Unfortunately the Cloudstore itself has a search facility that is badly broken. There are several obvious issues: many of the entries created by the larger suppliers have been keyword stuffed – here’s a particularly egregious example from Atos which seems to include most of the terms used in software in the last few years. I found this using the search terms ‘enterprise search’ which produces very few relevant looking results. The online guidance for CloudStore search suggests putting double quotes around my terms (sadly I think few users will think of this) which improves things a little but there are still a lot of irrelevant results – an online conferencing system is fifth for example.

Fortunately all is not lost and in the next iteration of GCloud we are promised major improvements to the search engine. I’m hoping this will include phrase boosting. However, if the big SIs and others are allowed to create the sort of bad-quality content I have shown above, no search engine in the world will be able to sort the wheat from the chaff. It is essential that CloudStore entries are subject to some kind of curation and that keyword stuffing is banned and/or heavily penalised, otherwise SMEs like ourselves will still find it very hard to compete with the big SIs.

Update: it seems there is a new system under construction, and the search works a lot better. Let’s hope it comes out of alpha soon and can be used by purchasers!

The post Why GCloud search is badly broken & how to fix it appeared first on Flax.

Part of the process is to input various mysterious Product Codes, and to find out what these were I downloaded a file from the MISO website. I use the Firefox browser and OpenOffice so I had assumed that opening this file would be a relatively simple process…perhaps unwisely.

Firstly, due to some quirk of the website and/or browser the file arrives with no file extension. I’m assuming it’s some kind of Microsoft Office document so I try renaming it to .xls as an Excel spreadsheet, and open it in OpenOffice Calc. This doesn’t work, as I end up with a load of XML in the spreadsheet cells. As it’s XML I wonder if it’s a newer, XML-powered Office format, so rename to .xlsx, but no, it seems that doesn’t work either. Opening up the file in a text editor shows it’s some kind of XML with Microsoft schemas abounding. At this point I tried contacting the MISO technical support department but they weren’t able to help.

A quick Google and I’ve discovered that the file is probably SpreadsheetML, a file format used before 2007 when Microsoft finally went the whole hog and embraced (well, forced everyone else to embrace) their own XML-based standard for Office documents. The latter format is something OpenOffice can easily read, so I try renaming the file as .xml and importing it. OpenOffice now tells me "OpenOffice.org requires a Java runtime environment (JRE) to perform this task. The selected JRE is defective."

This is now taking far too long. After some more research I discover what this actually means is OpenOffice needs a version of Java 6 (now discouraged by Oracle). I have to register for an Oracle account to even download it. Finally, Open Office is able to read the file and I can now fill in the original form.

If anything this process proves that central government has a long way to go towards adopting open standards and using plain, widely adopted file formats. The G-Cloud framework is a great step forward – but some of the details still need some work.

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