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September 2009 Newsletter

September 30, 2009

September 2009 - Archive

CONTENTS


NEW RSS SUPPORT IN THUNDERSTONE SEARCH APPLIANCES

With our software R & D team's release of texisScripts 7.0.3, the Thunderstone Search Appliance now supports both consuming and producing RSS feeds.

RSS feeds in crawled web pages will now have their links extracted and properly followed. This includes feeds that are normal hyperlinks and feeds that are embedded as the feed for that page.

In addition, all searches now have an embedded RSS feed for that search query. This can allow you to monitor certain queries to see when the results are added or updated. Just bring up the results that you'd like to monitor, and your browser's RSS icon will light up, indicating you can follow the feed for it. Please see the Appliance documentation under "Search Result RSS Feeds" for more details.

In next month's newsletter we'll discuss the OpenSearch support that was also recently added.


QUOTE OF THE MONTH

 

"Sorrow and scarlet leaf,
Sad thoughts and sunny weather.
Ah me, this glory and this grief
Agree not well together!"

 

A Song For September
Thomas William Parsons, 1819 - 1892

 


HAPPENINGS

KMWORLD SELECTS THUNDERSTONE SEARCH APPLIANCE AS A "TREND-SETTING PRODUCT" FOR 2009

KMWorld, a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc., has included the Thunderstone Search Appliance on its 2009 Trend Setting Products list. The annual Trend-Setting Products awards began in 2003. This year KMWorld assessed more than 800 nominated products via a judging panel made up of editorial colleagues, analysts, system integrators, vendors, line-of-business managers and users. According to KMWorld, the 130 products selected all demonstrate clearly identifiable technology breakthroughs that serve the vendors' full spectrum of constituencies – especially customers.

KMWorld featured the list in its printed September 2009 edition, as well as online at the KMWorld.com site.


UPCOMING SEARCH PROJECTS FOR YOU?

We know it still looks like summer outside. However, if your plans for 2009 include any projects that could benefit from the assistance of our Professional Services team here at Thunderstone Software – you should contact us soon to make sure we can accommodate your desired requirements and timelines.

We've got a pretty good load of development and implementation projects underway at the moment. So, please call +1 216 820 2200 if you would like to schedule any programming/consulting/training, etc. for this autumn or winter. Let's discuss your needs now, before time runs out, because we really do want to help you succeed.


Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. Send your email to

August 2009 Newsletter

August 31, 2009

August 2009 - Archive

CONTENTS


HAPPENINGS

LATEST SEARCH APPLIANCES FEATURED IN KMWORLD

A front-page article by ArnoldIT.com's Stephen E. Arnold highlights the newest versions of the Thunderstone Search Appliance and the Google Search Appliance in the printed July/August edition of KMWorld, a publication of Information Today, Inc.

The author says Thunderstone's high-performance, flexible appliances give administrators and developers excellent control over the system – with strong document-level security, feature-rich tuning controls and ability to schedule, stop, pause or configure database crawls in the same way as they can for file servers, Web servers, intranet servers, etc.

You can read the KMWorld article, entitled "Making room for appliances," online here.

THUNDERSTONE ADDS A RESELLER IN AUSTRALIA

We welcome the following organization to our growing Thunderstone Channel Partner Program:

(For Search Appliances and Webinator)
Tredale
1300 737 078
http://www.tredale.com.au


UPCOMING EVENTS

Development work continues on 2009 Thunderstone Software releases of:

  • TEXIS (Version 6)
  • Webinator (Version 6)
  • Thunderstone's Texis Catalog (eCommerce search engine for online catalogs)

CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

 

"What we have in this particular case is a Native American user group thesaurus language. It's been developed, and it can be added to. The more that it's used – and you put that feedback loop back into this thesaurus – the smarter it becomes. And it starts to create, with this new millennium, a written mind that parallels the thesaurus user group's community. This is something that TEXIS is equipped to deal with that the other stuff out there is not equipped to deal with. It's part of its strength."

 

Kathy Pincus
Chief Technology Officer
Mnemotrix Systems, Inc.
http://www.NativeAmericanInstitute.org

 


TECH TIP: DIRECTING YOUR CRAWLER WITH YOUR CONTENT – USING ROBOTS.TXT AND META-ROBOTS

Robots.txt refers to a way for a website to indicate to crawlers what parts of the site it would like the crawler to stay out of. This is not specific to Thunderstone software, and it applies to other web crawlers too. There are two ways of accomplishing this:

 

    • With a "robots.txt" file at the root of the webserver, such as http://www.thunderstone.com/robots.txt. This can be used by site maintainers to tell crawlers to stay out of entire sections. For details of the syntax, please see http://www.robotstxt.org/.

 

 

    • Within an individual HTML page as a custom header, such as <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">. This allows page authors to control the indexing of the content and following of links of an individual page, without affecting others around it.

 

Note that these are guidelines – they do not create technical restrictions that prevent a crawler from descending into a directory or following links, and they should not be used for security purposes.

All Thunderstone products obey robots.txt and meta robots by default. Sometimes you need to index content you don't control that has a robots exclusion on it. If you'd like to ignore the robots reccomendations and index the content, there are Walk Settings that allow this:

 

    • Robots.txt (Y or N) – whether or not to obey the /robots.txt on a site (if it exists). Defaults to Y.

 

 

    • Meta Robots (Y or N) – whether or not to obey any meta robot headers found within an individual page. Defaults to Y.

 

 

    • Robots Placeholder (Y or N) – When a page is excluded from the crawl via robots, this affects whether a "placeholder" record is kept in the crawl data. The placeholder keeps the page from being visited unnecessarily, but it can cause the page to show up in searches where the URL is being searched (by being included in Index Fields.) Defaults to Y.

 


Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. Send your email to

June 2009 Newsletter

June 30, 2009

June 2009 - Archive

CONTENTS


HAPPENINGS

THUNDERSTONE ADDS MORE RESELLERS.
We welcome the following organizations to our growing Thunderstone Channel Partner Program:

(For Texis, Search Appliances and Webinator in the U.S.A. and Canada)
Alliance Technology Group, LLC
+1 410 712 0270
http://www.alliance-it.com


CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: THUNDERSTONE'S TEXIS POWERS NATIVE AMERICAN MIXED-LANGUAGE SEARCHING ON A HERITAGE EDUCATION SITE

The Challenge:

How do you create an online learning resource with search capabilities that satisfy the special requirements of students, teachers and tribal leaders in today's Native American communities?

 

    • Kids on the reservations often speak in a manner that combines their traditional native language and English. They want a website that allows them to search for desired information in the same way.

 

 

    • Educators need innovative, practical tools that can help students to learn more about their native languages, history and culture. They must teach nearly forgotten subjects and transmit cherished values.

 

 

    • People with the responsibilities of leadership in Native American tribes have a dislike for anything that threatens their unique heritage. They fight against the corrosive influences of rampant commercialism.

 

The Solution:

The Native American Cultural and Historical Institute (NAI) and Mnemotrix Systems, Inc. created a Heritage Education online database with sophisticated User Group features and Concept Search capabilities powered by Thunderstone's TEXIS.

 

    • Users of the Intelligent Archive Search tool at NativeAmericanInstitute.org can enter 'mix-and-match' queries that combine English with words from the Seminole, Miccosukee, Creek, Muskogee, Cherokee, Apache, Lakota, Sioux, Yurok and other Native American languages.

 

 

    • The customizable thesaurus in TEXIS takes advantage of vocabularies developed by Native American speakers working closely with the tribal communities. As more people use this search application's thesaurus and continue to add to it, it becomes increasingly smarter.

 

 

    • TEXIS allows NAI to index only targeted content into a fully searchable database optimized for rapidly accessing and retrieving both structured data and unstructured information. TEXIS will enable online users to very quickly find text documents, maps, images, audio recordings, photographs and related educational materials with a high degree of relevance to authentic Native American knowledge, achievements, beliefs and perspectives.

 

Tendencies within public school systems on the reservations often end up taking Native American kids away from who they are, forcing students to choose between educational attainment and their tribal community roots. In response, the Native American Cultural and Historical Institute (NAI) developed NativeAmericanInstitute.org — a Heritage Education teaching resource for tribal educators, students and researchers. This web-based database provides access to an expanding quantity of archived information via Thunderstone's TEXIS search technology.

Click here to read more online.

Click here for a PDF of the NAI case study.


UPCOMING EVENTS

Development work continues on 2009 Thunderstone Software releases of TEXIS (Version 6,) Webinator (Version 6) and the new Texis Catalog product (eCommerce search engine for online catalogs.)

Looking ahead, you can also expect additional enhancements to the recently-released Version 7 software for Thunderstone Search Appliances and Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliances.


CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"You guys are fantastic. I can't think of any vendor that's been as responsive and accommodating. I really appreciate it!"

Gene Quinn
Web Services Manager
State of Georgia Department of Corrections
http://www.dcor.state.ga.us/


TECH TIPS: USING THE DISK SPACE VIEWER ON YOUR THUNDERSTONE APPLIANCE

Disk space is rarely an issue on Thunderstone Search Appliances, due to the fact that the Appliance only stores the plaintext representation of content (so, a 5Mb PDF might only contain 10k of plaintext.) Still, it can be nice to keep tabs on space.

The Search Appliance can tell you how much disk space is used/free and exactly how much each individual profile is using.

  • After logging in, click the "Maintenance" link on the left.
  • Click the "Display Disk Space" link at the top.

The top section lists the free space, available space and total space for your Appliance.

The bottom section lists the size of each profile, sorted by disk space (largest profiles by on the top.) Clicking on the "Profile" column header will sort by profile instead.

If you click on a profile's path, it will show the sizes of the individual files for that profile. This can be helpful when troubleshooting with Support if a profile seems to be taking up more space than it should.


Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. Send your email to

Thunderstone Software's John Turnbull to Present April 17 Workshop for Association Leaders at DigitalNow 2009 Conference

April 17, 2009

LAKE BUENA VISTA, FL — John Turnbull, President & CEO of Thunderstone Software LLC, will present a workshop session entitled "The Next Generation in Search: Today's Best Practices" on Friday, April 17, 2009, from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., during the DigitalNow 2009 Conference at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

DigitalNow (http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow/) is an annual conference that brings together senior-level executives and volunteer leaders from some of the most influential professional and trade associations in America. Produced by Fusion Productions and Disney Institute, two of the foremost authorities in adult educational design, with input from registered attendees and a conference advisory board, DigitalNow addresses the critical issues facing association leaders in the digital age.

Session Description:

Search, as a function, has progressed from a complex tool that only librarians or information specialists could use to an everyman's tool that millions of people can use to find information on just about anything. Participants in this workshop will have an opportunity for direct dialog with John Turnbull, President & CEO of Thunderstone Software LLC. They can learn about what sort of information can be behind a search engine and how to make it more valuable to users. Barbara H. Lange, Staff Director of Product Management and Business Development for IEEE, Inc., will join Mr. Turnbull during the session to provide a case study.

About Thunderstone
As a true industry pioneer — providing some of the world's most powerful, flexible and scalable search solutions since 1981 — Thunderstone Software LLC (http://www.thunderstone.com) has developed hard-to-match expertise in creating high-performance products with tremendous value for governments, NGOs, educational institutions and businesses of all sizes.

Sales contact: Fred Harmon

+1 216 820 2200 ext.105

Media contact: Peter Thusat

+1 216 820 2200 ext.118

 

Thunderstone Software's Frederick A. Harmon Named as 2009 Channel Chief by Everything Channel's CRN Magazine

March 1, 2009

Search Pioneer's Top Sales Executive Honored for Successful Launch of New Thunderstone Reseller/Channel Partner Program

CLEVELAND, OH — Thunderstone Software LLC, the R & D leader that pioneered simultaneous searching of both structured and unstructured data with its TEXIS relational database optimized for full-text search, today announced that Frederick A. Harmon, Thunderstone's Channel Director & CSO, has been named a 2009 Channel Chief by Everything Channel's Computer Reseller News (CRN) magazine. This annual listing recognizes influential I.T. channel executives who defend, promote and execute effective channel partner programs and strategies.

According to Robert C. DeMarzo, SVP/Editorial Director of Everything Channel, "Effective channel executives consistently ensure that the Channel's voice is heard when strategic decisions are being made and continually nurture mutually profitable relationships. This year's Channel Chiefs are strong channel advocates, and we applaud them for their successful partner programs and strategies."

Frederick A. Harmon joined Thunderstone Software as Channel Director & CSO in January 2008. He worked closely with CEO John Turnbull and CMO Peter Thusat to plan, develop and launch a new Thunderstone Reseller/Channel Partner Program that already has five Resellers in North America (with 40+ locations) and four Resellers/Channel Partners in Europe.

"Thunderstone has many proven competitive advantages for efficiently bringing a wide range of enterprise search solutions to large, medium-sized and small businesses — as well as to government entities, NGOs and educational institutions," said Harmon.

He continued, "In addition to Thunderstone Search Appliances, we also provide highly customizable search software products and hard-to-find services in the areas of search analysis and design, prototyping, application development, training, application optimization and application hosting — on either dedicated servers or on virtual servers in our data center.

"And we don't force our sales partners to become enterprise search experts. Unless you choose to have some of your employees trained as Thunderstone-Certified Representatives, you can simply rely on Thunderstone to handle all the product demos, the evaluation process and technical support of your customers."

"Resellers want a sound, practical approach to realistic revenue growth with an experienced enterprise search partner who makes things as easy as possible for them. They prefer a Reseller Program that doesn't impose any fees, minimum volume requirements or sales quotas. They insist on world-class tech support delivered by real engineers who actually solve problems."

"We get it. And it shows."

Resellers/Channel Partners can easily profit from an amazing product that will 'wow' their customers, while Thunderstone provides:

  • Account protection with quick email/fax registration of targeted sales opportunities
  • Free and personalized online product demos tailored to each customer's particular needs, using the customer's own data and matching the customer's desired "look and feel"
  • 30-day eval units shipped to customers and pre-configured to their requirements
  • Superior tech support by phone, email and message board
  • One-time, perpetual licenses offering 40-60% upfront savings and even more dramatic year-to-year savings for customers
  • Product Investment Protection that makes upgrading easy, desirable and affordable
  • 28+ years of real-world success as a search industry pioneer, which means Thunderstone understands better than most what works and what doesn't
  • Discounts for Resellers/Channel Partners and exciting SPIF programs available for salespeople

Harmon concluded, "Top industry analysts expect annual enterprise search sales to exceed $1.1 billion in 2009. We've made it easy for Resellers, Integrators and Solution Providers to profitably collaborate with Thunderstone to capitalize on this rapidly growing enterprise search market."

Thunderstone's enterprise search products include:

 

 

    • Thunderstone's TEXIS
      TEXIS, the innovative development platform behind Thunderstone's entire line of enterprise search products, is the only fully-integrated SQL RDBMS that intelligently queries and manages databases containing natural language text, standard data types, geographic information, images, video, audio and other payload data. Texis powers many diverse, real-time and integrated applications such as message profiling & handling, image library management, help-desk support, online news retrieval, business intelligence, research libraries, litigation support and eCommerce search engines for online catalogs.

 

 

    • The Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliance
      The Parametric Search Appliance delivers the flexibility and power of TEXIS plus the ease of use of an appliance. It provides an easy way to create applications that combine full-text and structured data without programming. The Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliance enables standard SQL data retrieval and full-text keyword searches combined with a user-selected filter on up to 50 data fields.

 

 

    • The Webinator
      The Webinator is a sophisticated Web indexing and retrieval package that allows Website administrators to create and customize a high-quality retrieval interface to collections of web documents no matter where they reside. The Webinator serves as an example of the type of applications that can be built around Thunderstone's Texis RDBMS and Web Script (Vortex.)

 

 

    • The Thunderstone Search Appliance
      The Thunderstone Search Appliance is a plug-and-play device combining the simplicity of a hosted service with the security and performance of a local solution. The Appliance can handle more than 1,000 typical queries a minute — providing excellent value without adding administrative overhead. It delivers an easy-to-use feature set that especially appeals to the mission-focused requirements of non-technical executives and staff.

 

About Everything Channel
Everything Channel (http://www.everythingchannel.com) is the one-stop shop for accessing, enabling, managing and accelerating technology sales channels. From branding and recruiting to marketing and sales, Everything Channel offers technology marketers the unmatched breadth and depth of global brands and market intelligence combined with unparalleled audience loyalty and credibility serving all technology sales channels through an extensive database. Everything Channel provides innovative sales and marketing solutions to arm the sellers of technology with the resources they need to achieve measurable and significant results.

You can visit the CRN website (http://www.crn.com/crn/chiefs/2009cc.jhtml?chief=136) to view pertinent information about Fred Harmon in the list of 2009 CRN Channel Chiefs.

About Thunderstone
As a true industry pioneer — providing some of the world's most powerful, flexible and scalable search solutions since 1981 — Thunderstone Software LLC (http://www.thunderstone.com) has developed hard-to-match expertise in creating high-performance products with tremendous value for governments, NGOs, educational institutions and businesses of all sizes.

Sales contact: Fred Harmon

+1 216 820 2200 ext.105

Media contact: Peter Thusat

+1 216 820 2200 ext.118

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