The Mayor’s selected option

Hmm. Interesting, isn’t it. Not a clear-cut decision. There are good arguments for either approach. The Mayor’s decision will ultimately depend on (a) how sure he is of his own vision, (b) his financial and time constraints and (c) how changeable these factors are likely to be over time. In short, he has a trade-off decision of relevance vs. reliability.

Turning analogy onto Intranet Projects

In chapter 16 of my Intranet Portal Guide, I explore these concepts in a bit more depth.

However – put simply – answer for you will depend largely on how sure you are of your vision, support of stakeholders, availability of resources and degree of change in your organisation and it’s requirements.

If you are operating in a stable business environment and are well funded and supported, then waterfall offers real benefits. You could establish an Intranet Portal that is well founded, scalable and secure. If not, then RAD could offer you means to make some progress now at low cost and use results of your early work to build a stronger case for future investment. It also allows you to vary approach – or begin again – should circumstances or requirements change.

Most Intranet evangelists will find themselves perhaps in a mixed situation, where there is support and funding but there is also risk of rapid changes to underlying business environment and requirements. Here, I would recommend a mixed approach: Use a waterfall project to establish underlying portal infrastructure (as this platform will be bedrock on which you will build and needs to stand test of time). Then use a RAD method to build content and applications (developing solutions that are timely and relevant to businesses operating in a fast-moving and competitive environment).

About the author:

David Viney (david@viney.com) is the author of the Intranet Portal Guide; 31 pages of advice, tools and downloads covering the period before, during and after an Intranet Portal implementation.

The email query results are best! No longer have you had to remember in which folder you stored email written to John in reference to Peter. By searching for Peter or John, you will find all relevant emails and related correspondence. You can read and answer to any of discovered email from thread. This really saves time when you need to follow up to a large numbers of emails each day.

There are two more text buttons next to search field. One is Desktop Preferences and other is Remove Items. Desktop preferences allow you to choose types of files you would like program to include in its index out of available ones. You can also point out not to index specific folders from your hard disk. If you share your PC with others, it’s a good idea to eliminate your private folders from Desktop index. You can also specify not to index certain websites from your cached web history as well. The Remove items button allow you to eliminate selected results from index.

The advance search option allows you to search by phrase by putting phrase within quotation marks, to eliminate a word from search by putting a minus sign in front of word, to search by file type, and to search within a web URL. A neat feature is to integrate your desktop search with your web search. This is very handy if you have already done an extensive search for some information and after a few days doing search for similar information once again. Privacy question

By default, Google Desktop Search collects a limited amount of non-personal information from your computer and sends it to Google. This includes summary information, such as number of searches you do and time it takes for you to see your results, etc. You can opt out of sending this information during installation process or from Desktop preferences later. According to Google Privacy Policy no personally identifying information, such as your name or address, will be sent to Google without your explicit prior permission.

What is missing?

I bemoan not having PDF files in search process as yet. I have dozens of e-books and PDF whitepapers residing in my PC, and I really would prefer to have them indexed. That way, I’d have been able to read materials, when I needed them most.

The other thing I want to see is clustered result of my query, which shows organized search results into meaningful hierarchical folders similar to way Vivisimo search engine works. This clustering is particularly helpful for desktop search, as this allows us to see other relevant documents connected to searched word.

Conclusion

Due to Google’s immense popularity as a search engine, it’s logical that most users will prefer Google’s desktop search program as oppose to other similar programs, such as Copernic and Hotbot. Finally you can search your very own computer with similar ease and preciseness as you have been searching Internet for quite some time.