Office 2010 System Requirements

Minimum CPU and  RAM requirements are unchanged from Office 2007, but the footprint of most Office applications have gotten larger. Most standalone application disk-space requirements have gone up by 0.5 GB and the suites have increased by 1.0 or 1.5 GB.

So, in short, if your PC can run Office 2007, it will be able to run Office 2010. If you just acquired a brand new PC, it also will be able to run the forthcoming suite. But if you’re using Office 2003, there are no guarantees you’ll automatically be able to run Office 2010 on the same hardware.

The 32-bit version of Office 2010 will run on the following 32-bit operating systems: XP with Service Pack (SP)3, Vista SP1, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 R2 (with MS XML). The 64-bit version will run on on 64-bit versions of all of these same operating systems, with the exception of Windows Server 2003 R2.

via Mary Jo Foley

Cloud Computing to Top IT Spending in 2010

Gartner has published it’s annual prediction of the Top 10 strategic IT investment areas. They are:

1. Cloud computing
2. Advanced analytics
3. Client computing
4. IT for green
5. Reshaping the data center
6. Social computing
7. Security
8. Flash memory
9. Virtualization
10. Mobile applications

Introducing my new company…

As some of you may know, having recently escaped corporate shackles I have been working on a plan for Career 2.0, and so…

Please welcome Connectegrity!

I am really excited about being able to talk about this at last.

At Connectegrity we will be working to deliver innovative IT solutions to the legal, accounting and professional service industry. Having worked with some of the most talented people in our industries, we plan to focus on innovative professional service firms that are seeking to improve the efficiency of fee-earners and reduce the time spent on non-revenue generating activities.  We believe that on-going commoditisation and consumerisation of technology now brings solutions that were once the preserve of FTSE-100 companies within reach of mid-size firms.

We are currently putting the final touches to our team. The web site is a work in progress, and I expect it to evolve rapidly over the coming weeks as we better define our products and offerings. Despite that, I’d love to hear any feedback you have so far…

 

If you would like to join me and the Connectegrity team on our startup journey, you can follow our progress on the Connectegrity blog, or subscribe to the RSS. We’ll be talking about SharePoint and technology in general, but specifically as it applies to professional services.

Meanwhile I’ll still be blogging here on SharePoint, social computing, Enterprise 2.0 and anything else that grabs my attention. Or you can follow me on twitter.

4 Great Reasons to use Social Media

1. If your customers, competitors or partners are using social media, why wouldn’t you?
2. No matter how big you are, you cannot hire all the smartest people. It doesn’t mean they are inaccessible.
3. Your customers and clients are co-shaping your reputation. Do you know what they are saying?
4. You can spot trends by monitoring …but only monitor what would cause you to act.

All too often, businesses block access to tools that they deem irrelevant to employees work and a drain on productivity. But why block employee access to tools that your customers are using? It’s a false assumption. You may as well ban email because for sure people will be sending irrelevant emails during the day. Instead, provide the tools but have clear policies regarding their use and the consequences of their misuse.

With thanks to Sharon Richardson and her two great posts from the Dell Social Media Huddle: Trends Part 1 and Community Matters.

Official SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Blogs

Following on from my summary the other day of official SharePoint 2010 resources, here’s a list of 20+ official Microsoft Office and SharePoint product team blogs that you can count on to have the most up-to-date product information as we head towards launch.

 

SharePoint Server 2010 Blogs

• SharePoint Team Blog
• SharePoint Enterprise Social Computing Blog
• Business Connectivity Services (BCS – formerly BDC) Team Blog
• SharePoint BI Blog
• SharePoint Enterprise Search Blog
• SharePoint Content Management (ECM) Team Blog
• Records Management Team Blog
• Office Web Applications
• PerformancePoint Services
• Unified Communications Blog

 

Office 2010 Client App Blogs

• Office 2010 Blog
• Outlook Team Blog
• Word Team Blog
• Excel Team Blog
• PowerPoint Team Blog
• SharePoint Designer Team Blog
• SharePoint Workspace Team Blog
• InfoPath Team Blog
• Access Team Blog
• Project Team Blog
• Visio Team Blog

 

Have I missed anything? Leave a comment below to let me know.

Smart Viral Marketing Technique for Small Legal Practice

I was forwarded an email today from CM Murray, a solicitors practice (law firm for US readers) in the UK, that had these two links in the footer of the email:

Little Book of Redundancy

Little Book of Employment Law

The links point to two fun, educational and beautifully presented, pocket guides to the areas of law that CM Murray specialise in.

Now I am in no need for an employment lawyer right now, and hopefully I won’t be for a long time, but if I ever am, I will certainly remember CM Murray.

My one tip: they should get these posted up on SlideShare and Scribd right away to get them under the noses of as many people as possible.

Well done to all involved.

Round-up of SharePoint 2010 Resources

As much for me as anyone else, here’s a round-up of SharePoint 2010 (Beta) resources to date.

SharePoint 2010 Feature Overview from SharePoint Team Blog

SharePoint 2010 Overview and Demos

MSDN Library – SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 Developer Center

SharePoint 2010 MSDN Forums

The Public Beta should be available in November. I’ll bet the product group were trying to sync the Beta with the SharePoint conference but slipped. There would’ve been some wringing of hands about that.

Mary Jo Foley is suggesting RTM will be in May or June 2010. In my experience of running Early Adopter Programmes for SharePoint 2003 and 2007, that timing sounds about right.

Lessons In Social Media

Interesting watching events unfold today around the Guardian gag-order case. Here’s the background: Late last night The Guardian reported that it had been served an injunction stopping it reporting on events in parliament around a specific question that an MP was planning to ask. It was banned from reporting the name of the MP, the question, the topic of the question, or anything else apart from the name of the law firm (Carter-Ruck) serving the injunction.

Skip forward 12 hours and a full-blown TwitterStorm is in flow with 4 of 10 trending topics relating to the case and speculation about what the parliamentary question is about.

 

The lessons from this:

• Law firms need to understand the power of social media to be able to advise clients on risks of taking legal action.  They also need to consider how their own reputation could be damaged by taking on cases that are perceived by the general populous to be unethical or immoral.
• Big corporations need to weigh-up whether taking legal action will draw more (negative) attention to their case than would otherwise have happened if they had just kept quiet and let traditional media report unrestricted.

Chalk one up for democracy and the little guy.

Making Sense of the SharePoint 2010 Pie

A new version of SharePoint gives us an updated SharePoint Pie.  Like the SharePoint 2007 pie, SharePoint 2010 has six slices, most subtly renamed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Collaboration becomes Communites

• Renamed, perhaps to emphasize the intent to make SharePoint 2010 a more social experience.
• Aim to empower people to work together in new ways through ad-hoc collaboration in communities of interest or in work-group communities

Content Management becomes simply Content

• Does this imply a de-emphasis of SharePoint as a serious content management platform?  I think not. I suspect this is a desire to move people away from traditional equation of content management to web content management, towards a broader view of content management…covering document management, records management as well as web content management.

Search stays as Search

• What’s publicly known right now is inclusion of FAST technologies and improvements to people and line of business application search.  At the top end of the market Microsoft is loosing out to the likes of Autonomy, and they’ll want to put the brakes on that.

Business Intelligence becomes Insights

• The new name emphasises the business impact, rather than the technology function, which is powerful. Perhaps again, Microsoft is taking a broader view of this capability, thinking about getting insights in a more human way, through crowdsourcing or collaborative approaches, as well as simply through data crunching.  Just speculating.

Business Process and Forms becomes Composities

• Composite Applications being a more corporate-friendly word than mashups.
• The idea once again I think is to broaden the category to include other user and developer tasks of creating custom business solutions through mashing together web parts, forms and processes.

Portal becomes Sites

• This moves away from positioning SharePoint as an Intranet Portal product to being a product capable of serving as a intranet, extranet or Internet site

So, IMO, a well thought out set of capabilities around which to discuss the detail of the product features. I’ll look forward to seeing the detail of those soon.

Why the Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal Should be Good for Yahoo and Good for Consumers

Lots of stuff on the web today heralding the death of Yahoo.  Not least this one from Jason Calacanis, that sits atop Techmeme as I write.  Nothing could be further from the truth though…provided Yahoo play it right.

Jason argues that Yahoo is dead because they lost the battle for Search eyeballs…a category they helped define.  He argues that Apple and Nintendo beat Microsoft through “aggression and innovation”.

Maybe. But you need to decide which battles to fight.

Before Apple won big with the iPod, they lost against the PC, lost against Windows and lost against Office.  They lost to the extent that they even needed to be bailed out by Microsoft.

Before Nintendo won big with Wii, they lost out massively to PlayStation with the GameCube, and many commentators were predicting a slow, drawn-out death for them.

What happened? Apple and Nintendo both found new niches that played to their strengths, where they could dominate; Apple with the portable music player, and Nintendo with casual video games.

So, what next for Yahoo? Time for them to double-down, look at their strengths and portfolio, innovate and then go out and define their market. There is absolutely no reason they cannot  do what Apple and Nintendo have done so successfully.

Yahoo have an awesome array of consumer applications, from Yahoo Mail and Groups, through News, Flickr and Messenger.  And then their is delicious.com. What the heck happened to that? In fact when you look at Yahoo’s array of consumer-focussed social software, it easily trumps Microsoft, it’s better than Google and faces biggest competition from Facebook.

Yahoo now have a guaranteed revenue source from Microsoft, are freed from the need to chase Google in Search, and can now focus all their energies in excelling in their category of choice.

Time for the new Yahoo to step forward…

 

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