BillCan's Place : Development

Help us develop a new Solution Accelerator focused on Secure Collaboration

BillCan — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 00:27:00 GMT

Employees need to share documents with individuals from other companies, such as partners and suppliers. These documents often contain sensitive information that needs to be kept safe and secure. Microsoft SharePoint products deliver the document collaboration capabilities, but many IT departments have been reluctant to use a SharePoint infrastructure with external parties because of concerns about security and user management.

Project Inverness is an effort to address these concerns. This project will provide authoritative guidance and tools to help your organization set up SharePoint to provide users with the flexibility they need to collaborate easily with external people while simultaneously allowing the security manager to rest assured that confidential data is protected. This Solution Accelerator will be freely downloadable from TechNet.

To help us develop a Solution Accelerator that really helps address our customer's pains, we need customers like you who can review our designs, preview early versions of the guidance and tools, and provide valuable feedback. The benefit to Microsoft is obvious: with your help, we can provide a Solution Accelerator that better meets the needs of our customers. You can also benefit from participating in our development process. You will help ensure the final deliverables meet your specific needs, get early access to the solution accelerator so you can begin planning your implementation, gain access to Microsoft experts, and be acknowledged for your contribution in the final deliverables. In addition, we will provide a nice thank you gift to those users who make a particularly significant contribution to the project.

If you are interested in helping out, please visit https://connect.microsoft.com/InvitationUse.aspx?ProgramID=1657&InvitationID=PRM1-C3FJ-W3FP&SiteID=14 and follow the instructions to enroll in the program.

Thank you,
Bill Canning
Sr. Program Manager
Solution Accelators - Security and Compliance

EFS Assistant Updated: RC2 now available on CodePlex

BillCan — Sat, 12 May 2007 09:38:00 GMT

We have made a few bug fixes to the EFS Assistant tool and its Administrator's Guide. We have posted new versions to our CodePlex site at http://www.codeplex.com/EFSAssistant. Please let me know if you find any bugs or you get any error messages when you run the tool.

Looking for a few good devs...

BillCan — Sat, 05 May 2007 01:20:00 GMT

Are you an IT administrator who wants to do some development on the side? Are you a developer who is interested in IT administration? We're looking for you!

My team has created a tool called the EFS Assistant and are putting the source code out on CodePlex (see http://www.codeplex.com/EFSAssistant). We think we have made a great start on this tool, but we know lots of additional features that could be added. To help keep the tool moving forward, we are looking for someone (or some people) who would be interested in taking the project forward.

If you are interested in participating in the project, let me know by using the email link to send me an quick note. I look forward to hearing from you!

Bill

New pre-release version of the EFS Assistant tool available on Codeplex

BillCan — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 08:19:00 GMT

We have migrated development of the EFS Assistant tool to Microsoft's Codeplex site. To celebrate, we have posted a pre-release version of the EFS Assistant on the site. This version incorporates feedback we got from customers and internal reviewers.

The EFS Assistant page on Codeplex is here: http://www.codeplex.com/EFSAssistant.

Have you heard about CodePlex?

BillCan — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:40:00 GMT

If you are familiar with SourceForge, you might want to check out CodePlex. According to their website, CodePlex (www.codeplex.com) is "Microsoft's open source project hosting web site." It has a lot of the features that SourceForge provides (issue tracker, discussions, source code distribution, etc.), but has one really cool feature: it is based on Microsoft's Vistual Studio Team Foundation Server. This means that it can be tightly integrated into your Visual Studio development environment.

I'm no developer, but CodePlex seems like a really cool idea. In fact, a number of Microsoft project teams are actually participating in community development efforts using CodePlex. Check it out at www.CodePlex.com.