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September 30 RELEASE: Encarta on MSN MobileAnnouncing: Encarta on MSN Mobile! If you have a smart phone, you can check it out by going to MSN.com and in the channel menu, select “All”, then “Encarta”. You can see our Quote of the Day, peruse three editorially-programmed articles of the day, take a quiz, guess the Mystery Picture of the day, and do an Encarta article search. If you don’t have a smart phone, you can view it here. INFO: Fixing Sharepoint sites for Internet Explorer 8.0 compatibilityOne of my customers has been trying to mitigate compatibility issues between Internet Explorer 8.0 & Sharepoint Server 2007. Yes, that’s right: IE8 & MOSS 2007. I told y’all to test, test, test. At least someone listened. It turns out that the traditional Sharepoint masterpage solution that’s documented online to automatically request IE7 Compatibility Mode doesn’t always work because ASP.Net themes render code in front of the all-important meta tag that tells the browser about the need to change modes. My customer found this article and added the metatag info to the HTTP Headers instead and it fixed the IE8 display problem.
For more information, visit the article referenced below:
NEWS: Upcoming HTC Windows Mobile-based phone releases
The Windows Mobile 6.1-enabled Samsung Omnia will be coming to AT&T as the Mirage. Hopefully next month. Palm’s Treo Pro looks like it’ll be sold through AT&T by the end of hte year. It’s currently priced above $500 however after subsidies from AT&T, it’ll likely be closer to $200. http://www.cellaz.com/news/2764/fcc-unveiled-the-cdma-samsung-omnia/ WEBCAST: Getting More Out of Your SharePoint Investment, Oct 2nd
Thursday, October 2, 2008 10:00 AM-11:00 AM Pacific Time If you are looking for manageable, easy to design workflow capabilities that go beyond what MOSS or SharePoint Designer offers without writing code, you need K2 blackpoint, a new exciting offering from K2 dedicated to SharePoint. In this session you will see an application built with K2 Studio, an Office-style process designer, using SharePoint-specific task wizards and integration with InfoPath Forms Services. Agenda: K2 blackpoint overview:
Demonstration of a process built in K2 blackpoint that manages all aspects of an Internal Recruitment process, including:
Who Should Attend: Registration: EVENT: “Work Anywhere” – Building infrastructure for flexible work practices
Working Anywhere is about ‘working’ – and deploying the right combination of infrastructure, tools, training, and support for employees that can be tailored to the business requirements of any specific firm. It involves managing people, property, IT, and communications complexity across the globe. Our extensive global experience helps our customers build a new cultural and business environment. Attend this executive peer-networking event and hear how BT and Microsoft© are uniquely positioned to understand the challenges you are facing and help you determine the best path toward implementing flexible working practices that contribute to your bottom line. Learn how BT and Microsoft© can help you:
BT takes the complexity out of implementing flexible working by providing a scalable ‘single point of contact’ solution that is designed around the way you work. BT and Microsoft© will work with you to implement a solution that will:
Who should attend: Senior Managers/Directors/Vice Presidents of IT, Finance, Operations, HR, Sales and Marketing
To register for this invitation-only event, please contact me for details. TRAINING: Developer’s Hands-on Workshop for "Office for Business Applications" using Visual Studio 2008 - Los Angeles, Nov 10thComplimentary 1-day Developer’s Hands-on Workshop Microsoft invites you to a hands-on training experience created specifically for our Enterprise customers. You learn how to do Office 2007 development using Visual Studio 2008. The format of this session will be brief topic presentations followed by hands-on labs (HOLs). The intent is to spend a majority of the day in the HOLs.
Time: 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Location: Microsoft Corporation Lunch will be served. Please see parking instructions below on where to park. Topics will include:
Prerequisites: Registration is limited to managed Microsoft customers. If you are interested in attending and you are a customer of mine, please contact me and I will get you the appropriate information for registration. Note: My customers take priority. Individuals that are not directly managed will be bumped from the list in favor of those who are. NEWS: Games for Windows Live – FREE enhanced multiplayer gaming & matchmaking
With Games for Windows – LIVE, you get an online identity – called a gamertag – and a friends list that works across multiple games, the XBOX 360, and even the Zune music service. You can easily find and communicate with your friends online with text and voice chat. Earn achievements and Gamerscore that lets you track and compare your accomplishments. Play multiplayer games with your friends, or play against new opponents online using our exclusive TrueSkill™ matchmaking system – with other Windows® players or with or against XBOX 360 players (in supported games.) All of this is possible today – and at no charge.
LINK: RELEASE: Virtual Earth has Major UpgradeVirtual Earth just got and update along with Live Search Maps which went up including a new version of the 3D control. Here’s a quick list of the major feature additions to VE:
One of the cooler things is the real time weather that is displayed within the maps when viewing an area using the 3D Map rendering tool. LINK: September 26 NEWS: Microsoft opens datacenter in TexasWe’re putting up a new datacenter – but this time it’s in Texas, and it’s the largest yet. Larger purportedly than even our Quincy, WA facilities.
READ: http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/local/Microsoft_data_center_goes_live_today.html Additionally, the plan is to install solar panels to assist in powering the facility sometime in the future. Of course this has hit the mainstream media like a Mac truck, what with their “save the planet” orientation. Unfortunately for many press writers, many have already written that the datacenter will have photovoltaic cells on the center’s rooftops – despite the fact that that’s not actually going to happen any time soon.
September 25 WHITEPAPER: Using Sharepoint Blogs and Wikis in Business
This paper, “User Blogs and Wikis in Business”, provides business and technical discussion about the use of wikis and blogs in the business environment. The use of wikis and blogs (Weblogs) in business is the latest development in the fast-moving content publishing revolution that has been created by the Internet and Web technologies. Like all technological advances, they are already affecting the way we work. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 now offers both wikis and blogs, so business and technical decision-makers can understand what the technologies offer and the technical and business considerations for their adoption. The wide-ranging business and technical impact of wikis and blogs means that the information about uses and management is pertinent to many staff members within a company, because of the enormous variety of business applications of blogs and wikis. The paper includes discussion and examples of uses that are relevant to board, business, and technical managers, such as program management, departmental and organizational collaboration, partner team working, and compliance. ---------------------------
Additionally, Eileen Brown wrote a magazine article, “Wikis, blogs, IM – cool business tools?”, that is fully downloadable, that talks about blogs & wikis as interesting business tools that workers will actually want to use: September 24 INFO: Publishing Access databases to Sharepoint Server 2008
The question is, if I want to move an Access database to Sharepoint to expose it’s data and functionality to others, how do I go about doing that?
TOOL: PPTMinimizer – Powerpoint file compression tool
Well, there’s still this little problem of the JPGs: They aren’t shrunken or reduced. They’re kept in their original resolution and size – and simply reformatted when displayed. Now this is cool if you plan on reusing the content later. Maybe resizing the photos in the Powerpoint or whatever but if you’ve created a final deck, and you don’t need the images to be 4000x6000 pixel resolution, why not shrink them down to the size of the format in the Powerpoint? They’d require a lot less storage and would be MUCH easier to email. Introducing Balesio’s PPTminimizer. ($40) Why’d I insta-buy the product? My feeling is this: I’ll save $40 in my time easily simply by quickly running this product on all the Powerpoints I send to my customers. It only took 10 seconds to compress my 9MB file and not only saves me space on my Skydrive allocated storage on the web, but it more importantly took only a couple seconds to upload instead of a few minutes. Not to mention that now, at 3.7MB, it’s actually conceivable that I could email the deck to someone. It also has a mode that will autoseek-and-compress Powerpoints on your hard drive or on a server which could probably save some companies massive amounts of storage on their NAS/SAN-based file servers. And that ultimately saves you money. And I’m willing to bet on most file servers not used by marketing groups or folks that deal with media all the time, that if the tool was executed, most business users would never even know it happened because the quality remains the same. So give it a try: It comes in two flavors. One is a installable for Windows, and the other is a standalone executable that runs off of a USB drive without installing. Good stuff. Well done Balesio. September 23 BETA: Compliance Management Series
Managing compliance issues imposed by regulations and statutory requirements can be difficult to reconcile with regulations and standards such as:
An additional challenge is the lack of a single source of compliance configuration guidance for Microsoft products. The Compliance Management Series (a MOF–based expansion of the Regulatory Compliance Planning Guide) provides Standards of Care and simple checklists to help you configure Microsoft products to address Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) requirements. Standards of Care simplify complex categories such as Asset Management, Compliance Management, and Risk Management, and clarify how to configure Microsoft products quickly and effectively for these categories. The Series uses Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0 to provide a mechanism for viewing data in a Plan-Deliver-Operate-Manage methodology. The beta release of the Compliance Management Series is now available and will be open thru September 24, 2008 for your review. Participation in the beta includes:
OneCompliance Platform REGISTER: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9522146 NEWS: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 coming in 20 days
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will be a standalone version of Microsoft’s Hypervisor for hardware virtualization and is a head-to-head competitor with VMWare ESX Server, providing bare metal hypervisor-based server virtualization. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will be downloadable in 30 days from Microsoft.com and it will be completely FREE. It was originally slated to be available for purchase for $28 but on September 9th, it was announced that that fee would be waived and that anyone would be able to download and use our best and most powerful server virtualization technology for no charge. It’s my theory that Hyper-V Server 2008 would have shipped as a $28 product at launch had it not been for the fact that VMWare in an attempt to match Hyper-V, decided to suddenly make their ESX3i product free. This marketing move of theirs effectively allowed us in the name of competition to make our product free, since we were simply matching their ‘pricing’. So thanks VMWare! IMPORTANT NOTE: This is not to be confused with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V which is our server operating system that has Hyper-V as a feature, and of course has licensing that is required. The Server OS of this product runs in a parent partition of a Hyper-V hypervisor and provides rich functionality for virtualization such as automated fail over, hot-add CPUs, & other high availability functions. HYPER-V SERVER CHARACTERISTICS
It is also has a series of restrictions on usage including a 4 physical processor maximum, 32GB RAM max, and a lack of clustering support. As a result, Hyper-V Server 2008 makes sense as a technology predominantly used by:
Most Enterprise organizations will likely choose Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, however they now have a low risk, low investment choice. LINK: http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/default.mspx September 22 INFO: Zune 3.0… now with Authenticated Podcast support!
Zune’s Desktop Client v3.0 now enables you to “Add a Podcast” then provide credentials for a persistent on-going subscription to the podcast. Simply go into the Zune 3.0 desktop client software and add the podcast. When you do so, the client software recognizes when the the link requires a username and password and the dialog box to the right will appear allowing you to enter in and if you choose, cache you credentials for future RSS subscription downloads. Wheee! Podcasting for corporate types! Now onward and upward to the Podcasting Kit for Sharepoint! (Download the Zune 3.0 Desktop Client & the new Zune 3.0 Firmware here: NEWS: Technet Plus Subscriptions… now with eLearning!
As part of your TechNet Plus subscription benefits you have access to a set of eLearning courses at no additional charge. These courses change quarterly so take advantage of these training resources while available. The following courses are now available:
And on top of that, the next DVD shipment is scheduled for October and will include the following:
BETA: Silverlight 2 for Sharepoint Blueprint (BETA 2)
DOWNLOAD: What it provides is the ability to do numerous complex interactive functions within the Sharepoint UI with very little cost or time. For example, the blueprint includes webparts that provide a slider control, a custom navigation toolbar, a colleague viewer and a few other things. One of the capabilities is that it will enable Sharepoint admins to publish a special user interactive webpart into the Sharepoint site that can point to a Sharepoint list of multimedia such as pictures & videos. By adding videos and photos to the list, end users find that the Silverlight webpart will automatically make them available for viewing in a very elegant way without traversing the lists themselves. All navigation is taken care of within the Silverlight control instead of the Sharepoint interface.
This can be either pictures or video or music. It’s trivial for Sharepoint administrators to add and enable within their Sharepoint environment, and it’s completely free to use. Once Notice the interactive sidebar in the webpart. This provides the end user with snapshots of all photos available in this case. The same goes for videos which shows a thumbnail of each video within the content list, allowing the end user to select what video they want to view along with a description of the content within an overlay window. RELEASE: .VMC file conversion tool for Hyper-V
Matthijs ten Seldam, a member of the Virtualization team at Microsoft, has produced a Powertoy tool for migrating these .VMC configurations to Hyper-V installations.
http://blogs.technet.com/matthts/archive/2008/09/12/vmc-to-hyper-v-import-tool-available.aspx NEWS: Microsoft announces $40B stock buyback
Translation: MSFT is a solid, well financed company. And as Steve Ballmer said, Microsoft shareholder win either way when it comes to the stock: When the stock goes up, Microsoft shareholders wins. When the stock goes down, Microsoft’s got the cash to buy the stock back when it’s a “buy”. And as a company, we’re very bullish about our strategy & annual growth so we’re more than happy to invest in our future if others aren’t. What blows my mind is that as a company, Microsoft has a market cap of $237B. I mean, do the basic math: Buying back $40B in shares is a really, really large chunk of the company. While this is next sentence is a pipe dream, we make about $30B annually in income and if you completely disregard the monetary war chest we have in the bank & non-corporate investments, if we were to execute a buyback like this a few more times at the current market cap, Microsoft could at some point be fully funded private company. I don’t know too many places that have that ability.*
* And yes, that includes a certain search company with $2B in annual income and a monster market cap of $139B. September 21 HOWTO: Update your MSN Client softwareMSN Dial up Client software is something I’ve stuck to with great loyalty. Why? Because it’s anti-SPAM functionality is something that I adore. I’d switch over to MSN Premium but apparently, they won’t let me (I’ve got a special employee deal) so no biggie. I get dial up connectivity (as if I needed it) for free. But trying to find the MSN client software on MSN.COM is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I still don’t know where the heck I found this link from but it’s good to keep in your back pocket if you have MSN: This link automatically checks to see what version you have installed and what version is most current. It also tells you what changes have occurred between revisions. For example: Update History User Interface changes: None Additional updates:
User Interface changes: None Additional updates:
User Interface changes: Minor Improvements Additional updates:
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Looks like HTC is coming out with yet another phone. The Touch HD looks to be a bit larger than the HTC Touch Diamond and Touch Pro models (via 
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