- Foothill High School student overcomes learning disability - Inside Bay Area
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I usually keep this blog to all things technical. But this story struck me personally. I am a huge supporter of the Barton program. Its is a significant reason both of my daughters are able to survive school. There are those who think that Dyslexia is “word blindness”, but they are unaware of the challenges and difficulties that these students face. I know their struggle. I am dyslexic too…
Foothill High School student overcomes learning disability - Inside Bay Area
- SharePoint Social Computing - Enterprise Social Software
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What a wonderful site. Here you will find feature content especially for and about enterprise social computing—why you should plan for it, what Microsoft offers, and why you should consider Microsoft as your social platform of choice.
Id especially invite you take a look at the this case study to see how a local customer has taken advantage of the social integrations within the MSFT stack and improved their collaboration and communication.
Its a very rich and content laden site. Make sure to explore the demos and the whitepapers. All terrific site in one convenient site.
SharePoint Social Computing - Enterprise Social Software
- Office 2010 The Movie
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Another Summer block buster! LOL- Very funny stuff..
Office 2010 The Movie
- Google's Real Outage Failure: Gmail's 'Offline Mode' Didn't Work - Google Blog - InformationWeek
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I think this article reinforces what I've been saying for awhile. Do they have a plan for critical outages? What is the roadmap for Google?
Google's Real Outage Failure: Gmail's 'Offline Mode' Didn't Work - Google Blog - InformationWeek
- Google suffers major failure
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One of the most frustrating things of my job – keeping my customers on the ball when it comes to optimizing their IT investment - I get the “for only $50 dollars a user” speech. I try to not only point out that there are huge risks in reducing their users’ productivity, but what is mind numbing to me – WHY WOULD ANYONE TRUST THIER ENTERPRISE TO THESE GUYS!!!!
Despite what some people think - this article captures my deepest fear for those people. Trusting your enterprise with basically a “advertising company”. There is a career limiting move if I ever saw one.
Google suffers major failure
- Microsoft Releases Office 2007 SP2 -- Microsoft Office SP2 -- InformationWeek
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Congrats to the Office team – this is a terrific release and I can highly endorse this SP. I’ve been using the beta for about 2 months. I would easily classify it as a huge success. The outlook issues alone made huge strides in my productivity. I highly recommend it. We are seeing alot of our customers starting to move to Office 2007 enterprise deployments.
Microsoft Releases Office 2007 SP2 -- Microsoft Office SP2 -- InformationWeek
- Microspotting
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Is Microsoft cool? As some of you know – working here in the Silicon Valley there are plenty of examples of cool. I know many many people get googly at the mere mention of campus with fine dining. (Have you ever tasted the Kobe beef burger at the MSFT campus? To die for..). Startups abound with the mere whiff of “coolness”.
My teenage daughter wears proudly amongst her peers the various MSFT t-shirts that are thrust upon us (GEEK is her favorite). She is a PC (converted from a MAC). She is a closet geek – but is slowly seeing there are two sides to the debate.
What does any of this have to do with anything Hi Tech Manufacturing? Not much, but when I get to talk to my customers and the whip out a Google pen in our meetings – it cracks me up. Are we cool? Check out the above site. I think you might be surprised…
Microspotting
- When Cloud Computing Doesn’t Make Sense - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
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This article and the available report shows what I have felt for a long time. That IT data centers aren't very efficient. They lack controls and real analysis of their usage and power consumption. Am I a data center expert? Do I know something everyone else doesn't know (and this research proves)? Nope. I just talk to a lot of IT people. I RARELY meet folks who are completely on top of their enterprise. In fact – most of them rely on conjecture and broad estimates. I would have thought that IT teams are more organized and skilled on utilization and planning. But most aren't. They are much too stretched thin to be “strategic”. I think alot of them see GAPE they see their ticket out. I think choice is a much better strategy for cost effectiveness...Cloud + Client…
When Cloud Computing Doesn’t Make Sense - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
- Download details: SharePoint Designer 2007
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Its Free – yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus. If you haven't already heard, SharePoint Designer is now free. There are tons and tons of bloggers talking about the reasons, issues, ramifications. Take a moment and pull it down – its very easy to use and learn. Its the new tool going forward for designing web pages. Why not make it free? Enjoy!
Download details: SharePoint Designer 2007
- Gartner delivers new “Vendor Rating” report about Google.
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Sorry if you don't have access to the a Gartner account. Suffice to say – there are a lot of “questions” about the use of Google applications in the enterprise. I have written and blogged about this in many of my past posts. I believe that large enterprises that consider an end to end Google enterprise strategy might not be the best choice. Gartner gives them a “promising” but also points out the rate of their progress to become enterprise class will take tremendous effort and time. IMHO – Google isn't serious. They continue to try to make their consumer based applications (all still in Beta) relevant into the enterprise.
Here is the Gartner report #. Again – you must have a Gartner Account to be able to read their opinions.
# G00165639
1 April 2009 | Pages: 10
Vendors
- Microsoft Case Studies: NetApp
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This is a terrific example of how the “business” is uncovering and unlocking the value of MOSS as a platform. This guy John is the “Energizer Bunny” – he is a true believer of the intrinsic value of communication and collaboration of MOSS. I encourage you read this and it will help you understand how SharePoint can change the way people get things accomplished.
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002727
Microsoft Case Studies: NetApp
- Google is not for my enterprise…
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As I have written about in prior postings – the use of Google apps in the enterprise is a curious phenomenon. I really think there is a lot of “noise” and FUD as people are made to believe that Google is wiping out Exchange. If you read all the twitter – you would think MSFT should just pack it in and give up selling Office and Exchange.
You really need to take a serious look at the below listed case studies – all culled from the Microsoft site pointing out that customers who considered or even attempted (with little success) to get their enterprise on Google and made the more reasonable choice in the end. We get it. Not sure they do…
Are they really an enterprise software company or an advertising company looking for their next big thing?
James C. Nolan Law Office
Law Firm Cuts IT Costs by 90 Percent, Dismisses Server Worries with Online Services
“Nolan looked briefly into Google online applications, but “the amount of storage provided by Google was nowhere near what we needed,” Nolan says. Also, Nolan employees used Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 as their desktop productivity software, and were especially dependent on the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client. “The Google applications just weren’t robust enough to compete with Office Outlook functionality,” Nolan says. “We were pretty committed to sticking with Microsoft Office.”
Datatune
Online Services Help Software Firm Affordably Access Enterprise-class E-mail
If you use the Web interface only, it takes a long time to get used to Google’s threaded presentation of messages. And if you’ve come from a traditional mail client experience into Google Apps, there’s a tremendous difference, and a lot of people—myself included—just can’t get used to that. We’ve been trying to shove the Google Apps square peg into a round hole for a year now, but I’m not willing to go back to and set up a whole new domain in Exchange Server and have the expense associated with that.”
Centro de Innovación en Productividad
Delivering Real Value Through Integrated, Enterprise-Class Online Solutions
On any given day, its 50 users worked with Google Apps, SugarCRM, WebEx, MindSalt, SurveyMonkey, BeamYourScreen, and more. In all, Competitiveness was relying on more than a dozen application and service providers. That meant more than a dozen user interfaces and more than a dozen passwords for each employee to remember and re-enter on a daily basis. The Google applications tended to be somewhat basic in their functionally, so Competitiveness employees typically ran the Microsoft Office suite of productivity tools on their laptops, saving their documents and presentations to Google Docs whenever storing them. That, however, posed compatibility and formatting issues, as Google Docs converted the files to the formats associated with Google Apps whenever the Competitiveness employees saved them in the “cloud.”
W.J. Bradley Company
Mortgage Bank Gains Anytime, Anywhere Access to E-Mail with Flexible, Hosted Offering
Initially, W.J. Bradley tried several hosted solutions, including Gmail from Google, that used POP or IMAP to deliver e-mail functionality. However, those solutions created more problems. “Our users almost universally preferred to use Outlook® as their e-mail client, and getting everything to work properly with e mail servers that weren’t running Exchange Server presented lots of challenges—especially with mobile devices,” says Howard Michalski, Managing Director at W.J. Bradley
SBS Pros
Online Services Enables IT Consultant to Refocus on Higher Value Strategic Services
According to Alford, several of SBS Pros’ clients have looked at other solutions, such as Gmail and Google Apps, but they have come away unconvinced. “I think the advantage that we have going in with this Microsoft offering is that the product has already proven itself as a thick client, and we’ve already proven our expertise in making it work for clients. We’re just carrying that expertise over to the thin client, and our clients are comfortable with that. With the Google applications, nobody feels that they have any hands-on expertise because it’s always been out in the cloud and nobody has ever had the opportunity to support it onsite
Wyoming Department of Health
State Agency Improves Communication and Productivity with New Software
WDH has also brought instant messaging communications under the strong protection of Active Directory. “People were using Google Talk and other systems before,” Corbin says. “Employees received training for securing these conversations, but they often forgot precautions. By shutting down other instant messaging systems, we know that these conversations are safe and auditable, with no confidential data being leaked out. We can better comply with federal regulations governing Medicaid and other programs.”
- Newsletter – Various topics
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I am pleased to receive a wonderful newsletter from an internal MSFT employee. He aggregates a ton of informative articles and various bits. I thought I would share…
Office SharePoint Technologies
· SharePoint Diagnostics Tool v1.0 (SPDiag) Released There is a new GUI utility published today to Microsoft.com/downloads for x32 and x64 environments which should help cut down the ping pong performance related troubleshooting discussions between IT staff, support, and developers regarding the SharePoint farm itself. Use the tool to collect data from performance counters, ULS log files, IIS log files, event logs, and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), and then display and analyze the data in snapshots and custom reports.
· Microsoft SharePoint Developer Challenge Here is an opportunity for you to win great prizes by sharing your knowledge and breadth of experience with Developers in the SharePoint Developer Forum.
· SharePoint + PowerShell Those of you who read my blog know that I am a huge fan of PowerShell and on occasion talk about various ways to use PowerShell for managing SharePoint deployments. Additionally I’ve seen projects and people around the web discuss it. However, it wasn’t until learning about some of the most in-depth inner-workings of PowerShell did an important realization come about.
· Microsoft Unveils New Enterprise Search Road Map Microsoft Corp. today disclosed a detailed road map for its enterprise search products, including the introduction of FAST Search for SharePoint and FAST Search for Internet Business.
· Analyzing Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Usage Mike Wise who works on the Customer Advisory Team specializes in SharePoint capacity planning and architecture and his goal is to make SharePoint capacity planning more of a science and less of an art. His whitepaper is the first step, concentrating on the descriptive side of the task and showing one powerful technique that can be used today to make SharePoint performance and capacity measurable. You can count on seeing more papers, reports, and calculation methods building off his technique in the coming months.
· Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog
· SharePoint Toolbox
· SharePointPedia is the very first custom developed Internet facing SharePoint based application hosted by the MSCOM Operations team that has support for Windows Live ID authentication and integration with Microsoft's "RegSys" user profile system that is used across all Microsoft.com properties
Microsoft Office System
· OCS: OCS 2007 installation with SQL 2005 SP3 SQL 2005 SP3 has an update that changes a return code that the OCS 2007 install was not designed to handle. If you are having to install a new OCS 2007 pool and are using SQL 2005 SP3 here are two possible workarounds to complete the install.
· Office Communications Server R2 Launch Check out the new Virtual launch site of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 at http://www.ocsr2launch.com/. The site is packed with useful and entertaining content for you to explore
· Access: Automate data collection forms using VBA Access 2007 has a nifty feature that allows you to collect data via email. There isn’t a straight-forward way to do this and it isn’t officially supported. It’s possible if you don’t mind a little reverse engineering…
· What self-taught users do with Access It is amazing what self-taught users are able to accomplish. There is a interesting thread What do you use Microsoft Access for? on UtterAccess. Here is an interesting Wordle tag cloud of the thread.
· Excel: How to Create a Professional Chart using Excel 2007 As a new program manager in Excel one of my first tasks was to understand what problems users encounter when building professional charts in Excel. I defined professional as following the principles of Edward Tufte by reducing the amount of non-data ink on a chart.
· Quick and Easy Data Access with Excel Services I have seen a lot of great blog posts that tell folks how to do great things with refreshed data in an Excel spreadsheet using Excel Services. I’ve seen posts about slicing dashboard pages, about using .odc files to manage data, and more. One thing that continues to be an issue is how to get connected to that data in the first place, in way that will work on Excel Services. The key is all about ‘telling the server’ what user identity to use when connecting to your data source.
· Project: Project Conference 2009 - Early Bird Registration is Live!!! Join us to celebrate the successes of Microsoft Project and to see what's coming, as we exclusively unveil the powerful capabilities included in the next release. At this year's conference, you will learn how Project is helping customers today to save money, enhance efficiency and drive growth, as well as obtain unique insights into how the next release will continue to support your business tomorrow.
· Administrative Time Explained It’s time again for another posting on some best practice use of Project Server. This time the author will go in depth about the Administrative Time feature in Project Server 2007.
· Outlook: Announcing the February Cumulative Update for Outlook 2007 The Outlook team is proud to announce the release of the February Cumulative Update for Outlook 2007, a series of performance and reliability improvements that have been consolidated into a single package for our customers. To get detailed information regarding which specific issues have been addressed please read the February Cumulative Update Whitepaper.
· Outlook Connector and migration to Windows Live Calendar As previously announced, the Windows Live Calendar service will start migrating existing MSN Calendar users to the new Windows Live Calendar service as early as March 2009. The migration process will ensure that all the supported user data on the MSN Calendar is moved to the Windows Live Calendar without any action required for the user.
- Productivity Future Vision
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Who says MSFT isnt cool? Take a look at the embedded video. Its amazing…
Productivity Future Vision
- Office 14
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Office 14
Have you seen it? Do you want to know how its going to work? Im showing alot of my customers similar types of demonstrations.
Take a look!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVQRkhJTqvk
