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Thursday, Jul 3 2008

Microsoft’s big next-generation virtualization beast has arrived and the speculation pours forth like wine. Redmond’s hypervisor based virtualization system for x64 systems, Microsoft Hyper-V, has released to manufacturing and is available for deployment into production environments. So far, the verdict is out in regards to Hyper-V’s actual performance, but what about its implications for the virtualization market?

A good blog post is in essence a question; purposefully opinionated, or better yet, outright wrong. It demands interaction.

The blogger’s job is to provide the question, provoke debate, and invite the community at large to pool its immense knowledge and take the conversation further (a characteristic which distinguishes the blogger from the journalist). The conversation is the reason why we prefer blogs. If it weren’t for the dialog between writer and reader, we may as well just pick up a newspaper or listen to the damn radio.

This is how it was always supposed to be. But typically, either this conversation does not really happen at all, or else it is so slow and disjointed as to suck the life out of the whole process. Blogging platforms and the blogosphere as a whole have failed miserably at enabling effective conversation.

But it would appear that the landscape changing, and that the evolution of conversation is changing the nature of blogging itself. To demonstrate this, we look at a particular, regular post by Robert Scoble, and look at how the conversation now shifts from one forum to another (and more importantly, why). This will demonstrate how the blogosphere is becoming less about the blog, and more about the conversation.

This trend has wide-ranging implications, and points the way for future web communication, both in the blogosphere and beyond.

Tuesday, Jul 1 2008

We told you at the beginning of April of the upcoming release of Andrew Connell’s book on SharePoint. Well we finally found it available at almost all book retailers.

Called Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007, the 456 page book published by John Wiley and Sons is the only book known to cover the Web Content Management aspects of SharePoint in detail.

Andrew is a big proponent of SharePoint’s ability to create highly engaging web content management sites and this book is his attempt to sell us all on it’s potential.

Chapters in the book cover everything from master pages and page layouts, to content types, navigation, accessibility, workflow, content deployment and a lot more.

Oddly enough, the book comes at a time when we hear more about SharePoint’s collaboration capabilities than its content management. It seems like lately we don’t talk too much about what SharePoint can do from a web content management standpoint. Now that’s either because we’ve finally all settled on the fact that it isn’t quite there yet, or we are just way too caught up in this whole social computing discussion where Microsoft seems determined that SharePoint is a leader.

In either case, this is a book I would personally like to read, especially considering it’s coming from someone who has dedicated his career to learning and understanding how SharePoint works from a web content management perspective.

If a book isn’t enough for you, Andrew is set to teach some WCM courses — both online and in person over the next couple of months on SharePoint and Web Content Management.

Friday, Jun 27 2008

So maybe it’s not the end of Microsoft Outlook, but the news coming from Australia this week may be a sign of the changing times for the mighty Marketing machine. Google’s Gmail application has kicked Outlook out of the schools by Australia’s education sector. The New South Wales Department of Education has announced that Gmail will replace Outlook as the email application for over 1.3 million students.

A big win for Google, a big loss for Microsoft.

Tuesday, Jun 24 2008

It’s a day for SharePoint based news announcements. This time the news comes from Clearview Software who is releasing the latest version of their SharePoint-based ECM Suite. V4.1 provides a number of enhancements and new features designed to support the growing needs of enterprises around the globe.

Microsoft isn’t the only game in town if you want to build your website in a hosted SharePoint environment. SharePoint360, a SharePoint hosting and consulting firm located in San Diego, has launched a new SaaS offering — SharePoint360 Web.

Wednesday, Jun 18 2008

It’s well known that Microsoft relies heavily on partners to help develop extensions or integrations to their software. That doesn’t mean however, that they sit back and wait for the cool tools to come to them. Such is the case with social networking. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week they demoed a social networking solution they had been testing internally called TownSquare.

Tuesday, Jun 17 2008

Microsoft is starting to dole out its 2008 Partner Awards. One excited vendor is happy announce they have been selected as one of two finalists for Microsoft’s Partner of the Year in ISV/Software Solutions, Innovation.

Monday, Jun 16 2008

NewsGator Technologies was one of the nine companies who announced product integrations with Microsoft SharePoint at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week. For these guys though it wasn’t “breaking” news, as they have been talking about the latest version of Social Sites for a few months now.

Friday, Jun 13 2008

Not all vendors out there believe that you should be able to move back and forth between Lotus Notes and SharePoint. AvePoint, provider of SharePoint infrastructure and administration management solutions, continually brings to market migration tools to move content from another product to SharePoint. Their latest migration tool is the DocAve Lotus Notes Migrator.

Wednesday, Jun 11 2008

With a relationship that was first announced at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit in October last year, it was probably no surprise that Atlassian officially announced their partnership with Microsoft to integrate their Confluence wiki with SharePoint at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week. Still it’s an interesting integration to look closer at. And so we did.

Tuesday, Jun 10 2008

Most of the integration news we hear about SharePoint relates to the creation of internal, employee focused solutions. Here’s one that flips that around and focuses on SharePoint as an external solution. Awareness, a provider of social media solutions, has integrated their product with SharePoint — both WSS3.0 and MOSS — to provide Web 2.0 communities capabilities inside the SharePoint world.