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Posts Tagged ‘Search Capabilities’

3 Ways to Make Outlook More Social?

Microsoft Outlook has historically been at the heart of document-based environments that for many years have ruled the enterprise.

But the walls that have guarded this document-based world are crumbling fast. Outlook is now more than a message center. It is becoming a collaborative space where the lines between Google Docs and other social applications start to blur.

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Three extensions exemplify this trend. These services are quite similar. Xobni has the longest track record. it started as a consumer-based service, gaining a following for its search capabilities in Outlook. Search is Outlook’s inherent weakness. Neither DocVerse nor Harmony have deep search capabilities like Xobni. That may only be a temporary issue for DocVerse. Last week, Google announced that it had acquired DocVerse. We expect that will in some way translate into better search in the weeks and months ahead for the DoVerse service.

Harmony

Harmony is the newest of the group. The Mainsoft service is a mash up between Google Docs and Outlook. It also puts SharePoint directly into Outlook. Like most Outlook extensions, Harmony pulls Google Docs or Sharepoint into an Outlook sidebar.

The service is intended to ease attachment overload by creating a central place where people can access Google Docs. It’s a drag and drop environment that allows people to drag email attachments into the Harmony sidebar.

A document may also be dragged into an email where it appears as a link for the recipient. The recipient may access the document by signing into their Google Docs or Google Apps account.

The service is now available as a free download. It is compatible with Sharepoint 2007 and Sharepoint 2010. It will be available later this year as an extension for Microsoft Office.

DocVerse

DocVerse plays a similar role to Harmony. The service synchronizes in the Outlook Sidebar. The widget associates a link to the document that is getting the edit. Every modification is synced. When multiple people work on a document, the updates are made through the plug-in and versions are stored online.

Xobni

Xobni provides what Outlook really needs. Great search. It will search Outlook and external social networks and third party applications to get a fuller profile of the contact. In November, the company released Xobni Enterprise. The service gives I.T. administrators the ability to deploy and manage the plugin across the enterprise. it also offers integration across services such as Salesforce CRM and Sharepoint.

Outlook Has Come A Long Way

The old days are over for Outlook. It’s now entering an era where the degree of collaboration will center around a hyperlinked environment more so than document-based systems. The enterprise is becoming more web-oriented and Outlook is no exception to the change.

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Chomp Closes In On 300,000 Users, Launches App Review Site And Chomp Connect

When Chomp launched eight weeks ago in the iTunes store, it launched as an app for reviewing other iPhone apps. The app shows you a stream of realtime reviews, which you can filter by everyone or just your Facebook freinds. The app is showing some traction and should hit 300,000 active monthly users sometime tomorrow, according to co-founder Ben Keighran.

While it started out as an app, today Chomp launched a complimentary Website with full app search capabilities and links for each app. There, users can also see the stream of reviews, as well as dedicated pages for each app and vanity URLs for each reviewer. Developers can now link to the Chomp reviews directly from inside their apps using Chomp Connect, which also launched today in private beta. Chomp Connect lets developers add Chomp review buttons right inside their apps without forcing to go anywhere else.

Keighran contends that reviews on iTunes tend to have a more negative bias because people are prompted to submit a review every time they delete an app. With Chomp Connect, developers can ask their most engaged users to submit reviews.

He hopes to make Chomp a social alternative to iTunes reviews. By driving reviews straight from their apps, developers can promote their apps in the Chomp review stream. The more reviews, the more often it appears in the stream.

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Confluence Supports Google’s Open Social, Microsoft Office 2007

Confluence now supports Open Social, allowing users to pull in gadgets to check Salesforce contacts, Gmail, Google Calendar and other items.

The new features in Confluence 3.1, an Atlassian product, show that dashboard environments are certainly in vogue as the social web becomes a pervasive part of the business user’s daily work life.

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Wikis, though are not a marketing term that has as much resonance. Enterprise collaboration is the holy grail. The release from Confluence shows the importance of open, collaborative services that provides the ability to stitch different data sources together into one environment.

With its new release, Confluence is adding a number of new features:

Open Social gadgets may be added by pointing and clicking. The upgrade to Confluence 3.1 includes two gadgets. Confluence Activity Stream displays a list of recent updates from a Confluence site. Quick Navigation provides Confluence search capabilities and suggests results while typing.

Here’s an example of how a gadget is pulled into Confluence.

Attachments may dragged and dropped into the Confluence environment. The idea being that Confluence can act much like a desktop application.

Support is now provided for Microsoft Office 2007. Users may view attached Office 2007 documents, such as PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets within the Confluence wiki page. Users may search inside files and edit documents.

Confluence is one of the leading service providers in the Enterprise 2.0 space. The service demonstrates how 2010 will see the continued integration of the open web within enterprise environments.

As Bill Arconati of Atlassian said in an interview:

“It’s all about interoperability.”

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Adobe’s Upgrades Acrobat.com, Launches New Mobile App

Adobe’s online office suite, Acrobat.com, is getting its first major upgrade since the service left beta back in June of this year. The new release, launching tomorrow, is an entirely unified experience thanks to the addition of a much-requested file organization tool, explains the service’s Director of Project Management Rick Treitman.

Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com’s smartphone application, users won’t just have access to their files on the go – they can also scan in new documents with their phone’s camera.

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The New File Organizer

The one major new feature in this release of Acrobat.com is the file organizer. Before, files could live in three different places on the service. Now all files are accessible through one main interface.

<img src=”http://www.family-learning-center.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/b93a8_acrobat_file_organizer.png”

The file organizer itself includes some handy features, too. Instead of using a traditional folder structure like you have on your computer’s hard drive, the service introduces something called “collections.” These are more like iTunes playlists than file folders (or even labels in Gmail) because files can be assigned to multiple collections instead of having to sit in just one folder.

Another key component to the organizer is a file search tool. Believe it or not, the online service had no way of helping you find your files until now. Although the current search capabilities don’t yet offer full text search of your documents, Adobe says that may come further down the road.

Also new is the organizer’s “import and edit” feature which lets you open external files directly into the appropriate program so you can begin to work on them online. In the past, you had to first launch the program, then import the file. This time-saving step is more akin to what rival Google Docs offers via their upload feature except that in Acrobat.com, you don’t have to click a link to open the uploaded file – it happens automatically.

Other New Features

The various online office programs themselves have seen improvements as well in this new release. Buzzword is leaving beta and now it, along with Presentations, lets you import images from online services like Flickr and Google Images in addition to the images found on your computer. One drawback to this feature, though, is that the online image searches don’t offer filtering by license type, so a user could easily get into trouble by adding a copyrighted or otherwise licensed photo into their document if they neglect to check permissions first.

The Tables app, still in beta, now has the ability to do more data sorting and filtering. It also adds new views including a print layout view that shows what the document will look like on the printed page.

Acrobat.com Comes to iPhone, Blackberry

One of the more exciting developments is the new Acrobat.com mobile application which will be made available to Blackberry and iPhone users shortly. Built in conjunction with a company called scanR, the mobile application lets users take advantage of their mobile phone’s camera to add new files to the service. After taking the photo, the app uses OCR technology to convert the image to text. How well this works is unknown at this time because the app has not yet arrived in the respective app stores.

The app also lets users view their files in a read-only mode, convert them to PDFs, and share them with others via fax or email. There will be two versions of the app made available – a free version and a premium offering which will allow for more PDF conversions and faxes.

According to Adobe, the Acrobat.com service is faring well. They already have 6 million users and add around 100,000 more each week. While a lot of users are students and SMB owners looking for a free alternative to more expensive Microsoft Office software, the company says they’re also seeing the service picked up and used in small workgroups at larger companies. However, Adobe admits that they’re not an enterprise play yet and they also won’t reveal how many people use the premium version of the service – only that they’re “happy” with the number thus far.

If you want to try the upgraded online suite, you can do so at www.acrobat.com as of tomorrow (Saturday, November 21st) at 6 AM EST.

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Google Fixes Usenet Archive; Old Geeks Rejoice

In response to a Wired article that ran yesterday, Google is fixing its archives of Usenet posts, one of the richest and oldest repositories of user-generated content ever to exist online.

For those of you under the age of 30, Usenet began in 1979 in Chapel Hill as a collection of newsgroups. In the years that followed, Internet history unfolded, jargon was coined, and lore was created in these discussions. In 2001, Google acquired two Usenet archives comprising 700 million posts and failed to index them in any meaningful way. As of today, that wrong is being righted.

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In the past, searching Usenet posts archived in Google Groups often yielded few or no results. For example, this recent discussion thread is all about the brokenness of Google’s Usenet archives and search capabilities.

“None of my posts are showing up (using advanced search, trying email and name in the author field, even limiting the date range to the right years),” wrote one user.

Noting that Google’s Usenet search “often… returns no results for queries which obviously shouldn’t,” another user said, “You just have to cross your fingers and hope that they [Google] notice the problem themselves and fix it.”

Fortunately, after media attention and user complaints, the search giant has responded and rectified the situation.

Today, Google rep Victoria Katsarou told Wired, “It turns out there was a bug, a specific bug, that affected search within a specific group. That bug is something we’re working on fixing, and I think that will be fixed by tomorrow. Thanks for writing this, because that’s how we discovered this specific bug.”

Just one bug wrecking search results for archives spanning 700 million posts and more than 20 years of data? Seems hardly likely.

Search results are particularly buggy when users filter results by date. As an example, searching alt.usenet.kooks for “godwin” produces 6,520 results. Until we tried to look at results sorted by date. Once that happened, we got 93 results. And searching alt.comp.freeware for “MS-DOS” yielded no results after 2000, even though we eventually found posts dating back to 1995 when we browsed without narrowing the dates.

If “Internet oldtimer” user complaints, Slashdot threads, and detailed email exchanges aren’t enough to get Google to tend this garden of information and ensure it is searchable, and if media attention is really what it takes, then we must add our voices to those at Wired in asking Google to keep Usenet useful, and we ask that likeminded individuals would do the same in the comments.

For a nice Usenet history lesson in timeline form, check out Google’s highlights of Usenet posts dating back as far as 1981. Of particular interest to us web geeks at RWW is Tim Berners-Lee’s announcement of the World Wide Web.

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NextBio takes $8M for scientific search engine

NextBio, a search engine that scours the net specifically for information related to the life sciences, has raised $8 million in a third round of funding from Newbury Ventures. Targeted at researchers, the Cupertino, Calif. based service, provides mostly journal articles, scientific news, and updates on clinical trials. It plans to use the new financing to expand internationally and continue developing its technology. And because it is packaged as a software-as-a-service, it is easy to deploy and systems large and small.

The company has partnered with Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly and Stanford University to provide specialized search capabilities to their web sites. So far, its product is free to use, and combs both public and proprietary data. It has raised $16.1 million to date, all from Newbury.

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Layar augmented reality app now available globally, lets you hunt down tweeps with cold, calculated precision

Following a Netherlands-exclusive release back in June, SPRXmobile has now taken its so-called Layar “Reality Browser” for Android to the global stage and advanced it to version 2.0 in the process. Perhaps the first commercial augmented reality app to launch on a large scale, Layar’s got a good amount of momentum behind it — the company claims that 100 developers are already hard at work developing reality layers that users can toggle, and an additional 500 developers are being added into the mix with the latest release. Version 2.0 adds favorite layers (because we’re sure you’ll be stalking friends and foes all too often using the Tweetmondo layer), map and list views, and enhanced search capabilities, but the real secret to Layar’s power might ultimately lie in the third-party ecosystem if they can get enough content providers on board.

We grabbed Layar off the Market and took it for a quick spin; we’re having trouble getting it to aim correctly, though Google Sky Map is having the same issues, so we’re fairly certain that we’re dealing with a phone or location problem rather than a Layar one. The key thing with an app like this is going to be speed and fluidity, and even on our Magic’s relatively lightweight 528MHz core, it’s plenty usable. The Google-powered Layar local search — arguably the most important reality layer bundled with the software — is a little annoying to use, primarily because the search box has no history or suggestion capability which means you’ve got to type out a full search every time you want to use it. Ultimately, though, the app’s very young (as is this whole category of technology, for that matter) and we’re stoked to see where this goes over the coming months.

Filed under: Cellphones, GPS, Handhelds

Layar augmented reality app now available globally, lets you hunt down tweeps with cold, calculated precision originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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