I've Been Gone A While

I know that, while I’m travelling, I should just file blog postings from the road since it’s more dynamic and compelling ‘n’ stuff, but I didn’t.  I’m sorry.  On the plus side, I’ve been taking notes, and I have a lot to blog about for several days.

I’ve been to TechEd North America, SharePoint Advisor Live, the Collaboration Technologies Conference, and TechEd Europe.  Great events all.  You’ve been talking to me, and I’ve been paying attention.  Expect individual blog posts on supportability, interoperabiltiy with other products, the PDC, and several other topics.

But before I move on…

Cool Partner Product Shout-Out: Longitude

First off, I blogged about Ontolica last month, and wanted to point out another good partner enhancement for SPS search, namely Longitude from BA-Insight.  They do at least two very clever things (they do more than two, but I particularly care about two).  One is that they inspect SPS’ taxonomy informaiton and provide an easy interface to further filter search results. 

The really clever thing they do, though, from my developer evangelsim bias, is hook into the indexing gathering process and add an event to our index pipeline (the set of things the index gatherer does when it decides a document has been modified, such as index it, check for notification alerts, check for topic assistant pattern matches, etc.).  Longitude will create viewable images of multiple pages of each document being indexed.  It stores them in its own database, and provides SPS UI for adding file viewing to the browser-based search results experience.

The extra clever bit is that we haven’t documented the index pipeline APIs – they had to have figured this out by trial and error.  But now that someone has proven that there’s a commercially viable reason to do such a thing, it gives me ammo to go back and persuade our SPS Search team to, indeed, document the darned things.