Enterprise Search

Start-up fever?

If you've ever been curious about starting a business, our friend Sean Murphy over at SKMurphy is holding a free web event you may want to attend. Sean, who runs the popular Bootstrapper's Breakfast groups that meet at cities around the country, is hosting a call in discussion of the first chapter of Barry Moltz's book 'You Need to Be a Little Crazy" on Wednesday June 8 2011.

Participating in the call along with Sean are serial entrepreneurs Dorai Thodla of iMorph.com, Massimo Paolini of MPThree Consulting. I've been invited to participate as well, having co-founded both SearchButtin.com and New Idea Engineering; but it is Sean, Dorai, and Massimo you'll want to hear.

If you've ever wondered what it takes to start a company, this call is for you.

Details:

Time: 3PM EDT; Noon PST (2000GST)

Registration link is:

http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2011/05/07/you-need-to-be-a-little-crazy-by-barry-moltz/

Use 'NewIdea' as your discount code to get in at no cost

Just remember, as Wally found out from Dilbert in 1991- 'the company stops paying you if you quit' to become an entrepreneur!

 

/s/Miles

 

 

SharePoint and FAST ESP Search Book SHIPS!

Wow, pent up demand never hurts!

We knew that there were a bunch of people waiting for the Advanced Microsoft Search Book, but we were kind of surprised by today's Amazon results. The book shipped Monday - we just got our 'official' copies yesterday; but Amazon reports our book ended up in the top 10, at least in one category:

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #6,609 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
   #7 in  Books > Computers & Internet > Microsoft > Networking
   #24 in  Books > Computers & Internet > Software > Business
   #28 in  Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Software Development 

Well, I'm impressed. Thank you for those who are buying the book! We all hope it is useful for you. And we all want to know what you liked and didn't like, and where you need more content. Here's the official Wrox site for the book (for errata and updates) ; but we've also kicked off a blog just for the book where all four of us will be adding things like PowerShell scripts and taking questions.

What we did over our summer vacation

We've been very fortunate that the last several months have been unusually busy for us - in fact, almost too busy. We've been active in a number of interesting and demanding customer projects, and have invented some very powerful and useful technology along the way which we'll have more to say about over the next month or two.

However, it's time for us to formally come clean about the thing that really took up our evenings and weekends for most of the last year: 'the book'.  Since early last year, we've been working on a book project with Jeff Friend (Microsoft) and Natalya Voskresenskaya (Acrovis). The book, Advanced Microsoft Search: FAST Search, SharePoint Search, and Search Server, is finally available. The ISBN number is 0470584661 and you can order it from Amazon today.

A few good friends have known of the book for a few months now, and while we all felt we finished the book in record time, we're sure it seemed like geologic time to our editors and some potential readers. And I'd be remiss if I did not give special thanks for John Kane (HP), Carl Grimm (Avanade), and Jason Noble (Neudesic) for their roles as technical reviewers.

We cover the entire Microsoft search family with technical coverage on both the SharePoint and the ESP product families. We also have a few chapters on the business side of search: Centers of excellence, operations, selection, and so forth. We even have chapters that deal with ESP under Linux, possibly a first for a Microsoft search book!

We invite you to have a look at our work; and let us know how we did. It took me 20 years to forget what a time sink it is to write a book; and yet now that it's done, we're already talking of a fourth. I guess my memory isn't what it used to be!

Enjoy!

/s/Miles

Dummies Books Take On Search

Does this signal the end of days?  The fine folks with the friendly yellow books have taken on search engines and their related advertising in a big way!

Actually we're fans of the Dummies books, for example they cut through a lot of the hype back in the early days of XML.  This time around they are offering titles on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and using Google's AdWords and AdSense.