The Blog

We’ve implemented Ontolica search (for MOSS 2007) for several of our customers. The product fits our service offerings very well, and provides a great value add for minimal cost and effort (compared with other search replacement products).

The sales team has been very helpful and responsive. They’ve provided trial licenses quickly and without hassle, have provided training and demos/overviews of the product, and have even been excellent interfaces to help escalate support incidents. I can’t really say enough about the sales team.

I can’t say that about their support however. So far, they have had just about the worst level of support I have experienced with a third party SharePoint product. If you file a support incident through their web site or via email, you are guaranteed to not get a response.

I filed one particular support incident, never heard back from anyone, until 2 months later, when I received an automated email asking me if my incident had been resolved. Another incident received no response until I involved the sales persons, who managed to look into the issue themselves. A co-worker filed another incident, and never heard a response. I’m not even convinced they have a support team.

Outside of the support, if you are interested in their product, keep in mind that they have very little extensibility. This can be important if you ever need to write any customized search code, and would like to take advantage of the Ontolica features in your custom search solution.

One client of ours had a need to run searches using impersonation, so we wrote code to leverage the MOSS search web service, passing in the credentials of the impersonating account. We would have liked to have been able to pass our returned results into the Ontolica web parts (or simply have been able to use Ontolica with impersonation), but the web parts all use internal hidden search objects that are obfuscated and cannot be interacted with (unless you like deciphering obfuscated code). This made it so that we had rich search tabs with all the Ontolica features, and then our customized search tab with stripped down functionality. To be fair, my beef also lies with Microsoft for closing up their own search with the SearchResultHiddenObject, which cannot be used easily without reflection and a big level of effort. I would have thought that a product that provides such a good experience with installation and configuration would have put more thought into extensibility (and support).

Overall I would give Ontolica 3 out of 5 stars.

If you are shopping for granite countertops in the Seattle area, Import Stone has a great selection. While Pental probably has the best selection, they are too big and pricey. Import Stone is just the right size to not be overwhelming, but is big enough for you to find that unique special piece.

The folks there were very friendly and helpful, and we got an amazing and very unique slab from them.

When we had our granite countertops installed, we used a great installer, Western Tile and Marble. They were very professional, and did a flawless job. They didn’t make a fuss when we requested keeping the leftover bits (they had to make a second trip out to deliver the scrap pieces).

Additionally, we had ordered a marble-topped vanity from overstock.com that came with a chip in the corner. We asked for a price to have them take the square edge of the marble top (with the chip in it) and router the edge to make it rounded to get rid of the chip. They just decided to throw that in for free for us, and made a separate trip out to fix that edge. They routered the three sides of the marble top flawlessly right at our house.

I’d recommend them if you have any granite fabrication to do in the Seattle area.

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I’m one of those people without cable or dish television service, so I get to miss all the good NBA games. Last year during playoff time, I purchased video of some of the games to download and watch on my PC from http://download.nba.com.

The interface was clunky, the shopping cart system broken at times, but I overlooked that as I was enjoying watching the exciting games like the double-overtime Lebron James extravaganza against the Pistons.

I was pretty certain the NBA would have come a long way with this technology over the last year, unfortunately it sucks just the same.

First of all, it’s playoff time now, and I am ready to jump the gun and purchase the entire playoff series, including the finals. Unfortunately, even though ad banners on the NBA site mention that I can do this, when I go to the downloads site, there is no place for me to purchase rights to view any of the upcoming games. There is no mention of Playoffs 2008. I’m ready, they aren’t.

Second, even just clicking through their site to look at previous regular season games throws “Object reference not set” errors. Sloppy.

Third, the interface hasn’t changed one bit from what it was like last year (searching is difficult, navigation sucks, integration with the rest of the site nill, throws errors).

I find it pretty hypocritical that an asshole commissioner like David Stern who is so concerned about profit that he deems Key Arena in Seattle unacceptable, would completely ignore this revenue stream for an entire year, and make no improvements at all.

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