Month: December 2004

Press release: Omniture’s SiteCatalyst 11 Delivers Web Analytics to Managers, Executives and C-Level Decision-Makers

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Press release: Businesswire

Omniture have release SiteCatalyst 11, and made a lot of industry leading claims in the progresss. Such as:
- Dynamic “live” integration of Web analytics data into Microsoft Excel featuring single-click refresh of live data
- Desk-top integration supporting executive workflow (ability to access SiteCatalyst reports from within the Windows Start menu or via Windows Desktop Shortcuts.)
- KPI-based dashboards that can be customized for “at-a-glance” views of Web analytics performance in concert with data from other sources CRM, ERP, etc.)

Personally, I’ve not used SiteCatalyst, so cannot comment.

I do however think that if they can get live data which is refreshable into Excel, that is definitely competitive.
Adding a shortcut to Windows, no way.
KPI dashboards are a nice to have, especially if they integrate into exisiting CRM/ERP systems, but I think that won’t remain a competitive advantage for long – the KPI’s are the hard part.

In short, web analytics is all about trends and making decisions based in data that has been crunched, so if they make that trend info really easy to understand using tools executives and decision makers already understand, then that’s good for them.

Problem is, how do you standardise accross industries?

Listing all Team sites

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Found this by following a link from Bil’s site:

Listing all Team sites…
Looks like there’s other people interested in something I’d like to do.

I think that having a list of the team sites running on a Sharepoint installation should be mandatory, especially if you work in an organisation where there are likely to be more than a few, and you’re likely to be a part of more than one. It just makes common sense to me.

Which is one of the frustrating bits of Sharepoint – it’s this really cool (if you’re into calling software cool that is) out of the box Microsoft products that does a lot of what most people need, but there is also a lot lacking… I’m not looking at this as a developer, but as a user, and someone who would use it to derive a business benefit.

More on that in the months to come…

Using search engines effectively

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Ever typed in a search phrase in a search engine and get many, many results that are not relevant?

Well – I’ve been trying to figure out how to do something in Outlook, trying many search phrases, only to get too many result, and each time to give up in frustration. So, today I tried another phrase that came to mind, and it worked.

I started with:
this
or
always have groups collapsed in Outlook 2003 -> in Google

then wen’t to:
this
or
always have “groups collapsed” in Outlook 2003 -> in Google

Notice the difference in the search terms, using the ” ” to get Google to search for posts that have both “groups” and “collapsed” on the same page…

I then found:
this
which was the first result and solved my problem.

Turns out this is something that I should know as I’ve seen it before, but obviously didn’t make the connection!

Card scam in the UK

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From my friend Norman today:

“You may wish to be aware that gangs of criminals are targeting the cash machines on London Underground and British Rail premises. The criminals have been fitting portable card readers (skimming devices) and, in some instances, pin-hole cameras, to the machines. This enables them to capture your card details and PIN number, and use them to create cloned, or counterfeit, cards with which to empty your bank account.”

Read the full story at http://www.ncis.co.uk/cashmachinesecurity.asp