or vendors sometimes sunset their products. This actually happens less than most customers fear, but when it does happen, the results can range from damaging to catastrophic. Therefore, a prudent customer will monitor key technologies and suppliers for potential problems.

Fortunately, a failing vendor or open source project will exhibit telltale signs of a coming failure. By identifying these signs as a customer, you can conduct your own risk mitigation accordingly. This paper identifies ten potential warning signs and offers an approach to distinguish between simple technical or business hiccups, and potentially serious trouble. It includes a simple quiz for you to rate likely risk levels among your key technology suppliers.

As of 2011, the search market has been dominated by three big names, Google, Microsoft, and Lucene. The Google Search Appliance continues to sell well at the departmental level within organizations, though clearly there is a greater understanding of the Appliance's limitations than there had been in previous years. Microsoft (via its dominance with Office and SharePoint) has become the de facto search application for many back-office needs, and Lucene has become ubiquitous as an embedded search engine in many products and applications. With these three very different -- yet equally dominant -- search engines on the market, it is challenging to be differentiated and marked as an independent, small search vendor today. We could add a fourth name to the list -- Autonomy, the UK search giant -- but over the last few years (although remaining a formidable force), Autonomy has become better known for acquiring a myriad of companies and essentially becoming a holding firm, with its various products linked together via the IDOL platform, rather than as a major enterprise search vendor.

Compounding all of this is the fact that the enterprise search market can be described (at best) as "slow moving." Although names may change over the years, the underlying technology remains much as it was a decade ago. On the one hand, this is a positive thing, because we have mature, scalable, and well-tested offerings that generally perform well. On the other hand, we have search engines that continue to fall short of end users' expectations, no matter how realistic those expectations are. Many expectations are set in large part by Internet search experiences (via the likes of Google and Bing), which is a very different search paradigm with few of the necessary restrictions or challenges of enterprise search.

We've just published an update to the Enterprise Search Version 4 Report. Version 4 includes updates to the title and Chapters 4 & 5. The Vivisimo Velocity 8.0 Evaluation has also been updated and Harvey Balls are now incorporated into the report.

MarkLogic is a unique platform that can provide impressive, infrastructural services for XML storage and processing. We deliberately don't classify MarkLogic as an enterprise search tool or a content management system (it lacks core content management features, such as versioning and workflow). This paper analyzes why, and despite the fact that MarkLogic has strong search capabilities of its own, we don't recommend it for enterprise search -- or even consider it to be an enterprise search system. Download and read the full Advisory Paper here.

Requests for Information (RFIs) will help you gather information to make better decisions, and eliminate suppliers that cannot or should not be working with you. Download the advisory paper here.

We've just updated many key evaluations in our enterprise search and information access stream: Google, IBM, ISYS, Lucene, Solr, Coveo, SAP, Open Text, Oracle, and Microsoft (which includes our latest take on FAST and SharePoint search). Download the updated chapters and comparison charts here.

We just updated our Search research with new scoring, a fresh view of how the vendors rate against 13 enterprise search use cases. Download here.

Recently released paper makes sense of the very complex world of enterprise software licences. Download the paper here.

New advisory paper contrasts SharePoint 2010 Search with FAST Search services. Download the paper here.