THUNDERSTONE NEWS

December 2007 - Archive

CONTENTS

Special Holiday Double Issue

Because things can get so busy at this time of the year, and knowing how everyone's hectic schedules often leave people feeling pressed for time, we've decided to combine the December 2007 and the January 2008 editions of our "Thunderstone News" into a special holiday double issue.

The current format of this monthly publication typically includes new product release information, recent happenings, upcoming events and sometimes a featured Thunderstone customer success story. Please feel free to email us at your convenience () and let us know if you have any ideas or suggestions about ways we could improve the newsletter.

Customer Quote

“We love it! "We had your software up and running in 15 minutes. I am a huge fan already, keep up the good work.”

Bill Wasserman
AORN

Happenings

Thunderstone Software mourns the loss of Mark Bacho (Sales Director) who passed away suddenly on 16 November 2007, one day after returning from the CIA Technology Expo in Langley, VA with Thunderstone's Peter Thusat (Communication Director).

In November Thunderstone's Mark Bacho participated in an EchoQuote case study conducted and published online by MarketingSherpa (http://www.marketingsherpa.com.)

Upcoming

John Turnbull, President & CEO of Thunderstone Software LLC, has accepted an invitation to participate in an expert panel discussion on “Enterprise Search Platforms” for the upcoming December/January printed and online editions of Business Management magazine.

Come visit us at AIIM 2008 in Boston March 3-5 and hear Thunderstone customer Derek Matthews of Ariba along with John Turnbull of Thunderstone explore the importance of using search as part of a Business Intelligence (BI) solution.

We will also be exhibiting at FOSE in Washington DC April 1-3 2008, and at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York City May 19-21.

If you are going to be in town for any of these events please let us know and we can schedule some time to get together and make sure we are serving you as well as possible.

Quote of the Month

“My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that 'achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success.”

Helen Hayes
(1900 - 1993)

Customer Success Story

TRADE PRESS PUBLISHING UTILIZES WEBINATOR AS A CUSTOMIZABLE WAY TO ADD VERTICAL SEARCH ENGINES TO MULTIPLE INDUSTRY WEB PORTALS

When implementing an optimal solution for the heavy search demands of multiple online properties, a website administrator needs a practical way to easily create and provide a high quality retrieval interface to collections of HTML documents. In this article we review how Trade Press Publishing successfully added powerful and flexible vertical search engines to its popular web portals with the help of Thunderstone's Webinator web index and retrieval system. Webinator serves as an example of the type of applications that can be built around Thunderstone's Texis RDBMS and Web Script.

Trade Press Publishing Corporation (http://www.tradepress.com) is a privately-held company based in Milwaukee and a leading provider of market intelligence to the facilities management, building service contractor, housekeeping, cleaning supplies distribution and railroad industries. In addition to publishing business-to-business magazines and eNewsletters, it also produces trade shows and conferences, as well as offering variety of related educational and marketing opportunities.

Jesus Carrillo, Director of Information Technology, joined the company's Pre-Press Division more than 16 years ago and as the company grew has continued to search out technology applications in the b-to-b publishing space.

Special Requirements to Index and Search Industry-Focused Web Content

Trade Press Publishing Corporation uses Webinator on four “vertical portal” web sites, including two in the facility management space and two in the sanitary distribution/cleaning space. The main site is at FaciltyZone.com (http://www.facilityzone.com.) Carrillo said the biggest reason he selected Webinator as the indexing and searching tool for Trade Press had to do primarily with Webinator's open-ended customizability.

According to Carrillo, “Probably the single identifying characteristic of the Webinator software, for us, was the ability to get to the source code. And that allowed us the flexibility to put it to work to do the things that we wanted to accomplish with its back-end. For example, we were indexing over six thousand web sites, which is quite a bit of data. And the first results that came up were kind of cool. We could see how, out of these millions of pages, you do a search, and there's some logic in there that says "these are the ten best ones" out of the millions of pages I've got.

“Taking a closer look at them, we felt that to really bring it to a marketplace and have it be as meaningful as possible to our end users we were able to go in and play with a lot of the settings to get the search engine to produce the particular kind of results we believed that our users would typically want to find.

“We spent some time working with Thunderstone's tech support, doing tests and evaluations to get things to the point where now it seems on a regular basis the terms we're punching in are getting the types of results that we know will make our users happy,” Carrillo explained.

Webinator's user features include:

  • simple navigation
  • intelligent query capabilities with natural language processes, special pattern matchers (regular expressions, numeric quantities, fuzzy patterns,) document similarity searches, in-context result listings, link reference reports, proximity controls and set logic

Carrillo continued,“The setup and deployment of Webinator is extremely easy and straightforward. All the core functionality is there plus the ability to access the source code and be as creative and as customized as your capabilities will let you be. In other words, Thunderstone doesn't hold you back. Thunderstone lets you take the product to whatever level you're ready, willing and able to take it. For that reason we've stuck with it, we've used it, and it's been great in that regard.”

“Locked Box” Approach of Others Inadequate

“We took a look at the Google appliance. It was brand new at the time. And the reason we didn't go with the Google appliance was we had no control over it. No flexibility. No ability to customize. Basically it was a ‘locked box’ sitting in our office. We've got technical expertise on staff. We can go in. We can study and learn the scripts. We can make our modifications.

“The access to the source code and the flexibility of Webinator were definitely both something of value to us. Basically, we could not have done what we did without it. Working with the tech support team at Thunderstone, we have access to people who will actually call you back and work with you on some crazy questions.”

“We'd like to take advantage of the new applications that Thunderstone develops and apply them to our industries and to our users,” Carrillo said.

Web portal administrators looking for a web walking and indexing package to help them add vertical search engines to multiple online properties will appreciate the fact that Thunderstone's Webinator:

  • indexes multiple sites into one common index
  • offers administrators detailed verification and logging of document linkages
  • can index/update documents while the database is in use
  • permits multiple databases at a site
  • features a simple browser interface
  • is written in Texis Web Script for complete flexibility
  • provides an SQL query interface to the database for maintenance and reports
  • allows remote sites to be copied to the local file system
  • lets multiple index engines run concurrently against a common database.

Happy Holidays to all of our valued customers this year from everyone at Thunderstone!

Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome to

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