20 Oct 08 SharePoint for Project Management ; nice deck & video presentation by Dux Raymond at 2008 PMI Global Congress
I follow Dux Raymond a fair bit, not just because he happens to be one of the more profilic people who shares knowledge about SharePoint technologies (and real-world experiences) but more specifically because he focusses on using SharePoint for Project Management…
Indeed, he believes that SharePoint technologies (like he says in the deck, SharePoint is a framework of tools, of which SharePoint Server and WSS team sites are just one part of the toolset) can be used to create a full blown Project Management Information System (PMIS)… I agree. With the right business processes in the background.
He recently presented at the PMI Global Congress in Denver, Colorado, and has shared some of his presentation material;
7 Ways to Leverage SharePoint for Project Management (PDF , a few MBs in size)
How SharePoint empowers Project Managers:
and even a SharePoint WSS site template for project management.
Tags: PMI Global Congress, Project Management, SharePoint, Software, Web 2.0, WSS site template
04 Oct 08 32-bit vs 64-bit ; SharePoint Administration Toolkit download stats from Zach Rosenfield on MSDN
Zach Rosenfield, the program manager for MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint server) at Microsoft posted some interesting download stats for the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit – despite the 64-bit version being available for quite a while now, the 32-bit downloads still surpass the x64 version by almost 4 to 1. This is even as recently as September!
Zach provides some interesting (and pretty logical) reasons to go 64-bit with SharePoint and all it’s related componentry …
I wonder, though, if doesn’t reflect a more cautious approach on the part of enterprise customers in putting x64 versions of Windows Server 2003 and 2008 into production environments.
Tags: 64-bit, SharePoint, Software
07 Nov 07 Microsoft releases Search Server 2008 from Office SharePoint Server
Well, just days after announcing that SharePoint would no longer be bundled with Windows Server 2008, yesterday they further announced Microsoft Server Server 2008 and Search Server Express. These are the Enterprise Search service that up until now Microsoft has bundled within SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.
“Information workers waste as much as 9.5 hours each week on searches that don’t turn up the right information, which can add up to millions of dollars in lost productivity every year*,” … “We believe there is a core set of enterprise search features that every business should have, and we’re delivering them for free in Search Server 2008 Express.”
- Kirk Koenigsbauer, general manager of the SharePoint Business Group at Microsoft
Interesting, the key point thet Search Server 2008 Express is free. Ever try running Enterprise grade services on SQL Server Express ? (AKA MSDE) … you won’t get far… and MSFT will be more than happy to migrate you to SQL Enterprise 
At the Microsoft Unified Communications launch event in Montreal last week, it was mentioned that they were moving away from the monolithic server architecture and more towards smaller server applications that co-exist either on the same OS and/or physical box, or on multiple disparate boxes (virtual or physical) to provide for more granular management and availability.
And more granular server and CAL licensing… (and see how the folks at the GooglePlex in Palo Alto respond with regards to their Google Mini Enterprise Search in a Box product.
Time to redo all those Excel, err, Google Spreadsheets detailing the TCO of your IT software infrastructure.
P.S. Search Server Express 2008 is not yet RTM, but it the Release Candidate is available for free.
Tags: SharePoint
26 Oct 07 Classic guide to integrating SharePoint (MOSS 2007) with other portals and applications
Lawrence Liu republishes a great basic guide, originally written by fellow MSDN blogger Jose Barreto, about integrating SharePoint with other portal / ECM systems including LAMP systems all the way up to IBM WebSphere.
It doesn’t delve into the hardcore technical details – as one may hope from MSDN staff – but it is a great launching point! After all, they’ve got to leave some consulting room for their dev partners! 
Tags: Collaboration, SharePoint
02 May 06 AJAX in SharePoint 2003 : Nifty Search AJAX Code
Carlos Segura Sanz has published some very cool AJAX code to run SharePoint searches and return results without a screen refresh… now what I would like to do is adapt Matthew McDermott’s SharePoint People Finder code to run with the AJAX of Carlos…
The thing is the AJAX code by Carlos runs direct queries against the DB (I believe) whereas the People Finder passes custom search parameters to the existing search.aspx page.
Any ideas or comments most appreciated.
Tags: SharePoint
