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.

The problem with netbooks is the lack of CD/DVD-rom and if you are installing an operating system like Windows 7, things could get challenging.

What I did on my Lenovo S10 was to borrow an external DVD drive and loaded the DVD disc where I burned the Windows 7 installer as an ISO file.

Other options I considered was booting up from an external drive. You can use the Live USB Helper and Daemon to mount your disk. I didn’t want to go this route as borrowing an external DVD drive was the simple path.

Although, I am considering buying an external drive given that the cost should be justified as you’ll always find yourself needing that drive for your netbook.

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.

I am reading this article by Christopher over at ZDNet which argues that netbooks are great for educators because they are low cost, small enough to fit in cramped up backpacks and small desks, easily disposable than their average laptops and most importantly does everything that most students need from a computer.

In an excerpt:

So netbooks are great for us educators. Fine. We’ve established this. What Microsoft has established, however, is that, although Windows 7 will run well on netbooks (unlike Vista), most netbooks will be loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition. According to the Wall Street Journal,

Netbooks are expected to run better on Windows 7 than Vista, which required more powerful hardware than netbooks offered. To encourage use of the new software, the company plans to offer a version called Starter that will be inexpensive but comes with significant limits. Besides only running three application programs at a time, Starter will also lack some spiffy graphical interface features of other versions of Windows 7.

He goes on to argue that Linux is better on netbooks because it’s low cost, requires less power, etc.

While I agree, more than three decades has past and people would rather buy Windows than use Linux. I can’t understand why this doesn’t stick to the cranium of Linux fans? The first release of netbooks has Linux all over the place but as it turned out majority of these machines were shipped back by the customer because they simply didn’t like Linux and didn’t think spending time learning the system is worth it. As educators, use the technology that most enterprise use since this is the technology you ought to be teaching your students.

Netbooks would be powered by Windows XP and there is no stopping netbooks being powered by Windows 7.

Read the article here.

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.

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Despite the sudden explosion of netbooks powered by Intel atom, Intel is not abandoning the higher spectrum of processors and have looked to release 3GHz mobile Penryn CPU.

This faster processors would be part of Intel’s Montevina Plus platform. This platform focus more on High-Definition capabilities and is expected to be released on the second quarter of this year.

This high-end CPUs would be welcomed by Microsoft Windows 7 which is expected to be released later this year.

Netbooks are getting cheaper and more powerful by every release. We have seen the power of Asus Eee PC T91, and now HP has another answer to that, the HP Mini 2140. Below are it’s specifications (source here):

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