Digital Collaboration Guide, a SharePoint Architect's view

A week ago the Emerging Business Team at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus hosted a SharePoint 2010 competition titled “SharePoint 2010 SocialFest” where seven startup companies were given one week to develop an application on SharePoint 2010. During the week long event activities such as talks from developers, SharePoint engineering and product management teams, and venture investors were done. By Friday, the contestants presented their applications to a panel of judges which included Charles Schwab & Co. and McKesson. The winner of the competition was Huddle, which was basically synching up external team sites.

The rest of the application developed are the following:

1. Calinda MindUP – presents email interactions into visual maps which help create conversations between groups enhancing collaboration.

2. Confer – is simply twitter on SharePoint 2010 for both internal and external employees.

3. Cortex Intelligence – is an intelligent RSS tools which is presented via webparts fpr discussion, sharing, etc.

4. Leverage Software – makes your email thread into on-deman social workspace for sharing with others.

I work in an off-shore location which means my environment is an outsourced environment and projects and clients I am working on are mostly based in the United States, Europe or Australia. For the past 5 years I mostly haven’t seen the people I am working, talking to for hours during day to day synch-up meeting and calls. While some of the project managers have gone to visit us here in the Philippines, majority of the people are faceless. The common phrase we blurt out on rare occasions we meet the people we are working with is, “putting a face to the name”. What’s fascinating is that after we have put a face to the name, the working relationships seems to improve and some issues and concerns don’t get escalated easily.

Microsoft Bing looks different with all the mushy stuff put in the homepage. The experience doesn’t differ from that of a Windows Desktop experience.

The left side you can see the various search options available and these are: images, videos, shopping, news, maps, travel.

The background features a landscape scenery and mouse over shows various hotspots that show a tool tip on that particular area.

Missed some images? You can go back to various images shown by bing thru the button at the right-end side of the screen. While I appreciate the beauty of these sceneries, I would rather see a Kobe Bryant image dunking over Yao Ming. In other words, I want images based on my interest.

Anyways, the search results is similar to Live services with the left and right zones (see image below).

I am not sure what happened, but when I accessed the wp-admin of this wordpress blog I got the HTTP Error 500 Internal server error. I am using Wordpress 2.7.1 but I didn’t get that error even after upgrading the application. I am not a PHP or Apache guy and having tried a number of recommended solutions, I still couldn’t get through my admin.

What I did was to link directly to other wordpress php files—wp-admin/themes.php or wp-admin/plugins.php and was able to get through the admin. However, when I click on the homepage from the wordpress admin dashboard, I go back to the wordpress HTTP Error 500 Internal Server Error. I was getting frustrated and at the back of my mind I was thinking of migrating this blog to SharePoint instead. But I don’t think I would actually go through the trouble after making a ballpark estimates on the effort of migrating a Wordpress blog to a SharePoint blog. I am too busy to do this right now.

Anyways, I am hosted at 1and1 and a suggestion posted over at codedifferent saved my day. In his solution:

1. Create a text file named php.ini
2. Write this code—memory=20MB
3. Save the file
4. Upload the php.ini to your blog directory under /wp-admin/ folder

That solved my solution.

Source from CodeDifferent: http://www.codedifferent.com/2009/01/12/solution-for-500-internal-server-error-after-upgrading-to-wordpress-27-at-1and1-server/comment-page-1/#comment-4890

Apple is known as the fire starter of technology products but given the power of netbooks, the company might rethink their strategy and join the bandwagon instead.

They have recently hired Ivan Krsctic who was once a security director at the One Laptop per Child project. The company has announced that they want to improve the security of their operating system.

I think that’s bull, they have just released their latest OSX and Ivan doesn’t have the credentials for security improvements for laptops or desktop PCs. The security in place for OLPC is different from that of conventional computers and my take is that Apple is putting their foot in the door on the netbooks market by getting people from this industry to start brainstorming and conceptualizing their next move.

Microsoft has already recognized the explosion of the netbooks market along with the rest of the vendors and look into Apple joining this market.

Netbooks started its revolution in 2007 when Asus released their Eee PC under $ 400 USD. The economy was on a downturn which made people look at cheaper options while remaining productive. The netbooks was the best choice at that time which spurred an industry revolution where we saw major players join the bandwagon from HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.

Software giant Microsoft also recognized the power of netbooks and quickly moved to extend the life of Windows XP to make sure that Linux is not making stride and taking advantage of the power of netbooks.

Was Asus the fire starter of netbooks? Not really, the inspiration of netbooks started with Mary Lou Jepsen who was tasked to create the machine that was popularly known as the “One Laptop per Child”. The goal was to create a machine for $100 that was capable of connecting to Wifi networks, colored screen, and had a full keyboard. The users of this machine would do most of their work off the internet.

Video description: The video demos how to send large file attachments through a Cloud (Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure) directly from your MS Outlook email client. No more FTP, no more sharepoint, and it is cheap and secure. Best of all, pay as you go ($0.15/GB/month for Amazon S3) and unlimited storage.

In support of the International Women’s day, I am referencing you to this post that lists the top Women bloggers right now—The Big List of Top Women Bloggers

In my work environment, IWD is big especially when the number of women is very small relative to guys. We are an equal employer it just happened that there are more male Microsoft technologists than women. Having said that, our support for IWD reinforces that we are not biased to any gender.

I do plan to make more posts on Women around technology and would do so in the coming days.

Video description: Members of the Transition’s TIGR team explain how technology can bring reform and transparency to the Obama Administration.

Gizmodo’s Wilson Rothman has posted an interview with Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie. The bulk of the interview are Quantum Computing, Neural control, retinal implants, Windows in the Cloud, Multi-touch patents, and suspension of disbelief in interface design.

As written:

When you say 3 years, you’re talking about new UIs and when you say 20 you’re talking about what, holographic computing?

Yeah, or quantum computing or new models of computation, completely different ways of writing programs, things where we don’t know the answer today, and it would take some considerable time to merge it into the ecosystem.

So how do you organize your thoughts?

I don’t try to sort by time. Time is a by-product of the specific task that we seek to solve. Since it became clear that we were going to ultimately have to change the microprocessor architecture, even before we knew what exactly it would evolve to be from the hardware guys, we knew they’d be parallel in nature, that there’d be more serial interconnections, that you’d have a different memory hierarchy. From roughly from the time we started to the time that those things will become commonplace in the marketplace will be 10 to 12 years.

Most people don’t really realize how long it takes from when you can see the glimmer of things that are big changes in the industry to when they actually show up on store shelves.

Is it hard for you to look at things that far out?

[Chuckles] No, not really. One of the things I think is sort of a gift or a talent that I have, and I think Bill Gates had to some significant degree too, is to assimilate a lot of information from many sources, and your brain tends to work in a way where you integrate it and have an opinion about it. I see all these things and have enough experience that I say, OK, I think that this must be going to happen. Your ability to say exactly when or exactly how isn’t all that good, but at least you get a directional statement.

Go on and read the interview here.

Everyone wants to be in the cloud and SAP has continued improving its vertical market by acquiring the intellectual assets of Coghead, a company developing the next generation of web applications. The company claims they are the fastest and most efficient way to build and deliver applications in the cloud. Whatever those applications that make them the fastest cloud building tool would surely benefit SAP.

SAP is a large scale company and Coghead’s tools might help SAP get their modules to the cloud in chunks.

Microsoft has finally decided to open their own retail store instead of just pushing their products to their retail partners and associates. They have built a powerful ecosystem that relies heavily on vendors.

While this move is being reported as an attempt to copy Apple, this business model is not unique to the fashion company (I meant Apple company) and Microsoft have the resources to create a high-level consumer experience while keeping the price of their products at a minimum.

Microsoft products such as Zune, XBox 360, windows, etc. could do very well especially when they provide a level of user experience and support better than mid-range retailers. How about PCs? It is not yet clear whether Microsoft plans to have their own hardware or sell Dell and other brand PCs. The store is not a Microsoft store if it doesn’t have Windows, and Windows wouldn’t be what it is without PCs.

As written: In this post, I will show all the steps required to run Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V with the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target. We will cover the specific scenario of a standalone Windows Server 2008 server (as opposed to a clustered one) on a full install (as opposed to a core install) and using a VHD file (as opposed a pass-through disk).

In order to follow these instructions you will need at least two computers. One computer will run a full install of Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role enabled. The other computer needs to be a Windows Storage Server (WSS) with the iSCSI pack or Windows Unified Data Storage Server (WUDSS). Optionally, you could add a Client for your Virtual Machine and a computer for remote Hyper-V Management.

Continue reading here.

This should make your Windows Vista box open up faster.

Video description: tips to make vista faster at start up and everywhere else, defrag and do virus and spyware checks as well as these tips to have a speedy computer.——-PAUSE to read everything——-, i didnt want to guess how fast people can read and also i figured you would pause to do these steps anyways so it wouldve been pointless me making this video 5 minutes long and for you to skip around. have fun!!

Asus has announced their latest version of their revolutionary netbooks, the Asus Eee PC 1000HE. The current introductory prices is at $399 USD.

As of their press release:

Asus Eee PC 1000HE are devices to support Lenovo S10.

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