Bob Daniels - Professional Services Software Solutions

Pimento Pardon Peppers

I had the opportunity to try these peppers while in Seattle. I must say I am hooked. They are so tasty.However about 1 in 10 are seriously hot. I mean wash your hands, etc. They will hurt you. So my trick now is to bite a small part of it ans see what happens. So since I am in New Hampshire where the living is good I am not able to get them very often. So what is a man to do? I bought some seeds and am waiting eagerly to get them and grow them in my garden. Wait with me ans see the results!

Boston Cloud Computing User Group April Meeting

Date: April 14, 2009
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7pm
Meeting: 7-9pm

NEW LOCATION!!! Microsoft Northeast District: Waltham, MA

Address: 201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor Waltham, MA 02451 Phone: (781) 487-6400 Fax: (781) 487-6600

For this months cloud meetup we have one confirmed speaker so far - Treb Ryan from Opsource - a web service operations company that delivers Cloud SaaS services including PCI and SAS70 compliant environments.

BIO Treb Ryan
Chief Executive Officer

Prior to co-founding OpSource in 2002, Mr. Ryan was President of the Americas for Metromedia Fiber Network (MFN). He was responsible for integrating the sales and delivery organizations of the company’s Internet businesses-hosting, IP networking, and managed services - providing customers with an integrated network and IT infrastructure solution.Mr. Ryan joined MFN from SiteSmith, a company that he co-founded in 1999 and ultimately sold to MFN in a deal valued at $1.4 billion. Prior to co-founding SiteSmith, Mr. Ryan was Vice President of Professional Services for GlobalCenter, a pioneer in the hosting and Internet services marketplace. Mr. Ryan has been a guest speaker at numerous industry events, including CIO, venture capital, Internet, hosting, and software conferences. He attended UCLA and is an advisor to the UCLA CLAS fund.

My Take on Linkedin verses Facebook

Seems to me that Linked in and facebook are like Amazon and EBay. Linked in is very structured. Very defined linkages are delivered in an easy to follow manner. Sort of like Amazon. Facebook is a lot less structured. Kind of like how EBay is. As social computing become more mature there will certainly be less players in the market. Kind of reminds me of the rush to ecommerce in the late 90's,  In hate late 90's there were thousands of start up to support ecommerce. They are all gone fortunately. But 2 of the biggest remain. Amazon and EBay. I suspect that in years to come many of the marginal social computing and networks sites will disappear. Leaving Facebook and Linkedin and of course LiveSpaces. Which undoubtedly will gain a lot more traction as it is a compelling value proposition having more than your Friend or professional networks.

March New England Cloud User Meeting

Boston Cloud Computing User Group

5th Silver-lining Meeting – The New England Cloud User Group

Date: February 10, 2009
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7
Meeting: 7-9

NEW LOCATION!!!
Microsoft Northeast District: Waltham, MA
 
Address:
201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor
Waltham, MA 02451
Phone: (781) 487-6400
Fax: (781) 487-6600

Each meeting we try to have two presenters. The January meeting had two great presenters - Greg Arnette, CTO at Sonian (http//www.sonian.net) and a Cloud vendor Sun, represented by Angelo Rajdurai. We finally figured out how to post the meeting summaries, slides, and podcasts in the cloud! They are linked here: Sonian and Sun.  The conversation continueus to evolve and we are always finding new ways to leverage the cloud as we listen to entrepreneurs, investors, and established vendors share their views and ask great questions.

This months meeting we have two interesting speakers - Mike Pitaro, Found and CCO from SnapLogic and John Fawcett, CTO  from Tamale Software.

SnapLogic provides the glue to tie Enterprise applications to Cloud SaaS offerings such as SalesForce. Tamale Software provides a shared research space for financial services organizations  that includes work-flow and collaboration tools.

Future of Search in Professional Services Firms

Scenario: Changing Governance and Accountability

U.S. companies will drop Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP by 2016, with the largest companies switching to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) before that. Most large companies and all public companies typically employee the services of the big 4 accounting firms.

Issues will arise from one main component of IFRS which are subjective standards and interpretations of the code. At the heart of the code is a framework describes the qualitative characteristics of financial statements as being:

• Understandability
• Relevance
• Reliability
• Comparability.

The demands on search will likely increase in areas of fuzzy logic, conceptual, and translation technologies. For instance fuzzy logic will be implemented to look for likely forensic issues around insuring accurate reporting. Translation of the GAAP to IFRS reporting of the measure elements on financial statements and showing comparative transactions will force search technology into deeper areas of understanding. And over time build knowledge onto itself in an artificial intelligence learning engine.

Scenario: Search as the Virtual Person

No one can deny the demands of the changing Governance, Risk, and Compliance models will outpace the human intellect. Over time search will build models that can interpret repositories of stored financial statements and the measurements that went into the report at an instance of time. We will demand that search run proactively and “suggest” areas for inspection based on model, regulation, or other external factors.

Auditors and consultants will want to see side by side proactive search results for faster interpretation. The firms that invest in technology like this will reduce their own risk  and ultimately gain market share by being able to deliver highly accurate results.

Scenario: The Information Pivot

The higher the level of the person in a firm or the practice will require them to dynamically pivot on information. Typically the information is not static information. The creates the need for real time search on multiple repositories. Ranging from CRM, Document and Contract  Repositories, and other Line of Business Applications.

OBA Composition Reference Toolkit

The Platform Adoption Team in DPE announced the release of the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit at ODC2008. Tool toolkit integrates with the Microsoft Office 2007 System to enable a prescriptive application composition experience for Information Workers to build and deploy Office Business Applications (OBAs) using semantically related OBA Components like Workflows, SharePoint document libraries and lists, SharePoint Pages, Web Parts, VSTO Office Client Add-ins, BI Reports, BI Dashboards etc. The  toolkit consists of an OBA Composition Server and an OBA Composer. The OBA Composition Server implements metadata and provisioning services to enable cataloging OBA components, defining semantic relationships between components, defining the bindings between components and LOB systems, and to support deploying OBAs composed by users. The OBA Composer is a WPF application that consumes and uses the services of the OBA Composition Server to enable a rich client and prescriptive user experience for composing and deploying OBAs. It is currently available on the MSDN Architecture Center,

SQL Server 2008

Taking on SQL 2008

SQL Server 2008 has new features for increasing job performance and productivity. Microsoft Learning can help get you prepared and make you an expert. Microsoft Learning Materials are the most reliable and up-to-date source of learning about Microsoft Products. With a robust set of offerings that can suit any learning style, from electronic books, e-learning, books, instructor-lead-training, and certification exams, MSL has the right training solution to suit your needs.  

 

Come to the Learning Portal to see the latest training resources available for SQL 2008.

 

FREE E-Learning and Ebook now available!

 

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/sql2008

Windows Live Platform

The Windows Live Platform is growing. Check out all the new SDK's. Myself I am interested in mapping and proximity. The mash up and combined views provide users with clear visual tools.

Customizing MOSS Navigation

Customizing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Navigation

Unified Communications for Professional Services Firms

It really is time we circle back on technology and decide where our investments need to be focused. Unified communications takes us to a new level of quality for delivering a high value customer experience and delivery of services. Advances in integration of voice and email and VOIP are starting to materialize.

 

Think of scenarios where voice mails are turned into text and placed into official records repositories. Think of how valuable it willl be to turn those into text message and index these using your enterprise search strategy. A new level of information at your fingertips starts to play.

 

Take a look at Microsoft's offerings around Unified Communications!

 

Microsoft’s Public Messaging on Unified Communications:

·        http://www.microsoft.com/uc/default.mspx

·        http://www.microsoft.com/uc/UnifiedCommunications.mspx

·        http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jun06/06-25UCGRoadmapPR.mspx

·        http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/uc/gallery.mspx

·       http://www.microsoft.com/midsizebusiness/businessvalue/communications.mspx

 

2007 Microsoft Office System Virtual Labs

Want to try out Office 2007 in a virtual environment for free

• Creating Workflows for Windows SharePoint Services
• Introducing Content Types for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Understanding the 2007 Microsoft Office System User Experience and Interface Design
• Programmatic Manipulation of the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats

Tech-Ed 2006

Tech·Ed 2006 is sold out but that does not mean you have to miss out. Join us online June 12-16 as we simulcast more than 40 breakout sessions live from Boston—for free.

In the meantime, explore our library of more than 130 other live and on-demand Tech·Ed webcasts. Get up to speed on Microsoft Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, management and operations, security, server infrastructure, and more. You can also take part in the Tech·Ed Virtual Experience to access the keynote address, blogs, videos, and news.

Office Live Basics

Why not try out Office Live Basics for free? This is an outstanding offer from Microsoft and BTW it costs less than a cup of coffee!

Easy-to-use Web site design tool

Get started fast with our easy-to-use Site Designer tool. Don't worry — it was designed with the small-business owner in mind, so you can quickly create your own Web site.

Free domain name and hosting

Select your own domain name (for example, www.northwindtraders.com) and let Microsoft keep your Web site up and running.

5 personalized e-mail accounts

Access your company e-mail using your personalized domain name (for example, jsmith@northwindtraders.com).

Storage and data transfer

More than enough space to promote every aspect of your business and plenty of bandwidth to allow lots of customers to visit your site.

Web site traffic analysis and reporting tools

View the success of your Web site with reporting that lets you see how often people visit your site, what pages they visit the most, and their system and browser information.

Support

Our online support pages are here to answer questions and help you get started by providing quick responses to your most frequent questions. One-on-one e-mail support is also available to address other questions.

 

http://officelive.microsoft.com/officelivebasic.aspx

 

 

Want to know more about the Ribbon in Office

Here is a great short way to find out more about the Ribbon in Office 2007

http://officebeta.iponet.net/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC101482291033