It is sooo easy to create bad usability… i.e. look at our friend

by Xavier Comments: 0

It is so easy to be part of the 90% of Sturgeon’s law! How hard can it be to create something with bad usability? Apparently it is extremely easy. Take a quick look at this example I am within the corporate Sharepoint. I want to upload a document. So I click Add document. assessment1 And now I get this popup.  My question is how hard can it be for Microsoft to create #1 a decent upload control to select location #2 that has enough space so that I can actually read the current location #3 and I clicked Add document within a specific folder. I think the majority of times I would want to add the document where I clicked. assessment2   How hard can all this be? Well, SharePoint is a great product but there are some areas for improvement and I would love if someone at the SharePoint team could take a stab at this.

I heard something about good UX a bit a ago that makes perfect sense. A UI is like a joke, if you have to explain it then it is not that good!

Solr Configuration

by Xavier Comments: 0

For those of you that landed directly on this page, I am working on a series of post that help people “Get Started with Enterprise Search using Apache Solr”. In this post I cover one specific module. If interested in watching the course please click here: http://pluralsight.com/training/courses/TableOfContents?courseName=enterprise-search-using-apache-solr . Click here to get to the starting point: https://www.xaviermorera.com/2014/06/getting-started-with-enterprise-search-using-apache-solr/ You’ve made it to module 3! Thanks a lot if this is the case. So far we started by understanding “Why Enterprise Search?” and “Why Solr?”, both very valid questions and fundamental if you want to go down the “search” path – which by the way if more people really understood search this could really save millions and millions of hours of frustrated users! And remember my promise: I will show you how to, in a few hours, build something that may cost thousands of dollars to develop and may take a long time to learn! That is pretty powerful if you ask me. After that, I walk you through architecture to show you where to place the search engine and also the internal architecture of Solr – don’t forget Lucene! And now we get to module 3, Solr Configuration. I start by showing you how to download solrinstaller.exe, click next/next/next and Solr is up and running! Yay…. Not quite Solr is not yet at that point. There is no Windows installer (yes, I am a Windows guy… no Linux) but it is extremely simple none the less. So in this module I show you

  • How to land on your feet when starting the wonderful search engine. I explain how you use Jetty server which can be started immediately. But this is only for dev purposes.
  • Then we move on to the areas of when you first open you search administration page, located in http://localhost:8983.
  • We move on to each one of the ares of the Admin UI. It is not 100% necessary to know them all, but there are some that you actually should. You may not care now, but if you run into errors then it is useful to know how Logging is where you should go.

logging

  • And then I do something that may save you a lot of time. I show you how to run Solr within Tomcat, which is suitable for production.

Let me tell you a quick story from a while ago so that you understand. I could be ashamed to say that it took me several hours to run Solr within Tomcat the first time I did it. I am not ashamed. I was clueless, some blog posts were technically accurate but confusing. In this training I show you how to do it in less than 7 minutes. This will save you time and frustration if you have never done it before and need to do so! And this is the end of the module. I prepare you for what’s to come, index data and the fun part: searching! I hope you enjoy and contact me if you have questions, concerns or most preferably criticism so that I can improve my trainings!