MC+A

Google client solution video featuring Tivo. MC+A was the Partner that implemented this highy effective solutions for Tivo. Enjoy

If you can believe it, it is April already. Time seems to be flying in 2009. This becomes a great lead into the topic for this month. This month’s topic is the time saving search appliance for business. The Google Search Appliance provides a great wealth of information in sub-second speeds.

An analysis of knowledge-workers’ time illustrates the importance of a fully-functioning search appliance for organizations. Without effective and efficient search, half of employees’ time is spent non-productively. This means that for every hour of work, thirty minutes is utilized on: gathering information for documents, converting information from other formats, unsuccessful search for documents, and recreating previously created content. From a management standpoint, knowledge workers should have the information in front of them instantly and be able to use the information productively.

In addition to the wasted time recreating content and changing formats, employees also spend 25% of their time searching. Successful enterprise search should give the users information and they should be spending, on average, 5-10% of their time locating essential information. Ultimately, this means that only about 25% of workers’ time is spent on the core task. Obviously, this is discouraging to any manager or executive.

The problem only gets worse though. With each passing day, month, and year of an organization, the amount of information is exponentially rising. Another study performed by IDC, says that most users do not attribute speed as a factor for their searches. However, with an increased content count and proprietary search slowing down as a consequence, users will drop the search after a few seconds. Users have become used to the Google.com sub-second response time, and assume something is wrong when these results are not produced.

This is not even to mention customer frustrations. When a customer goes to a site, they are expecting to find the product, service, or information quickly. But when a proper search is not in place, studies have shown that individuals will leave the site if search is timely or non-existent. Users will also abandon their searches if it takes too long to produce results. Thus, by decreasing the response time by 30%, an organization can effectively increase customer satisfaction and increase site traffic by 25%. These are impressive numbers.

Time is extremely valuable to organizations of all industries, verticals, and sizes. The more time wasted on searching for content, the less time using that content to create essential information for product launches, documentation of projects, and even customer sales. It is well understood in the global business market and with the speed of business, that both workers and customers know that sub-second results are possible.

If searching and recreating content takes time, and time is money…you can do the math. Happy Searching!

Complexity of the Enterprise

Why is finding what you need so difficult? I have been thinking about why always seem to be the case. Large enterprise rarely just pop up overnight, actually often growing organically, adding functionality and hardware as demands increase. This layered approach while great for scalability and practicality often creates problems around finding, accessing and using the information that is contain within those layered systems. Because information can difficult to find, time is wasted by all members of the team from employees to managers attempting to make decisions. Wasted time is money wasted. Good enterprise search save both.

Simplicity of Google Enterprise Search

Our partnership with Google stems from the fact that the Google Search Appliance (GSA) is simply the most successful solution for bringing simplicity to enterprise search. The GSA is an integrated hardware and software appliance that is packed full of the necessary search algorithms built into it. Think Google in a box. All our customers have needed to do is plug and play. Well actually they typically go a little more like: install appliance behind the firewall, insert an ethernet cable, power up and then specify which repositories the appliance should search. The appliance does the rest, completing a one-time crawl, creating a master index, and performing periodic incremental crawls on a managed schedule to refresh its listings.
That is all out of the box. Good enterprise search is simple, fast and robust.

Universal Search is a Great Solution

From an end-user perspective, the Google Search Appliance provides a comprehensive search experience often described as “Universal Search.” This concept promotes a one stop shop for you search information. Specifically, all information inside the enterprise will be accessed through a single search entry point. The appliance can integrate into many different data sources making for a search boxes that is the destination for connecting to your enterprise data. The universal search concept also allows for less training. Most of your users are familiar with how to use Google’s keyword search paradigm. Again, think Google.com in a box.

Google Search Appliance is designed to ease IT configuration issues. It is pretty simple to deploy and pack full of goodies.

A plug-and-play appliance: On an average deployment you simply rack it, and point it you your documents and the appliance automatic starts indexing

Software does the heavy lifting: You have Google.com in a box. You be able to provide quality results without meta-tags, customization or any need for algorithm re-writing

High level of security: The GSA will filter search results on access permissions. Users only view what they are entitled to view.

Simple to install. Universal search experience for everyone. That should make the ROI focused people happy!

In a recent Tech Target article, Google Android OS on Notebooks, MC+A’s president, Michael Cizmar, who was interviewed for the article expressed his thoughts about the future of Android Operating System.

Michael’s Comments:

“I would say there’s room for another OS,” said Michael Cizmar, president of MC+A, a Chicago custom application development house that works with Google appliances and APIs as well as the iPhone and Windows Mobile. “There will be two platforms. One will be Microsoft, and one will be Android.”

“Android is very attractive to developers because they can use their skills,” Cizmar continued. “The iPhone
is still very closed and requires a special set of skills to develop for. The only reason you go there is because of consumer popularity.”

Read the whole article:
http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid96_gci1352617,00.html

At MC+A, we are always on the lookout for companies implementing cloud computing solutions for their organization. Seeing as how we are Google Enterprise Partners and part of the Google Apps Partnership, it is easy for us to stay current on changes to business technology. Because of our position, we came across a couple of interesting whitepapers about the cloud computing solutions and felt that it would be best to address this in our own way.

The whitepapers are titled: Cloud Computing – Latest Buzzword or Glimpse of the Future? and Cloud Computing – What is its Potential Value for your Company? The first whitepaper analyzes the past, present, and future of computing in “the cloud.” It goes through the market landscape of which companies have, are, and/or would benefit from cloud computing. The analysis is in-depth to the point to give individuals the ability to see both sides of the coin – the benefits and negatives of “the cloud.”

The second whitepaper is more of an overview of organizations and governments who have recently joined the cloud computing revolution. They take four different organizations with four different job functions and analyze each and show the benefits of cloud computing. The results for each are startling (oh yes, they provide a financial benefit outline as well).

For those who are unaware of what cloud computing actually is, it is the ability to take previously in-house hosted solutions and move them into a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider hosting facility. Thus, companies free themselves from the burden of hardware purchasing, technical employee hiring, and license fees. A clever way to put it is to think of personal online banking, web email (like gmail or hotmail), and instant messaging (like AIM) – all done by not installing servers, hardware, or software – being stored in “the cloud” (or not local).

MC+A was extremely interested in these whitepapers and they sure did not disappoint. If you want to take a look at them you can click here.

Please see information on Google’s Support site:

https://support.google.com/enterprise/doc/gsa/00/update_index_page.html

Customers under Sliver & Gold support constracts with MC+A will be contacted regarding upgrading.

One of the most significant improves to the Google Search Appliance over the last couple of years has been in inclusion of the on board appliance database feeder.  With this technology, administrators can create crawls directly against several standard databases.

However, a limitation is that there is only one driver per database.  We’ve had several customers encounter this issue when connecting to DB2 on zOS or the 400.  This is a significant limitation when you are attempting to index your WCS database for something like product catalog search.

We’ve constructed an off appliance database connector that functions very similarly to the appliance.  It’s customizable to be able to use any JDBC connector and any transformation prior to submittal to the appliance.

We’ll be publishing the details shortly on the main website.  Until then, contact usfor more information.

For Immediate Release:
Contact: John Cizmar
media@mcplusa.com

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) March 13, 2009 – With the ever expanding corporate environment into the “enterprise 2.0” and cloud computing, MC+A has once again forged its way into the forefront of business intelligence solutions. MC+A announces the development and release of the new MC+A Physician Finder mashup.

This product will assist individuals locate doctors and physicians with more accuracy and less frustration. “Healthcare Providers are under great pressure to help their customers find the doctor of their choice,” said Michael Cizmar, President of MC+A. “In this product, we have combined two offerings from Google for a unique vertical solution achieving just that.”

With the development of this Physician Finder, MC+A has effectively and efficiently given its clients the ability to provide individuals with the most accurate healthcare information. This new technology brings together actual location of physicians and the information needed to make the best healthcare choices. “Through the use of the Physician Finder technology, end-users can effectively make more appropriate decisions when it comes to their health,” stated Michael Cizmar. Indeed, this new product offers a wide-array of tools, beneficial to all users.

The Physician finder incorporates the Google Search Appliance strength and physical relevancy of Google Maps By putting these two great technologies together, MC+A effectively took the guess work out of choosing a healthcare provider. The search results display the doctor’s name, address, contact information, and what health insurance plans they accept. MC+A desired to create a mashup that was simple to use and provided the greatest end-user advantage.

Some features of the Physician Finder include:

• Multi-language out-of-the-box
• Physician’s name and contact information
• Location context
• Insurance plans accepted
• Advanced Spell-check
• Parametric Filtering
• Advanced key-match
• Query Speed

For more information on the MC+A Physician Finder, please visit:
http://www.mcplusa.com/solutions/collaboration/physician-finder.aspx

About MC+A:
MC+A is dedicated to solving business challenges by enabling organizations to derive maximum value from their business intelligence assets. They provide solutions focused on managing business intelligence and help their clients build, find and share those assets securely. In addition, MC+A provides managed services implementing enterprise 2.0 and cloud computing initiatives.

Last month, I analyzed the Google Search Appliance and its relationship to business intelligence security. The next in this series of best practices for integrating enterprise search is the desire for companies to have knowledgeable workers. People are one of the greatest assets that an organization has. How often are the individuals working within the organization getting the information they need to make intelligent and informed decisions? Are individuals utilizing all the systems that have been integrated to assist in the storing of important information? Can these people find the data in a timely manner?

Many companies have spent millions of dollars to integrate enterprise-wide data storage units which include CRM systems, ECM systems, shared file systems, databases, web servers and many others. Each of these systems performs different functions, but they do share something in common: they store tons of information. As a company grows, so does its document numbers. According to studies done by IDC, content increases by over 80% per year. In addition to that, 66% of companies say they have 5 content repositories or more. With all the development of new data and the multiple locations to store the information are workers really finding the most relevant and beneficial information possible? Probably not.

How are workers finding the correct content to do their jobs more effectively? In many cases, with a multitude of companies, they can’t. Even knowledgeable workers who are hired on to perform a specific task due to their experience in it, they may not be able to find the tools necessary to equate their work with their particular company. What does this mean? Well often times it means duplicated efforts, loss in productivity, and wasted time (which more importantly equates to, uh oh, wasted money). Can a company afford, especially in these financial times, to not be fiscally responsible?

What should a company do in order to prevent this waste? Well multiple companies have implemented enterprise-wide solutions that involve extensive hardware and software implementations. This takes its toll on an organization as well. With the high cost of the technology, the system developers to implement, the administrators to ensure the systems are running properly, and the time to go through the entire development lifecycle, a company can spend literally millions of dollars to deploy. This is not even the greatest of all problems. The question remains: after designing, developing, and deploying the system, is it really going to provide knowledge workers with the correct information? If not, then why start in the first place?

The solution that is both economical and user friendly is the Google Search Appliance. End-users and knowledge workers will definitely benefit from using a system that is just like Google.com. They are already familiar with the user interface and will have no trouble searching for documents behind the firewall instead. Wasted time and efforts will be greatly decreased because the Google Search Appliance will crawl the entire enterprise repositories and find the information they are looking for. How will this happen? Google is the leader in search on the web and they have done so through speed and accuracy of searches. Thousands of developers have tuned the search algorithms to ensure the relevance and the speed of the Google Search Appliance. This means that no time will be wasted within an organization developing and tweaking algorithms to receive the most relevant content.

The Google Search Appliance due to its price, lack of labor needed to install, and end-user friendliness makes it the most powerful and best tool for enterprise search. An organization can really benefit right out the box from the Google Appliances. The knowledge workers will be able to find the information they need to make informed and better decisions without wasting time creating new content (especially since more often than not it has already been created). Business owners, executives, and managers can feel confident that employment decisions were accurate. Knowledge workers rejoice, assistance for projects comes in a little yellow box.

Google Enterprise has released a maintenance release of the software. Some minor fixes have been included. You can download the update at:

https://support.google.com/enterprise/

with the login credentials provided in your welcome email. If you are under a maintenance contract, MC+A Support will be contacting you to schedule your update. If you need assistance with the release, contact MC+A support or Google support.