Sydney SharePoint USer Group Meeting Tuesday 18th July 2006

Just over half a dozen turned up to the 12/13th month of these….

Ivan mentioned we had some good SharePoint add-ons referring to the WISDOM SharePoint products MacroView has.

Lars from Ontolica in Denmark presented Ontolica via Live Meeting and Skype.
After first trying to use skype over the room speakers, Ivan had to revert to some headphones plugged into his notebook.

The Ontolica search only needs an instance of Portal server installed and for WSS searching it uses Portal server engine to index the wss sites.

It is a Google like experience with a few extras!

It is Boolean by default so you don’t need to type in and between words, but can type in or and use nested logic….

The search scope item at the end of the search box is great and the power user method of being able to type filetype:doc etc like in Google to filter to a doc type or site etc was great.

The ability to change the look and feel was interesting as well as the extra web parts which make filtering a little cleverer and pleasant to use.
These web parts work out what items you can filter on and they help immensely in narrowing down the search items with a click or two.

The best bets web part is like Google ads and suggests what users should look at. If placed on the right hand side, it is so much like the Google ads…well say no more.

Their first release was in Sept 2004 and they have made many improvements since then.

It is a good product for those with portal server.

Ontolica are moving into more reporting on SharePoint especially as the new SharePoint V3 due out next year has better searching etc

Regards,

Tom Bizannes
SharePoint Consultant
http://www.macroview.com.au