Last day at SDM, dawn of a new era.

Today was my last day working at SDM. It has been great working at SDM and there are a lot of great people that I will be leaving behind. From Monday 1st October, I will be working at Microsoft as a SharePoint Technology Solutions Professional (TSP), supporting the Southern Region of Australia.

Microsoft adjusts license model for MOSS Internet Sites (MOSSFIS)

Microsoft have been listening…it was found that lots of Internet implementations of MOSS were employing an alternative architecture that was not of that intended, due to the license model of MOSS CAL and Internet Sites which could not co-exist on the same web farm. MSFT have adjusted its licensing model over MOSS and it is now allowed. This means that you can now deploy a Internet Site onto a single server for authoring (staging) and presentation, without breaching the license agreement. This would also mean that you would not need to implement Content Deployment and also that content changes, once approved, would be immediately viewable by the public.  Tom Rizzo, Director of Product Management, Microsoft has written a post describing this in more detail.

Parting gift from SDM

The guys at SDM decided to get me a going away present, so they produced t-shirts for most of the office and gave me one too.  They had the the following design on them;

FRONT

By the way WIPRSS stands for (William In Person Really Simple Syndication)

BACK

Very funny guys, I am going to miss all the humorous joking’s…

Office DevCon 2007

 

I have just been told that the website for the inaugural Office DevCon is now live (http://www.block.net.au/devcon/index.htm).  This will be an excellent event with presenters from all around Australia attending. The event will be held 3-4 November 2007 at Microsoft’s North Ryde offices in Sydney.  Information about the event including agenda, speakers and registration can be found on the website.  Some of the speakers at the event will be Aaron Saikovski, Adam Cogan, Andrew Coates, Mick Badran and MOSSIG‘s very own Ed Richard.

Did you know? You can add another time zone to your Outlook calendar

I currently work for a company that operates over two time zones (Melbourne/Sydney and Adelaide).  Some times when we book meetings the time zone thing can throw some people off.  So it is good to see that Outlook 2007 now has the facility to add another time zone to your calendar.  Now you can see what time the meeting is scheduled for in both time zones.

To add another time zone, go to Tools | Options… in Outlook

On the Preferences tab, click on Calendar Options…

On the Calendar Options dialog, click on Time Zone…

On the Time Zone dialog enter MELB as your current Windows time zone Label, tick the Show an additional time zone check box, enter ADEL as the Label and choose (GMT+09:30) Adelaide as the Time zone. NB: You can replace use your own labels and choose your own time zones. Click OK three times.

Now you calendar shows both time zones.

MOSSIG Enterprise Search Extravaganza

 

This month MOSSIG will be presenting a series of Enterprise Search related topics, so come along and find out how Enterprise Search can help you unlock your businesses data and improve productivity.

Where - Microsoft, Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place, Southbank

When - 26 Sept 2007 5:30pm

Show and Tell Session – Contact Selector Control in InfoPath (Ben Walters)

Ben Walters from Strategic Data Management will be providing a brief overview of the Contact Selector control available in InfoPath 2007.

Business Session – Search possibilities in your Enterprise (Tim Wragg)

According to IDC (Content Technologies Study 2004-2005), workers spend 9.5 hours per week searching.  Join Tim Wragg from Professional Advantage as he discusses the Enterprise Searching capabilities of SharePoint 2007 and what it means for business.

The presentation will include,

• positioning of the current search landscape from desktop to the web and where its going,
• search features including documents, people, business data and other sources,
• tips and tricks for an effective implementation , and
• the gotcha’s in features and licensing.

Technical Session – How to access and search business data (Matthew Cosier)

In this half-hour session Matthew Cosier from Readify will step you through the means of integrating external data with the Business Data Catalog, and exposing it via search. In particular he will take you through the process of writing a BDC web service, generating the application definition using the new Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor tool, and finally exposing the data to SharePoint search.

To register for this meeting please email register@mossig.net by COB Tuesday 25th September 2007.

Windows Live Update

I have been using the Windows Live Writer Beta for some time now and it has allowed me to create all my blog posts in a WYSIWYG offline environment.  I can write posts on the train on the way home and then have them published when I get home.   This has given me a major productivity improvement.  I am also a frequent user of the Window Live Messenger and have used that since its first inception.   Yesterday I was reading Angus Logan’s blog and learnt that the Windows Live team have been really busy and have just released a new suite of products and product updates, including Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta.   I updated my environment smoothly and I can now check my Hotmail email account directly from my desktop (instead of going to the Web) and I have also discovered some photos on my hard drive that I thought I had lost – Way cool!   I recommend upgrading to the latest Windows Live experience!

Get Windows Live

Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS)

Accessibility for Web Content Managed sites under MCMS was always a major challenge and sometimes even a stumbling for some customers.  Now that the WCM feature set has been migrated to MOSS it is great to see Microsoft is ensuring that the Accessibility of the product is improved.

Microsoft has hired HiSoftware as a vendor to develop the Accessibility Kit for MOSS 2007, also known as Accessibility Kit for SharePoint or AKS. The decision was made primarily based on HiSoftware’s in-depth expertise and broad industry experience in providing tools and services for improving software accessibility to the point of compliance with key industry and goverment standards and beyond. The contractual Statement of Work calls for HiSoftware to deliver a kit that can significantly reduce the time, knowledge, and effort required to implement a SharePoint-based web site that conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints, which are collectively known as WCAG 1.0 AA. The AKS can also be used to address the exceptions that have been identified in the U.S. government’s Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act’s Voluntary Product Accessibility Template or VPAT documents for MOSS 2007. While most of our customers find the improvements in accessibility (more info at Office Online) over previous versions of SharePoint to be adequate for their needs, a growing number has asked us to provide even more. The AKS is our near term response. Longer term, we plan to make significantly further improvements in accessibility in the next version of SharePoint, but we don’t have any details to disclose at this time.

Microsoft will be conducting a private beta as early as mid September 2007, with a release to community towards the end of October and an update in mid December.

These deliverables were established based on customer and partner feedback that we’ve received thus far and prioritized based on the scenarios that would impact the most end users of a MOSS-based web site down to the least.

• Milestone 1: AKS 1.0 Private Beta – ETA September 17, 2007
  This initial milestone will provide a testable version of the kit that focuses on the web content publishing and authoring scenarios for Internet facing web sites as well as intranet portals.
• Milestone 2: AKS 1.0 Release to Web – ETA October 29, 2007
  This milestone will provide a production ready version of the kit that can be used in the implementation of live MOSS based web sites or portals.
• Milestone 3: AKS 1.5 Update – ETA December 17, 2007
  This milestone will provide accessibility improvements for advanced web content authoring and team collaboration scenarios.

I have been involved in delivering several WCM solutions for government and Accessibility is always involved so I cannot wait to get a hold of AKS and dive under the covers and work out how this will improve the delivery time-frames for accessible web sites!