Top News Stories
Best Practices for Migrating from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint (ENT News)
Many organizations are migrating from IBM Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint because of the rich feature set of the Microsoft solutions, the strategic value of partnering with Microsoft and the high availability of IT staff trained on Microsoft technology. However, migrations are long, complex, and expensive projects that must be carefully planned and executed. Reliable automated tools from Quest Software can play a key role in keeping a migration on-schedule and error-free. And after migration is complete, Quest’s maintenance solutions complement the native Microsoft tools to ensure high performance and reliability.
Microsoft's Big Change on Performance Management (and BI) (Intelligent Enterprise)
What's the quickest way to grow your market share in an economic down turn? Change your licensing policy! That's exactly what Microsoft has done with its dashboard and scorecard capabilities that were initially part of PerformancePoint Server. PerformancePoint was released with much fanfare in 2007 as having integrated planning (the big innovation), scorecarding (an enhanced version), and dashboarding (acquired from ProClarity). It turns out many customers only wanted the latter two components, which are more BI related. So now Microsoft is making it easier for customers to get these by including them in the SharePoint Enterprise license. Effective today, SharePoint enterprise customers can download PerformancePoint for free. Conversely, customers who bought PerformancePoint with software assurance can download SharePoint for free. What's more, Microsoft added the following:
Financial Advisors Respond To Financial Crisis By Adopting Web 2.0 Technology (Virtualization)
With the global financial crisis causing many investors to fire their brokers, independent financial advisors are using Web 2.0 technology to attract clients, according to Advisor Products Inc., a leading marketing technology firm to independent advisors.
Microsoft Tackles Tough Times (Redmond Mag)
Microsoft's earnings reports have followed the same path for decades. The company announces revenue and profit growth, then does the same thing three months later...and on and on it goes. That is, until this beauty of a quarter. To get the bad news out of the way fast, Microsoft pre-announced its numbers. Profits are down 11 percent, but total sales are up 2 percent. For Microsoft, this is dismal, and is leading the company to lay off some 5,000 people. But for anyone else, this would be cause for celebration.
Review: New Windows Basically Fixes the Old (Sci-TechToday)
For an operating system that took five years to create, Windows Vista saw its reputation go down in flames quickly. Not since the Microsoft Bob interface in 1995 has anything from the software giant racked up so much contempt and derision. Not every company lives to see the day when its customers beg, plead and create petitions to bring back the previous version of its flagship product.
Feds Eye Windows 7 For Antitrust Violations (IntormationWeek)
The court-mandated committee overseeing Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s compliance with a federal antitrust settlement is taking a close look at the company's next major operating system to ensure that it meets the settlement's terms. The Technical Committee in December received a build of Windows 7 Beta from Microsoft and is checking it for any features that might violate the agreement, according to a document filed Wednesday by the federal government in U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C.
Windows 7 App Store Being Hinted At By Microsoft Survey (Gizmodo)
App Stores are the Trapper Keepers of 2009: everyone wants one, and the more stuff you have inside the cooler you are. Microsoft's even considering one for Windows 7, according to a survey. The intro to the survey said that they were going to ask them "various questions regarding a single place for finding and managing updates for the programs on [users'] PC." Among the more interesting theoretical implementations are:
Microsoft to Deliver First IE8 Release Candidate Monday (PC World)
Microsoft plans to deliver the first release candidate of the next version of Internet Explorer on Monday, according to sources familiar with the company's plans. Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) has been in its second beta release since August, and a post on Microsoft's IE8 blog on Wednesday said the company was "about to release" IE8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) for Windows XP and Vista. Sources familiar with the company's plans said the release will be Monday.
Around the Blogosphere
Fun with the BDC (Essential SharePoint)
A client was interested in the Business Data Catalog, so I finally had a chance to explore it in depth, and I came away impressed. Once it's set up correctly, it is amazingly easy to integrate data from your SQL databases in to SharePoint lists, libraries, and search without duplication. I've spent a lot of time and effort doing similar things for clients who are not running the Enterprise edition, and so can't use the BDC or Forms Services, and I now know the BDC is definitely the way to go.
More on PerformancePoint – Now Free If You Have SharePoint Enterprise CALs (Worker Thread Blog)
So I was a little too quick off the mark with yesterday’s post on the retirement of PerformancePoint. The bit I missed, due to the full announcements coming out later in the day from Microsoft is that if you already run SharePoint with Enterprise CALs, PerformancePoint Analytics and Scorecarding can be used with no additional licence cost. You can read more about the strategy here.
Windows 7 Beta: First Looks (Ferrara Data Consulting)
Earlier last week Microsoft opened the public beta for Windows 7, although I’m sure most of you have already been beta testing this for some time. I will be testing this extensively in the months to come, but I’d like to post some of the new features that Microsoft is aiming for. I’m hoping that these new features will be stable enough to test, but obviously that may not be the case just yet.
The Best Free SharePoint Downloads (Eli Robillard)
This post will continue to be maintained to contain the best free utilities and downloads available for WSS and SharePoint 2007. Add your comments and submit your nominations!
Microsoft Web Platform Installer 1.0 Download (Mark Harrison)
Version 1.0 of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer is now available. This enables developers to install the Microsoft Web Platform and simplifies the installation of developer technologies for building Web applications including IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition, Silverlight and the .NET Framework 3.5.
Become Your Company’s SharePoint Superstar in Less than Two Hours (EndUser SharePoint)
“Become Your Company’s SharePoint Superstar!“ is a special , live on-line session for SharePoint Power Users, the ones with all the responsibility and no authority to touch the servers. You know who you are. “Please manage the site so that it looks really good, is highly functional and, oh by the way, don’t touch the Master Pages and whatever you do, don’t even THINK about SharePoint Designer.” Does this sound familiar?
Around Bamboo Nation
Customizing a SharePoint Library (Part 4): RSS Settings (SharePoint Blank)
Continuing with the Communications-related library customization options that I began looking at with incoming email settings yesterday, it's time to close out the category with a look at the RSS settings. Before we jump in though, for anyone who may be unfamiliar with RSS, I feel I should mention that the acronym stands for Really Simple Syndication, which is exactly what the name implies: a really simple method of syndicating online content. An RSS document, or "feed," is commonly made available on many websites these days, and that feed can be picked up and displayed elsewhere, including on any number of freely available RSS readers which allow users to subscribe to a given site's content. These RSS readers handily aggregate the content for you automatically. If you stop and think about it, the entire syndication model is pretty awesome in its simplicity.
Microsoft Updates
You cannot browse to an SSL-secured Office SharePoint Server 2007 site or to the Search Settings page for a Shared Services Provider (KBAlertz - Microsoft Knowledge Base Article)
You cannot browse a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)-secured Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site or to the Search Settings page for a Shared Services Provider (SSP). Additionally, when you examine the Application log on the server in the server farm that is running Office SharePoint Server 2007, you see that an Error event ID 6482 was logged every minute. The following event entry is an example of one of the Error events:
Demo: Display Data From Multiple Sources in a Single Data View (Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer)
With Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can link two or more data sources that contain related data and then create a single Data View that displays data from those linked data sources. In the example in this video, product information is stored in an .xml file named Products.xml. Information about product categories is stored in another .xml file named Categories.xml. The two data sources are related to one another by a field named CategoryID. Watch how you can first link these two data sources and then use that linked data source to create a Data View that displays the products organized by category.
Watch This: Customize a Site (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS))
In this demo I show how to easily customize a site, right from the browser, so that users know where they are at just a glance. The scenario is based on the Adventure Works Marketing team which likes their new site, but wants to make it distinct from other sites within the company.
SharePoint Events
January 27, Christchurch, New Zealand, Christchurch SharePoint User Group
January 27-29, San Francisco, California, SPTechCon
January 28, Online, SharePoint Project Management Webinar
January 28, Online, SharePoint Administration Webinar
January 28, Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland SharePoint User Group
January 28, Melbourne, Australia, Microsoft Office System Special Interest Group
January 29, Online, What's New from Bamboo
January 29, Richmond, Virginia, Richmond SharePoint User Group Meeting
February 2-4, San Diego, California, SharePoint Best Practices Conference
February 4, New York, New York, Case Studies in SharePoint Dashboards
February 4, Online, SharePoint Project Management Webinar
February 4, Online, SharePoint Administration Webinar
February 7, Kansas City, Kansas, SharePoint Saturday
February 11, Online, SharePoint Project Management Webinar
February 11, Online, SharePoint Administration Webinar
February 12, Online, What's New from Bamboo
February 17, Milan, Italy, SharePoint Administrators Summit
February 19, Falls Church, Virginia, PMI Washington DC - Skyline Luncheon
February 21, New York, New York, SharePoint Saturday
February 26, Online, What's New from Bamboo
March 23, Baltimore, Maryland, SharePoint .Org Conference
April 6-8, London, England, SharePoint Best Practices Conference
April 6-8 Montreal, Quebec, SharePoint Summit 2009
* Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to include your event in our listing.
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Posted
Jan 26 2009, 08:19 AM
by
Chris Dooley
Chris Dooley is the Community Manager at Bamboo Solutions. Before joining Bamboo he spent 4 years in the Social Media group at AOL working on pets, photography, gay & lesbian and comic books. In his new position he works on Forums, Groups and all things community related. While he is not sure what all that will be, it is fun coming to work each day to find out.