This blog entry is for the students of Petar Stojadinovic at National University. It is to help facilitate some communications around using SharePoint in or as part of an overall eCommerce solution.

To help spark the conversation, I did a search over at www.live.com on "sharepoint ecommerce". I was surprised when I did not find any hits for customized eCommerce solutions using SharePoint. I was hoping to find some examples to point to but, alas, I did not stumble across a single site (I only spent a few minutes searching). Seems there are plenty of providers willing to customize SharePoint for you but none that do so from an eCommerce perspective. maybe the providers don't know about SharePoint Designer 2007??

Do you know of any eCommerce sites using SharePoint?   Let me know!

Cheers!

Tomorrow I am delivering a webcast entitled - Deploying IPSec with Windows Vista. I don't like the title very much because I won't be making a deep dive into deploying IPSec on a wide scale. It is more of an intro to IPSec on Vista and how we can control some IPSec functions using Vista's new Windows Firewall with Advanced Security (if you have Vista, type "Advanced" into the Start Button Search bar and you will see the tool......don't make changes 'til you have backed up though!). One interesting feature is the native support for IPv6 in the Vista Firewall. We will show some of that in the session.

I would really like your feedback on how this webcast goes. It is my first IPSec webcast and I would like to know if the session is useful and how much more information you want to know about IPSec. I have been toying with the idea of making some regular posts about it so this will help with direction.

Cheers!

subtitle - "I need more brain RAM..."

One of the pitfalls of being a technology evangelist, is the sheer magnitude of information that exists about technology. Just take a look at the Microsoft Product Catalog. Hundreds and hundreds of products and technologies. It is overwhelming. Add in just the competing technologies from the *nix world and my brain starts to overheat. Then start looking at Apple, Google, Yahoo, and the countless smaller vendors and my brain simply stops working. But let's take out the competitors and focus on just Microsoft for now. I need to know about the products we make so I can speak about them to my audiences. AND I need to know the basic information about our operating systems because I speak to ITPros almost daily. What they want to know, I need to know.

So imagine my surprise this morning when I was in Salem, Or delivering a session on Vista, Office, and Exchange when up comes the question - 

 "What are the big differences between the XP Tablet PC edition and Vista Tablet PC?"

- and....I could not give a good answer. What makes this particularly embarrassing is that I have a Vista Tablet PC in my home! Now, in my own defense, I don't ever get to use it because it belongs to Jeanne, my wife. I learned a couple years ago, when the Media Center attached to our living room PC was her primary machine, that experimenting with her machine was not very conducive to a conflict free relationship. So I have left the Tablet alone for the most part. Outside of fiddling with Tablets at various stores and the research I did on Tablets before buying her particular machine (which was originally an XP Tablet PC), I have not had much personal exposure to the Tablet PC products. I also have never been asked about Tablet PC's ever in a live session. So up till this morning, I have never had a real need to allocate any brain RAM to knowing the Tablet PC specs and info and differences.<tangent>

I know enough about my own brain that I unless I do something or use something on a regular basis, I just don't remember it. I know that my customers ask me about Windows Servers, Exchange, ISA, Media Center, SBS and most of the stuff that makes those products tick. So....I run a small domain at home with a couple of Windows 2003 DC's, and Exchange Server, a couple of ISA servers, a Media Center machine, and I keep and SBS Virtual Machine around just because my first 5 years with the company were supporting the SBS products. I think I do pretty good job of handling those products day in and day out. But the Tablet PC question stumped me.

Customer - 1, Chris - 0.

At this point I have to give kudos to Ken Shafer with Agape Computing. Ken's business is focused on small businesses with a strong focus on Small Business Server customers. I have delivered a session or two for his company and he was one of the partners at the event this morning. While I was moving on to my next set of questions, Ken went to the web, found what I should have already known and then emailed me a link that has a very good summary of the new features in the Vista Tablet PC. I knew about the improvements in handwriting recognition, and the pen usage (which I did mention in my session). I also knew about the Tablet PC Input Panel, Snipping Tool, and Explorer Check Boxes. I have used all of those on Jeanne's Tablet. Problem is, I never really used a Tablet under XP so I didn't know those things weren't in the XP version. But there were the other things I didn't know about, Touch Screen support, Pen Flicks, and the other improvements. Now I do! (Don't tell Jeanne, but the next time she is out and about, the Tablet is mine!.......mwahahahaha!)

Thanks Ken!

I decided to gather up some additional Tablet PC information sources just for my own future perusal (so I don't get caught with my pants down again) and to help you locate the information as well --

Windows XP Tablet PC Edition home page - just for comparison and support of those not making the jump to Vista immediately.

Tablet PC Community on Microsoft.com

Tablet PC Team Blog - Wish it were more active, but the most recent post on Pen Flicks is really interesting

Robert Scoble's Tablet PC posts - Scoble is a big tablet fan

Enjoy!

Cheers!

I updated my blog with better contact information. If you see my picture to the left, just below I have placed an Email Link as well as my cell number. Feel free to email or call if you need some information about a product or technology and I will do my best to get you in touch with the right people...

Cheers!

...or Seattle, or Bellevue, or Kirkland, or just about anywhere I can get to in a couple hours from Redmond. I have not been a registered member of a user group in a LOOOONG time. Now that I am well settled into my new home and area, I think it is time to get more involved. If you are a member of a UG in the area or would be interested in starting one, please let me know!

I am going to be attending a couple of Linux User Group meetings soon. It is also time to start playing with SUSE Linux and get a better feel for it. I have to admit I am a Linux n00b. My experiences with installing a few different distros a few years back were not very pleasant. I just have not had a reason to use Linux for anything personally but I believe now is the time to start getting my hands dirty. I would like to get SUSE up and running on my Laptop since that is what I use the most often.

I would be interested in hearing from you what your experiences are with SUSE and what I should watch out for when I go to install.

Cheers!

I am delivering a webcast on this subject in a couple of hours. I wanted to get some resources online to support some of what I will be discussing. If you are interested in attending, please register here. Here are some of the resources I will be touching on in the webcast --

ISA Sites --

Internet Security and Acceleration Home Page

ForeFront Edge Security Products

ISAServer.org

ISATools.org

Microsoft ISA Team Blog

Thomas Shinder's ISA Blog

ISA Tech Info --

Update to ISA 2006 for Publishing Exchange 2007

ISA TechCenter on Technet

Secure Application Publishing w/ ISA 2006

ISA Downloads --

ISA 2006 Virtual Machine for Virtual PC or Virtual Server

Virtual PC 2004 w/ SP1 Download

Virtual Server 2005 R2 Download

ISA Best Practices Analyzer

ISA 2006 Tools and Downloads

ISA Firewall Client Update w/ Vista Support

I will post Q&A after the webcast....

Cheers!

Today I am at Willamette University in Salem, Or sitting on a panel discussing the topic above. There are some interesting topics being discussed today - Kathleen O'Reilly from LAIKA is going to speak about Computers and Animation (go to the LAIKA site and look for the "MoonGirl" animation clip....very cool!). Mike Bailey, Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is keynoting on "Cool Jobs in Computer Science" and how there is no shortage of them. Paul McKenney a Distinguished Engineer from IBM's Linux Technology Center is giving us a "Day in his Life/My Road to IT" presentation.

I will be on a panel answer questions from students, teachers and parents about the future of computing in technology. I will be sitting in with Scott Hanselman of Corillian Corporation, Sean Atkinson and Jenny Orr of Willamette University, and Karen Ward of Portland University. We are going to have an open Q&A to just talk about....the future! 

We have about 50 people right now....will post some of the Q&A later this weekend...

Cheers!

I have received a dozen or so emails/calls about my interview from friends/family/co-workers. All but one pointed me to the Yahoo! Finance article as the reference point (see my earlier posting). Makes me wonder why so many of my acquaintances are going to Yahoo! Finance instead of MSN MoneyCentral! This is the first interview I have given while at MS, but I have recently been the interviewer for a series of Technet Radio Interviews. I figure now is as good as any to post about those.

Deploying Office w2007 w/ Josh Edwards - Technical Product Manager on the Microsoft Office Client  team

Windows Vista Deployment w/ Manu Namboodiri - Sr. Product manager in the Windows Client marketing group

Interview with Exchange Author and MVP Paul Robichaux

My co-workers Chris Henley and Michael J. Murphy also do interviews for Technet Radio.

Who would you like me to interview?

Cheers!

....of course, I am his older brother and based upon how much weight I have gained since the holidays, I am prone to agree with him. He sent me an email consisting of the Subject: Dude! and Body: Dude! You're Huge! and then a weblink. I expected it to be a link to a YouTube video of me pigging out on the 10 lbs of Hershey's Kisses my daughter sent me for my birthday. Fortunately, is was a link to an article on Yahoo! Finance about an interview I recently did with "Let's Talk Computers". In the interview we talk about Windows Vista and some of the new features available for consumers and businesses. Much better than watching me eat chocolate...

My friend and co-worker Chris Henley also did an interview with Let's talk Computers on the new Office 2007 release. There is also an interview with Stuart Scott, the CIO of Microsoft, regarding Vista and Office 2007. Seems I am in good company!

Cheers!

***Updated 12:28*** MSN Money/MoneyCentral link to Interview - Also, my previous post got eaten so sorry for the time shift...

For those of you that miss the "official" launch events, I will be delivering the same material at some post-launch Technet Briefings starting in March. Why am I posting about this now.....a month in advance? Because I expect these to be standing room only so I want you to get registered now. Here is some of what we will be talking about and demoing --

Exchange 2007 Role based deployment and how easy it is to configure a lite-weight, role based Exchange server config that only performs a small set of mail tasks

Exchange 2007 Management Shell (PowerShell) - automate mundane tasks and administrative chores using this powerful command line tool

Exchange 2007 Transport rules - Powerful mail management at the server level that allows you to make decisions about mail routing before it hits a database

Forefront technologies to protect your managed assets, email and more

Network Access Protection (NAP) - Ensure client machine meet a minimum standard of security before granting access to sensitive area of the network.

Vista Deployment - You just have to see how easy it is to create and deploy Vista machines as well as how much time you can save now when updating images

Vista Wow! - updates to familiar applications as well as brand new stuff you may not have ever seen.

I will be demonstrating all of this and more at these locations --

March   8th - 8a-12n - Lakewood, Wa

March 14th - 8a-12n - Anchorage, Ak

March 20th - 8a-12n - Redmond, Wa

If you don't live in Washington or Alaska, we do have events in other parts of the US. You may still be able to get into an Official Launch Event in February. If those are full, we do have some events in March delivering the same information just not with all the hype and flash as the big Launch events.

Cheers!

This week in Seattle, Microsoft is bringing together IT Evangelists (ITE's), Developer Evangelists (DE's), Technology Specialists (TS's), Architects, and many other technology specific roles for an semi-annual event called TechReady. As the name suggests, this technology conference is held to get those of us in customer facing roles prepared and up-to-date on existing and emerging technologies so we can speak to our customers intelligently about the cool new stuff and the updated "old" stuff. As I began planning my week I started selecting sessions *I* was interested in seeing. I realized that if I only go to the presentations that *I* am interested in, I may be missing the boat for my customers. Just because I am interested in Messaging and Compliance features in Exchange 2007 doesn't mean my customers are. (I know some of you are, but not everyone in my audiences is an Exchange admin.) I need to attend sessions that relate to the products and technologies that my *customers* are interested in.

So here is my ask of you - What products, features, technologies in Microsoft products are *you* interested in? Do I need to go to IPv6 sessions? Longhorn? Network Access Protection (NAP)? You tell me so when we meet face to face I can better provide you answers and information on what *you* want to know about!

Cheers!