Microsoft Security Updates Due Next Week, Moving from Lotus Notes to Exchange & SharePoint, Cloud Computing Hurts Margins

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Creating your SharePoint Governance Plan (Intranet Journal)
One of the most common questions that I get from prospects as I'm talking to them about the creation of a governance plan and process is what does it look like. In other words, there are materials available which describe what should be in a governance plan but there isn't a ton of guidance on what the process of creating a governance plan and process are.

Best Practices: Migrating from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange & SharePoint (ZDNet)
Many companies are moving from IBM Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint for a number of reasons: Microsoft's rich and varied features, the business value of becoming a Microsoft partner and the high availability of IT staff trained on Microsoft technology. But migrations aren't easy, and careful planning and execution are a must.

Project Management Central for SharePoint (Softpedia)
Bamboo Solutions, a Microsoft Gold-Certified Partner, is working to take advantage of the growth of the Redmond company's SharePoint platform. Project Management Central is a complex and professional application, created for collaborative project management and developed on the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Meant to offer customers interactive and professional workspaces, Project Management Central (PM Central) is also set up to boost the collaborative capabilities of SharePoint.

Microsoft to Plug Holes in Windows, IE, Word, Office, and Excel (CNET)
Microsoft will release 10 security updates on Patch Tuesday next week, including critical patches for holes in Windows, Internet Explorer, Word, Office, and Excel. In addition, Adobe said it will provide security updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat versions 7.x, 8.x, and 9.x for Windows and Macintosh on Tuesday in its first quarterly security update for its popular software for creating and reading PDF files. The critical update will be detailed on Adobe's security bulletin site.

Forrester: Microsoft Office in No Danger From Competitors (PC World)
Microsoft Office is still the most prevalent productivity suite among enterprise customers, but 2010 could see more adoption of competitive suites as companies ponder their next investments in this area, according to a new report by Forrester Research. Eighty percent of enterprise customers are still using some version of Microsoft Office for worker productivity and collaboration, with only 8 percent using alternatives, which include Sun StarOffice, Google Premier Apps, Lotus Symphony and Zoho, according to the report by Forrester analyst Sheri McLeish. The report polled 152 IT decision makers.

Build a Business Case for Windows 7 Upgrade Now (Computer Weekly)
Windows 7 will be Microsoft's most significant operating system launch since Windows 95. Due to ship on 22 October 2009, the next version of Windows will be crucial to Microsoft's future product plans such as its Azure cloud computing strategy and Office 2010. Microsoft lost credibility in the enterprise with Windows Vista when users found a large proportion of business applications could not run on Vista. Microsoft has tackled the compatibility problem with a free extension to Windows 7 called XP Mode, which allows users to run Windows XP applications on Windows 7.

Ray Ozzie's Cloud Hangs Over the Valley (CNET)
Ray Ozzie tends to see things much like a Seattle meteorologist--always cloudy. Making a trip to sunny Silicon Valley, Ozzie addressed Silicon Valley's Churchill Club, outlining the transformational role that cloud computing will play. As he discussed that vision, moderator Steven Levy asked if Microsoft itself was sufficiently cloudy when he had arrived.

Microsoft Exec: Cloud Computing Could Undermine Margins (The Wall Street Journal)
Though it's a "huge" revenue opportunity, cloud computing will likely put pressure on Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) margins, a senior company executive said Thursday. The remarks by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, appear to confirm fears that online software products, which Microsoft is rolling out, could undermine the company's margins over the long term.

Microsoft Lays Out Plans for Servers and Netbooks (PC Authority)
In his address to the Computex conference in Taiwan Microsoft’s OEM division corporate vice president Steve Guggenheimer has been outlining Microsoft’s plans for servers and netbooks. The company will debut Windows 7 in October, and Windows Server 2008 R2 at “broadly” the same time. Microsoft is preparing the two operating systems to be ready for two smaller markets; entry level servers and netbooks.

Windows 7 Security ‘Still has Room for Improvement’ (IT Pro)
A Sophos engineer has said he is ‘impressed’ with Microsoft’s focus on security with the upcoming Windows 7, but said it still has areas to be concerned about. In a blog entry, Sophos global sales engineer Chester Wisniewski highlighted a feature that he felt would be a “regression” from Windows Vista.

Around the Blogosphere
Bing vs Google (Worker Thread Blog)
Since the launch of Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” I’ve noticed quite a few Bing URLs cropping up in the referrer stats for this blog.  I thought it would be interesting to take an example of one of these referred searches, in this case “add PDF ifilter to SharePoint” and see how it fares with results from Bing and from Google.

Silverlight Web Application Explaining All STSADM Commands is Now Live (Stefan Goßner)
Technet now hosts a technical reference for the available STSADM commands based on Silverlight. Beside a view that shows all the commands you can choose a view that only displays commands new in SP1 or SP2 or commands that offer operations which are not available in the UI.

New Book Preview – SharePoint 2007 Developers Guide to the Business Data Catalog (Clever Workarounds)
I’ve been busy on a number of fronts and some of the fruits of that work will appear soon enough, but I thought that I would pop up to let you know about a forthcoming book written by Brett Lonsdale and Nick Swan on a SharePoint component that has until now, been seriously under-represented in the plethora of SharePoint books out there in the marketplace.

Case Studies in SharePoint Dashboards: Live Online Workshop (End User SharePoint)
The lack of Excel Services in WSS makes it difficult to create usable dashboards to help analyze information in a glance. There are alternatives, however, that can be implemented by a site manager or Power User without recourse to third party solutions and web parts.

SharePoint Branding Build Test Checklist (SharePoint Branding & Design)
During the creation of the CSS, Master Pages, and Page layouts its critical to stay on top of your Front End Development testing. As you know many classes in SharePoint are shared classes so when you make a modification to one element you have to test, test, test.

Around Bamboo Nation
Google Wave vs. SharePoint (The Bamboo Team Blog)
About a week ago, I was reading the latest edition of SharePoint Daily (incidentally the best daily digest of SharePoint & Microsoft news around) and I read the Information Week headline, Google Wave May Challenge Microsoft SharePoint.  The synopsis went on to say that "Google on Thursday demonstrated its new Wave communication and collaboration platform at its conference in San Francisco, prompting spontaneous applause and a standing ovation by developers."  As someone who has made the big bet on SharePoint, I confess that this was an "Oh ***!" moment for me, and I briefly experienced that sick queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach as I wondered if SharePoint was about to be obsolete.

Guest Blog by H3 Solutions' Jason Hall - Mobile Entrée, Taking a Look Under the Hood (The Bamboo Team Blog)
Mobile Entrée is installed as a SharePoint solution and is deployed as a series of features.  You read the first article, you already know that.  One thing we didn't cover is how remarkably easy Mobile Entrée is to manage.  The solution installs 3 features:

SharePoint Job Listings**
SHAREPOINT ARCHITECTS (H/F)
As a SharePoint Architect you will lead and participate in the architectural design, development, customization and integration tasks of enterprise solutions involving Portals, Enterprise Search, Enterprise Content Management, Business Intelligence and Business Process and Forms. The solutions you will design shall be based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) and other .NET components.

SHAREPOINT DEVELOPERS (H/F)
As a SharePoint Developer you will be involved in the implementation of projects using the Microsoft SharePoint platform at leading organisations. You will have the opportunity to work with the latest tools, attend training and work on technology leading projects.

Microsoft Updates
Description of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package (Coreserver.msp): April 30, 2009 (KBAlertz - Microsoft Knowledge Base Article)
This article describes the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 issues that are fixed in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package that is dated April 30, 2009. This article describes the following items about the hotfix package:

Change Your Regional Settings (Windows SharePoint Services)
Every site (both top-level Web sites and subsites) can be customized to use specific regional settings that are used as the default regional settings for all users of your site. Individual users can choose to use the default settings set by the site owner or specify their own personal settings. You can specify the following regional settings:

Customizing a SharePoint Site in Your Web Browser, Part 2 (Windows SharePoint Services)
This tutorial teaches you how to customize your site based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services by building an interactive Web page that makes the data in lists more dynamic and useful. It is the second of a two-part tutorial about using Web Parts—the basic building blocks of the pages in SharePoint sites—to customize your site. You should complete the first part, Customizing a SharePoint site in your Web Browser, Part 1, before you take this tutorial. In this lesson, you will move beyond the basic steps of site customization modifying your site's Home Page and build a new Web Part Page that will serve as a window into a set of sample data.

Watch This: Design a Document Review Workflow Solution (Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer)
Learn how to design a document review workflow and a custom Workflow Dashboard that shows you at a glance the status of all workflow tasks related to a specific document. This series of videos presents an end-to-end scenario, starting with the necessary site components and ending with saving the solution as a site template so that you can reuse it. Along the way, see how to design several secondary workflows and learn how to use a wide range of workflow lookups.

Create a Workflow (Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer)
With Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can design workflows that add application logic to your site or application without having to write custom code. Using the Workflow Designer, you create rules that associate conditions and actions with items in Microsoft SharePoint lists and libraries, so that changes to items in lists or libraries trigger actions in the workflow.

Bamboo Partner Events*
June 13, Chicago, Illinois, SharePoint Saturday
June 20, Charlotte, North Carolina, SharePoint Saturday
June 23, Basingstoke, UK, SharePoint Showcase Event - ICS Solutions

July 11, Toronto, Ontario, SharePoint Saturday
July 18, Harrison, Arkansas, SharePoint Saturday
July 25, Baltimore, Maryland, SharePoint Saturday

August 24-26, Washington, DC, Best Practices Conference - Mindsharp

SharePoint Events**
June 9, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
June 10, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar
June 10, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Administration Webinar
June 10, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
June 10, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
June 11, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
June 11, Evansville, Indiana, Evansville Indiana's SharePoint Group
June 13, Chicago, Illinois, SharePoint Saturday
June 16, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar
June 17, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar
June 17, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar
June 17, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar
June 17, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
June 17, Reston, Virginia, CloudCamp Washington, DC
June 18, Online, What’s New from Bamboo? Webinar
June 18, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
June 20, Charlotte, North Carolina, SharePoint Saturday
June 22-24, Boston, Massachusetts, SPTechCon
June 23, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
June 23, Basingstoke, UK, SharePoint Showcase Event
June 24, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar
June 24, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Administration Webinar
June 24, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
June 24, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Webinar
June 26-27, Dulles, Virginia, Regional SharePoint Users Conference 2009
June 30, Online, Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central Webinar

July 2-3, Wellington, New Zealand, New Zealand Community SharePoint Conference

July 11, Toronto, Ontario, SharePoint Saturday
July 13-16, New Orleans, Louisiana, Worldwide Partner Conference 2009
July 18, Harrison, Arkansas, SharePoint Saturday
July 20-24, Las Vegas, Nevada, SharePoint Branding Bootcamp
July 25, Baltimore, Maryland, SharePoint Saturday

August 24-26, Washington, DC, Best Practices Conference

September 21-25, Chicago, Illinois, SharePoint Branding Bootcamp

October 19-22, Las Vegas, Nevada, SharePoint Conference 2009

* If you are a Bamboo Partner please contact Janet Goda (janet.goda@bamboosolutions.com) to have your event included in the Bamboo Partner Events.

** Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to include your event  or job listing in SharePoint Daily.

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