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. 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. 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!
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 […]
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/ In the second module I start by trying to make my point on how Beauty is in the eye of the beholder Users usually don’t care about the application They care about getting accurate and fast results. Users don’t care about the how, engineers care about the how. The people that use it don’t. and that’s what counts! Then I focus for a few minutes on explaining architecture from two points of view: Where, architecturally speaking, within an application does the search engine fit in Solr’s architecture The third section of this module explains what makes Solr move and shake, mainly the search engine underneath: Lucene. And finally I explain to you the parts of a search application. This part may be a bit subjective depending on who looks at it, but most principles apply across the board. If you are interested on viewing this module you can start here: enterprise-search-apache-solr-m2 Here is […]
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/ The third module is made up of four sections: Installation In this section I will show you how to install Solr. It is not as simple as solrinstaller.exe, next, next next… but it not too complicated either. Demo Watch, learn and follow. You will be able to get Apache Solr running in a few minutes. Admin UI In this section I go over each one of the options in the Admin UI. I don’t spend too much time as there are many secitons, but enough for you to understand what they are for. Tomcat Solr comes with Jetty server out of the box. However Jetty is not for production purposes, instead it should be for development only. I will show you how to run Solr within Tomcat. BTW: if you do not know how to do this, it may take you a few hours of research to learn on […]
Today a good friend asked while watching my Getting Started with Enterprise Search Using Apache Solr course in Pluralsight on how to index data in different cores in Solr. Here is the answer. Let’s say you want to feed data to Solr’s default collection, called collection1, using the update handler, then do this: java -Durl=http://localhost:8983/solr/update -Dtype=text/csv -jar post.jar “Two sample courses with author test.csv” But if you have a different core, i.e. psdemo, then do this: java -Durl=http://localhost:8983/solr/psdemo/update -Dtype=text/csv -jar post.jar “Two sample courses with author test.csv” Easy as pie! If interested in watching the course please click here: http://pluralsight.com/training/courses/TableOfContents?courseName=enterprise-search-using-apache-solr .
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/ I start my Enterprise Search Apache Solr training course by conveying my beliefs to you. I truly believe that a good search implementation can help tremendously with the adoption of your application or providing huge savings by letting your users find what they are looking for. I can even say that a Search Engine is a very straightforward and easily understood name, but maybe sometimes I think that you should have a Find Engine! Anyway, in this module I start with why. I really hope we both are in the same lane. Immediately I tell you what I promise you will get from this course. It is a pretty powerful promise, but believe me it is true. I promise… That in the next couple of hours I will teach you to build things that might take you weeks to learn on your own and we will create together a search […]
This post originally appeared in Pluralsight’s blog in http://blog.pluralsight.com/tips-for-meetings I am including it here as future reference of all my writings Meetings can be wildly useful for things like brainstorming and communicating within — and between — teams. They can also be great for sparking collaboration and moving projects forward. But when they get misused or abused, which happens all too often, they end up being little more than a gigantic waste of time. Let’s look at the top five things that tend to go wrong in meetings, and how you can fix them. 1. Busyness vs. Productivity. For some people, the mere act of sitting in a meeting is considered work. This becomes an issue when those in attendance use the time to appear busy, rather than actively, and constructively, contributing. Meetings that go over in this manner tend to end with scheduling another meeting just to “continue the discussion.” This is all too common among project managers or product managers. The fix: Make sure every meeting you attend or lead has a real and very clear objective. Moreover, make sure that this meeting is actually necessary. If the objective is not important or required, then simply defer the meeting until the right […]
