As you’re about to read “In the News” below, data-management solution provider Pingar is releasing an end-user version of its metadata extractor tool for SharePoint. I spoke with Pingar’s Owen Allen this week about the release, and during our talk, he indicated that Pingar already has a version for SharePoint 2013 being tested at a few customer sites, and expects it to be released in time for Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference in November.
When I asked him if customers were clamoring for a 2013 release, Owen’s reply was similar to what I’ve heard from other vendors: “We’re hedging our bets by covering both 2010 and 2013.”
This, of course, led to a discussion about when SharePoint customers will upgrade to 2013, and Owen said he believed “the thirst for an upgrade [to 2013] is not as urgent” as it was three years ago, when users began the move from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. “SharePoint 2010 is meeting the needs of customers now more than 2007 did three years ago,” he said.
Owen pointed out that at Microsoft’s Partner Conference in July, the company’s SharePoint division chief Jared Spataro stated that a huge number of people had made the migration from 2007 to 2010. Owen said that “Twenty-eight months from now, I hope that high a percentage will have moved to 2013.” The reason for delay? “The perceived benefit of 2013 isn’t as in my face,” he said.
Microsoft is emphasizing the cloud capabilities in SharePoint 2013 because the on-premise SharePoint market already is monetized, and it might not be able to generate the kind of growth that the paradigm-shifting, cloud-centric capabilities in 2013 could spur. Owen noted that SharePoint 2013 can be used on premise as well, but that version does not deliver the neat new cloud-based functionality, so for users of 2010 on premise (who would use 2013 on premise), the benefits aren’t as clearly defined.
What’s your take? Are you an on-premise SharePoint user who’s investigated 2013? What are your thoughts?
Now a bit more about Pingar. The company employs scientists doing work in the area of natural-language processing to be able to look at the unstructured parts of documents and identify what is a person’s name, or a possible important keyword, or a location name, to create metadata. Pingar had created an entity extraction service API that OEMs could build into their own solutions to create custom extractions, and now is offering that to SharePoint end users.
“People have always focused on structured documents,” Owen said. “The unstructured part is hard for a programmer to take apart and use.” So, even if users don’t enter metadata, or fail to enter it consistently, Pingar’s solution allows organizations to do more extensive business processes against a document by providing more, better metadata.
