Autonomy automation
Autonomy, the search specialist, has unveiled Autonomy ControlPoint, a compliance solution for organisations running Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. It is designed to automate the otherwise cumbersome process of searching for documents stored in SharePoint and tagging them to comply with corporate, legal and regulatory standards for document retention. ControlPoint can understand more than 1,000 different file types and can search across all the SharePoint servers and other repositories located on a corporate network.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products
Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products
In the 2008 Portal Magic Quadrant, Microsoft remained in the Leaders quadrant, moving a great deal towards the right on the vision axis and closing the gap between us and IBM. We were placed on the same level for the ability to execute axis as last year. We are also ahead of Oracle and SAS in both vision and ability to execute, exhibiting momentum against them as well.
Gartner gives Microsoft credit for the explosive demand SharePoint has experienced over the past year, listing SharePoint’s significant adoption by enterprises as a strength. In fact, SharePoint’s explosive growth is also referenced in the market overview section, offering yet another proof point of the significant impact the product has made in the industry.
Gartner also calls out that Microsoft is successfully fostering deployments through Enterprise licensing agreements, use as team-based collaboration document management driving use for other initiatives, as well as SharePoint Online as a SaaS horizontal portal as being key strengths for the company.
http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article2/article2.html
In the 2008 Portal Magic Quadrant, Microsoft remained in the Leaders quadrant, moving a great deal towards the right on the vision axis and closing the gap between us and IBM. We were placed on the same level for the ability to execute axis as last year. We are also ahead of Oracle and SAS in both vision and ability to execute, exhibiting momentum against them as well.
Gartner gives Microsoft credit for the explosive demand SharePoint has experienced over the past year, listing SharePoint’s significant adoption by enterprises as a strength. In fact, SharePoint’s explosive growth is also referenced in the market overview section, offering yet another proof point of the significant impact the product has made in the industry.
Gartner also calls out that Microsoft is successfully fostering deployments through Enterprise licensing agreements, use as team-based collaboration document management driving use for other initiatives, as well as SharePoint Online as a SaaS horizontal portal as being key strengths for the company.
http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article2/article2.html
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Microsoft looks to cloud to open new windows
Microsoft looks to cloud to open new windows
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: October 23 2008 19:43 | Last updated: October 23 2008 21:43
After years of hesitation, Microsoft is finally ready to take a big leap into the world of internet-based computing.
That, at least, has been the message for much of this year from senior executives, including chief executive Steve Ballmer.
The wraps are set to be taken off at a conference that the company is throwing for software developers in Los Angeles that starts on Monday.
Depending on what it has up its sleeve, Microsoft’s move could propel it into a new internet-based approach to computing that has become all the talk of the tech world.
Known as “cloud computing”, this involves a greater centralisation of processing power and information storage in large networks of datacentres.
Rather than relying on computing power from corporate servers or desktop PCs, applications and services created in this new “cloud” are delivered over the internet and often accessed through a simple web browser.
If Microsoft fails to lay out a compelling plan for how it will adapt to this new world, however, it would add to a nagging concern among investors and customers that the company is falling behind in the biggest transition to hit information technology in years – and could further open the door to rivals.
“The market is going to look for something big,” said Frank Gens, a technology analyst at IDC.
“If they do it in dribs and drabs, if they come out with a half-hearted ‘cloud’ deployment, it will open the way for IBM, or for Amazon and Google.”
The software company has already hinted at what it has up its sleeve.
Mr Ballmer recently promised that next week will bring an “operating system that runs in the internet” – something he dubbed “Windows Cloud”.
The clear message: having dominated the PC-era of computing, Microsoft believes it is now ready to move to a new arena.
Microsoft’s attempt to reposition its core software reflects a broader change that is forcing all the big tech companies to rethink their approach.
“Platform shifts like this come along every 15 or 20 years,” said Sean Poulley, vice-president of cloud services for IBM’s software division.
Tech executives argue over how new this trend really is or how quickly it will take hold, but generally agree on its significance.
In the consumer world, advertising-supported internet services like those offered by Google have already won a big following.
Corporate IT departments, which account for the lion’s share of the tech business, have started to inch towards a similar approach.
About 4 per cent of IT budgets are currently spent on the business applications, infrastructure software, servers and storage technologies that support cloud computing, according to IDC.
But by 2012, with the share up to 9 per cent, spending on this new approach to technology will account for a quarter of the annual growth in technology spending, making it an important new market for the entire industry.
Much of the attention around cloud computing so far has focused on services, such as Google’s online word-processing service or the corporate applications from Salesforce.com.
Microsoft’s announcement next week, however, will shift the focus back to the guts of the technology behind this shift: the infrastructure of datacentres that supports it, and the software “operating system” that supports online services, in much the way that the current Windows PC operating system supports applications that run on a PC.
The scramble to win a piece of this new market is in its early stages. “There will be a number of years when there will be a lot of competition and confusion,” said Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch, a recent book about the coming transition. “Over time, I think it will resolve to a small number of platforms.”
Big IT suppliers like IBM on the one hand, and internet companies like Amazon have already dipped their toe in this water.
As the technology industry’s pre-eminent “platform” company, Microsoft’s promised move has attracted considerable anticipation.
The biggest question that has hung over Microsoft, and the one to which next week’s event may provide an answer: how far, and how fast, will the company push as it reorientates its business around the web?
This is largely an economic decision.
Microsoft’s current highly lucrative business relies on sales of PC and server software, mainly to business customers.
If these customers turn away from that computing approach and instead buy services delivered from the “cloud”, often at low monthly subscription rates based on how much they use, it could undermine the company’s core business model, said Mr Gens.
To compensate for that, Microsoft will have to run fast to create new markets for cloud-based services, for instance among small businesses and consumers, as well as in emerging markets, he added.
Oracle dismisses development as a fad
Larry Ellison, the outspoken head of Oracle, recently dismissed cloud computing as little more than a fad.
Many of the technologies included under these latest buzz words, he said, have long been in use.
“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion,” Mr Ellison said, though he added Oracle would adopt the phrase in its own marketing if it helped sales.
His cynicism points to two commonly-held complaints about cloud computing.
One is that this is merely a new term for a vision that has been around for years – even decades.
“Thin” computing, utility computing, application service providers, on demand computing, software-as-a-service: plenty of jargon has been invented before to describe the long-promised shift of computing on to a more efficient infrastructure of centralised servers.
The second complaint is that in the past, all of these supposedly revolutionary advances have come up short.
Computing still takes place as much on local “clients” – principally PCs – as on servers.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: October 23 2008 19:43 | Last updated: October 23 2008 21:43
After years of hesitation, Microsoft is finally ready to take a big leap into the world of internet-based computing.
That, at least, has been the message for much of this year from senior executives, including chief executive Steve Ballmer.
The wraps are set to be taken off at a conference that the company is throwing for software developers in Los Angeles that starts on Monday.
Depending on what it has up its sleeve, Microsoft’s move could propel it into a new internet-based approach to computing that has become all the talk of the tech world.
Known as “cloud computing”, this involves a greater centralisation of processing power and information storage in large networks of datacentres.
Rather than relying on computing power from corporate servers or desktop PCs, applications and services created in this new “cloud” are delivered over the internet and often accessed through a simple web browser.
If Microsoft fails to lay out a compelling plan for how it will adapt to this new world, however, it would add to a nagging concern among investors and customers that the company is falling behind in the biggest transition to hit information technology in years – and could further open the door to rivals.
“The market is going to look for something big,” said Frank Gens, a technology analyst at IDC.
“If they do it in dribs and drabs, if they come out with a half-hearted ‘cloud’ deployment, it will open the way for IBM, or for Amazon and Google.”
The software company has already hinted at what it has up its sleeve.
Mr Ballmer recently promised that next week will bring an “operating system that runs in the internet” – something he dubbed “Windows Cloud”.
The clear message: having dominated the PC-era of computing, Microsoft believes it is now ready to move to a new arena.
Microsoft’s attempt to reposition its core software reflects a broader change that is forcing all the big tech companies to rethink their approach.
“Platform shifts like this come along every 15 or 20 years,” said Sean Poulley, vice-president of cloud services for IBM’s software division.
Tech executives argue over how new this trend really is or how quickly it will take hold, but generally agree on its significance.
In the consumer world, advertising-supported internet services like those offered by Google have already won a big following.
Corporate IT departments, which account for the lion’s share of the tech business, have started to inch towards a similar approach.
About 4 per cent of IT budgets are currently spent on the business applications, infrastructure software, servers and storage technologies that support cloud computing, according to IDC.
But by 2012, with the share up to 9 per cent, spending on this new approach to technology will account for a quarter of the annual growth in technology spending, making it an important new market for the entire industry.
Much of the attention around cloud computing so far has focused on services, such as Google’s online word-processing service or the corporate applications from Salesforce.com.
Microsoft’s announcement next week, however, will shift the focus back to the guts of the technology behind this shift: the infrastructure of datacentres that supports it, and the software “operating system” that supports online services, in much the way that the current Windows PC operating system supports applications that run on a PC.
The scramble to win a piece of this new market is in its early stages. “There will be a number of years when there will be a lot of competition and confusion,” said Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch, a recent book about the coming transition. “Over time, I think it will resolve to a small number of platforms.”
Big IT suppliers like IBM on the one hand, and internet companies like Amazon have already dipped their toe in this water.
As the technology industry’s pre-eminent “platform” company, Microsoft’s promised move has attracted considerable anticipation.
The biggest question that has hung over Microsoft, and the one to which next week’s event may provide an answer: how far, and how fast, will the company push as it reorientates its business around the web?
This is largely an economic decision.
Microsoft’s current highly lucrative business relies on sales of PC and server software, mainly to business customers.
If these customers turn away from that computing approach and instead buy services delivered from the “cloud”, often at low monthly subscription rates based on how much they use, it could undermine the company’s core business model, said Mr Gens.
To compensate for that, Microsoft will have to run fast to create new markets for cloud-based services, for instance among small businesses and consumers, as well as in emerging markets, he added.
Oracle dismisses development as a fad
Larry Ellison, the outspoken head of Oracle, recently dismissed cloud computing as little more than a fad.
Many of the technologies included under these latest buzz words, he said, have long been in use.
“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion,” Mr Ellison said, though he added Oracle would adopt the phrase in its own marketing if it helped sales.
His cynicism points to two commonly-held complaints about cloud computing.
One is that this is merely a new term for a vision that has been around for years – even decades.
“Thin” computing, utility computing, application service providers, on demand computing, software-as-a-service: plenty of jargon has been invented before to describe the long-promised shift of computing on to a more efficient infrastructure of centralised servers.
The second complaint is that in the past, all of these supposedly revolutionary advances have come up short.
Computing still takes place as much on local “clients” – principally PCs – as on servers.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
A culture of security (FT.com)
A culture of security
By Lee Hezzlewood
Published: October 21 2008 15:55 | Last updated: October 21 2008 15:55
Data loss by major organisations keeps on happening. Why? The simple answer is that many organisations don’t have a “culture of security”.
Virtually all have passwords or biometric security to control access to systems, and swipe cards and high fences to control physical access, plus vetting of staff to check backgrounds and criminal connections. But not enough engender a culture of security with all staff, encouraging them to be aware of how security interacts with their day-to-day role, how they have a responsibility for the security of the information they work with, and how to protect that information and themselves.
As an IT security consultant, I am constantly assessing the security implications of a particular course of action – will this change affect the security of a system, does that person or role need that information, does the data need to be sanitised before being distributed, and so on.
While staff within an organisation should not go around constantly looking over their shoulders, organisations should be proactive in educating their staff about security. Teaching staff the basics should be as important as showing them the fire escapes and the canteen.
So why not add a security awareness element to staff induction processes? The program should be informative, educational, fun, and interactive for it to make an impact. Merely getting to staff to read and sign security policies is not enough. Few people will remember them and even fewer are unlikely ever to review them.
Existing staff need to go through a similar process on a regular basis as part of their annual review to ensure everyone has the same security grounding and a mechanism for continual improvement and assessment.
Hold open workshops or intranet forums designed to promote a security culture and raise awareness of specific topics. Make them interactive and encourage open and frank debate. Get staff to recommend improvements in security and have topical discussions on relevant news items. Try discussing how your organisation could fall victim to a security incident and what steps you could take to stop it happening.
It is vital, though, not to bore staff or patronise them. But educating them about security will raise their awareness of the risks and threats to them and the organisation and reduce your risk profile. A regular programme will keep the knowledge fresh and ensure staff are informed of new issues or changes to procedures.
Staff are the eyes and ears on the ground. With the right education and encouragement they can provide a valuable resource in preventing security incidents and perhaps reduce the chances of their organisation being the next news headline.
Lee Hezzlewood is an IT security consultant with Pentest Limited
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Lee Hezzlewood
Published: October 21 2008 15:55 | Last updated: October 21 2008 15:55
Data loss by major organisations keeps on happening. Why? The simple answer is that many organisations don’t have a “culture of security”.
Virtually all have passwords or biometric security to control access to systems, and swipe cards and high fences to control physical access, plus vetting of staff to check backgrounds and criminal connections. But not enough engender a culture of security with all staff, encouraging them to be aware of how security interacts with their day-to-day role, how they have a responsibility for the security of the information they work with, and how to protect that information and themselves.
As an IT security consultant, I am constantly assessing the security implications of a particular course of action – will this change affect the security of a system, does that person or role need that information, does the data need to be sanitised before being distributed, and so on.
While staff within an organisation should not go around constantly looking over their shoulders, organisations should be proactive in educating their staff about security. Teaching staff the basics should be as important as showing them the fire escapes and the canteen.
So why not add a security awareness element to staff induction processes? The program should be informative, educational, fun, and interactive for it to make an impact. Merely getting to staff to read and sign security policies is not enough. Few people will remember them and even fewer are unlikely ever to review them.
Existing staff need to go through a similar process on a regular basis as part of their annual review to ensure everyone has the same security grounding and a mechanism for continual improvement and assessment.
Hold open workshops or intranet forums designed to promote a security culture and raise awareness of specific topics. Make them interactive and encourage open and frank debate. Get staff to recommend improvements in security and have topical discussions on relevant news items. Try discussing how your organisation could fall victim to a security incident and what steps you could take to stop it happening.
It is vital, though, not to bore staff or patronise them. But educating them about security will raise their awareness of the risks and threats to them and the organisation and reduce your risk profile. A regular programme will keep the knowledge fresh and ensure staff are informed of new issues or changes to procedures.
Staff are the eyes and ears on the ground. With the right education and encouragement they can provide a valuable resource in preventing security incidents and perhaps reduce the chances of their organisation being the next news headline.
Lee Hezzlewood is an IT security consultant with Pentest Limited
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Outlook upbeat for Autonomy (FT.com)
Outlook upbeat for Autonomy
By Philip Stafford
Published: October 15 2008 18:02 | Last updated: October 15 2008 18:02
Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy, predicted business for the search software company would remain strong for the rest of the year in spite of the economic slowdown.
As the group unveiled earnings at the top of expectations, Mr Lynch said most purchases were made due to regulatory-driven demand from banks and financial authorities, with both often gearing up for potential lawsuits.
“After death and taxes, the next best bet is litigation,” Mr Lynch joked. “We’re seeing sales up 300 per cent there.” He added that he was “comfortable” with the group’s outlook.
Autonomy had already announced it expected record third-quarter results as it benefited from a US legal decision at the start of the year, which ruled that lawyers had just 99 days to decide what electronic data could be used as evidence in a lawsuit. Autonomy’s products help businesses archive and retrieve materials such as e-mails and phone calls. The financial crisis and consolidations of banks during the past six weeks had helped business, Mr Lynch added.
Like many companies in the IT sector, shares in Autonomy have been hit by concerns of a broader economic slowdown.
But Rajeev Bahl, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, said: “The stock has everything you’d want, from revenue growth to rising margins, strong cash flow and a decent backlog – it ticks all the boxes.
“It’s just that the multiple the market is willing to pay for growth stocks has come down.”
Third-quarter revenues to September 30 rose 42 per cent to $127m. Pre-tax profit increased 162 per cent to $47.8m, while earnings per share rose from $0.06 to $0.16.
The average selling price for Autonomy’s technology was $395,000, up from $375,000. Shares in the company closed up 1p at 829p.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Philip Stafford
Published: October 15 2008 18:02 | Last updated: October 15 2008 18:02
Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy, predicted business for the search software company would remain strong for the rest of the year in spite of the economic slowdown.
As the group unveiled earnings at the top of expectations, Mr Lynch said most purchases were made due to regulatory-driven demand from banks and financial authorities, with both often gearing up for potential lawsuits.
“After death and taxes, the next best bet is litigation,” Mr Lynch joked. “We’re seeing sales up 300 per cent there.” He added that he was “comfortable” with the group’s outlook.
Autonomy had already announced it expected record third-quarter results as it benefited from a US legal decision at the start of the year, which ruled that lawyers had just 99 days to decide what electronic data could be used as evidence in a lawsuit. Autonomy’s products help businesses archive and retrieve materials such as e-mails and phone calls. The financial crisis and consolidations of banks during the past six weeks had helped business, Mr Lynch added.
Like many companies in the IT sector, shares in Autonomy have been hit by concerns of a broader economic slowdown.
But Rajeev Bahl, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, said: “The stock has everything you’d want, from revenue growth to rising margins, strong cash flow and a decent backlog – it ticks all the boxes.
“It’s just that the multiple the market is willing to pay for growth stocks has come down.”
Third-quarter revenues to September 30 rose 42 per cent to $127m. Pre-tax profit increased 162 per cent to $47.8m, while earnings per share rose from $0.06 to $0.16.
The average selling price for Autonomy’s technology was $395,000, up from $375,000. Shares in the company closed up 1p at 829p.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Outlook upbeat for Autonomy (FT.com)
Outlook upbeat for Autonomy
By Philip Stafford
Published: October 15 2008 18:02 | Last updated: October 15 2008 18:02
Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy, predicted business for the search software company would remain strong for the rest of the year in spite of the economic slowdown.
As the group unveiled earnings at the top of expectations, Mr Lynch said most purchases were made due to regulatory-driven demand from banks and financial authorities, with both often gearing up for potential lawsuits.
“After death and taxes, the next best bet is litigation,” Mr Lynch joked. “We’re seeing sales up 300 per cent there.” He added that he was “comfortable” with the group’s outlook.
Autonomy had already announced it expected record third-quarter results as it benefited from a US legal decision at the start of the year, which ruled that lawyers had just 99 days to decide what electronic data could be used as evidence in a lawsuit. Autonomy’s products help businesses archive and retrieve materials such as e-mails and phone calls. The financial crisis and consolidations of banks during the past six weeks had helped business, Mr Lynch added.
Like many companies in the IT sector, shares in Autonomy have been hit by concerns of a broader economic slowdown.
But Rajeev Bahl, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, said: “The stock has everything you’d want, from revenue growth to rising margins, strong cash flow and a decent backlog – it ticks all the boxes.
“It’s just that the multiple the market is willing to pay for growth stocks has come down.”
Third-quarter revenues to September 30 rose 42 per cent to $127m. Pre-tax profit increased 162 per cent to $47.8m, while earnings per share rose from $0.06 to $0.16.
The average selling price for Autonomy’s technology was $395,000, up from $375,000. Shares in the company closed up 1p at 829p.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Philip Stafford
Published: October 15 2008 18:02 | Last updated: October 15 2008 18:02
Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy, predicted business for the search software company would remain strong for the rest of the year in spite of the economic slowdown.
As the group unveiled earnings at the top of expectations, Mr Lynch said most purchases were made due to regulatory-driven demand from banks and financial authorities, with both often gearing up for potential lawsuits.
“After death and taxes, the next best bet is litigation,” Mr Lynch joked. “We’re seeing sales up 300 per cent there.” He added that he was “comfortable” with the group’s outlook.
Autonomy had already announced it expected record third-quarter results as it benefited from a US legal decision at the start of the year, which ruled that lawyers had just 99 days to decide what electronic data could be used as evidence in a lawsuit. Autonomy’s products help businesses archive and retrieve materials such as e-mails and phone calls. The financial crisis and consolidations of banks during the past six weeks had helped business, Mr Lynch added.
Like many companies in the IT sector, shares in Autonomy have been hit by concerns of a broader economic slowdown.
But Rajeev Bahl, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, said: “The stock has everything you’d want, from revenue growth to rising margins, strong cash flow and a decent backlog – it ticks all the boxes.
“It’s just that the multiple the market is willing to pay for growth stocks has come down.”
Third-quarter revenues to September 30 rose 42 per cent to $127m. Pre-tax profit increased 162 per cent to $47.8m, while earnings per share rose from $0.06 to $0.16.
The average selling price for Autonomy’s technology was $395,000, up from $375,000. Shares in the company closed up 1p at 829p.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Friday, October 10, 2008
Liferay Leads Market as Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant
Leading Open Source Portal Recognized for its Completeness of Vision
Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, September 2008
New entrants provide additional options for enterprises willing to consider open-source and software-as-a-service alternatives for horizontal portal functionality. To differentiate their offerings, horizontal portal vendors are incorporating support for enterprise mashups and social networking.
Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, September 2008
This Magic Quadrant assesses vendors with capabilities that go beyond enterprise search to encompass a range of technologies. Their capabilities include search; federated search, content classification, categorization and clustering; fact and entity extraction; taxonomy creation and management; information presentation (for example, visualization) to support analysis and understanding; and desktop search to address user-controlled repositories in order to locate and "invoke" documents, data, e-mail and intelligence.
We consider all enterprise search vendors to be information access technology vendors. However, those that only offer search capabilities (frequently called "keyword search") are neither Visionaries nor candidates for the Leaders quadrant, although they are part of the market. Finding information, and acting on it intelligently, demands increasingly sophisticated and innovative strategies and technologies.
We recommend that large commercial and government enterprises select at least an information access platform vendor for the majority of future projects. Platform vendors offer modular architectures, wide varieties of relevance modeling, multiple vertical applications and significant customizability. These enterprises should also typically have a tactical vendor to increase agility for short-term and quick-start projects. Tactical vendors may lack architectural sophistication and customizability, but their products are quicker to deploy and easier to understand. Often, enterprises obtain search as part of a different product, such as a portal or enterprise content management (ECM) application. In such cases, these enterprises may choose to make this embedded search a target for federation. Large enterprises must also recognize the need to explore more specialized products for certain important projects, such as e-discovery, e-commerce search and research science support.
Information access technologies access applications such as document management, Web content management and relational database management systems to provide users with insight into their contents. Increasingly, information access technology is also expected to include results from enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and legacy systems. In addition, it increasingly looks outside enterprises as well, to premium sources of information, Web sites and elements of the social Web. Information access technology is often acquired as an embedded aspect of other applications, and OEM arrangements are significant for information access vendors. Portal, ECM, business application and other vendors frequently include enterprise search as part of their products.
We consider all enterprise search vendors to be information access technology vendors. However, those that only offer search capabilities (frequently called "keyword search") are neither Visionaries nor candidates for the Leaders quadrant, although they are part of the market. Finding information, and acting on it intelligently, demands increasingly sophisticated and innovative strategies and technologies.
We recommend that large commercial and government enterprises select at least an information access platform vendor for the majority of future projects. Platform vendors offer modular architectures, wide varieties of relevance modeling, multiple vertical applications and significant customizability. These enterprises should also typically have a tactical vendor to increase agility for short-term and quick-start projects. Tactical vendors may lack architectural sophistication and customizability, but their products are quicker to deploy and easier to understand. Often, enterprises obtain search as part of a different product, such as a portal or enterprise content management (ECM) application. In such cases, these enterprises may choose to make this embedded search a target for federation. Large enterprises must also recognize the need to explore more specialized products for certain important projects, such as e-discovery, e-commerce search and research science support.
Information access technologies access applications such as document management, Web content management and relational database management systems to provide users with insight into their contents. Increasingly, information access technology is also expected to include results from enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and legacy systems. In addition, it increasingly looks outside enterprises as well, to premium sources of information, Web sites and elements of the social Web. Information access technology is often acquired as an embedded aspect of other applications, and OEM arrangements are significant for information access vendors. Portal, ECM, business application and other vendors frequently include enterprise search as part of their products.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Autonomy expects to top forecasts
Autonomy expects to top forecasts
By Philip Stafford
Published: October 3 2008 18:56 | Last updated: October 3 2008 18:57
Autonomy , the search software company, bucked the gloomy prognosis for IT groups as burgeoning demand for its compliance-related software meant third-quarter earnings would be “significantly” ahead of market estimates.
The group expects to report record third-quarter results, with both revenue and earnings per share either ahead of consensus estimates or above the top end of the range. Organic growth was also accelerating, Autonomy said.
The group has felt the benefit of a US legal decision at the start of the year ruling that lawyers had just 99 days to decide what electronic data could be examined for evidence in a lawsuit.
Autonomy’s products help businesses archive and retrieve materials such as e-mails and phone calls. Its software discovered inconsistencies in the trading records of Jerome Kerviel, the rogue trader at SocGen.
Mike Lynch, chief executive, told the Financial Times that the group still had a high backlog of work “that gives us a much higher level of confidence about 2009”. He also said Autonomy had experienced “waves of interest” from insurers in the wake of AIG’s rescue to struggling hedge funds.
“Our take is that the statement is pointing us towards $125m-$128m (£70m-£72m) of revenue and 17 cents of EPS,” said David Toms, an analyst at Numis Securities.
However, the shares fell 39½p to 890½p on continued concerns that the market for business software had slowed recently amid the wider banking global crisis.
The stock has dropped 20 per cent since re-entering the FTSE 100 for the first time in seven years in mid-September.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Philip Stafford
Published: October 3 2008 18:56 | Last updated: October 3 2008 18:57
Autonomy , the search software company, bucked the gloomy prognosis for IT groups as burgeoning demand for its compliance-related software meant third-quarter earnings would be “significantly” ahead of market estimates.
The group expects to report record third-quarter results, with both revenue and earnings per share either ahead of consensus estimates or above the top end of the range. Organic growth was also accelerating, Autonomy said.
The group has felt the benefit of a US legal decision at the start of the year ruling that lawyers had just 99 days to decide what electronic data could be examined for evidence in a lawsuit.
Autonomy’s products help businesses archive and retrieve materials such as e-mails and phone calls. Its software discovered inconsistencies in the trading records of Jerome Kerviel, the rogue trader at SocGen.
Mike Lynch, chief executive, told the Financial Times that the group still had a high backlog of work “that gives us a much higher level of confidence about 2009”. He also said Autonomy had experienced “waves of interest” from insurers in the wake of AIG’s rescue to struggling hedge funds.
“Our take is that the statement is pointing us towards $125m-$128m (£70m-£72m) of revenue and 17 cents of EPS,” said David Toms, an analyst at Numis Securities.
However, the shares fell 39½p to 890½p on continued concerns that the market for business software had slowed recently amid the wider banking global crisis.
The stock has dropped 20 per cent since re-entering the FTSE 100 for the first time in seven years in mid-September.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Microsoft SharePoint gets search, file sharing features
Add-ons let users search on document images and securely extend file creation and sharing across corporate boundaries.
John Fontana (Network World) 30/09/2008 09:11:00
Data capture vendor Captaris and security software developer Epok had developed add-ons to Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 that let users search on document images and securely extend file creation and sharing across corporate boundaries.
Captaris, best known for its RightFax software for distributing faxes, recently introduced the TIFF iFilter for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
The iFilter takes an image, scans it using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and then stores it in SharePoint along with all its meta data. The resulting file is then available for discovery by SharePoint's search engine.
IFilter components are used by Microsoft Indexing Service and other Microsoft Search-based products, such as SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Exchange Full Text Search and SQL Server FTS.
Captaris, which is in the process of being acquired by OpenText, thinks paper-centric industries benefit the most from its TIFF iFilter such as insurance, governments, health care and financial services.
The iFilter supports Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and works on both 32- and 64-bit versions of the Windows OS, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server.
The Captaris TIFF iFilter comes in three editions: Standard (for two core systems), Pro (four core systems) and Enterprise (unlimited cores).
Standard is priced starting at US$299. Pro starts at $499, and Enterprise pricing will be announced before the end of the year.
SharePoint is Microsoft's fastest growing enterprise software in its history and the company counts 100 million licenses and more than a US$1 billion in revenue, according to figures released this summer. The platform also is attracting third-party vendors driven to plug some of the gaps in the platform.
Earlier versions of SharePoint had support for TIFF images, but it was dropped in the 2007 version of SharePoint. Microsoft released a Filter Pack for SharePoint in Dec. 2007, and specifically made apologies for the absence of the TIFF filter in the release.
Experts have also said that SharePoint has gaps in its access control story.
Epok in particular is attacking that need with an update to its cross-organization access management software called Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4. The platform extends user authentication to a company's partners.
The 2.4 version breaks the restriction that only a user within a SharePoint domain can use Microsoft Office to create, edit, and then save documents directly into SharePoint.
Epok extends that capability to any Office user in any domain as long as they have the needed access rights.
The upgrades also include a reporting system that can show such facts as who has access to a document and when the document expires. And a mouse over feature on user icons shows additional access details and expiration dates.
Epok can automatically enforce those expiration data on a user's access to certain documents while maintaining the user's overall access rights.
"SharePoint is creating a control problem and what we see is a huge demand wave for extranet access," says Nigel Simmons, vice president of product management.
Epok also takes maintenance of permissions for access controls out of the hands of IT and put them in the hands of business users.
In addition, the system can be configured to require users to view and/or acknowledge certain contractual obligations related to data such as non-disclosure agreements.
The Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4 is priced at US$25,000 per server.
John Fontana (Network World) 30/09/2008 09:11:00
Data capture vendor Captaris and security software developer Epok had developed add-ons to Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 that let users search on document images and securely extend file creation and sharing across corporate boundaries.
Captaris, best known for its RightFax software for distributing faxes, recently introduced the TIFF iFilter for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
The iFilter takes an image, scans it using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and then stores it in SharePoint along with all its meta data. The resulting file is then available for discovery by SharePoint's search engine.
IFilter components are used by Microsoft Indexing Service and other Microsoft Search-based products, such as SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Exchange Full Text Search and SQL Server FTS.
Captaris, which is in the process of being acquired by OpenText, thinks paper-centric industries benefit the most from its TIFF iFilter such as insurance, governments, health care and financial services.
The iFilter supports Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and works on both 32- and 64-bit versions of the Windows OS, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server.
The Captaris TIFF iFilter comes in three editions: Standard (for two core systems), Pro (four core systems) and Enterprise (unlimited cores).
Standard is priced starting at US$299. Pro starts at $499, and Enterprise pricing will be announced before the end of the year.
SharePoint is Microsoft's fastest growing enterprise software in its history and the company counts 100 million licenses and more than a US$1 billion in revenue, according to figures released this summer. The platform also is attracting third-party vendors driven to plug some of the gaps in the platform.
Earlier versions of SharePoint had support for TIFF images, but it was dropped in the 2007 version of SharePoint. Microsoft released a Filter Pack for SharePoint in Dec. 2007, and specifically made apologies for the absence of the TIFF filter in the release.
Experts have also said that SharePoint has gaps in its access control story.
Epok in particular is attacking that need with an update to its cross-organization access management software called Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4. The platform extends user authentication to a company's partners.
The 2.4 version breaks the restriction that only a user within a SharePoint domain can use Microsoft Office to create, edit, and then save documents directly into SharePoint.
Epok extends that capability to any Office user in any domain as long as they have the needed access rights.
The upgrades also include a reporting system that can show such facts as who has access to a document and when the document expires. And a mouse over feature on user icons shows additional access details and expiration dates.
Epok can automatically enforce those expiration data on a user's access to certain documents while maintaining the user's overall access rights.
"SharePoint is creating a control problem and what we see is a huge demand wave for extranet access," says Nigel Simmons, vice president of product management.
Epok also takes maintenance of permissions for access controls out of the hands of IT and put them in the hands of business users.
In addition, the system can be configured to require users to view and/or acknowledge certain contractual obligations related to data such as non-disclosure agreements.
The Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4 is priced at US$25,000 per server.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
HostReview : Web Hosting Guides : Apps4Rent: Why Windows SharePoint Services?
HostReview : Web Hosting Guides : Apps4Rent: Why Windows SharePoint Services?
Windows SharePoint Services is a versatile technology that organizations and business units of all sizes can use to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, Windows SharePoint Services gives people access to information they need.
Windows SharePoint Services is a versatile technology that organizations and business units of all sizes can use to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, Windows SharePoint Services gives people access to information they need.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
SharePoint: Improving Performance : Beyond Search
SharePoint: Improving Performance : Beyond Search
In my opinion, SharePoint is a slow poke. Among the reasons:
SQL Server bottlenecks
My old pal IIS
Churning when complex pages experience latency because needed data are scattered far and wide across the SharePoint landscape.
In what has to be the most amazing description of sluggish performance, Microsoft has released SharePoint Performance Optimization: How Microsoft IT Increases Availability and Decreases Rendering Time of SharePoint Sites . This is a 27 page Word document, which I was able to download here.
I scanned the white paper. I did not dig through it. The good stuff appears after the boilerplate about how to find out what part of the SharePoint system is the problem. In my experience, it’s not “one part”. Performance issues arise when there are lots of users, complex “sites”, and when some of the other required servers are tossed into the stew.
A happy quack to Nick MacKechnie who pointed to this Microsoft white paper in his Web log here.
Stephen Arnold, September 23, 2008
In my opinion, SharePoint is a slow poke. Among the reasons:
SQL Server bottlenecks
My old pal IIS
Churning when complex pages experience latency because needed data are scattered far and wide across the SharePoint landscape.
In what has to be the most amazing description of sluggish performance, Microsoft has released SharePoint Performance Optimization: How Microsoft IT Increases Availability and Decreases Rendering Time of SharePoint Sites . This is a 27 page Word document, which I was able to download here.
I scanned the white paper. I did not dig through it. The good stuff appears after the boilerplate about how to find out what part of the SharePoint system is the problem. In my experience, it’s not “one part”. Performance issues arise when there are lots of users, complex “sites”, and when some of the other required servers are tossed into the stew.
A happy quack to Nick MacKechnie who pointed to this Microsoft white paper in his Web log here.
Stephen Arnold, September 23, 2008
Redmond Developer News | Alfresco Gets SharePoint Savvy
Redmond Developer News | Alfresco Gets SharePoint Savvy
Alfresco Software’s open source enterprise content management system presents a new challenge to SharePoint.
Alfresco Software’s open source enterprise content management system presents a new challenge to SharePoint.
ITWeb :Autonomy 'enterprise-proofs' Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server for large, global enterprise customers
ITWeb :Autonomy 'enterprise-proofs' Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server for large, global enterprise customers
Microsoft hosts Autonomy's software to meet scalability, connectivity and conceptual search requirements of most demanding deployments.
[ Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, California, 22 September 2008 ] - Autonomy Corporation (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today announced its information processing technology extends Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to meet customer requirements for scalability, connectivity and conceptual search.
Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) software is hosted by Microsoft or deployed onsite by hundreds of large, global MOSS customers to enable SharePoint users to find and process content based on understanding the meaning of information. As an example, IDOL's highly scalable, distributed architecture is in use in one of the world's largest SharePoint retrieval projects, which consists of 400 000 users, 25 000 sites, and over one billion documents.
SharePoint's portal and collaboration capabilities have led to rapid adoption and widespread use in large, geographically dispersed organisations. IDOL's distributed and modular architecture complements MOSS by enabling users to access SharePoint files over Wide Area Networks (WANs), overcoming a major challenge for global companies with distributed servers as Shared Service Providers (SSPs) do not natively support WAN communications. Moreover, encrypted inter-machine and intra-process communication protocols are woven into the fabric of Autonomy's modular design at a fundamental level, providing secure transmission of information throughout the architecture. IDOL routinely supports millions of documents, hundreds of thousands of users, and hundreds of thousands of transactions on distributed commodity servers, with the largest installation exceeding 10 billion documents.
Autonomy further extends global MOSS scalability through its distributed, brokered architecture and "geo-efficient" design, which allows data to be automatically replicated in the most sensible location based on bandwidth, lag time, availability and demand. This enables high performance and gives users aggregated access to all enterprise information in a unified view in globally dispersed environments, while reducing bandwidth overhead. Because IDOL creates a stub, or shortcut, to the data and supports tiered storage rather than requiring that data be stored in SQL Server, organisations using IDOL with SharePoint can further benefit from dramatically reduced SQL Server licences and associated scalability limitations. In addition, large enterprises with complex deployments can take advantage of IDOL's redundancy, load balancing, mirroring and high failover to enable linear scalability, high availability and rapid performance of MOSS.
Autonomy IDOL's mature connector framework, which supports over 400 repositories, is additionally leveraged by organisations with SharePoint to avoid custom creation of IFilters and Protocol Handlers and ensure all data will be indexed. Autonomy IDOL can index and automatically analyse any piece of information from over 1 000 different content formats, unifying enterprise information to allow an unprecedented view of the organisation's information assets. This enables SharePoint to transform from a departmental collaboration solution to enterprise collaboration.
Furthermore, Autonomy's advanced conceptual search functionality supplements native MOSS capabilities to enrich the search experience. IDOL forms an understanding of the content of any given page and makes contextual associations between pages, documents, multimedia and search queries to ensure users are always provided with information that is particularly relevant to them. Using the idea behind the given words, and not just the words themselves, IDOL avoids inaccuracy and retrieves not just the most popular content, but the most pertinent.
"SharePoint delivers excellent 'interface and workflow' frameworks for productivity and content applications, but the large and growing volumes of users and rapid increases in content in SharePoint deployments necessitate the highest levels of security and scalability, which Autonomy delivers," commented Mike Lynch, chief executive officer of Autonomy. "The advanced pan-enterprise search capabilities of IDOL leverage Meaning-Based Computing technology to form a conceptual understanding of all data, regardless of what or where it is. This enables customers to capitalise on their SharePoint investments and harness the full richness of human information."
Autonomy provides Microsoft's SharePoint Server customers with:
* A conceptual understanding of the information within MOSS to proactively make connections between users, enhancing collaboration among them.
* A modular, distributed architecture supporting enterprise-class scalability for hundreds of thousands of enterprise users accessing hundreds of terabytes of data with sub-second response, indexing in excess of 110GB/hour and supporting over 470 million documents on 64-bit platforms.
* Unique Mapped Security and native support for all enterprise security models, permitting MOSS to be run within security sensitive environments, such as DOD 5015, EAL, and Bell-LaPadula.
* Extension of standard Microsoft's IFilter file support from 16 to 1 000+ file formats, including ODF and PDFX, with native support for over 400 repositories regardless of operating system.
* Over 500 advanced functions, such as expertise location, communities, implicit profiling, explicit personalisation, automatic categorisation, clustering, geo searching, automatic query guidance, and automatic hyperlinking.
Autonomy
Autonomy Corporation (LSE: AU. or AU.L) is a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise and is spearheading the meaning-based computing movement. Autonomy's technology allows computers to harness the full richness of human information, forming a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data including unstructured information, be it text, e-mail, voice or video. Autonomy's software powers the full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications, including information access technology, pan-enterprise search, information governance, end-to-end eDiscovery and archiving, records management, business process management, customer interaction solutions, and video and audio analysis, and is recognised by industry analysts as the clear leader in enterprise search.
Autonomy's customer base comprises of more than 17 000 global companies and organisations, including: 3, ABN AMRO, AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Bank, Ericsson, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyd TSB, NASA, Nestle, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, T-Mobile, the US Department of Energy, the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. More than 350 companies OEM Autonomy technology, including BEA, Citrix, EDS, H-P, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and TIBCO, and the company has over 400 VARs and Systems Integrators. The company has offices worldwide.
Autonomy and the Autonomy logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autonomy Corporation plc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Microsoft hosts Autonomy's software to meet scalability, connectivity and conceptual search requirements of most demanding deployments.
[ Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, California, 22 September 2008 ] - Autonomy Corporation (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today announced its information processing technology extends Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to meet customer requirements for scalability, connectivity and conceptual search.
Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) software is hosted by Microsoft or deployed onsite by hundreds of large, global MOSS customers to enable SharePoint users to find and process content based on understanding the meaning of information. As an example, IDOL's highly scalable, distributed architecture is in use in one of the world's largest SharePoint retrieval projects, which consists of 400 000 users, 25 000 sites, and over one billion documents.
SharePoint's portal and collaboration capabilities have led to rapid adoption and widespread use in large, geographically dispersed organisations. IDOL's distributed and modular architecture complements MOSS by enabling users to access SharePoint files over Wide Area Networks (WANs), overcoming a major challenge for global companies with distributed servers as Shared Service Providers (SSPs) do not natively support WAN communications. Moreover, encrypted inter-machine and intra-process communication protocols are woven into the fabric of Autonomy's modular design at a fundamental level, providing secure transmission of information throughout the architecture. IDOL routinely supports millions of documents, hundreds of thousands of users, and hundreds of thousands of transactions on distributed commodity servers, with the largest installation exceeding 10 billion documents.
Autonomy further extends global MOSS scalability through its distributed, brokered architecture and "geo-efficient" design, which allows data to be automatically replicated in the most sensible location based on bandwidth, lag time, availability and demand. This enables high performance and gives users aggregated access to all enterprise information in a unified view in globally dispersed environments, while reducing bandwidth overhead. Because IDOL creates a stub, or shortcut, to the data and supports tiered storage rather than requiring that data be stored in SQL Server, organisations using IDOL with SharePoint can further benefit from dramatically reduced SQL Server licences and associated scalability limitations. In addition, large enterprises with complex deployments can take advantage of IDOL's redundancy, load balancing, mirroring and high failover to enable linear scalability, high availability and rapid performance of MOSS.
Autonomy IDOL's mature connector framework, which supports over 400 repositories, is additionally leveraged by organisations with SharePoint to avoid custom creation of IFilters and Protocol Handlers and ensure all data will be indexed. Autonomy IDOL can index and automatically analyse any piece of information from over 1 000 different content formats, unifying enterprise information to allow an unprecedented view of the organisation's information assets. This enables SharePoint to transform from a departmental collaboration solution to enterprise collaboration.
Furthermore, Autonomy's advanced conceptual search functionality supplements native MOSS capabilities to enrich the search experience. IDOL forms an understanding of the content of any given page and makes contextual associations between pages, documents, multimedia and search queries to ensure users are always provided with information that is particularly relevant to them. Using the idea behind the given words, and not just the words themselves, IDOL avoids inaccuracy and retrieves not just the most popular content, but the most pertinent.
"SharePoint delivers excellent 'interface and workflow' frameworks for productivity and content applications, but the large and growing volumes of users and rapid increases in content in SharePoint deployments necessitate the highest levels of security and scalability, which Autonomy delivers," commented Mike Lynch, chief executive officer of Autonomy. "The advanced pan-enterprise search capabilities of IDOL leverage Meaning-Based Computing technology to form a conceptual understanding of all data, regardless of what or where it is. This enables customers to capitalise on their SharePoint investments and harness the full richness of human information."
Autonomy provides Microsoft's SharePoint Server customers with:
* A conceptual understanding of the information within MOSS to proactively make connections between users, enhancing collaboration among them.
* A modular, distributed architecture supporting enterprise-class scalability for hundreds of thousands of enterprise users accessing hundreds of terabytes of data with sub-second response, indexing in excess of 110GB/hour and supporting over 470 million documents on 64-bit platforms.
* Unique Mapped Security and native support for all enterprise security models, permitting MOSS to be run within security sensitive environments, such as DOD 5015, EAL, and Bell-LaPadula.
* Extension of standard Microsoft's IFilter file support from 16 to 1 000+ file formats, including ODF and PDFX, with native support for over 400 repositories regardless of operating system.
* Over 500 advanced functions, such as expertise location, communities, implicit profiling, explicit personalisation, automatic categorisation, clustering, geo searching, automatic query guidance, and automatic hyperlinking.
Autonomy
Autonomy Corporation (LSE: AU. or AU.L) is a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise and is spearheading the meaning-based computing movement. Autonomy's technology allows computers to harness the full richness of human information, forming a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data including unstructured information, be it text, e-mail, voice or video. Autonomy's software powers the full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications, including information access technology, pan-enterprise search, information governance, end-to-end eDiscovery and archiving, records management, business process management, customer interaction solutions, and video and audio analysis, and is recognised by industry analysts as the clear leader in enterprise search.
Autonomy's customer base comprises of more than 17 000 global companies and organisations, including: 3, ABN AMRO, AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Bank, Ericsson, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyd TSB, NASA, Nestle, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, T-Mobile, the US Department of Energy, the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. More than 350 companies OEM Autonomy technology, including BEA, Citrix, EDS, H-P, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and TIBCO, and the company has over 400 VARs and Systems Integrators. The company has offices worldwide.
Autonomy and the Autonomy logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autonomy Corporation plc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Gustaf's Microsoft Dynamics CRM & SharePoint Blog: The power of SharePoint
Gustaf's Microsoft Dynamics CRM & SharePoint Blog: The power of SharePoint
The power of SharePoint
Presently I am employed at Logica as a consultant and the projects I am involved in are always Dynamcis CRM centered. However, I used to work at Humandata earlier, run by the SharePoint MVP Göran Husman and I am since this time a devoted SharePoint fan.
Apart from this, it is also a great tool for running projects in. Instead of millions of post-its with all the questionsmarks in the project, we use a discussion board. Instead of impossible hierarchies of folder for SureStep documents, we use one Document Library with Meta-data describing what part of SureStep the document should be connected to. This way, documents are easier to find, easier to work with, easier to share and we get version control all for free.
The power of SharePoint
Presently I am employed at Logica as a consultant and the projects I am involved in are always Dynamcis CRM centered. However, I used to work at Humandata earlier, run by the SharePoint MVP Göran Husman and I am since this time a devoted SharePoint fan.
Apart from this, it is also a great tool for running projects in. Instead of millions of post-its with all the questionsmarks in the project, we use a discussion board. Instead of impossible hierarchies of folder for SureStep documents, we use one Document Library with Meta-data describing what part of SureStep the document should be connected to. This way, documents are easier to find, easier to work with, easier to share and we get version control all for free.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
FT.com / Digital Business / Personal view - Going for a song
FT.com / Digital Business / Personal view - Going for a song
Going for a song
By David Ford, chief executive of Securecoms Ltd
Published: September 18 2008 16:52 | Last updated: September 18 2008 16:52
Keeping confidential information secure seems to be getting harder and harder. It’s not enough to protect your own networks, computers and storage devices – you must also worry about anyone else who might hold your data.
We need to consider very carefully what happens to confidential and personal information when it’s in our possession and, importantly, when it leaves our offices. Electronic data takes on a life of its own. While photocopying paper files is a lengthy undertaking, copies of electronic data are created in moments and then cease to be accounted for. Just ask someone to look at the contents of their USB stick – almost always you’ll find documents there which should have been deleted long ago.
With scandals about sensitive data being lost, or popping up where it shouldn’t, seeming to occur daily the urgency of addressing the security implications of our ever-increasing technological capabilities has become acute. We are now exploring the security of the various devices we carry outside the office but we’re still overlooking the main route by which confidential information leaves the security of our office networks – e-mail.
Every day, highly confidential information travels round the internet insecurely. We wouldn’t dream of entering our credit card details on an insecure web page; we certainly wouldn’t conduct our online banking that way but we use e-mail to transport the majority of written business communication. Businesses of all sizes, and their advisers, send every conceivable sort of confidential information via e-mail – either contained directly in the e-mail or, increasingly, using e-mail as the conduit to send documents as attachments.
Using e-mail is like sending your communications by postcard. Actually it’s worse than that. Postcards, at least, remain in the possession of the post office until delivered. E-mails, on the other hand, travel across an insecure public network and pass through many unknown points before arriving at their destination.
We rage when we hear the latest story about a government laptop being lost or stolen, or a memory stick being mislaid, or CDs being lost in the post, yet we are all guilty of similar security lapses by sending unprotected confidential information out via e-mail.
Public companies, for example, send price-sensitive information to their various advisers during the periods before the making of announcements via e-mail. The Financial Services Authority has expressed concern that there is too much leakage of sensitive information and has reviewed the whole area of IT. However, although it recognised that external network connections should be secured by encryption (recommending the use of VPNs), it made no similar recommendations in connection with the encryption of e-mails. It made the obvious point that sensitive information should not be e-mailed to web-based e-mail accounts (presumably they meant free e-mail accounts) and that “address auto-complete” should be disabled, but didn’t devote any deep thought to the whole issue of the insecurity of e-mail.
Similarly, the Information Commissioner’s Office has not tackled the issue of insecure e-mail. The ICO accepts that sending unencrypted e-mail on open networks poses a security risk but, since its resources are stretched, it is concentrating on what it sees as more pressing problems – unencrypted laptops, disks and memory sticks. In other words it is not prepared to take a lead, preferring to react to events after they occur.
The only organisations in the UK that have made clear recommendations on this topic are the Law Society and the Bar Council. However, despite this advice from their professional bodies, more than 99 per cent of e-mails sent by solicitors and barristers are still sent insecurely.
The situation is not complicated. We have developed technologies that enable us to store and manipulate masses of personal and confidential information with ease. These capabilities impose a responsibility on us to ensure information is kept securely. We have accepted for some time that we must keep our internal networks secure.
However, now that it has become so easy to take or send information outside the secure environments we have built, we must ensure it is properly protected en route. This must be true whether information is carried on a laptop or a USB stick or sent out on a CD or an e-mail. An appropriate form of encryption is the only real security solution.
Until this simple principle is adopted by all of the main regulatory authorities and the message clearly conveyed to all of us who deal in confidences, whether our own or others, nothing will be done. Only when secure e-mail becomes an expected norm will we adopt the necessary systems to ensure that stories about yet another scandalous loss of personal data or confidential information have become a thing of the past.
David Ford is chief executive of Securecoms Ltd and former managing partner of Tarlo Lyons, the law firm
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Going for a song
By David Ford, chief executive of Securecoms Ltd
Published: September 18 2008 16:52 | Last updated: September 18 2008 16:52
Keeping confidential information secure seems to be getting harder and harder. It’s not enough to protect your own networks, computers and storage devices – you must also worry about anyone else who might hold your data.
We need to consider very carefully what happens to confidential and personal information when it’s in our possession and, importantly, when it leaves our offices. Electronic data takes on a life of its own. While photocopying paper files is a lengthy undertaking, copies of electronic data are created in moments and then cease to be accounted for. Just ask someone to look at the contents of their USB stick – almost always you’ll find documents there which should have been deleted long ago.
With scandals about sensitive data being lost, or popping up where it shouldn’t, seeming to occur daily the urgency of addressing the security implications of our ever-increasing technological capabilities has become acute. We are now exploring the security of the various devices we carry outside the office but we’re still overlooking the main route by which confidential information leaves the security of our office networks – e-mail.
Every day, highly confidential information travels round the internet insecurely. We wouldn’t dream of entering our credit card details on an insecure web page; we certainly wouldn’t conduct our online banking that way but we use e-mail to transport the majority of written business communication. Businesses of all sizes, and their advisers, send every conceivable sort of confidential information via e-mail – either contained directly in the e-mail or, increasingly, using e-mail as the conduit to send documents as attachments.
Using e-mail is like sending your communications by postcard. Actually it’s worse than that. Postcards, at least, remain in the possession of the post office until delivered. E-mails, on the other hand, travel across an insecure public network and pass through many unknown points before arriving at their destination.
We rage when we hear the latest story about a government laptop being lost or stolen, or a memory stick being mislaid, or CDs being lost in the post, yet we are all guilty of similar security lapses by sending unprotected confidential information out via e-mail.
Public companies, for example, send price-sensitive information to their various advisers during the periods before the making of announcements via e-mail. The Financial Services Authority has expressed concern that there is too much leakage of sensitive information and has reviewed the whole area of IT. However, although it recognised that external network connections should be secured by encryption (recommending the use of VPNs), it made no similar recommendations in connection with the encryption of e-mails. It made the obvious point that sensitive information should not be e-mailed to web-based e-mail accounts (presumably they meant free e-mail accounts) and that “address auto-complete” should be disabled, but didn’t devote any deep thought to the whole issue of the insecurity of e-mail.
Similarly, the Information Commissioner’s Office has not tackled the issue of insecure e-mail. The ICO accepts that sending unencrypted e-mail on open networks poses a security risk but, since its resources are stretched, it is concentrating on what it sees as more pressing problems – unencrypted laptops, disks and memory sticks. In other words it is not prepared to take a lead, preferring to react to events after they occur.
The only organisations in the UK that have made clear recommendations on this topic are the Law Society and the Bar Council. However, despite this advice from their professional bodies, more than 99 per cent of e-mails sent by solicitors and barristers are still sent insecurely.
The situation is not complicated. We have developed technologies that enable us to store and manipulate masses of personal and confidential information with ease. These capabilities impose a responsibility on us to ensure information is kept securely. We have accepted for some time that we must keep our internal networks secure.
However, now that it has become so easy to take or send information outside the secure environments we have built, we must ensure it is properly protected en route. This must be true whether information is carried on a laptop or a USB stick or sent out on a CD or an e-mail. An appropriate form of encryption is the only real security solution.
Until this simple principle is adopted by all of the main regulatory authorities and the message clearly conveyed to all of us who deal in confidences, whether our own or others, nothing will be done. Only when secure e-mail becomes an expected norm will we adopt the necessary systems to ensure that stories about yet another scandalous loss of personal data or confidential information have become a thing of the past.
David Ford is chief executive of Securecoms Ltd and former managing partner of Tarlo Lyons, the law firm
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Improve Your Collaboration with Microsoft® SharePoint®-based Solutions
Improve Your Collaboration with Microsoft® SharePoint®-based Solutions
Information sharing, both inside and outside the enterprise, continues to be a challenge for many organizations. BearingPoint believes that distributed information management supported by a centralized management infrastructure can help address this issue. We have been collaborating with Microsoft for nearly 10 years; we’re building on that experience to create enterprise information solutions based on Microsoft® SharePoint® technology.
Microsoft® SharePoint® provides a framework that can help improve:
- Collaboration
- Business intelligence
- Business processes
- Content management
- Search capabilities
SharePoint® -based solutions can help organizations manage information seamlessly across their enterprise. This technology facilitates collaboration and distributed project management by supporting central deployment of the infrastructure needed to create and support cross-enterprise activities. The technology is non-intrusive and integrates with desktop applications. However, it is also far reaching in terms of supporting the complex workflows and information sharing that communities of interests require.
BearingPoint consultants can combine SharePoint® with other core Microsoft technologies to create customized solutions that provide rich security, document management and collaboration features. And SharePoint® -based applications can grow as your organization grows and evolves.
Learn more about SharePoint®-based Solutions. Contact Us
Information sharing, both inside and outside the enterprise, continues to be a challenge for many organizations. BearingPoint believes that distributed information management supported by a centralized management infrastructure can help address this issue. We have been collaborating with Microsoft for nearly 10 years; we’re building on that experience to create enterprise information solutions based on Microsoft® SharePoint® technology.
Microsoft® SharePoint® provides a framework that can help improve:
- Collaboration
- Business intelligence
- Business processes
- Content management
- Search capabilities
SharePoint® -based solutions can help organizations manage information seamlessly across their enterprise. This technology facilitates collaboration and distributed project management by supporting central deployment of the infrastructure needed to create and support cross-enterprise activities. The technology is non-intrusive and integrates with desktop applications. However, it is also far reaching in terms of supporting the complex workflows and information sharing that communities of interests require.
BearingPoint consultants can combine SharePoint® with other core Microsoft technologies to create customized solutions that provide rich security, document management and collaboration features. And SharePoint® -based applications can grow as your organization grows and evolves.
Learn more about SharePoint®-based Solutions. Contact Us
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Information governance – more than a guiding force? (FT.com)
Information governance – more than a guiding force?
By Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy
Published: September 16 2008 11:40 | Last updated: September 16 2008 11:40
Corporate attitudes to information governance are changing. The exponential growth of information that is created and cultivated within a business has in many ways become as much a liability as it has an asset.
Regulatory fines, internal fraud, and class action lawsuits, unexpected personal data leaks and loss can cost a business millions, and impact the corporate brand with a backlash of public opinion which can devastate a company for years and in some cases, such as that of Arthur Andersen, the damage can be irreversible.
In the corporate world these days the smoking gun is often found on a server and that is where the regulator has learned to look.
The two extreme policies of keeping everything, or alternatively keeping nothing, are in most industries now illegal and certainly out of date. While we may long for the days when a midnight e-mail from IT could kindly ask employees to clean up their network folders, stop using personal hard drives, or refrain from deleting germane files needed in a legal case, organisations are recognising that the potential damage from rogue (or uninformed) employees far outweighs reliance on principle alone.
These risks are driving organisations to implement strict information policies for accessing, holding and disposing of data in a timely manner to ensure compliance and avoid hefty fines or, in the worst cases, criminal prosecution.
Gone are the days when compliance used to be determined by a filing cabinet. Today more than 80 per cent of data in the enterprise is not neatly organised on shelves and resides outside the scope of structured databases on laptops, servers, and mobile devices across corporate divisions, languages and geographic boundaries.
With documents, e-mails, instant messages, blogs, and audio files being created at uncontrollable levels, and a huge influx of rich media into the business, this content has become particularly hard to retrieve, systematise and certainly govern.
Traditional approaches where companies simply preserve everything cannot be sustained. The cost of storage is far more than hardware alone, and organisations struggle to use basic search technologies to find relevant information when needed. Data protection laws may not allow retention and in any case unnecessarily retained information can cause cost and unexpected liability, for example during e-discovery for lawsuits.
The sheer volume of this unstructured data and the crude number of governing policies that can affect content have for long nourished the misconception that an organisation needs an army of professionals stationed at every digital intersection to decide the appropriate course of action: a model as unappealing as it is impractical.
True information governance goes beyond merely alerting a compliance officer to a potential set of policy violations or counting the number of privacy breaches. It includes broad control and action and does not leave enforcement to individuals who are unable to keep up with the volume and speed of modern business. This should happen in real-time with visibility into the process to foster collaboration among compliance officers, legal, and IT.
Unfortunately these challenges have led many executives to operate under the misguided notion that true information governance can only exist as a guiding force and not a proposed reality.
They fail to realise that a fundamental shift in the way computers operate enables intelligence and automation within governance. Meaning-based computing allows computers to ingest information in its native human-friendly format, form a conceptual understanding of the content, its inherent rules and security entitlements, and take action upon it.
This ability of computers to understand the meaning of data – the who, when, where and how of content – enables a fundamental shift from manual to automated, consistent, and secure governance.
Technology can now read an e-mail as it is sent, realise it is a compliance issue and prevent it being sent out. It can analyse the files on a laptop and lock down those relevant to a legal case. It can take a message and realise it concerns a national of a country that does not allow information on its citizens to be held outside its borders and route it to the right server for storage. It can take a message, read it and understand it and decide that it must be archived for seven years, while another message for only 30 days. Then after the allotted time it can automatically delete them.
By gaining a conceptual understanding of all corporate data, one is able to utilise a policy-based approach effectively to execute all processes associated with the retention, supervision and ultimate disposition of electronic information. Organisations are able to define and apply policies at the point of data creation, automating information classification based on its content, flagging any non-compliant documents, preserving data in archives and integrating disposition management systems that can honour any legal holds.
Just as we saw Sarbanes Oxley as a response to the Enron era, it is likely we will see a further acceleration of information governance regulations as a response to the events of the sub-prime crisis.
These new rules along with the consequences of the recent changes in the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), Data Protection legislation, Compliance regulations and many countries’ new geographic storage rules will drive the need for companies to take a pan-enterprise view of information governance.
By automating information governance to reduce business risk, we ultimately safeguard the guiding principles that drive the vast majority of employees and officers to protect the integrity of the corporate brand, while not impeding the creativity and flexibility that drive value in modern business.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy
Published: September 16 2008 11:40 | Last updated: September 16 2008 11:40
Corporate attitudes to information governance are changing. The exponential growth of information that is created and cultivated within a business has in many ways become as much a liability as it has an asset.
Regulatory fines, internal fraud, and class action lawsuits, unexpected personal data leaks and loss can cost a business millions, and impact the corporate brand with a backlash of public opinion which can devastate a company for years and in some cases, such as that of Arthur Andersen, the damage can be irreversible.
In the corporate world these days the smoking gun is often found on a server and that is where the regulator has learned to look.
The two extreme policies of keeping everything, or alternatively keeping nothing, are in most industries now illegal and certainly out of date. While we may long for the days when a midnight e-mail from IT could kindly ask employees to clean up their network folders, stop using personal hard drives, or refrain from deleting germane files needed in a legal case, organisations are recognising that the potential damage from rogue (or uninformed) employees far outweighs reliance on principle alone.
These risks are driving organisations to implement strict information policies for accessing, holding and disposing of data in a timely manner to ensure compliance and avoid hefty fines or, in the worst cases, criminal prosecution.
Gone are the days when compliance used to be determined by a filing cabinet. Today more than 80 per cent of data in the enterprise is not neatly organised on shelves and resides outside the scope of structured databases on laptops, servers, and mobile devices across corporate divisions, languages and geographic boundaries.
With documents, e-mails, instant messages, blogs, and audio files being created at uncontrollable levels, and a huge influx of rich media into the business, this content has become particularly hard to retrieve, systematise and certainly govern.
Traditional approaches where companies simply preserve everything cannot be sustained. The cost of storage is far more than hardware alone, and organisations struggle to use basic search technologies to find relevant information when needed. Data protection laws may not allow retention and in any case unnecessarily retained information can cause cost and unexpected liability, for example during e-discovery for lawsuits.
The sheer volume of this unstructured data and the crude number of governing policies that can affect content have for long nourished the misconception that an organisation needs an army of professionals stationed at every digital intersection to decide the appropriate course of action: a model as unappealing as it is impractical.
True information governance goes beyond merely alerting a compliance officer to a potential set of policy violations or counting the number of privacy breaches. It includes broad control and action and does not leave enforcement to individuals who are unable to keep up with the volume and speed of modern business. This should happen in real-time with visibility into the process to foster collaboration among compliance officers, legal, and IT.
Unfortunately these challenges have led many executives to operate under the misguided notion that true information governance can only exist as a guiding force and not a proposed reality.
They fail to realise that a fundamental shift in the way computers operate enables intelligence and automation within governance. Meaning-based computing allows computers to ingest information in its native human-friendly format, form a conceptual understanding of the content, its inherent rules and security entitlements, and take action upon it.
This ability of computers to understand the meaning of data – the who, when, where and how of content – enables a fundamental shift from manual to automated, consistent, and secure governance.
Technology can now read an e-mail as it is sent, realise it is a compliance issue and prevent it being sent out. It can analyse the files on a laptop and lock down those relevant to a legal case. It can take a message and realise it concerns a national of a country that does not allow information on its citizens to be held outside its borders and route it to the right server for storage. It can take a message, read it and understand it and decide that it must be archived for seven years, while another message for only 30 days. Then after the allotted time it can automatically delete them.
By gaining a conceptual understanding of all corporate data, one is able to utilise a policy-based approach effectively to execute all processes associated with the retention, supervision and ultimate disposition of electronic information. Organisations are able to define and apply policies at the point of data creation, automating information classification based on its content, flagging any non-compliant documents, preserving data in archives and integrating disposition management systems that can honour any legal holds.
Just as we saw Sarbanes Oxley as a response to the Enron era, it is likely we will see a further acceleration of information governance regulations as a response to the events of the sub-prime crisis.
These new rules along with the consequences of the recent changes in the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), Data Protection legislation, Compliance regulations and many countries’ new geographic storage rules will drive the need for companies to take a pan-enterprise view of information governance.
By automating information governance to reduce business risk, we ultimately safeguard the guiding principles that drive the vast majority of employees and officers to protect the integrity of the corporate brand, while not impeding the creativity and flexibility that drive value in modern business.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)