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…

 

Technorati Tags: yahoo,microsoft

Chrome OS and Windows 7…some thoughts

Wow.  Great piece from Mary-Jo Foley today, bringing some old fashioned common sense to the news today of Google’s planned Chrome OS.  Many of the points, I was going to make – but Mary-Jo, you have saved me the job, and done it far more eloquently than I ever could.

A few extra thoughts from me:

1. Microsoft is laser-focussed on its competitors. It does its best work when it has good, solid competition.  Mary-Jo writes that Chrome OS is good for consumers, PC makers and Microsoft too.  And I agree.  Look how the Office suite has evolved in leaps and bounds since early this decade, when Open Office reared it’s head.  It’s been too long since Windows had some real competition.
2. Microsoft will defend Windows to the hilt. Not many people outside MS, for instance, realise that the reason it pumped billions of dollars into making XBox a success was not because it wanted to be in the games business, but because it wanted to defend Windows market share.  Don’t get it?  If you recall, 7-8 years back, there were lots of rumours about Sony using its (then) dominance in the home entertainment market to turn Playstation into something more sophisticated that might threaten home PC sales.
3. There has been talk of a Google OS since 2006 at least. Know that Microsoft will have a plan ready to swing into action for this.  I’m looking forward to finding out what that is. It might include the ideas from the Gazelle project, or something else.  But whatever happens, we will be the winners, benefitting from more innovation, more choice and lower prices.

Thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 and Corporate Culture Change

Lawrence Liu wrote in Key success factor for Enterprise 2.0: Finding new roles for middle management

…Enterprise 2.0 technologies enable people who are doing the “real” work within organizations to bypass their middle management and connect and collaborate with each other directly as well as update and engage upper management directly. By cutting out middle management, the savings are not only in the salaries of those individuals but also in the time and energy expended by their subordinates and upper management to interact with them. Yes, middle management is the tangible overhead in many organizations that Enterprise 2.0 can eliminate!

I too believe this change will come, and that the flatter organisations of the future may well resemble the consulting organizations of today – the likes of IBM Global Services, McKinsey or Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), where until a few moths ago I worked. 

Lawrence goes on to argue that a manager to report ratio of 1:30 is impossible, but in MCS that is exactly what it was.  Managers were not your traditional manager though.  They were not responsible for giving reports work to do.  Instead a resource pool operated with resourcing managers identifying staff with the right skills mix to quickly staff-up and tear down projects.  Consultants had to proactively go about managing their career, promoting themselves and finding their next job.  This, I believe will become the new model of the corporation in a Web 2.0 world.  And the fact of the matter is this model exists today in many consulting firms. 

But the impact and change brought about by Enterprise 2.0 will not be without pain.  MCS went through plenty when they made the change some 3 years ago. A lot of middle managers DID have to find themselves new jobs.  And it was VERY painful. 

If you are interested in the cultural impact this new world of work will bring, Tom Peters has written some good stuff on the topic of working and thriving in this kind of workplace.  The best place to start would be his Brand YOU article in Fast Company.  An absolute must read for anyone in the professional services industry.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0,Web 2.0,Corporate Culture,Tom Peters

SharePint London next week

I am planning to be at the SharePint* session in London next Wednesday (8 April).

Be good to catch up with some old friends and hopefully make some new ones. Hope to see you there. Location is The Old Star, 66 Broadway, Westminster, London, SW1H 0DB.

 

(*) just how many puns is it possible to make out of a product name? Answers on a postcard to the usual address….

If you are going to spend money on advertising…

…at least run it through a spell checker first!

 

(Picture taken in a local shopping mall this weekend)