I have to admit reading Google's recent "Spring Cleaning" announcement marking the official passing of the Google Mini left me feeling somewhat nostalgic. Back in 2005 -- when the little blue box for first announced -- I was a proud owner of one of the first devices shipped in the UK. On a development floor containing around 50 people, a fair-sized crowd gathered

Google has been promoting its broad suite of "Google Apps for Business" as -- among other things -- an enterprise collaboration and social computing offering, aiming to compete with the likes of SharePoint.

To that end, Google has won a handful of big deals, but in discussions with some larger early adopters, a hype cycle appears to be playing out:

I have just spent two days at the inaugural European Enterprise Search Summit in London, and left with much to think and rant about.  For I listened to a series of consultants and vendors telling the audience that enterprise search was an imperative

Now that HP has announced its intent to buy Autonomy, the deal has come under a lot of scrutiny.  One area though that few have yet to look at in detail -- and of particular interest to us as buyers' advocates -- is the whole topic of the IDOL search OEM business

Google has announced that for Google Apps, it's dropping support of older browsers. Only the current and previous versions of IE, Firefox, Safari, and of course Chrome will be supported. After August 1st, Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3 and older versions will be the first to be dropped. Clearly, this is going to put some customer IT departments in a bit of a pickle

I have been attending and speaking at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York this week, a good conference with many opportunities to rub shoulders and pick the brains of smart folk. But it's also an event that gives me a sense of deja-vu, since so little appears to change in the world of search. In fact I am fairly convinced that I could pull out a presentation from a decade back, brush off the dust, and present it with a straight face today

Today I was thinking about search tools -- and adjacent topics such as content/business analytics -- and all the different situations that today's enterprise search engines find themselves involved in

As I've noted on this blog many times before, a lot of Google Search Appliance's "features" are actually outside-of-the-box, rather than out-of-the-box. That can present an unpleasant surprise to many Google customers. But ironically, it's also a great advantage to anyone who wants to use

I led a session at last week's Info360 event in Washington DC called "ECM & BI - a Shotgun Marriage."  I was unsure about it from the get-go, as my fear was that I would spend 45 minutes essentially making a single point: that these two things are largely incompatible. What actually transpired was a bit more interesting

One of the questions I hear time and again is: "We're running SharePoint. Should we get a Google Appliance for search?" This was the case with SharePoint 2007, and it hasn't changed with 2010

We've released a number of updated product and vendor evaluations within our enterprise search & information access research stream this week. Apoorv Durga, Adriaan Bloem, and I are seeing many search vendors broadening their capabilities. But as usual, with more complexities come more potential implementation pitfalls and challenges

Google is announcing a new version of the Google Search Appliance today -- version 6.8 of the company's enterprise search solution. The headline feature is "Cloud Connect" -- but that's in fact a pretty superficial addition. If you look at the technology, what's more interesting is that this release marks another small step in Google's long transition from fiction to reality

We've just updated several vendor evaluations in our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software technology stream, including

What, your system vendor doesn't have an app store yet? Apple has popularized the concept, and most phone platforms now have something similar: Google's Android Market and Nokia's Ovi Store come to mind. So now everyone has to have one, not just devices, but enterprise software as well