SharePoint Daily for August 7, 2008

Top News Stories
With Help from Microsoft, NBC to Stream 2,200 Hours of Live Olympics Coverage Online (Seattle Times)
NBC, with help from Microsoft and several other technology companies, is attempting an unprecedented online presentation of the Summer Olympics. Beginning early this morning with women's soccer, the television broadcaster is planning to put 2,200 hours of live, streaming coverage of the Games in Beijing on NBCOlympics.com, which will use a custom video player built on Microsoft's Silverlight 2 technology.

Microsoft Spills the Beans on Hosted Exchange / SharePoint (Network World)
I’ve had a lot of questions about Microsoft’s hosted Exchange and SharePoint offerings since Microsoft’s announcements at the July 08 Worldwide Partner Conference. Most of the details divulged there were just about the partner pricing, but I want to know; who owns the customer, how will support work, can anyone call Microsoft or must the partner, what if the customer switches partners, are there any SLAs, what are the differences between the deskless and full product offering?

All Roads Lead to SharePoint (Sys-Con Brasil)
Corporate IT organizations have deployed numerous platforms over the years to enable users to collaborate on and share unstructured documents, files, and other data. File shares, document management systems, e-mail servers, Web servers - chances are that most of these are still in use in your company. New user requirements and technical capabilities have driven this evolution, and the result is a scattered variety of platforms that have become unwieldy and expensive to manage.

IT Shops Beware – Define SharePoint Parameters Before Installing (searchWinIT.com)
Apart from email, no other technology in an enterprise is touching as many end users as Microsoft's SharePoint. And as interest in this technology grows, there comes a need for customer education, says author, consultant and training specialist Bill English, who has offered SharePoint expertise since 2000 through Mindsharp, a Minneapolis-based educational firm he co-owns.

Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2008 (Information Week)
Microsoft released SQL Server 2008 on Wednesday. The new database software is a continuation of Microsoft's efforts to bolster SQL Server's credibility as a highly scalable database and the cornerstone to Microsoft's evolving "data platform."

Is Microsoft Ready to Tap 'Mobile Goldrush'? (Internetnews.com)
Microsoft sold more than 18 million licenses in fiscal year 2008 for its Windows Mobile software. Internationally, the company saw triple digit gains in France, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Japan and India.

Around the Blogosphere
SharePointers - What Do You Tell Your Friends and Family You Do? (John Ross)
I run into this all the time -- my parents or friends ask me "What do you do?"  I can tell them I'm a consultant but inevitably they always ask for more details.  What do you say?  Heck, my own wife barely understands it.  For those of you that have ever watched Friends, she says I'm like Chandler - no one knows what I really do.

Play Olympic Games in Silverlight (Method ~ of ~ failed)
With the Olympic ceremony only days away and being able to enjoy the Olympic experience online via Silverlight, why not get a little excited and play some casual games, Olympic style.  All of these were build using Silverlight and the Popfly game creator:

Major Internet Security Flaw (The Boiler Room)
"Acclaimed Internet security researcher Dan Kaminsky detailed a flaw in the current architecture of the Internet today, firing the starting gun for a race between hackers who can now take advantage of the vulnerability and the big companies who have yet to patch their systems..."

Screencast - How To Add 'Share This' Functionality To Internet Facing SharePoint Blogs (Michael Gannotti on SharePoint +)
Ever since I posted how I had added "Share This" functionality to my blog I have gotten a few emails asking if I could demonstrate it so here it is in video screencast format. Following the video you will see the code I use. To utilize it simply copy and paste it in to a text file.

Introducing MashPoint Beta II - Three Major New Features (Bamboo Nation)
In June of 2008, Bamboo Solutions unveiled MashPoint, a major new initiative to enable data integration in SharePoint.  Today, we are releasing MashPoint Beta II, adding critical components and significantly extending the MashPoint platform.  We have previously provided a number of working use cases for your reference and review.  With MashPoint Beta II, we are providing two more detailed examples to demonstrate the rapidly growing capabilities of the platform.

Press Releases
New Google Search Appliance: 10 Million Documents in a Single Box (Business Wire)
Google Inc. today announced an all-new version of the Google Search Appliance™ integrated hardware and software solution, with a new architecture that can index all of an organization's content — up to 10 million documents — in a single box.

SharePoint Events
August 7, Kansas City, Kansas, Kansas City Office Geeks
August 7, Washington, DC, Federal & Military SharePoint Users Group of Washington D.C.
August 7, Arlington, VA, The SharePoint Users Group
August 12, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philly Office Geeks
August 13, Jordan, Jordan SharePoint User Group
August 13, Brisbane, Australia, Brisbane SharePoint Users Group
August 13, Bloomington, Minnesota, Minnesota SharePoint User Group
August 14, Bellevue, WA, Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group
August 14, London, England, SharePoint User Group UK
August 19, Nashville, Tennessee, Nashville SharePoint Users Group
August 19, Dallas - Fort Worth, Texas, DFW SharePoint community
August 19, Tallahassee, Florida, Tallahassee SPEED
August 20, Houston, Texas, Houston’s SharePoint User Group
August 20, Iselin, New Jersey, NJ SharePoint User Group
August 20, Indianapolis, Indiana, SharePoint Users of Indiana
August 21, Columbus, Ohio, COSPUG Meeting
August 21, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, Bay of Plenty User Group
August 21, Baltimore, MD, Baltimore SharePoint Users Group
August 21, Louisville, Kentucky, Kentucky Sharepoint Users Group
August 25-29, Sydney, Australia, SharePoint August Training Summit
August 26, Tampa, Florida, Tampa Office Geeks Association
August 26, Christchurch, New Zealand, Christchurch SharePoint User Group
August 26, Sydney Australia, Sydney SharePoint User Group
August 27, Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland SharePoint User Group
August 27, Melbourne, Australia, MOSSIG
August 28, Phoenix, Arizona, Arizona SharePoint Pros
August 28, Auckland, New Zealand, Auckland SharePoint User Group

September 1-3, Auckland City, New Zealand, TechEd New Zealand
September 2, Chicago, Illinois, Chicago Microsoft SharePoint Business Strategies Group
September 4, Washington, DC, Federal & Military SharePoint Users Group of Washington D.C.
September 15-17, Washington, DC (McLean, Virginia), Best Practices SharePoint Conference
September 20/21, Waltham, Massachusetts, New England Code Camp 10

October 27-30, Los Angeles, California, Microsoft Professional Developers Conference

November 3-7 and 10-14, Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft TechEd
November 10-13, Las Vegas, Nevada, SharePoint Connections Conference

* Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to include your event in our listing.

Microsoft Knowledge Base
Description of the Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package: July 11, 2008 (KBAlertz)
This article describes the Excel Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 issue that is fixed in the Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package that is dated July 11, 2008.

You may experience poor performance when you use many SetCell calls in Excel Services (KBAlertz)
When you use many SetCell calls in Excel Services, you may experience poor performance.

Error message when you add a user who was previously a site owner to a WSS 3.0 site collection: "The file exists" (KBAlertz)
The SharePoint site administrator provisions a new Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site and is listed as the site owner. When you try to delete the account from Active Directory and then re-create an account that has the same account name, you cannot add an account back to the site collection. Additionally, you receive an error message that resembles the following:

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