Joseph Fluckiger's Blog

Coveo vs. Ontolica. Search is very important part of a corporate Intranet portal or Internet site. Choosing the right search engine is critical, but can also be a difficult process because the most important questions like "is this search engine scalable, reliable and secure" take the longest to answer. I've worked with two of the more popular search engines for SharePoint over the past 6 months and have gathered enough data on the two to make some valuable, well-tested observations. Below I will compare Coveo and Ontolica. Both Ontolica and Coveo are very good products. I have really been impressed with both. They offer fantastic, have-to-have features over out-of-the-box SharePoint. After you have used either Ontolica or Coveo, you will not want to go back to native SharePoint Search. About Ontolica Ontolica uses the SharePoint native search engine. Note that the native SharePoint search engine is included with the purchase of WSS 3.0 and MOSS...

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SUSHI has become more popular than I had ever imagined. Codeplex has just added a fantastic statistics page which shows exactly how popular it is. The stats include number of downloads, visits and referring sites. SUSHI has been downloaded over 2000 times! Figure 1: Downloads since the project began in November 2007:   It is interesting to see where most of my traffic comes from, and read the reviews on those sites. My favorite review is from a this German site : " Send a Test Email – Um die outbound Mail Funktion zu testen ist dieses Tool super handy." :) It looks like wssdemo.com has brought me a lot of traffic and of course google. Figure 2: Top Referring Sites over last 30 days:   Final Comments SUSHI fills a need for SharePoint in a way that very few other tools do and it is much more user friendly than command lines, or SharePoint features. But it is not yet finished. I still have a lot of additions to make. I would love to have com...

You can download the latest version of SUSHI here . Improvements in this version include:   *Improvements to the "Copy a view" feature. Change copy a view so it doesn't require all fields to be present. This is a nice improvement! so that this feature can be used without having to have all the columns of the view present in the destination list. **More tab for less popular features, click on the More tab to open up these features. BugFix: For Import Documents feature, Upload button was disabled after pressing the validate. button. This is fixed now.   version 2.23 is in the works: I've been working on improvements to the security report in SUSHI so that the report will also take into consideration active directory group membership in determining if a user has access to a site. To accomplish this, I've had to brush up on the System.DirectoryServices namespace used to access Active directory.   -Joseph

I never thought that I would like XSLT and I hoped that I wouldn't have to learn this "wimpy web language" which is how I used to see it. But after this weekend, I am a big XSLT fan.  Which is appropriate because this month marks the 10 year anniversary of XML . So why is XSLT so cool? I think I would have embraced it much sooner had someone made this simple comparison for me: XSTL is like TSQL. I love TSQL: it is so powerful for getting and manipulating data. It is blazing fast and it takes way way fewer lines of code than it would take in .NET. XSLT is similar because both TSQL and XSTL are declarative languages: they focus on saying what do do rather than how to do it. When writing TSQL or XSLT I only have to say what I want done, and the parsing engine is responsible for figuring out how to do it. Another way to look at these two languages is that they do one thing really really well: TSQL manipulates data in a database, and XSLT transforms XML. I strongly reco...