MC+A

Most likely, you have heard this saying before, but have you really thought about what it really means?

Quite frankly, there are times when I have felt like it would be better when I win and the other party loses. This may be true in cheering for your favorite sports team or even more so if you are on the team. However, in business, it’s different. Think about it. Do you really want the cheapest price? Or would it be more accurate to say you want the best value?

Before you answer, think about this.

Cheapest price = short term actual cash leaving your company’s balance sheet and going to the company you are buying’s balance sheet. If short term is ALL that you are interested in, then this may be a good philosophy. Granted, in business, the “what have you done for me lately” philosophy will always be a factor. But, more importantly for most of us, we want and need to be a going concern for the long term. With this in mind, my argument for having a win / win philosophy fits the business model more appropriately. Let’s say that your company can buy a widget from “The CP (Cheapest Price) company” or from “The BV (Best Value) company”. Buying from the CP company, like I mentioned before, means the least out of your Cash Account……for now. What about the support that you need later? Is it possible for a company to sell at the cheapest price AND to be able to pay a competent support person to provide you support later when you need it? Good luck, you’ll probably be on your own, wasting time and money. One step further, will they even be in business for you to contact them?

Let’s take your company’s need to implement a GSA, Workshare, or Connectbeam solution. That’s where MC + A becomes the BV company. You could buy the GSA, for instance, from a reseller and pay your IT professionals their salary (time and opportunity cost) to figure out a basically one time, one use implementation and not know if you are getting the full capability out of your GSA… or you could engage MC+A and have your GSA up and running, using very little of your own IT resources and know very confidently that you are making the most of your new GSA purchase in as little as a few days.

That’s win / win.

It is interesting to see another year come and go. In the waning months of 2008, it was great to get involved in such a versatile and needed industry. Over the past couple months the importance of the Google Search Appliance and what it can do for companies, has really come into focus for me.

With each passing day, more and more documents are created, modified and deleted. When end users are going through the documents that make their workday easier, it is important for them to know whether documents have been altered in anyway. Corporate information security is particularly analyzed and scrutinized by both legal and IT departments. So would it not be beneficial for employees to know if documents are the most relevant or now out-of-date? The Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini assist end users much the way Google helps internet users find the sites they are looking for online.

For the new year, I have set out to do a best practices analysis of companies that utilize the Google Search Appliance (aka GSA) or the Google Mini. My blog post will be what I will call a “secular” (or non-IT) analysis of the Google Search Appliance and which companies would benefit most from this outstanding and adaptable technology.

What are your company’s most important needs? Most managers and executives would agree with a 5 simple answers: information security (also known as data leak prevention), knowledgeable workers, timeliness, effective and efficient task completion, and great customer service. The amazing aspect of the Google Search Appliance (GSA) and the Google Mini (as well as other products offered by MC+A) is that it can assist, if not alter, all of these important business facets.

In upcoming blog posts, I will go through each of these business needs and analyze in depth how the Google Search Appliance and/or the Google Mini can help with each of these areas. I hope that you have a great New Year and that 2009 brings market growth and with it a healthy bottom line.

Full Article:
http://www.crn.com/software/21290062

Michael was interviewed by crn.com for an article posted today. CRN’s article covers the growing Google Partner channel and how it compares to Microsoft robust partner channel.

Keypoints

• Google believes their new reseller program for Google Apps Premier will put them on par with Microsoft, as a channel vendor
• Google has been open and willing to included partner feedback moving forward.
• As a Partner, MC+A has observed Googles williness to educate partners, and pass on leads.

The Quote:
“Google has been very helpful in educating the partner community and providing training, marketing and lead referrals,” Cizmar said. “We’ve encountered no channel conflict.”

As always, if you have any questions about Google, SharePoint or how we can help you more efficiently integrate those or other technologies for your business, contact us at sales@mcplusa.com.

In this difficult economic environment, it’s easy to see why many companies will look to slash 2009 IT budgets in an effort to reduce costs and streamline operations. While this may be justifiable in some instances, it shouldn’t be a given that IT is a wise area in which to cut spending.

Case in point:  In a recent keynote address at the Gartner Symposium/IT Expo, John Chambers stated that Cisco will increase its IT budget for 2009 as they look to increase productivity and cut travel expenses through the use of collaboration tools. Chambers noted that internal use of collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies has helped Cisco save over $150 million on travel costs. In addition, Chambers said that IT managers need to look closely at the use of blogging and video collaboration as a way to reduce long term expenses and gain near term competitive advantage (source:eWeek).

Other leading companies are doing the same. Difficulty breeds distinction, and as the saying aptly states, “When the tide goes out, it’s easy to see who’s been swimming naked”.

In short, companies that view IT as a strategic business enabler that can reduce overall costs and increase productivity are using this economic downturn to ramp up innovation and take market share from less savvy competitors who are forced into slash and burn mode.

While cutting IT costs now may seem to be an easy short-term band-aid, it most likely will have negative long- term consequences as stronger, more able competitors use the mismatch to leapfrog ahead. By the time the business environment actually improves, most of the weak players will be too far behind to catch up.

Undoubtedly, this is one of the most challenging business environments in decades. In spite of these challenges, however, it is also a time when great companies will seek to turn short-term obstacles into long-term opportunities.

About MC+A:
MC+A is a leading IT solutions provider.  We work with clients seeking to leverage and extract the business value of a well planned IT strategy. Our core focus includes helping companies create, find, share, and protect their business intelligence assets in a way that reduces overall costs, improves efficiency, and drives more revenue to the bottom line.  For more information, please contact us.

I recently attended a Workshare training/demonstration at Microsoft’s Chicago campus and was impressed with the product. The Workshare product suite is great for securing your company’s intellectual property and other critical data. Workshare just recently released a network appliance that is designed to sit between your company’s intranet and the Internet acting as a gatekeeper. It can function as a MTA or just passively monitor your network traffic.

The appliance uses policies, created by the admin, to determine what characteristics to look for in emails, IMs, data transfers, and more. If it finds any of these characteristics the appliance puts a halt to the transmission. I am excited that we have decided to partner with them. MC+A will be implementing Workshare across our network. You can find a little more information on Workshare and Information Leakage here:
http://www.workshare.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_loss_prevention_products

An update was released last week for the Google Search Appliance. Version 5.2 has been updated and released for the GB-1001. It also contains some bug fixes from the previous version as well.

Below are a list of version 5.2 includes the following features (Copied from here).  A detail of the fixes in the release can be found here.

The latest Google Search Appliance gives users secure access to more content sources, with enhanced search quality and new user interface options.

End User Features

Personalized Search Experience
Allow administrators to adjust search results for different user groups, based on department or function.

Alerts
Employees can subscribe to email alerts for topics and documents of interest, choosing an hourly, daily, or weekly schedule.

Spellchecker in Six New Languages
French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch.

Enterprise Content

Languages
Restrict search results to any of 27 auto-detected languages including administrative functions in five new languages (Czech, English-UK, Portuguese-Portugal, Turkish, Vietnamese); contextual spell checking for all end users in Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch.

Security and Access Control

Kerberos Support
Provide native support for Kerberos, enabling a silent authentication experience for end-users.

Metadata Biasing
Administrators can bias results based on metadata (in addition to biasing based on source, URL or date).

Advanced Reporting
View and export daily and hourly result sets, top queries, special feature usage, and more. Report for every query, including reports on which queries receive no clicks by a user and how often users are clicking on sponsored links in comparison to organic search results or OneBox modules.

Administration and Customization

Localized Administration
Administer your Google Search Appliance around the globe in 27 different languages. Full administration is now supported in Basque, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US), English (UK), Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Two weeks ago MC+A did a webinar on using a Google Search Appliance (GSA) to index product catalog data.  The demonstration was developed to showcase how effective Google search technology can be added to a public facing website search.  Jason Wasserman from boats.net joined us on the call.  I recommend visiting their site to see great example of the technology in production use ( and for all of your OEM Yamaha and Honda marine parts).  This post is a detailing of how we built the example site for the demonstration.

Content Acquisition

Product catalog information provides some challenges because skus vary greatly from product line to product line.  Many times there are white space characters such as ‘-’ or ‘_’ in the sku name.  By default, when the search engine indexes these documents, the skus will be tokenized so that the single sku will become multiple keywords.  Additional, meta data values become significant when a user would like to filter based on structured information.

The GSA has two effective means for this.  First there is the Google web crawler and navigator your site hierarchy and find all of the documents very much like the Google.com crawlers do.  Second, the GSA comes with a database crawler that queries the database directly, indexes the result set and provide a direct link to the document.  There are some benefits for each approach.    Specifically,

Web Crawler

• The Web Crawler acts similarly to the public crawlers.  Improvements to it will positively effect your public search ranking.
• Utilizing the Web Crawler requires no direct access to the database by the GSA.
• Search Engine Optimizations performed for improving the GSA search quality will also positively effectively your public search results.
• Meta data can be added via meta data tag anywhere in the content (i.e. <meta name=”price” content=”12.95″)

Database Crawler

• Very fast reindexing.  (Jason mentioned his 1.5 million documents get indexed in 20 minutes.)
• The content that is indexed is limited to the query result and very specific to the product content.   We say that it has limited ‘noise’ or interference.
• You can add meta data per column of the result set.  This does not have to be included in your public content.
• Customization on how the content is index via the dbstylesheet.

For the purpose of the demonstration we choose the db crawler.  We set up a commerce website at http://catalog.mcplusa-dev.com.  It is a fresh install of OS Commerce.  OS Commerce by default uses product keys as the url.  This is a less effective way to reference a document.  For example, http://catalog.mcplusa-dev.com/product_info.php?products_id=1 would be better if it were http://catalog.mcplusa-dev.com/graphics/Matrox_G200_MMS.  There are url rewriters for most standard commerce products that help you achieve this.

Here's the out of the box installation of OS Commerce

Step 1: Setting up the Database Crawler

For the purposes of the webinar we set up a simple query based on the schema of  OS Commerce.  We create a Google Search Appliance data source with the following settings:

1. Database Type: MySQL
2. Host name: the Ip address of the server
3. Port: 3306
4. DatabaseName/UserName/Password: Specific to the db
5. Crawl Query:
   

   select products_description.products_name, products.*, manufacturers.manufacturers_name, products_description.products_description, concat(‘http://catalog.mcplusa-dev.com/product_info.php?products_id=’, cast(products.products_id as char)) as url from
   products inner join products_description
   inner join manufacturers on products_description.products_id = products.products_id and
   manufacturers.manufacturers_id = products.manufacturers_id
   where products_description.language_id =1

6. DB StyleSheet: dbstylesheet_catalog_testxsl This xsl was written by John Gregory a couple of years ago.  Its better than the on board stylesheet because it changes the title to the first column returned from your query and it makes each column a meta data field.
7. Serve URL Field (Radio Checked): “Url”  Url is a computed column in the result set and links directly to the product page.

Basic configuration of the Database Crawler

Step 2: Setting Up the Collection

The set up of the collection was pretty straight forward.  We set the url pattern to be: http://catalog.mcplusa-dev.com
Content Serving
We create a separate GSA frontend for this demonstration and added several tool-kits to it.  The first one we added was parametric navigation.  This toolkit allows you to filter your result set based on meta data.  Secondly, we added Search As you Type open source toolkit.  Following the instructions in each toolkit we were able to build the front end in about 20 minutes (and it probably shows ).

Search Results with Parametric and Search As You Type

Conclusion

We’ve demonstrated the steps necessary to effectively implement the Google Search Appliance for a product catalog.  Customers of ours who have used these steps have seen conversion rates increase 3 fold using the search compared to those who have not.   Feel free to contact us should you have any additional questions.

MC+A is proud to announce the launch of it’s online store. The store will allow for streamlined purchasing of our hardware and software solutions.

MC+A President, Michael Cizmar welcomed the stores launch. “We are extremely excited about the store coming online. It should allow for a streamline purchasing experience for our clients and expand our reach in the marketplace.”

You can visit our store at: http://stop.mcplusa.com

Earlier this week, a client asked me to investigate a spamming issue that they were concerned about the origination of the emails.  Upon first glance it appeared that the emails were coming from their email address.  After examining the message header, it was clear that it was not.  I foolishly sent an email out to demonstrate what was happening.  Unknowingly, I added myself to the list and inadvertently sent a message to thousands of people.

This post is to help spread information about the cause for people affected by it.  Also, people facing other issues can uses the same techniques.

The Problem

• Spam emails were being generated from and to info@worldswidedomains.com
• Replying to this address caused your name to be added to the list server and an email went out to everyone’s name who had previously been added to the list.
• Most people on the list were added manually without their knowing.

Resolution

FIRST
Find out who the domain is registered to by going to: http://whois.domaintools.com/worldswidedomainname.com (you can replace the worldswidedomainname.com for other domains).  This produced the following information.

Registrant:
Alex Shafts
504 LEONARD AV
Las Vegas, NV 89106
US
Domain name: WORLDSWIDEDOMAINNAME.COM

Administrative Contact:
Shafts, Alex  
504 LEONARD AV
Las Vegas, NV 89106
US
702.5431469
Technical Contact:
Shafts, Alex  
504 LEONARD AV
Las Vegas, NV 89106
US
702.5431469
Registration Service Provider:
Ecommerce, Inc., 
800-861-9394

http://ecommerce.com

UNLIMITED Storage Space, 3 TERRABYTES of Monthly Transfer & up-to 16
domains, starting at $3.95!

LIFETIME FREE DOMAIN REGISTRATION + FREE FEATURES INCLUDED. ONLY AT
ECOMMERCE.COM

Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 24-Oct-2008.
Record expires on 25-Oct-2009.
Record created on 25-Oct-2008.

Registrar Domain Name Help Center:

http://domainhelp.tucows.com

Domain servers in listed order:
NS16.IXWEBHOSTING.COM
NS15.IXWEBHOSTING.COM

Domain status: clientHold
clientTransferProhibited
clientUpdateProhibited

SECOND
Next I looked up the MX record.  The MX record is a type of domain record that tells people looking to send you an email where to send it.  On most computers there is a command called nslookup.  Open a command prompt and type nslookup.  Next type the ‘set type=MX’ so that you’ll look up the MX record.  Then type in the domain you are looking for.

Based on this and the emails I received.  I contacted ixwebhosting.com.  They have assured me that the domain was suspended.

The question remains…who is “Shafts, Alex” and is this the mail address we should send to:

504 LEONARD AV
Las Vegas, NV 89106
US
702.5431469

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Last year we assisted our customer Legal Services of Northern California with our JumpStart service. It has been nearly a year and I am happy to see how much they’ve come along. They’ve recently launched a website showcasing their project.

Their Findability Project is the public face of a special technology search project undertaken by Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC), a legal services program assisting low-income clients in 23 counties in the upper third of California. Made possible by a grant from the LSC Technology Initiative Grant Program, the goal of the project is to implement a Google Enterprise Search Appliance as the principal building block of a modest but secure, well structured, fully web accessible knowledge-content system. If you have some time please read up on their initiative. If you are interested in how we can help you please contact us.