As the New Year begins and resolutions to quit smoking proliferate, Beaconfire is pleased to be working with the The American Legacy Foundation and their smoking cessation program – BecomeAnEX.org. The EX campaign is about re-learning your life without cigarettes and the EX site plays an important role in helping smokers learn their triggers and then maximize support from family, friends and the community of users at the EX community.

Recently, Beaconfire helped Legacy revitalize their website and migrate their users from Ning to the Elgg social networking software solution. Read more after the jump. (more…)

The future is here, and its name is Wave.

Not really… but the much anticipated Google Wave has arrived in “preview” mode. When Google says “preview,” they mean “we can’t call it beta yet”, and it’s available through a limited number of invitations to people who are willing to deal with lots of bugs in order to get an early peek at this tool.

The idea behind Wave is that email has been around, mostly unchanged, for a long time – so Wave purports to be what email would have been if it were developed using today’s technology and for today’s web user. Not everyone feels that Google’s description of Wave is accurate, however. Daniel Tenner blogged recently that Wave is not communications 2.0 at all, saying:

“Is Wave the next Twitter? Nope. Is it the next Facebook? Nope. Is it going to replace Instant Messengers? Possibly, in some circumstances, but not any time soon.. I believe this is partly Google’s fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it’s a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer.”

Confused yet? Check out a new collaborative user manual, read Lifehacker’s introduction, or Google’s hefty hour-long demo (below), and you’ll have a good idea of what it’s all about.

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True Web developers are like superheroes with magic powers, at least to someone like me, who has only enough technical skills to make me dangerous.

So when we have an opening for a new superhero, I get very excited. When we have two openings, I get downright overwhelmed.

We’re looking for a couple of fantastic developers to join our team and help provide technical solutions to our clients.

Tech Lead / Consultant - The Technical Lead’s powers are experience and leadership.  He/she uses these powers to provide both objective technical analysis, as well as lead the implementation and integration of possible solutions. He/she also possesses the power to do hands-on programming as part of the project team.

Web Developer/Software Engineer with .NET – The developer’s powers are amazing .NET (C#) programming skills and a deep knowledge of Web technology.  He/she will use these powers to implement websites in various content management systems, create custom applications for the Web, integrate Web sites with other client back-end systems, consult with clients on available technologies and evaluate technology options.

To find out more about these positions, click on the “about us” link and go to “careers”.

So put your cape on and join Beaconfire.  Help our clients use technology to make an even greater impact in the world.

There’s no doubt that Google is the search engine for most of the Internet.  Over the past few years, the big G has taken almost all of the growth in the search business (90% according to the linked source). And when vendors speak of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), they are recommending practices that are tantamount to Google Engine Optimization.  And why not? Most website administrators looking at their search referrals can plainly see why that’s where to put your effort in.

With the recent agreement between Yahoo and Microsoft making MS Bing the search platform for all of Yahoo’s sites, there’s now a new wrinkle in the SEO game.  Take the two numbers in your referral logs for Bing and Yahoo, combine them together — big enough to matter now? Especially with MS pushing the technology everywhere it can?  Right now you’ll continue to have traffic from both Bing and Yahoo, but moving forward, most sites will only have to optimize for a single additional search engine in the #2 position — Bing.

If you decide Bing is worth watching, try out these tips on optimization.  Remember – SEO is always a bit of black magic rather than hared science, but the rewards can definitely be worth the effort.

The question one finds asking themselves before taking any task of considerable effort is  whether they really want to do it. This past weekend, I exerted some effort to get myself from Washington D.C. to Cambridge, MA to attend a conference. The topic of discussion was Elgg. What is Elgg and why did I go to Cambridge? Read on and discover why.

Last week, it was brought to my attention that Elgg–an open source Social Networking Platform–was holding a conference on Social Media for Education, and a more specific conference on Elgg. I know and understand the needs of Education that the promise of Social Media can bring. I was very glad someone decided to bring people together to talk about it. Since it was on Friday and I was at work that day, I couldn’t make it. Thankfully, I did make the second conference on Saturday.

At ElggCamp Boston 2009, I was able to see the need for the "Social Networking Platform".Speakers made it very clear that Elgg was not for the person that needed to put up a generic social network to link people together. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter do that just fine.

The iPhone is arguably the most advanced piece of technology commonly found in people’s hands these days. It has a GPS to tell you where you are. It has a phone to let you communicate with people. It has a multi-touch LCD screen that lets the user use the device with no more and no less than one button. The iPhone is a computer … with the Internet. Ten years ago, try to imagine describing to someone what an iPhone does and they’d think that you were talking Sci-Fi. Well, folks, as much as people like to deny it, Science Fiction becomes reality every day in our world.

Jules Verne could see us going to the moon, and John F. Kennedy  actually pushed our country to do it. Star Trek could see us using tri-corders, and Motorola created it as the first cell phone. In my opinion, the iPhone, it’s market of applications, and growing user base is the best way to gain access to and interact with information. It also helps you get in touch with people, but I think face to face is the best way to interface with other humans.

Over the course of my trip to New York City this weekend, I realized exactly how valuable my iPhone is. When I got off my bus at 31st Street and 7th Avenue, I wanted to use my gym membership at the sports club. I went online on my iPhone, looked up the nearest 24 hour gym in their network, and copied and pasted the address into the Google Maps application. In about 2 minutes, I was on my way. After I arrived and couldn’t get into the side of the building which was advertised, I looked up the phone number online, gave them a call and got in. That’s convenience.

The sports club’s web site is not optimized for the iPhone, but since the built-in Safari Browser is a full-fledged browser, I was able to navigate with some effort and get what I needed. If the web site was actually created for the iPhone, it would have saved me some time from zooming in and out, panning left and right to get around. If they had an "app" for that, I might have been able to log into it with my account and it would have been geo-location aware of where I was and tell me the nearest branches of the club. Why don’t they create an "app for that"?

This is all possible and contradictory to popular belief, the functionality that I just described doesn’t have to be developed as an iPhone Application. Much of the functionality can be created in HTML as a web application and placed on the Internet. Google has done a great job by making all of their applications as iPhone friendly "webapps" which behave like iPhone applications.

Recently, some plugins have been released to make your WordPress blog iPhone friendly. Available at Brave New Code, the WPTouch Mobile Theme and Plugin for WordPress takes your standard WordPress blog and makes it look, feel, and behave as an iPhone application with nice transitions.

Static Content Sites

Many organizations have also released informational web sites in a handy, iPhone friendly format. Their sole purpose is to disseminate information. Web Apps such as the Athens Tourist Guide :  and Pocket Cambridge : are basically lists and tables of static HTML that look nice on an iPhone or an iTouch. Do you have information that can be useful to iPhone users? There are some really easy ways to get it out there.

1. iWebKit – “Iwebkit is the revolutionnairy kit used to create high quality iPhone and iPod  touch websites in a few minutes and is based on an LGPL license. In the first 4 months of it’s existance the pack has greatly evolved from a basic idea to a project that has reached worldwide fame!”

2. iUI – It has the following

1. Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
2. Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
3. Ability to handle phone orientation changes
4. Provide a more "iPhone-like" experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

Dynamic Content Sites

Do you have programming ability or resources which you can utilize to push out your content from your organizational and institutional databases? You can probably use the aforementioned tools in conjunction with dynamic server side languages, but you might want to look into the following options to make your life easy.

1. ComponentOne iPhone Studio – ComponentOne’s studio is a rich set of ASP.NET Server Controls which is beyond compare when it comes to giving you a competitive advantage in creating dynamic applications fast. Some of the included server controls are : Calendar, ViewPort, CoverFlow ( Like the iTunes record browser ), and MultiView ( like the Photo explorer in the iPhone Camera application ).

2. iWebKit for Grails – This plugin provides integration with iWebkit, a powerful User Interface Library for Safari development on iPhone. By using this plugin, the grail developer will have an iphone web app skeleton (CSS and javascript) but also a extended tag library helping in creating iphone web pages in an easy,clean and fast way. If you are a Java developer or your company has them, and have gotten the hang of Groovy, this might be the path for you.

3. iUI with Asp.NET – iUI is very simple and some people have taken some steps to create their own integration for ASP.NET and iUI. This page points you to some third party resources which may be helpful for you in creating dynamic iUI applications.

Possible Scenarios and Tips

How can you capitalize on the iPhone and iTouch user? Here are some ideas which may work out for you.

1. If you have a Calendar of events, you can add iCalendar format links which can let users download the event data and add it to their iPhone Calendar.

2. If you have a location or event search which requires an address or a zip code, you can use W3C’s Geolocation API which is supported by the built-in Safari browser on iPhones.

3. If you have a member’s only directory, you can create an interface which can list people’s information as well as publish their contact info in the vCard format so that they can add it to their contact lists.

It’s been four months since Idealware put out the outstanding report “Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone” and I’ve been meaning to post about it for some time now.  Laura Quinn at Idealware pulled together a collection of knowledgeable (If I do say so myself) contributors from all over the nonprofit tech field in order to produce this great resource, and it’s definitely worth the (free) download.

The report’s 60+ pages give a great overview of what you can expect from each of the systems mentioned, including:

• Ease of Hosting and Installation
• Ease of Setting Up a Simple Site
• Ease of Learning to Configure a More Complex Site
• Content Admin Ease of Use
• Graphical Flexibility
• Structural Flexibility
• User Roles and Workflow
• Community/Web 2.0 Functionality
• Extending and Integrating
• Scalability and Security
• Site Maintenance
• Support/Community Strength

Jeff Herron (Beaconfire VP) and I both contributed to the paper;  Jeff provided input about nonprofits’ needs for content management systems and about options beyond the systems mentioned.  I contributed what I could to the Wordpress section, as I have installed and configured it countless times (well, ok, not countless times, but more than I’ve kept track of), and a little to the Drupal section.

The report is free and available on the Idealware website.

Part of my role of late has been working with clients on Software Evaluations for CMS software. Sometimes we are hired as a stand alone project to make a CMS recommendation. Sometimes we evaluate and recommend CMSs as part of redesign of the client’s Website. Sometimes we use a formal process where  we gather and prioritize key client needs, identify key decision criteria,  then match requirements to product offerings narrowing the list from 8 to 4 to a final 2 vendors to demo to the client. Or alternatively, we use a more informal/faster/less costly approach, that leverages the  knowledge we’ve accumulated on past projects and simply matches the tools we know with their requirements and circumstances.

While many things vary from project to project — the client’s needs, budgets, technology preferences, interest in Open Source, the decision making team — our role is to lead clients to the point where they can make a decisions (yes this is the leading the horse to water part of the metaphor). However, there are some things happen on each project that amaze me including that sometimes you just can’t get the horse to drink from the right pond (have I extended the metaphor too far?). Read about the things that amaze me again and again, after the jump. (more…)

Recently, we relaunched an environmentally focused service learning program for the Wildlife Conservation Society on the Ning community platform. Teens for Planet Earth launched at the beginning of April (ok, I guess that isn’t so recent!) on Ning after beginning its life as a typical minisite some years ago. This project entailed migrating the existing site, enhancing the design and setting up the new community features.

For this client and project, Ning was a perfect choice, offering both the out of the box community features that a teen audience would expect with enough customization to satisfy the needs of the organization. Oh, and the price was right… just a few dollars to remove some ads and customize the domain name.

There have been discussions and comments about Ning’s value, ethics, and change in business model (this is just one of many posts out there). We’ve been monitoring this debate for a while, as we have a few clients on Ning. Ultimately the choice for this client was that Ning’s offering was more consistent with their needs, goals and situational realities. For another of our clients, the risks and impacts of working with Ning during their transition from social network platform provider to social network is more troubling.

Thankfully there are growing numbers of social networking tools sets – many free/open source, some commercial and costly, some good, and some bad. Seems like lately we’ve been asked to highlight the pros/cons of the various options, as more of our clients than ever consider whether to roll out their own social network. Products we’ve already reviewed include (in no particular order): Telligent Community Server, The Port, Higher Logic, Elgg, Grou.ps, KickApps, Collective X, and Pluck. Looks like the number of tools continues to grow and until a leader emerges, I have a feeling we’ll be asked to help clients make smart choices as part of our Software Evaluation service offering.

Just last month the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA) launched another Web site with Beaconfire’s help on Ektron – this one for their London Conference http://iahsa.net/LONDON/index.aspx. Last September, AAHSA launched its handsome new website, aahsa.org, powered by the Ektron content management system (CMS). The main site was designed by Portent Interactive which Beaconfire then implemented in Ektron.

AAHSA invested in replacing their static website with a CMS system to get the IT department out of the content creation process, reduce turn-around time in publishing content to the Web, and help enforce page layout and style. In addition to implementing the design templates, we migrated a number of custom .NET applications into the system, on time for AAHSA’s annual meeting held last year in Philadelphia, PA. So far, AAHSA has successfully migrated two affiliate sites into Ektron, thereby taking advantage of the same template structure and workflows and helping them to enforce organization-wide business processes for content management.

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Limitations. We hate them, but we have to live with them.

As web folks, often the source of our limitation is the CMS software that was supposed to set us free. In many cases, the vendor has the server, the vendor makes the software, and more often the not, and there’s no access to server-side scripting, such as PHP. Maybe your CMS has all the features you’re looking for – outside news feeds, photo galleries, calendars, and other fancy widgets. Sometimes, though, it seems that some of the features we covet are missing.

But if you can put JavaScript in your CMS then you can have your CMS and your widgets, too. There are several JavaScript libraries out there,  when combined with XML or other data formats, can get you almost anything you want.

Don’t think you can make XML? Think again.

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Few things scare clients like the “big black box” of development.  At the development phase, after intensive iterative rounds of creative and functional decisions with a tangible sense of back and forth, the client puts their faith in their consultant.  How do the client and consultant determine how well their development project is proceeding inside of that black box? Metrics – and the basic metric, understandably, is about budget.

Every time I discuss metrics, I realize that as a Tech Lead, my goals are not quite the same as a Project Manager – even Technical Project Managers.  Timeline, scope, budget – that’s what my PM is obsessing over.  Developers absorb the same concepts in a different way, through the classic adage “fast, good, cheap – pick 2.” But those demarcations make the most sense during discovery or design estimates.  In the middle of a build, things change.  My job is to make sure the build gets done no matter what, and my PM has to worry about it being paid for.  Scope is still vitally important, but budget, as it relates to profitability, is nearly meaningless to a Tech Lead, much to my PM’s chagrin.  It’s not that I don’t worry about the client’s budget, but that during development, the financial consequences of rates and margins are distilled down into staffing – how many developers of what skill for how many hours per week.  And timeline becomes the inevitable algebraic solution of when that staffing meets scope (with a little bit of magic pixie dust thrown in to the equation).

Recently, I was discussing metrics with a PM after a major build and had trouble articulating my thoughts.  It seemed to me we only achieved real clarity about tracking at the time when we had the least time to implement it.  A few days later, I came across a detailed email I’d written during the heady height of a previous build and completely forgotten about.   Not only did it address improvements to our current metrics, but it linked them all together to judge project health.  It was like reading the penned version of dream before some guy from Porlock wakes you up and everything turns vague and indistinct.  It was fantastic.

I couldn’t understand a word of it…

A little bit of clarity and some pretty charts, after the jump.

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Recently I launched my second facebook application called Feed the Pig and I figured I should take some time to share some of the lessons I learned and guidelines I’ve developed for making facebook applications. This post is the first of a series I plan to write in the coming weeks so stay tuned. A lot of the terminology that is used in this post is explained here.

• Keys to success
• Considerations and Cautions and Lessons Learned
• Structure/Pages (application Map)
• Permissions/Privacy
• Hosting
• Useful Links
• Useful Blog Posts

Keys to Success

Keep in mind why people tend to join facebook in the first place. Most users want to keep her/his friends and family updated on her/his lives. Users also want to keep in touch/keep track (perhaps stalk) one another. Facebook is a *social* network so you should design your application with that in mind. If your application doesn’t encourage users to share and interact with one another than maybe facebook is not to right place for it. Above all you need to make your application spreadable and continuously engaging.

• Make it easy for your current users to share with her/his friends
• Post your user’s actions to her/his feed.
• Design your application so that users can engage her/his friends, post things to either her/his friends profiles or her/his own, send requests to friends that will link her/him to the app.
• Don’t let your facebook application be just a passing fad. Many applications on facebook although exciting at first lose their luster after a user has tapped into all of the applications features.
• By updating your application with new features and content you can keep your users engaged and your application feeds going which is basically free advertising for your app.
• For non-profits, Facebook applications can be a great way to get users involved in a cause, provide her/him with a dashboard of tools to take action, and keep her/him posted about news and upcoming events. Email your users. If a user gives the application permission to change her/his status that is another great way to spread important updates about your cause. And again make sure you provide users with the tools to involve her/his friends.
• Here is very useful marketing post
  10 tips for releasing your Facebook application, and maximizing growth

Continue on to Considerations and Cautions after the jump…

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Answer:  Multivariate Testing (or MVT)

So what is it?  According to Wikipedia:

…multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment. It can be thought of in simple terms as numerous split tests or A/B tests performed on one page at the same time. Split tests and A/B tests are usually performed to determine the better of two content variations, multivariate testing can theoretically test the effectiveness of limitless combinations…In a nutshell, multivariate testing can be seen as allowing website visitors to vote with their clicks for which content they prefer and will stand the most chance of them proceeding to a defined goal.

Two Beaconfire staffers, Shiloh and Jo, recently won our Leadership & Innovation Award for their work on MVT, and I had the opportunity to sit down with them and find out more about it.

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Beaconfire is proud and excited to announce the launch of our refreshed Web site. It’s been in the works for several months, and it’s finally ready for public consumption. Our last major redesign occurred about three years ago, and the site was looking a little dusty.

Some of the new site features include:

• An interactive Flash design portfolio
• Fun facts about the team members at Beaconfire
• Blog postings integrated across the various sections of the site
• New options to sort and filter our ever-expanding client list

Most Beaconfire staff members had a hand in working on the site at some point over the past few months. Rahul and Adebo led the tech work. Creative Director Eve put together the new look. IA whiz Amy created the new site architecture. Eric, Elizabeth and Ali worked together on a new tone and copy for the site. Tim and Marissa did the HTML cuts. Michael acted as the executive sponsor, and Lynn was our “client” and did all the user acceptance testing. And Jennifer managed the project and kept us all moving in and around a very busy fall for our clients.

Part Two of a Two-Part Series

In our last episode, we explored why the iPhone is the Devil, and the downfall of Western Civilization as we know it. Or is it?

Fortunately, in addition to the aforementioned tools of evil, there is a tremendous range of applications that can be used to better yourself or the world around you. In spite of having one of the many Solitaire applications, the noble stuff is what I like to show people when they ask if they can see my phone. And this category of apps continues to grow, as non-profits and other civic-minded folks realize the potential of the iPhone to help bring their message to the masses. There are even personal finance applications, which I have to imagine will advise one to stop wasting their money on virtual beer applications. (iBeer was $2.99, last I checked.) More of my amazing insights, below the fold. (more…)

Step 1: Take 6 interesting blogs about technology and non-profits

• NTEN Blog
• Gavin’s Digital Diner
• Confessions of a Non-Profit Executive Director
• Wild Apricot
• Michael Stein’s NON-PROFIT TECHNOLOGY BLOG
• Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

Step 2: Aggregate them all via a Yahoo! Pipe

• The Pipe (feel free to clone)
• The Pipe’s RSS Output

Step 3: Consume the feed with Wordle

Step 4: Mess around with screenshots in Photoshop for 15 minutes because people still hate Java Applets

When it comes to professional obsession with browser rendering, I’ve never met anyone quite like our own Marissa. Between multiple-IE instance installs, Browsercam screenshots and an army of test machines, she could probably tell me what’s wrong with a site in OpenWeb on a NextStep machine from 1993.

About 6 months ago, she sent a call around the office for phones to view the mobile version of a site we’d just launched on. I gave her my LG Env2 and left my iPhone in my pocket. After all, the iPhone and mobile Safari were made to browse a site just like a “real” browser on a large display — and the iPhone interface handles this beautifully, with multi-touch zooming and double tapping that expands columns to the width of the phone.  It works so great Apple just got sued.

Since then, however, a growing number of major websites are sniffing the iPhone user agent and presenting mobile versions. Sometimes this is a relatively positive experience – like Amazon’s mobile shopping version – and other times (I’m looking at you m.cnn.com) it’s just terrible.. an endless loop of trying to avoid an ugly, stripped-down content missing mobile version. And that’s where the rant comes in.

Apple: Let me change the user-agent on the iPhone. Sometimes I’d rather just pretend I’m in Firefox. More than sometimes.

Designers: The iPhone may be a device-on-the-go, but it’s nothing like a traditional mobile device. Stop feeding me CSS designed for a phones with a 100×60 pixel screen. If you don’t want to take the time to craft an iPhone version or your mobile version looks terrible on iPhoney, just give me the real thing.

Developers: Always give me a way to get to the “real” site and stay there.

Until the situation improves, iPhone users will just keep looking for backdoors to get the content they really want.

Editor’s note: With the busy holiday season upon us, the Beaconfire Staff has had no time for blogging (as you may have noticed!). But to make up for it, we’re “reprinting” some of our most popular posts of the last couple years. Hopefully we’ll be back to generating new content soon, but for now, please enjoy Tim’s post for anyone who’s had to cut emails with the new Outlook.

There has been much discussion lately about Microsoft’s decision to abandon IE as the rendering engine for HTML emails in Outlook 2007. It’s hard to conduct a level-headed exchange on this topic because of strong feelings about HTML vs. TXT emails, and personal, professional, philosophical, or theological issues with Microsoft. Putting aside the endlessly repetitive and unproductive argument about whether Microsoft has any idea what they are doing, and whether or not it is a good idea to send HTML-formatted email messages, let’s look at the facts.

Molly Holzschlag’s (molly.com) post on the subject says that the impetus for this change was the unacceptable differences that MS Outlook users were seeing between what they saw in their inbox (rendered by IE engine) and what their friends saw when they forwarded those messages on to them (Composed by Word engine). Or when they composed messages from scratch (Word in Outlook) and their friends tried to read them (IE engine again). So it makes sense that you’d want the same engine to create a message that you use to view it. But Word? Really?

The problems enter in when you consider Word’s HTML engine: It’s inarguably sub-par. Already, those of us who create the HTML for use in client’s campaigns are forced to utilize a mish-mash of HTML coding techniques, some of which we’ve long left behind in building web pages. This isn’t just Microsoft’s fault; ALL of the email clients we test in have slightly different quirks and shortcomings. As a result, we are still using tables, spacer gifs, and (in many cases) font tags to layout our templates. So this is a situation of something broken being broken in a different (and perhaps worse) way when it really could have been a step toward fixing it.

So what do we do? Test about a bazillion times. This has always been the case. We have always had to test the rendering of our HTML messages in (at least) Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Entourage and — if we can, and depending on the client — Eudora, Pegasus, Lotus Notes, or Groupwise. The testing required for Outlook 2007 adds a new wrinkle to the Shar-Pei, but regardless of Microsoft’s decisions regarding rendering engines, did anyone really think that 2007 would render the same as previous versions? Not likely. However, most of us thought that we might see an improvement due to IE7s increased support for CSS.

Anyone using email newsletters as a mode of communication urgently need to have their templates reviewed in order to ensure that future messaging remains successful. Many existing templates will not be Outlook 2007 compatible, and can almost be counted on to break when viewed. After all, nobody in their right mind has been designing email or web pages to be viewed in MS Word! It just wasn’t ever something we dreamed we’d have to test.

Were not entirely in the dark, however. Microsoft is supplying us with some information on Outlook 2007 HTML and CSS support, as well as a validation tool. Read up, test twice as much and we’ll all pull through. If we just stick together.

Microsoft Tools:

• 2007 Office System Tool: Outlook HTML and CSS Validator
• Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007 (Part 1 of 2)
• Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007 (Part 2 of 2)

Other articles and discussions:

• Excellent article by Dave Greiner of Campaign Monitor
• SitePoint post by Kevin Yank
• Arstechnica post by Jeremy Reimer

Microsoft quietly launched their free Microsoft Search Server 2008 product earlier this year as a product that heavily leverages the same Enterprise Search technology found in their Sharepoint 2007 product. That quiet introduction belies the fact that Search Server is directly poised to take on the de-facto market leader in low cost website spidering and searching, the Google Mini. When the Mini was first launched it had a great price-point, the Google name, and a slew of glaring deficiencies that have now been largely patched out of existence. Search technology, which used to be the largest feature gap our company had to account for in implementations for content management systems without their own search provider, had started to become a new brainer – sometimes clients without the slightest idea what sort of technology to use for a website redesign were coming to us with a Mini already purchased. That is, until MS Search Server 2008 arrived, immediately becoming the Mini’s foremost competitor in the low and mid-tier market and presenting a compelling case for those clients already heavily invested in Microsoft technology.

Right now, we’re in the midst of a website redesign that utilizes Search Server 2008. It’s a pretty common type of redesign for us at Beaconfire – a website built on a content management system that doesn’t have a built-in search technology, or at least not one we want to use. The client’s search needs are also pretty typical for a lot of site builds:

1. The search is primarily targeted at the site being redesigned – federated searching of external content might be a plus but takes a back seat to getting good search results for the site the user is searching on.
2. The focus in on public HTML content, not documents or database items, and there’s little in the way of heavily role-based content restrictions
3. The need for advanced filtering is minimal but needs to be expandable for the future
4. The search is fully integrated into the main website. The search and the results returned are displayed seamlessly in pages on the site instead of shuttling users off to another server.
5. Emphasis is placed on returning the best results possible through keywords and “best bet” mechanisms

Those requirements result in what is decidedly not an Enterprise level of search, but a very good example of the type of search plenty of customers want in a redesign – not a fancy search, just a particularly smooth and relevant one.

With those requirements in mind, here’s the my quick take on how the two technologies stack-up based on my impressions with both, right after the jump. (more…)