Category Archives: Blog

Slowly We Turn, Step by Step…Time to Talk Facebook

Facebook is Getting Serious About Business I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Facebook is starting to turn towards a business platform, competing with the likes of Google and Microsoft. The core of this strategy is their “Workplace by Facebook” offering, which was introduced in 2016. They’ve designed Workplace to go toe to toe with […]

The Art of Listening

The most important part of my job is listening, not selling.  Several months back, I was sitting in the CIO’s office of a publicly traded company.  After we exchanged pleasantries, I asked very few questions. Instead, I sat there quietly and listened to the CIO. I listened to his problems and his vision. When you […]

The Microsoft Search Ecosystem – An Outsider’s View (Part One)

In this two-part post I’ll try to explain, compare, and contrast the different search solutions available from Microsoft including SharePoint Server, SharePoint Online, Hybrid SharePoint, Delve, Azure, and Bing. I try to take a business first approach, one I use with my clients, to use search to solve business problems. In part one I’ll start […]

Two Search Luminaries Join Our New Advisory Board

I’m delighted that Matthew McDermott and Kevin Watters have joined BA Insight’s Advisory Board.  Both are top-notch search gurus, new colleagues, and old friends.  I know them from different worlds- Matthew from SharePoint search and Kevin from open source search.

One Year Later: Now There Are Three

Way back in the middle of 2017, my colleague Jeff Fried participated in an exclusive member webinar with the Cognitive Computing Consortium on Leaders in Cognitive. He discussed the topic of, “The Race is On: Comparing Google and Microsoft’s Cognitive Services.”  I know… how is the middle of 2017 “way back”?  Well, in the terms of […]

Hackers Are Patient and Persistent – Your Employees Are Not

After having a great ride in cyber security for over four years, I was excited to get back into collaboration with BA Insight just over eight months ago and also join a former colleague of mine, Mark Aschemeyer. People often ask what I do for a living now that I have joined BA Insight. Initially […]

Reflections on Elastic{ON} 2018

Elasticon

Elastic{ON} 2018 just concluded, and what a great week it was. We at BA Insight started down our Elastic journey over three years ago and seeing this strategy and investment in action is very exciting. It was my first time at the conference, BA Insight’s first time as a sponsor with a booth, and because […]

Image Recognition and Image Search: A Picture is Worth a 1000 Words

Don’t you just hate it when you cannot find the content you are looking for? You know that you have relevant content, but either you can’t remember where it is, or you know where it is, but there is so much content that it will take ages to look at every file to find what […]

Search Predictions for 2018

New Year’s predictions are a longstanding tradition, dating at least back to the 16th century French seer Nostradamus.  Personally, I started only four years ago, and my predictions focus around search, digital workplaces, and market dynamics involving Microsoft.  I intend for these predictions to be much more useful, informative, and accurate than Nostradamus’ (a low […]

What Can You Crawl in Office 365?

As organizations move toward the cloud, there has been some confusion around management and optimization of search. I’ve had more than one conversation with customers about the continued need for a search strategy, and then someone asks, “But doesn’t the Microsoft Graph pick up everything? Why do I need to still worry about search?”

Tapping into the Cognitive Services Arms Race: Our Best-of-Breed Strategy

You hear about AI, machine learning, and cognitive services from every direction these days. Personally, I’ve been getting deep into the cognitive services provided by Microsoft and Google. Over the last year these have expanded enormously, and the pace of development is only increasing.

The Increasingly Intelligent Search Experience

How much time do you spend searching for the right content? According to one study, knowledge workers spend 20% or more of their day looking for timely and relevant content. Personally, I think that is a conservative estimate – but thankfully, Microsoft and many of its partners are trying to reduce that number.

The Important Role of Search Analytics

Adoption and engagement are quickly becoming the most discussed topics in the SharePoint community. Why? Because organizations are realizing that the concept of “build it and they will come” was never true, and that they need to do a better job of tracking and measuring collaboration – and demonstrating business value. They’ve learned that no […]