Category: SharePoint

What people are saying… Definition extraction

Today, I noticed a SharePoint Search feature I did not  know yet: I was looking for the meaning of an abbreviation using the SharePoint Search center, and at the bottom of the first page of my search results a link showed up: What people are saying. After clicking the link, it showed me a perfect definition, and links to the documents were it was found. Cool!

discovered-definition.JPG

This is what I can find in the Microsoft documentation: the Definition Extraction feature finds definitions for candidate terms and identifies acronyms and their expansions by examining the grammatical structure of sentences that have been indexed (for example, NASA, radar, modem, and so on). It is only available for English.

This means that during the crawling, the MOSS indexer is checking content for sentences like “X is ….”, and recognises them as a definition. It does not seem to be very configurable, but you can turn it off in the settings of the Search Core Results web part. Just uncheck Display Discovered Definition.

 

Switching to WordPress…

I made a tough decision today. I decided to abandon SharePoint as a blogging tool, and I am switching to WordPress.

Why this move?

  • the standard site template for blogs in SharePoint is rather limited, especially for the typical web 2.0 features (pingbacks, comments, tagging…)
  • writing content is sometimes very painful. Ever tried embedding a Youtube video?
  • there are some nice extensions (tag cloud, Enhanced blog Edition) but my hosting provider did not manage to install them properly
  • SharePoint hosting costs me money 🙂
  • I am using WordPress for our family blog and it is working great
  • my friend Gert is giving great service for the php hosting.

So if you have this blog in your feedreader, don’t forget to update the feed!

Store it in SharePoint or not?

One of the “frequently asked questions in a SharePoint course is “should I store it in SharePoint or not?”

There are some simple guidelines: these files don’t really belong in SharePoint:

  • very large files (there is a limit of 2 GB)
  • files that are linked
  • executable files

Joel Oleson posted a great overview.

Unified Communications. I know now…

Last week, I attended the Microsoft event in Louvain-La-Neuve where they launched their new Unified Communications products. As always, it was a very impressive show with lots of presentations, information, partner boots… Unified Communication will be a great tool to increase productivity and offer new ways of communication to the information workers.

I can’t wait to start using it, but as a trainer, I am also wondering how we will teach people how to use it? Using Office Communicator, is this something that you can learn in a classroom environment? Just imagine 10 students calling each other… Will you learn it using e-learning? Seems rather static and unreal to me. Do you have any suggestions?

One thing I realised is that it will be necessary for the users to understand the full picture of the infrastructure: where is my mailbox, what is happening when I start a voice chat, what happens when someone calls me, when I divert a call…

Another thing that I am always curious about is the different presentation skills and the presentation styles of the presenters. Presentation Zen has a an interesting blog post about the presentation styles of Microsoft’s Number One compared to Apple’s Steve Jobs.
I had the luck of seeing Bill Gates in action on the Vista launch last year, and I can agree with some of the remarks of Garr Reynolds; and as an Apple fan, I never miss a keynote of Steve. But to select a “winner” would be disrespectful for both: they are both passionate about what they do in their own way, and I experienced it again in Louvain-La-Neuve last week.