With many customers and partners migrating to SharePoint 2010, one of the topics I get asked about regularly is making “safe” customizations to SharePoint and thinking about upgrades and migrations – both now and in the future. While the answer is often “it depends” there are some general guidelines...

Thanks again to the 200+ customers that joined Microsoft and our partners at the Northeast Best of SharePoint Conference which was held in our Waltham, MA office on Monday, February 1. As promised, all slides presented have been posted on SkyDrive . I am looking forward to seeing many of you again...

One of the topics that I speak frequently about is using SharePoint as an application development platform. Often building solutions on top of SharePoint requires integration with external systems, people, data and processes. Microsoft is running a series of events targeted at Enterprise Architects and...

While preparing to present my 2 sessions at the “Maximize Your SharePoint Investment: Leverage It as a Development Platform!” events that we’re doing for Northeast enterprise customers in Waltham, MA (November 19) and Rochester, NY (December 9) I continue to be amazed at how rich and robust SharePoint...

Today at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, major announcements were made regarding Office, SharePoint, Project and Visio 2010. Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 have reached the technical preview engineering milestone...

We recently rolled out changes to the Microsoft Home Use Program (HUP) that may enable you to download Office Enterprise 2007 for your home personal use for just $9.95! Details can be found on the Home Use site . Not familiar with the Home Use Program? Home Use is just one of the many Software Assurance...

Earlier this week Microsoft made some important Office 2010 announcements during our annual TechEd conference . One of the announcements was that Microsoft will have an invitation only Technical Preview Program for Office 2010 . This program is scheduled to launch in July 2009 and will offer selected...

One of the topics that I frequently present on at conferences is the Office system and why it is “better” to use the Office 2007 client with the 2007 versions of the SharePoint and Exchange server products. The presentation that I use for most of these sessions is a summary of many of the key items...

Office 2007 service pack 2 has been released today and is available for download . Some of the features being incorporated into SP2 are integrated support for saving to PDF, XPS and ODF file formats - all of which previously required separate free downloads. There are also some bug fixes and performance...

The Office Sustained Engineering team has just released the official date for shipping Office 2007 SP2. This will be released to the web for download on Tuesday, April 28, 2009. More details on what is being addressed in SP2 can be found here on their blog post. Also, just a reminder that mainstream...

Prior to joining Microsoft last year, I worked for more than 14 years as a Microsoft customer primarily in IT architect, development and technical management roles for large companies. Most of my recent work was related to building custom applications and forms on top of ASP.NET One area that I did...