Business

I’m very excited and glad to announce that this is my last day at Connecta/Acando and starting on Monday I will be joining the Avanade forces here in Sweden. I will take the role as the Collaboration lead, continuing my passion for SharePoint and the future of collaboration on the Microsoft stack. Joining Avanade and in this role seems like one of the most exciting things I could do at the moment. We’re standing on the brink of huge changes going on in our collaborative environments. Cloud, devices, services, security and identity – there’s so many things going on right now and there’s so many things to think about, plan for and execute on. Also Avanade, being such a global company but being fairly small here in Sweden, brings a lot of opportunities on the table for me and my future customers. I’m looking forward to expanding and building the Collaboration team here in Sweden in combination with the Nordic and global teams – and build the best Collaboration delivery team on the Microsoft platform! If you want to be a part of this, then just ping me!

Now sitting here at LAX and reflecting over what we have experienced during the PDC 2008 the last few days. We learned a lot about technical stuff and what’s growing up in Redmond, but I think the most important stuff is what’s happening to the software business in large. With Windows Azure as the first large scale service host and with the number of online services that Microsoft will release in the upcoming years we have a real challenge to adapt to these new business models. Not only Microsoft is running this way, just look at Amazon and others, but Microsoft have such an effect on a large number of users.

Everyone, every company, small or large has some kind of file server for storage of documents and other files. The file server are in many cases the heart of the operations. Some have several file servers and some have even more. Almost every file server looks the same; some kind of shared folder with subfolders (in absurdum). Most of these file servers uses file/directory permissions to have control over who are allowed to view or edit the files. Most often this is configured through groups, but far to often permissions are set on user accounts directly.

Working and developing with Microsoft products is a great, but when it all comes down to deliver a full solution to your clients you must know how the different products from Microsoft are licensed – and this is a mess (SharePoint?). Hopefully you have some in your organization that has some knowledge of the Microsoft licensing or you have a nice licensing partner that can help you out. But once in a while you end up with a client that wants to know how much it costs – and right now! Therefore I think it is essential if you, as a developer or architect, has (at least) some knowledge of how the different products are licensed.

Microsoft SharePoint is a great Enterprise Portal framework and contains a lot of collaboration and management features out of the box. SharePoint also has the abilities to find users and their knowledge using a social distance algorithm, but it has lacked some of the social features that applications such as Facebook successfully has implemented and been recognized for. Microsoft even owns a smaller part of the Facebook company. The enterprise equivalent of Web 2.0 – Enterprise 2.0 is steadily increasing and to make it work for the knowledge worker of today you have to include the social features. There are now numerous third party applications you can use to leverage your SharePoint installation to an Enterprise 2.0 portal, I previously blogged about some of them.

If you are about to plan capacity for your Microsoft SharePoint 2007 topology you can get great assistance from the Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Model. What is Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007? The Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) 2007 is a pre-deployment capacity planning tool for Microsoft Server products when creating distributed application deployments. The SCCP allows you to create a model of your hardware, network and applications/servers using a Model Editor. The model can then be run through a simulator which warns you of eventual bottlenecks and allows you to analyze all kinds of different data.

Microsoft continues to strengthen their position in the Enterprise Search segment by acquiring the Norwegian Enterprise Search company Fast Search & Transfer (FAST). FAST is, according to Gartner, leader in the enterprise search segment together with Autonomy, where Microsoft was considered Tier 2 players. After releasing the Microsoft Search Server (MSS) and the MSS Express version, I’m glad Microsoft continues to emphasize on this interesting and “hot” area. Forrester stated after the Microsoft Search Server release that:

The year of 2007 is about to come to an end, and it has been a really exciting year. First of all I’ve had a great year with my family; my daughters turned four and one years old during 2007 and it’s so wonderful having them around giving me energy. My wife has been home with them the whole year and next year I will take a few months of parental leave and give them my full attention.

Today Microsoft announced that it will be extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with new enterprise social computing capabilities, by adding features from the partners NewsGator (Press release) and Atlassian. SharePoint Connector for Confluence This connector will integrate the Atlassian product called Confluence which is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge. The connector is allowing you to create more advanced wikis and blogs than the standard features of SharePoint or you can include SharePoint lists into Confluence, it even allows you to search both SharePoint content and documents as well as the Confluence content in one location.

DELL, one of the largest PC computer-hardware companies , has really understood how important it is to communicate and interact with customers. First of all I am a very satisfied DELL user, except for some problems with my Inspiron 9100, and I think that the DELL support has been great. But having good stuff to sell an providing satisfactory support is not everything. To be able to stay on top you have to evolve and get with the trends and listen to your customers/community.

Thinking about the environment is a high-priority nowadays and I stumbled across an interesting article on how we could save money and possible preserve the environment - Black Google Would Save 3,000 Megawatts a Year. The point in this article is that a CRT monitor uses up to 15 watts less power with a black screen instead of white, and as you know power costs money and affects the environment, mostly, in a negative way.

According to CNET News Google, Yahoo and Microsoft teams up on using the Sitemap protocol. The Sitemap protocol is an XML standard for describing the site content and the update frequency to make it easier for search engines to crawl a site. This is great news for all site developers and owners to have their sites crawled correctly. The only problem so far is that you have to submit the Sitemap to each and every crawler that supports the Sitemap protocol.

Demonstrating applications for customers is a haunted task. When doing a demo for a customer at least one thing will fail or result in an unexpected result; a brand new error, a debug dialog box with unwanted text, test content that should not be read by the ones you are demoing for etc. If it’s not the application then you have some other things messing up; no connection between the laptop or projector or no connection to the network.

The Windows Vista blog announces the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, a desktop solution that will help Windows desktop users tune their applications and operating systems. It will include applications and features that will enhance: desktop deployment application comaptibility diagnostics and repair This pack is a result of Microsoft aquiring a handful of nice companies, such as the great Winternals. You can read all about it at the Desktop Optimization Pack site. When I first read through that page something caught my attention:

Google has introduced a new Video Search which can be reached from the menu at the Google web site, read about it in the Google Blog. This is a nice new feature in which you can upload and share your videos but this post is not about that feature it is about that the Video link has replaced the nice Groups search link!! When stumbling upon a problem or whenever I try to find help on something I Google for it, and browse throught the first ten hits - then I just click on the Groups link to make the same search in the news groups, where most of your questions are answered. Now I have to click the more link and then select Groups which gives me one click more.

The Register reports an interesting Dell computer flaw, in which a Dell desktop can be turned of if a mobile phone close to the computer recieves an SMS message - at least it did not start to burn :-)Dell recommends users not to have their mobile phones to close to the computer.

Winternals Software LP is aquired by Microsoft! Winternal (previously known as NTInternals) is most known by their freeware site Sysinternals a site containing numerous awesome and crucial applications to be used with Windows operating systems such as; RegMon, FileMon, Debug Viewer etc. The aquisition is great for Microsoft as they will get their hands on Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell and their knowledge in how to create small, efficient and safe applications. Microsoft really knows how to get the best people and tools…

I have been using Microsof Internet Explorer 7 beta for a while and I have noticed that some sites are reported as suspicious phising websites. The address bar turns yellow and a big popup informs you about it. A few days ago the popup appeard on one of my blog entries. The popup includes a link to a site in which you may inform Microsoft that you are the owner of the site and the site is not a phising site. I gave it a try and reported the site not to be phising site and that I am the owner. Within 24 ours I recieved a response from Microsoft that they had reviewd my request and a few ours later the warning was gone. Phew! I think it all worked very smoothly and I think it is a great feature of IE7. If you would like more information on the IE anti-phising filter, read about it here.