This post is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network.

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

Knowledge Sharing Articles

The July articles were released last week. In case you missed it, topics ranged from DLP (data loss prevention) to email archiving and retention to deduplication to DR (disaster recovery). Check out this year’s publication schedule for more info.

There were also some good comments on one of this year’s winning articles: SAN Performance – Getting the Most ‘Bang’ for your Buck. If you have read the article, what do you think about John’s methodology for documenting, analyazing, remediating, and reviewing all elements of your SAN? (I thought it was a really good article – could have used something like this 5 years ago when I was working as a sys admin).

New Proven Professional Certifications announced

• EMCIE Backup and Recovery – Avamar Specialist Certification
• EMCSA Backup and Recovery – Avamar Specialist Certification

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

As usual, Proven Professionals are blogging about the cutting edge topics in the information and storage management industry:

• Mark Twomey blogged about EMC’s latest acquisition: Greenplum. If you are interested in MPP (massivly parallel processing) make sure you check out this post.
• Lee Dallas has a post about what the Greenplum acquisition will mean for Documentum.
• Roy Mikes has a post this week about the EMC 20% Guarantee. The post includes a couple of funny videos.

Did I miss a good post? Let me know in the comments.

Housekeeping

Please remember to mark your questions answered once they’ve been answered, and assign points to the people who helped you out. You never know when we’ll decide to do something with those points!

Why did you get Proven? Last call to participate in the poll.

What were you up to this week?

We’ve completed the first week of Q3. Who has been goaled to get a new Proven Professional certification this quarter? We’re here if you have questions on how to get started, ask away in the Proven Advisor: Ask Us section of the community.

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

If, like me, you skirt around the edges of the fitness blogging scene, you’re probably familiar with the person who starts a fitness blog, writes about their incredible gains (in fitness) and losses (in weight) and then suddenly the blog dries up for six months or a year.  You know what happened — the person hit a rough patch with their fitness and didn’t want to write about it.

So when someone who writes about today’s workplace, about corporate culture, about working at EMC, slowly dries up in terms of post count, it might be a good default assumption that they’ve hit a rough patch at work and don’t want to write about it.

In some ways, this is true.  I’ve struggled a bit over the past year to balance the different roles I have to play in the office,and I’ve felt like I don’t have anything insightful to say about that struggle.  Some of the struggle has been in getting to know and work well with new people, and I’m never comfortable blogging about the specifics of “live” interpersonal relationships.

But there are other factors at work here.  I’ve been busy as hell with my day job, trying to figure out how to rebalance my time management mechanisms to keep me from going insane.  Entire sections of my day job are getting deprioritized in any given week, so you can assume that blog posting is getting hit, too.  And my family life has gotten busy too — for great reasons!  Having a two-year old at home is more than enough to keep you occupied and engaged.  And when I do get a few free moments, I’m more apt to deal with things that need to be done around the house than writing a post.

The truth is, day by day, I’ve just been doing other “stuff” during the time when I used to blog.  I am still active; I monitor twitter and occasionally speak up.  I read blog posts, and share them on my Google Reader feed (which gets posted here on the blog and goes out to my Buzz account).  But I miss the outlet this blog provides.

From years of blogging for personal and professional reasons, I know better than to promise anything about the future.  But don’t unsubscribe yet.  Things are about to get really interesting in my office, and odds are I’ll find things to write about.  And if not, well, you know where else to find me….

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Where has Dave been?

One of the most common misconceptions I hear almost on a weekly basis is that search is just a install and go piece of software. The simple fact is this just isn’t the case if you want to maximize you return on investment and improve your content’s findability, configuration is essential.

At it’s highest level the success of a search engine is it’s ability to return relevant results and ranked in a reasonable order. To do this a search expert typically will create what is known as a ranking and relevancy model. If your site or application has any degree of personalization/user types, multiple models may be required. (Some search engines attempt to do this automatically with varying degrees of success).

So I’ve got the ranking and relevancy model defined, I can leave it now right? Alas No. As you add new content sources to the search engine or the content changes, as should the model. So the model should be regularly maint ained. I’d recommend the following:

• First month since go live (Weekly updates)
• First 3 months since go live (Every 30 days)
• First year, at least review the model every 90 days
• And update the model(s) if any new content source is added

Sometimes the process of maintaining the model is an hour of work, other times it could be in the 8-16 hours range, it really depends on how much the content has changed since you last updated it.

So what’s the value of this and why should your company spend the money in maintaining the ranking and relevancy model?

Put simply it’s the difference between good search results and bad ones and from a business point of view it all ends up as  return on investment. If you don’t update the model regularly, the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars you invested will not generate a significant return. You users will complain about search, IT will look bad for a “failed” p roject and the board will wonder what the money was spent on.

To give you an example I hear from a new potential client who says “We have vendor a, but it doesn’t work after we spend $xxxxxxx of dollars, so now we want vendor b”. To which I always reply when was the last time the search engine was looked at and the ranking and relevancy refined. The answer I always get is “not since we installed it x years ago”.

So trust me, maintain your search engine, you won’t regret it.