Postcards from the Edge

Well my slightly well-worn green and white rugby shirt (from the 1998 game - Ireland v England at Twickenham in the company of 12 non-sober Compaq resellers) obviously did the trick on Saturday. What a game !!!!!!!!!! End of gloating. Normal services...

What a week. Another full-on few days. We launched Partnering for the Future on Wednesday with some press folks. Quite a bit of coverage on the SaaS and BT partnership since. Check out Steve's blog for more. What's is all about? Through Partnering...

Microsoft has just posted architectural guidelines on how to build a SaaS aplication on our platform. Liteware is a fictitious HR application built using .NET 3.0 and on SQL 2005 and the sample application implements single-instance multi-tenancy patterns...

Realising that my blog is rather dull and devoid of pictures (apart from the dodgy leprechaun and armadillo's Chris added last week...thanks for that CP...) I thought I would share with you a picture of my lovely labradors. Dougal is nearly two and very...

Something else to attend this month?

I've heard quite a few things on what Web 2.0 means to public services and social networking this week. Here's something coming up that I plan on attending: Wt2 now have George Osborne talking. Great connection between public sector and technology innovation...

One of my teammates has just made us aware of a course that may be of interest on BI. Her message is short and to the point and I like it.... Hurrah hurrah - Partners have been asking me for indepth BI training - and its here! This is a 5 day course with...

Tuesday afternoon tea and biccies was had in the company of some very smart, passionate women. I seem to be making a habit of that lately. This time it was to attend the inaugural meeting of the UK Women's Enterprise Taskforce set up by the Government...

I drove through the snow to meet with Ted Okada yesterday. What a guy. He came into MS as part of the Groove acquisition and now works for Ray as Director Humanitarian Systems. Who they? Their vision is "by taking on some of the most challenging collaboration...

Have you seen the new range of products ? Great feedback from Web Designers. If you're into your web-related technologies, it's worth checking out MIX University too. Very cool.

Thanks to Nicola (our resident ebullient South African and newsletter editor) for highlighting this article where I also found a piece called called Outsourcing's own Long Tail . It is about "selling more of less" of course...but how does this phenomenon...

So we've been talking about Live a lot at Microsoft lately. I'm lucky enough to have seen some of the latest thinking coming out of Redmond recently - the paper that is essentially the follow up to Ray Ozzie's famed memo. I might be overestimating the...

This week Trestle Group Foundation announced a collaboration with the World Conservation Union . Dana Smith, MD of Trestle Group Foundation says of the partnership: “ We believe entrepreneurship fuels the engine that drives economic and social change...

Well I won my £20 bet with Prof Dylan - that Ireland would beat Wales by a ten point margin . Just. I watched nervously from the touch line in the Millenium Stadium as the Irish pack decided to make it one of those classic 'edge of seat' and 'could go...

This site has some good info for Developers and I think this one is really good - it has input and webcasts from the guru's Frederick Chong and Gianpaolo Carraro. Read more about what BT are doing here . Leaders from BT were at our Partnering for the...

According to David Bradshaw from Ovum (in his paper on the subject published in October) ISV's are "likely to find that SaaS can produce considerable advantages.....not least reducing the buying cycle significantly. SaaS enables users to try the software...

Sometimes the small things make a big difference. Like getting my BA silver card back last month. When I was at Marconi, travelling everywhere on fully flexible tickets in Business Class (managing budgets not a strong point perhaps?) - even though I travelled...