Microsoft’s Silverlight technology will be used by various broadcasting platforms for live and video-on-demand Online Streaming of the Inauguration of Barack Obama as US President on 20th January 2009

The Presidential Inaugural Committee (http://www.pic2009.org/) will be broadcasting live using Silverlight Technology. In August the 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) used Microsoft Silverlight to stream convention proceedings, including President-elect Obama’s acceptance speech.

CBS will be providing High Definition (HD) content using Silverlight Technology for it’s 25 owned and operated web sites.

CNN will be using Microsoft’s PhotoSynth for the iReport web site user-generated content.

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

Are you using Silverlight for your Online Streaming?

Eventually! Adobe has released a 64bit version of it’s PDF iFilter for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Up till now, your only options were Adobe’s 32 bit version, or buy the 32- or 64-bit version from Foxit Software.

Feedback from the field indicates that the Foxit iFilter seems to achieve higher performance, but the Adobe iFilter is free. So go and test yourself and see what your experience is.

(The article was originally posted on the German Language Swiss IT Professional and TechNet Blog by Stefan Hagenbuch)

It was just announced a few days ago that PerformancePoint Server will not longer exist as a stand-alone product. It's functionality will be integrated into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Exact details and the reasoning behind this are described below in the SharePoint Senior PM blog entry:

What is being announced?

As part of this vision, and feedback from a wide variety of customers, PerformancePoint scorecarding and dashboarding capabilities will now become part of SharePoint Enterprise CAL and available to customers who are on SharePoint SA. This means that customers who want to deploy PerformancePoint can do so today at no additional cost. 

In mid 2009, we will release PerformancePoint Server 2007 “service pack 3” which will include updates to the current product’s planning module. Thereafter, customers should not expect further investment in standalone versions of PerformancePoint Server. However, we will continue to invest in a performance management platform and increased functionality through Excel, SharePoint and SQL Server to support broad-based performance management models and simulations. These changes enable customers to deploy a complete BI solution with existing investments in SharePoint Server, SQL Server, and Excel.

What does this mean for you?

Microsoft is removing the barriers for customers who want to deploy a complete Business Intelligence solution, leveraging their existing investments in SharePoint Server, SQL Server, and Excel. Customers with SharePoint ECAL SA will have rights to deploy PerformancePoint Server today. PerformancePoint’s scorecard capabilities are certified by the Balanced Scorecard Institute/Palladium, building on the capabilities first introduced in Business Scorecard Manager. This means companies can implement their scorecards, following any methodology they choose, and accurately reflect this with their company strategy. The contextual dashboards allow organizations to create data-rich views that are interactive and change based on the users context. Organizations can create rich views that combine Excel, Excel Services, SharePoint Lists, Reporting Services, Analysis Services, and relational information to accurately reflect the business, measure the right information, and quickly understand changes in real-time.

This capability augments the team-based KPIs in SharePoint today, and utilizes the Excel Services environment, already allowing customers to share and reuse their workbooks in personal dashboards across the organization.

What can you do today?

More information is available on http://www.microsoft.com/bi regarding this announcement; here are some links to specific product capabilities and how-to's, to help you get started. Now, there is no excuse to start rolling out a complete BI solution, one that you know will be utilized because it uses the technologies you know today, and works with the systems you are already familiar with.

More information is avalable on http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/

(The article was originally posted on the German Language Swiss IT Professional and TechNet Blog by Stefan Hagenbuch)

SSIS Developers often wonder how they can get information into, and out-of a SharePoint lists. There is a solution.

Look at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd365137.aspx for an explanation on the SharePoint List Source and Destination Sample available on Codeplex.

The Beta of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have been released for TechNet and MSDN subscribers. It is available from here. For non-MSDN and TechNet subscribers, the beta of Windows 7 will be available on Friday 9 January 2009 from here.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are based on the same code base, and are derived from Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft has built a lot of functionality into the new releases, building on what foundation work was done in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. If an application runs well on Windows Vista, it will most likely run well on Windows 7.

For me, the improvements in Windows 7 are:

• Considerable performance improvements in terms of boot, wake from sleep and user interface responsiveness. In some cases, the difference is dramatic. Even on older hardware and the new WebBooks, performance is really impressive. Installation is blazingly fast.
• It is already extremely stable and I use it on my primary machines already.
• Configurable User Access Control (UAC), leading to less pop-ups for when elevated rights are needed by an application
• Simplified, yet very clever improvements, to the Task Bar and the Notification Tray areas
• Internet Explorer 8
• Bitlocker can protect removable storage also
• Consistent Search from a user interface perspective, and you don’t even notice it when it is busy indexing your data. Searching e-mails, files and SharePoint is performed in one place
• The concept of libraries of documents. Not everything has to be in My Documents to be shown in the Documents view

Please ensure that you download the beta from one of the Microsoft web sites and not from a 3rd party or peer-to-peer network. You know what you get from Microsoft, from other sources, you may have some extra non-Microsoft code included. The beta Expires 1 August 2009.

For more information, see the Windows Product Group Blog