Anyone who has been involved with replacing a content management software (CMS) application knows that what lies beneath the tip of the iceberg is the problem of migrating content. No matter how much preparation you do, it's not until the software is in and the templates and style sheets are written that the scale of the migration problem starts to become obvious. And intractable: Content authors are very unwilling to learn a new CMS and republish all the content they have created over many years in the space of a few weeks. To them, there is no business benefit; the pages look the same in the new CMS.

Compared to a CMS, installing a search application can be accomplished in a few hours, or less if you are using a Google appliance. The initial crawl may take awhile to complete but in perhaps no more than a few days, users are really pleased about the information they have found, especially the information they should not have found because no one has addressed the issues of secure search. Secure search is the "migration factor" of search implementation. Until the software is installed and all the documents are indexed, the scale of the problem remains unknown. With search, the challenge is even greater than for a CMS because you can at least tick the box as each page arrives at the new CMS. In the case of search, you may be faced with several million documents, and you won't live long enough to check each one.

The issues around secure search seem not to have been picked up by the information security community. I recently looked at a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers titled "Trial by Fire," in which the results of a global survey of 7,200 senior managers responsible for information security were presented. There was not one reference to the problems arising from search security anywhere in the report. Four out of every 10 respondents report that their organization has security technologies that support Web 2.0 exchanges, such as social networks, blogs, and wikis. In addition, approximately one-third (36%) audit and monitor postings to external blogs or social networking sites and 23% have security policies that address access and postings to social networking sites.

This indicates that the concern is about information going out electronically through the firewall, which is important but misses something very important. The most important information in your organization could walk out in the pocket of an employee.

Last year, I was working on the development of a global intranet strategy for a blue-chip high-tech company in Europe. To help me, special permission was obtained so that I could be provided with copies of PowerPoint files that summarized the strategic plans of the company. To say that these were highly confidential would be an understatement. But were they? The printouts that I was given had no security classification, no circulation list, and, other than the title page, there was no information given in the footer that indicated just how confidential these documents were.

It seems to me, based on a number of projects in the last 18 months, that information security managers have no understanding of the problems that arise from not having a formal policy about secure search. Ask your information security manager if he or she has a position on early binding versus late binding and see how quickly he or she can come up with a cover story. I've looked through some of the leading books on information security and, though they include pages on cryptography, secure search does not make it to the contents page. The focus seems to be on hackers and security of databases; the management of secure documents is nowhere to be seen, even to the extent of requiring basic circulation and security metadata to be added to each document and spreadsheet.

There are two main reasons why secure search will derail your search implementation. The first is that the RFP you have sent out to vendors will either omit the topic or not provide enough information for the vendor to assess the problem. The second is that, with the installation and initial crawl complete, the scale of the problem becomes very obvious as terms such as "confidential," "relocation," and "redundancy" are tried out.

Of course, the problem is not just at the document level. The search logs will quickly show who is searching for "workplace bullying." But are they the victim, a friend of the victim, or someone trying to see what they can get away with? Next time you do a search on an issue related to product development, industrial relations, or acquisition targets, just take a few seconds to look at each result and ask yourself if the document really should be on general release.

An intellectual property law firm has implemented a new e-discovery review platform to manage its document review. After a two-month onsite evaluation, Townsend and Townsend and Crew has chosen kCura’s Relativity solution firmwide.

Anthony David, litigation support manager at the firm, says, "As an intellectual property firm, we work on a variety of investigations and litigation matters that require a flexible platform for document review that can be adapted to the unique requirements of each matter. With Relativity, we have the tools to do just that. The flexibility of the product streamlines our e-discovery processes and enables our case teams to be more efficient. The cost savings created by these efficiencies are already paying dividends for our clients."

According to kCura, Townsend and Townsend and Crew selected Relativity for the following reasons:

• Ease of use—Attorneys can be up and running quickly with a minimal investment in training. The user interface, native review features and advanced search capabilities are said to make it easy to move from document to document.
• Stability and scalability —Users can add additional hardware as needed to expand capacity quickly and efficiently.
• Cost savings—With the solution’s native file viewing, production capabilities and accelerated workflows, the firm can reduce costs for its clients.

Cedric Tan, a litigation partner in Townsend’s Washington, D.C., office, says, "One of the largest costs in patent litigation is e-discovery. Investment in really good technology to manage and analyze the volume of data involved in discovery is money spent wisely and can save a firm a lot of time and money. Relativity does that, and it is savings that we can pass on to our clients."

Concept Searching reports that its conceptClassifier for SharePoint is now available for SharePoint 2010. With the new Term Store functionality in SharePoint 2010, says Concept Searching, organizations can develop a metadata model using out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities. Running natively and fully integrated with the Term Store, conceptClassifier for SharePoint can consistently apply conceptual metadata to content and auto-classify to the Term Store metadata model, solving the challenge of applying the metadata to thousands of documents and eliminating the need to depend on the user community to correctly tag content.

conceptClassifier for SharePoint's taxonomy manager component functions bi-directionally with the Term Store where changes can be made in the Term Store or in the taxonomy manager. This added functionality helps expedite the development of the metadata models, offers sophisticated refinement capabilities and significantly reduces ongoing maintenance, claims Concept Searching.

Further, says the company, conceptClassifier for SharePoint is the only statistical-based classification and taxonomy solution to use concept extraction and conceptual metadata generation to achieve the optimal approach to manage unstructured content. Features including automatic compound term and conceptual metadata generation, automated classification and innovative taxonomy tools result in a new approach proven to solve traditional knowledge management challenges.

Ektron has released eIntranet, a complete solution for intranets that integrates elements of Ektron’s core technology and gives businesses a powerful and trusted intranet solution. The company says eIntranet combines social software and Web content management (WCM) in one enterprise application, and the familiar interface and Ektron’s robust WCM functionality raise the daily value of the intranet for businesses. Activity streams, a gallery of widgets, mobile engagement and in-context analytic tools ensure that eIntranet is easy to deploy, use and extend—either on-premise, hosted or in the cloud.

Ektron reports the 10 major new features include:

Activity streams and timeline navigation. The most useful information finds the employees who need it most. Like ratings, status and activity updates on social networking sites, eIntranet gives employees a real-time picture of what’s happening in a company at the moment and what information has been the most effective for their peers.

Collaboration. Using personal profiles, groupspaces, forums, blogs, calendars and wikis, internal teams can collaborate on documents before sharing them with the entire organization. eIntranet ensures that everyone is informed instantly of status updates and has access to the most recent versions of documents.

Micro-messaging. Notification and filtering engines provide only relevant information. Mobile engagement. Critical information is delivered to employees via SMS alerts, e-mail or the eIntranet Mobile App anywhere, anytime. Analytics. The Ektron Open Analytics provider gives in-context information about eIntranet usage and adoption by tracking activity, trends and popular areas.

Findability. Its search and tag clouds are built on search and navigation best practices. Taxonomy enhances how information and documents are organized, going beyond folder structure to make collateral more findable.

Widget-based functionality. IT departments can use Ektron’s customizable widgets to integrate with business-critical systems. The widgets also extend the functionality of eIntranet. Developers and marketers can create their own widgets or download the latest widgets from the Ektron Exchange. Drag-and-drop widgets may be added or removed based on preference or advanced technical intranet demands.

Combination of social software and WCM. Social software by itself does not make an effective intranet; intranets require a content management platform to provide the workflow, document and content management and organization capabilities that are essential to productive and secure collaboration.

Integration. The eIntranet can become a portal for other enterprise applications such as SharePoint, CRM, HR and ERP systems.

Easy to deploy, customize and extend. eIntranet gives authors the power to create, edit and manage Web and document content without technical resources.

CABI announced a number of improvements to its CAB Direct reference service. In addition to the more than 8.8 million bibliographic records and 85,000 full-text articles available through the platform, users can now easily keep track of research with permanent marking of records, set aside up to 1000 records for additional examination and manipulation, and export citations and abstracts into tools such as RefWorks and EndNote.

CABI (Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International) is a not-for-profit science-based development and information organization with nine centers worldwide. The updates were made possible by a collaboration with Semantico.

(www.cabi.org)

Being the owner of two of the most important e-readers on the market puts me in a unique position to speak to the best and the worst of what e-readers have to offer. In my view, the Kindle - iPad comparisons I have read are usually based on a rather arrogant assumption: that reading books is, somehow, a more worthwhile intellectual pursuit than magazines, newspapers, or other content sources. My own reading time is split between online and traditional sources. So when the merits of a book-only e-reader are touted, I'm not impressed.

I jumped into the e-reader market in 2008, and bought the first version of the Kindle. At first I was thrilled with it, but the more often I used it, the more my feelings changed.

Things started to change after I finished reading my first purchase, Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers. It dawned on me that I could not loan it to my daughter, Heather, who would greatly enjoy it. Next, I discovered that the content of my Kindle subscription to The Atlantic Monthly fell far short of the printed magazine. Some material was simply missing.

In addition to the other issues, I grew to dislike the drab, grayish screen. It is not, as some would claim, like reading a newspaper or magazine. For me, it's an inferior viewing experience. And the idea that users should prefer it to reading on a good color screen is, in my opinion false. My wife, Jenny, after reading one book on my Kindle, (because it was all she could get on a cross-country flight) refuses to ever touch the Kindle again. Kindle's alleged strong point is that you can read it outdoors in the sun. Few people, I believe, actually read their Kindle in blazing sunshine. They're smart; they read in the shade when outdoors - where an iPad blows it away.

Last, but not least -- and this is a point that applies to most ebooks, regardless of reading platform -- I think the $9.99 price point, when considered in light of the non-loanability of the product, is way too high. I would consider $5.99 as my personal "no-brainer" price point.

Let me frame ebook pricing, in general, from our family's viewpoint. Jenny is an avid reader, and hardcover buyer, of action-adventure and suspense books by authors such as Dan Brown, Lee Child, and James Patterson. She often buys them at Borders with her discount card, which, I believe, costs $25 per year. With her discount, she pays around $17 per title. Every month, she gets a $5 special discount, so she pays $12 for that book - less than Apple charges for an ebook! All books are passed on to one or both our daughters, Heather and Holly, who pass them on to their husbands and then to friends. Their half-life is long, indeed.

Moreover, Jenny often buys remaindered, year-old hardcover titles for $5.95 - while Amazon is still charging $9.99. To me, the idea held by many hardcover publishers, that ebook buyers will pay even more than $9.99 is a pipedream. (Clive Cussler's new book, The Spy, is $14.99 at Apple's iBook store.)  That's getting close to the $17 hardcover price Jenny pays at Borders.

My iPad, in contrast to my Kindle experience, has definitely changed the way I read. Even though I have been using my laptop for current events reading for years, I didn't use it for reading books -- too hot, too heavy. The iPad changed that, in ways the Kindle never could. Now, if I'm reading a book and come across a topic I want to explore on the spot, I just take a minute and Google it. The iPad is heavier than the Kindle, but it rests comfortably on my belly -- not a problem. 

What happened to the books I bought for my Kindle? Well, "there's an app for that," as they say. I can read Kindle books on both my iPad and iPhone. In fact, it is Amazon's stated policy to make Kindle books readable on as many platforms as possible.

Unlike my MacBook, my iPad is an "arm's-reach" device. That accessibility is a big deal for me - especially for "impulse research." It is also a "hand-over" device. (When I find an item of interest, I hand the iPad over to Jenny.) Consider the following example:

Jenny and I are watching The Today Show. On that particular day, as a novelty, all NBC live personalities did not wear makeup. The older folks did not fare well. I wondered aloud whether Kathie Lee Gifford might be in her sixties. Jenny argued for fifties. So I reached for the iPad, and Googled Kathie Lee. She is 56. Time? About 20 seconds. A trivial search? Sure. But it represents a change in habits that, for me, is indeed profound. One impulse lookup begets another...and another. And so on. 

There are reports that Amazon has plans for a color touch screen device with Wi-Fi capabilities -- obviously going well beyond the limited searching of present-day Kindles. The idea is that this will be an "iPad killer," with Amazon offering free "WhisperNet" service on AT&T. (But with the recent elimination of unlimited data transfer for the iPhone, it remains to be seen whether AT&T will still be on board with WhisperNet's pricing when the device finally materializes.)

Amazon is also said to be planning a wide variety of apps, some of which will compete with Apple and Google. In February, Amazon acquired a small startup called Touchco, which has a patent-pending new technology for touch screens said to be much lighter than conventional screens and, possibly, with superior color.

Most recently, Amazon lowered its prices for Kindles and incorporated new higher contrast screens. Clearly, Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, thinks Amazon can afford to see the contest through to the end - unless Wall Street says otherwise by punishing its stock, as it did to Barnes & Noble for spending too much on its Nook e-reader. What a fascinating technology battle.

(www.amazon.com, www.apple.com, www.barnesandnoble.com)

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, committed to constructing the first online digitized presidential archive, will undertake the project with assistance from Endeca Technologies, Inc. Endeca will provide the technical and software assistance required to establish search capabilities at the archives' website.

The online archives, consisting of historical documents and images associated with the Presidency of John F. Kennedy, would be made accessible to global citizens, students, and scholars via a portal in the Kennedy Library website.

The project was first announced in 2006 by the president's brother, the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, who detailed a partnership between the library and the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) to build a digital archive.

(http://endeca.com; www.jfklibrary.org)

Yellow Pages Group (YPG) of Canada has selected the Exalead CloudView search-based application to collect customer sentiment information for YPG’s Urbanizer iPhone application. Exalead was acquired recently by Dassault Systemes.

Exalead’s CloudView is embedded in the Urbanizer application architecture and uses semantic extraction capabilities to distill sentiment from unstructured Web data from consumer comments posted to Urbanizer. The solution allows consumers to discover restaurants in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa based on their mood and social networks. Users, for example, can choose from a selection of predefined moods such as "romantic dinner" or "hipster snack," or use Urbanizer’s equalizer function to create a custom mood based on combinations of cuisine, ambiance and service categories.

Nicholas Gaudeau, VP of digital media at Yellow Pages Group, says, "Matching the comprehensive restaurant information from Yellow Pages Group with the advanced social semantic capabilities of Exalead results in consumers being able to make better decisions. Then, by connecting through Facebook Connect, it becomes very easy to share experiences with friends."

Silverchair’s Semedica Division announces the 4.0 release of the Tagmaster integrated semantic tagging solution, which includes robust and highly accurate automated tagging functionality for scientific, technical and medical (STM) content.

The Web-based Tagmaster system combines text analytics with a robust taxonomy to provide a domain-aware dimension to the automated tagging process. The company says the system is easily integrated into production workflows and live applications. Tagmaster 4.0 also features a new configuration dashboard that puts powerful controls to adjust autotagging settings in the hands of users without programming expertise.

Silverchair announced the 4.0 release of its Tagmaster integrated semantic tagging solution. The product features robust automated tagging for scientific, technical, and medical content and is powered by text analytics. The web-based solution provides domain-aware automatic tagging and is easily integrated into both production workflows and live applications.

Version 4.0 of Tagmaster also includes a new configuration dashboard robust that lets users easily adjust autotagging settings without the need for programming familiarity or expertise. Tagmaster 4.0 was developed by Silverchair's Semedica division.

(www.semedica.com, www.silverchair.com)

Chemidex, a specialized search engine for the fields of chemical and life science, as well as the world's largest repository of product technical literature for those industries, announced that it has changed its name to Innovadex. According to the newly renamed company, the move reflects its expansion into more diverse fields, including a majority of industrial, scientific, technical, and medical markets.

The company also announced that its usage and advertising units have more than doubled over the past 24 months. The company's search engine is available in seven languages, with offices in North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Asian Pacific market.

(www.innovadex.com)