I got an email from a colleague who looks after App-V and thought it could benefit anyone out there that was about to Beta test the new Office 2010 application while maintaining your existing applications.
With the release of the Office 2010 Beta there has also been an update to App-V to support this - http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2009/11/19/announcing-app-v-4-6-rc-and-integration-with-office-2010-beta.aspx. The Office and App-V teams have collaborated very closely on this release to ensure that the previous limitations of deploying office via App-V have been overcome.
So why deploy with App-V?
- App-V provides the ability for the Office 2010 Beta to live side by side with the your current version of Office so can allow them to quickly and easily trial it within their organisations.
- This scenario also provides you with a very easy and cost effective way to provide training to end users when used in conjunction with the Office on line training we provide.
- When you migrate to Office 2010 it also provides a risk mitigation strategy for any documents/spreadsheets or applications which may require a previous version of Office.
Exciting news, overnight Microsoft released the Beta 2 components for SharePoint Server 2010 to MSDN. If you have an MSDN subscription you can download them now http://www.msdn.com/. If you do not have a subscription, the Beta 2 components will be released publicly soon.
“In September 2008, Microsoft along with EMC and IBM announced the Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS), a jointly developed specification designed to facilitate interoperability between Enterprise Content Management repositories from different vendors. At that time, the draft specification was handed over to OASIS to undergo a rigorous review with the aim of producing a final specification.
Since last year, the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee has worked on revising the specification and there has been significant activity from ECM vendors to develop and test prototypes. Microsoft is actively involved in the ongoing development of the specification through our representation on the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee and continues to work closely with leading ECM vendors to validate prototype solutions based on the draft specification.
At this time, the specification is in the final stages before being submitted for public review and Microsoft is pleased to announce our intention to add support for CMIS to SharePoint 2010. Microsoft will be announcing our intention to support CMIS at the ARMA Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida on 16 October 2009.”, Ryan Duguid, Senior Product Manager – Enterprise Content Management, Microsoft Corporation
CMIS Resources
During the Keynote at TechEd we showed Federated Search Connectors for Windows 7 Windows Explorer. I have been using this for searching the web using Bing! I have just uploaded the Search Connector for Bing! to my Sample Code page.
To use it simply;
- create a new folder on your C: drive “Search Connectors”
- download the Bing.osdx file to this new folder
- double click the Bing.osdx file
- click Install, then you are ready to go
You can also create Federated Search Connectors to other OpenSearch standard search services such as Flickr and YouTube or you could even create one for SharePoint.
Tech Ed Australia 2009 is on next week on the Gold Coast. This year we have some exciting things planned which all start with every attendee receiving a free HP Mini 2140 Netbook – pre loaded with Windows 7 RTM, Office 2010 and a host of other goodies.
Lee Hickin and I will be presenting on the differences between the on-premise and online versions of SharePoint (OFC250 Friday at 9:45am in Meeting Room 7. More information on this can be found on the Online Services Team Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/msonline/archive/2009/09/03/teched-australia-2009-down-under-and-online.aspx
Please track me down during the conference to discuss all things SharePoint. I will be manning the SharePoint Booth during the Tuesday night welcome party and again on Thursday morning so please pop by.
Have you registered to attend the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas coming up in October?
SharePoint Conference 2009 will be the first time Microsoft will publically share all of what SharePoint 2010 has to offer.
There are almost 250 sessions planned, and over 80% of them will be brand new 2010 content. That’s 15,000 minutes of SharePoint, SharePoint and more SharePoint that you’re simply not going to get anywhere else!
You’ll get to listen, talk and network with Microsoft Product experts, SharePoint MVPs, Customers, top Industry Analysts and over 140 SharePoint Partners. There won’t be anywhere else on the planet with this concentration of SharePoint knowledge and experience in one place and at one time.
To help you get maximum value from the conference, we will be recording every session and publishing the files within 48 hours for registered attendees to watch, on demand, through the SharePoint Conference 2009 web site. Almost 250 sessions and you won’t miss a thing!
Registration is currently at over 70% of capacity and is selling out very quickly! So get in quick before it is completely SOLD OUT!
For more information visit www.mssharepointconference.com.
During the registration process don’t forget to put my name “William Cornwill” down as the referral name.
Today the SharePoint team announced that SharePoint 2010 has reached the Technical Preview engineering milestone.
What is SharePoint 2010?
SharePoint 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise & the Web that enables you to connect & empower people through an integrated set of rich features. Whether deployed on-premises or as hosted services, SharePoint 2010 helps you cut costs with a unified infrastructure while allowing you to rapidly respond to your business needs.
Below is the updated pie slide showing the investment areas and messaging for SharePoint 2010.
You can get a sneak peek of SharePoint 2010 here.
Joel Oleson (ex SharePoint product team) is coming to Australia in July. He has organised two morning sessions with local SharePoint experts, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne. I will be sitting in on Joel’s session in Melbourne and will also be hanging around as a panel expert.
“Joel is a senior product manager and SharePoint evangelist at Quest where he is responsible for product direction and strategy. He is well known in the SharePoint community as an enthusiastic trainer, evangelist and architect and he maintains a popular blog. Prior to Quest, Joel worked at Microsoft and was a part of the first Microsoft global deployment of SharePoint. During his Microsoft tenure Joel helped various customers achieve the critical governance they needed to upgrade and achieve scale with SharePoint 2007. He would later design the extranet and hosted SharePoint deployments. http://www.sharepointjoel.com”
Keynote:
- 10 Steps to successful SharePoint Deployments, Joel Oleson
- Preparing to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 today, Joel Oleson
Sydney Guest Speakers:
- Email integration , storage and management in SharePoint, Kathy Hughes
- TBC, Adam Cogan
- Demo – SharePoint customisation and application development, John Ackery
Melbourne Guest Speakers:
- Configure, Customise, Code, Elaine van Bergen
- Demo – SharePoint customisation and application development, John Ackery
Plus, you can learn tips and best practices to help you overcome your most difficult SharePoint challenges during a panel discussion with SharePoint experts and bloggers.
Space is limited so reserve your seat now!
How cold is it at the moment....brrrr! Luckily Tech Ed Australia 2009 will be on the Gold Coast this year bring on the sunshine baby.
If I can manage to get off the beach and into the auditorium, this year I will be co-presenting a session with Lee Hickin on the differences between SharePoint on-premise and SharePoint Online part of the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). During the session we hope to provide the following information;
- Learn SharePoint customisation techniques that will work in BPOS or on-premise
- Describe provisioning options for SharePoint – in-house, hosted, cloud
- Understand pros/cons for each model
- Demonstrate SharePoint designer and Office customisations to SharePoint
In order to make the session a little more interesting we would like to get some participation from the community so we are going to run a little competition. We are going to get several community members to create a highly customised and funky SharePoint Online site which will be reviewed for originality, style, design and also what features from the online platform have been utilised.
The winner of the competition will get to present their solution on stage during our session as well as getting a prize. If you are interested in getting involved please register through the call for content as described on Andrew Coate’s blog.
Lee and I will work thru the list of people who register thru the Call For Content tool and let the eligible people know how to access their SharePoint Online site to start customising. I am looking forward to seeing some really interesting sites come out of this.
The SharePoint product team has posted an article on an issue found after installing SharePoint Server 2007 SP2.
We take product quality seriously and make every effort to avoid and resolve issues that adversely impact our customers. Unfortunately, we have recently discovered a bug with Service Pack 2 (SP2) that affects all customers that have deployed it for SharePoint Server 2007.
During the installation of SP2, a product expiration date is improperly activated. This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed. The activation of the expiration date will not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes. Furthermore, product expiration 180 days after SP2 installation will not affect customer’s data, configuration or application code but will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users.
We are working to release a hotfix to automatically fix this issue. A manual work-around is currently available and involves customers re-entering their Product ID number (PID) on the Convert License Type page in Central Administration. For more information and detailed steps please read this KB article. (The KB link is not currently active, it will be available within the next 48hrs)
We want to assure our customers that this issue does not impact data integrity or their SharePoint deployment in any other way.
For your convenience, below are some answers to questions that you may have and we will update this blog post with a link to the hotfix as soon as it’s available.
Tech Ed North America 2009 kicked off today, where Microsoft extended its first invitations into the Office 2010 Technical Preview and demoed Office 2010 onstage at the first major event since PDC.
- Registrations began for the Office 2010 Technical Preview program. Attendees will get the first opportunity to opt-in at Teched to the invitation-only Office 2010 Technical Preview program which will launch in July. (Office client only)
- IT Professional Community viral site launched. IT Pros, and others, can sign up to be on a “waiting list” for the Technical Preview program at www.office2010themovie.com.
- System Requirements announced. Preliminary system requirements for Office 2010 were shared today and can be found here.
- Outlook 2010 demoed for the first time onstage! Bill Veghte, SVP of Windows, got the conference underway with a message to IT Pros and developers including a demo that featured Outlook 2010 working with Exchange 2010. Click here to see the keynote.
“Office 2010 will help you do more with less, stay competitive, and prepare for the future by providing IT with a flexible platform and end users with tools to more effectively work together to bring ideas to life across the PC, phone, and browser. We’ve barely just begun to share the upcoming innovation with the world, but every step we take to prepare our customers for this game-changing release is an important one.”, Takeshi Numoto, CVP Microsoft Office
![clip_image002[4]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/williamcornwill/WindowsLiveWriter/Saveupto80offthepriceofexamsforMCPs_9312/clip_image002%5B4%5D_1.jpg "clip_image002[4]")
MS Learning is taking up to 80 per cent off the exam price for Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCP) who have not attained a new Microsoft Certification Credential since 1 July, 2007. Until 30 June, MCPs are eligible for a Microsoft Certification exam at the reduced price of US$25. So it is time to up-skill with new Microsoft technologies and stay ahead in today’s market! Check out the website for terms, conditions and more information.
During a recent chat with Andy Neumann and Elaine van Bergen at OBS, they told me about a National SharePoint Survey that OBS, Nintex and i5 are sponsoring. Below are the details of how to respond and enter the draw to win an Acer notebook computer or V8 race experience. I think the I would take the V8 experience if I was to win. :)
They also told me that they were only looking for Australian Customers that use SharePoint to respond and preferably not partners, etc…
This is an independent survey being conducted to get a glimpse into the adoption and usage of Microsoft Office SharePoint products and technologies within Australia.
The survey has been designed to ensure we are respectful of your time, no questions are mandatory, the majority of the questions are multiple choice, and the path of questions is customized based on your responses. In total there are fourteen questions.
Enter the survey at www.sharepointsurvey.com
You are welcome to forward this survey link to your business or IT professional colleagues who use Microsoft SharePoint so they can partake.
The survey will close for participation on Friday 8th May, 2009.
Thank you in advance for your participation.
The National SharePoint Survey is Proudly Sponsored by –
*This is a game of chance and one winner will be drawn randomly by the promoter following the closing of survey on 8th May, 2009. The drawing of the winner is final and the promoter will contact winner by email and/or phone to advise them of their win. If repeated attempts to contact winner fail the promoter reserves the right to draw another winner.
Overnight the product team released SP2 for WSS v3 and MOSS 2007. After installing this service pack, SharePoint customers can benefit from performance, stability and availability improvements. IE8 is also put into level 1 support.
In addition, SP2 introduces a new stsadm operation preupgradecheck (also known as the Upgrade Checker) to check if the farm can be upgraded to SharePoint 2010. It is very important for existing SharePoint customers to go to SP2 since it “could” be one of the requirements to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. :)
The SP2 is a cumulative update and includes all the fixes prior to SP2 in addition to the improvements mentioned above.
Also something to note, there are no plans for an official MOSS slipstream build with SP2. An official slipstream guide will be provided so customers can create their own slipstream build based on their patch needs. WSS with SP2 slipstream builds are provided on download center.
Call to Action
Since Service Pack 2 improves performance, stability and availability for SharePoint server farm, and it is also could be a requirement to upgrade to SharePoint 2010, I encourage everyone to start planning to apply Service Pack 2 on their server farm.
KB Article Links
Description of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Pack SP2
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953338
Description of 2007 Microsoft Office servers Service Pack 2 (SP2) and of 2007 Microsoft Office servers Language Pack Service Pack 2 (SP2)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953334
Download Links
Service Pack 2 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, x86 & x64
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=79BADA82-C13F-44C1-BDC1-D0447337051B&displaylang=en
Service Pack 2 for Office SharePoint Server 2007, x86 & x64
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7816D90-5FC6-4347-89B0-A80DEB27A082&displaylang=en
Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog
For more information including installation steps and benefits, check out the posting on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog Announcing Service Pack 2 for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
