Microsoft does 'social computing' with SharePoint
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Blog: At Enterprise 2.0 conference, Microsoft releases toolkit to enhance Web 2.0 tools in SharePoint.
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The 2008 Microsoft Office System Developer Conference this week focuses on the company's Office application suite as an application development platform in and of itself.The event in San Jose, Calif. features a presentation by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and is the first time it has been held away from the company's Redmond, Wash. campus."We are holding the first open-to-the-public Office developer conference," said Chris Bryant, Microsoft senior product manager in the Office platform strategy group. When previously held in 2005 and 2006, the event was invitation-only."We decided it was time to reach out broadly," to the public, said Bryant. The company estimates that approximately 45 percent of developers worldwide do development work related to the Office platform, he said.At the event, Gates will give a keynote presentation featuring a guest from FedEx, David Zanca, senior vice president for e-commerce technologies, who will show how FedEx is extending Office with custom interfaces.?FedEx will launch FedEx QuickShip, an add-in for Microsoft Outlook. With the add-in, users can create a FedEx shipping order from within Outlook. The shipping form is pre-populated with contact information.Microsoft will make several announcements at the show. The company will launch version 2 of its OBA (Office Business Applications) Sample Kit for SAP, which lets developers build an Office business application that uses SAP as a back-end data source. Version 2 features compatibility with the newly released Visual Studio 2008 development toolset. Also, the company will offer OBA Sample Kit for PeopleSoft to connect to PeopleSoft data sources. Both the PeopleSoft and SAP kits are free.Another product, Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.1, a free download from MSDN that adds SharePoint project types to Visual Studio, Bryant said. Developers can build a Web part or a workflow. New project types are featured, including the ability to build a SharePoint site template from an existing SharePoint site. Developers can build an application on a SharePoint site and redeploy it to other SharePoint instances.The company will release to manufacturing its BizTalk Adapter Pack. "They are data source adapters for Oracle, SAP, and Siebel," for exposing those data sources as Web services and connecting them to SharePoint, said Bryant. The product, to be globally available March 1, presents a more unified data connectivity layer on top of different data sources, he said. This product is expected to cost $5,000 per processor.Another product on tap from Microsoft is OBA Component Library for Financial Services, also a free product. "It's a set of more than 100 standards-based components that allow developers to build Office business applications in the financial sector," said Bryant. New reference and sample applications will be offered in such spaces as insurance packaging and capital market packaging.?Microsoft will debut the Winter 2008 release of the online Office Office Live Small Business, which will be version 2 of the service. With this release, Microsoft will offer a base, free offering and then sell additional services, such as extra storage or mail boxes. A small business would get a Web site and the opportunity to have a domain name and a set of e-mail boxes, Bryant said."Customer feedback has essentially told [Microsoft] that the packaging options [were] not as granular as people want," said Bryant.The company will announce its Metro program for Unified Communications, which will have developer evangelists engaging ISV partners to build unified communications-enabled applications such as ones incorporating speech into applications. Microsoft will seek ISV partners for this program.FedEx also will show proof of concept applications to deepen its connection to Office, including a connection between FedEx Kinkos printing services and Microsoft Word. Users would be able to choose professional printing options and select a local FedEx Kinkos office where they could pick up their order.Also planned by FedEx is a link with SharePoint pertaining to shipping and an integration with Word in which the Office ribbon is customized for access to binding, stapling, and collating.
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Companies to create real-time, rich-media collaboration for Windows Messenger users and later for Office Live Meeting users.
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The social networking site will supply APIs and test apps to support integrated widgets.
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Microsoft used a Seattle conference to show off some features of the next version of Project.
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Blog: Educational software company Blackboard offers Scholar as a social-networking site for academics.
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TechWeb - Microsoft has released the community technology preview of PerformancePoint Server 2007, a key component of the software maker's business intelligence suite.
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Microsoft has released a beta version of its Forefront Security for SharePoint product, part of the company's new lineup of security tools for businesses. The application is designed for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Services 3.0, due out early next year with Office 2007.
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IBM released Atlas, a software toolset that provides advanced search and analysis functions for its enterprise social networking product, Lotus Connections, on Tuesday.&quot;Atlas looks at the data within Connections and does some visualizations of the information,&quot; said Chris Lamb, senior product manager. &quot;The main point is that it is a way to visualize the social data from a line-of-business perspective and a personal level.&quot;The Atlas suite contains four components dubbed My Net, Find, Reach, and Net.The Net component provides a view of groups that have formed within an organization due to work on similar projects, IBM said. The point is to help users find ways to improve communications among various nodes throughout the company. My Net provides a similar view but focuses on a user&#39;s personal network.Atlas also includes Reach, a dashboard-like tool that helps users &quot;navigate the six degrees of separation that divide them from a colleague,&quot; as an IBM statement describes. The purpose is to help workers more quickly connect with people in the organization who have a particular skill set or area of knowledge.The last component is Find, which can provide search results that leverage social networking-related data, such as blogs and reporting structures, according to IBM.Atlas and Lotus Connections fit into an ambitious push by IBM around social collaboration in enterprises.A growing number of people use multiple networks and would like to easily move their profile data between them. Without providing specifics, Lamb said IBM is moving to address the problem.&quot;That&#39;s something that we&#39;re looking at, how we aggregate that,&quot; he said. &quot;There will be some announcements around the Lotusphere time frame.&quot; Lotusphere is scheduled for Jan. 20-24 in Orlando, Florida.IBM is selling Atlas through its Software Services for Lotus group. Lamb declined to provide specific pricing information.
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Microsoft Corp. and conferencing technology maker Polycom Inc. are teaming up to develop ways for people using PCs and other devices to hold virtual meetings with those using more traditional conferencing equipment.
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On his blog, Ben Ramsey comments on the Microsoft Web Development Summit currently happening in Redmond, WA.  Microsoft has invited us to their main campus in an effort to reach out to the PHP community to solicit opinions and feedback on various technologies, including IIS, Silverlight, their Ajax library, Expression Web, etc.  For anyone interested, he's been posting his own notes from the summit on his Wiki.
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Nearly one-fourth of companies surveyed by ChangeWave Research are now using Web 2.0-social networking software in some form, and another 8 percent intend to do so within the next year.The study is the organization&#39;s first stab at tracking Web 2.0 in the enterprise, said Joshua Levine, editor of ChangeWave Investing, an advisory service from the Rockville, Maryland, firm.&quot;I think Web 2.0 has been simmering a lot for the last couple of years under the radar, at least in enterprises; 2008 looked as we were coming toward it that this stuff would be exploding,&quot; Levine said.Overall, 39 percent of respondents said their firms are very or somewhat willing to use social software. In addition, among respondents whose organizations are already using such software, 35 percent said spending on it will rise in the next 90 days and just two percent said it will fall.Twenty-six percent of companies currently using social software said they plan to invest most heavily in wikis, followed by blogs (15 percent), social networks (13 percent), mashups (5 percent), RSS feeds (5 percent) and collaborative tagging (3 percent).However, the trends were somewhat different among future Web 2.0 users. They said their companies intended to spend the most money on social networks and blogs, which scored 22 percent and 21 percent, respectively.While 79 percent of current Web 2.0 software users said it is being used to improve internal communication and collaboration, only 48 percent of future users said the same. Future users were more focused on external goals, such as better customer service, greater brand awareness and increased sales.&quot;That&#39;s something we really want to drill into next time, why that is,&quot; Levine said. The company plans to repeat the survey, possibly by as soon as midyear.ChangeWave&#39;s report also tracked which vendors are benefiting from the Web 2.0 trend. Microsoft ranked highest in each of the six software categories, followed by IBM in a number of categories.However, open-source and in-house-developed software both showed strength. Some 31 percent of respondents whose companies are using or will begin using wikis within the next year are doing so with open-source technology, and 28 percent of those using mashups developed them in-house, according to the study.ChangeWave surveyed 2,081 people in September.
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Social-networking sites like the big three -- MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn -- act as a sort of shared address book, letting people post profiles, leave notes for one another and find out whom they know in common.
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Microsoft has advised customers using its SharePoint collaborative working products to apply newly released software patches designed to provide performance and security improvements.
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Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new set of Web-based services allowing users of its MSN service to publish and track each other&#39;s blogs.
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(InfoWorld) - As Web 2.0 technologies continue seeping into business systems, a new generation of corporate users is starting to gain access to the collaboration capabilities they are demanding from IT, according to attendees at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. But before use of the tools spreads too far, they noted, companies must strike a balance between the Web 2.0 wants of users and the needs of corporate IT. The conference, described as a collective experiment by its long list of sponsors, was organized in two months using the online productivity and collaboration tools that are the focus of the event, organizers said. Jonathan Rochelle, product manager of Google's spreadsheet product, predicted that real-time collaboration capabilities, as provided in the Google Docs & Spreadsheets tool set, will become a key part of the next generation of office tools. Employees are increasingly demanding tools that will let them collaborate online when creating documents, he noted. "The consumer expectation [for Web 2.0 tools] is being brought to the workplace," he said. "Work groups are taking the product in because they like working with it, and they are more productive." Indeed, within Google itself, workers are now derided when they attach documents to e-mail instead of using the online editing tool in Google Docs, he noted. The traditional route is now viewed as a drain on productivity, he added. Richard McAniff, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office, also predicted that Web 2.0 tools will become interwoven into corporate life over the next few years. For example, combining a social networking tool like Facebook with productivity tools could "really change the way people do work," he noted. "We really have to look at ... how we can have a complete game changer in terms of what the workforce is really doing," he said. Still, companies have to reconcile the demand of its employees for the new tools with the inevitable productivity bumps that come when new technologies like Web 2.0 tools are added in the workplace, he added. "What people want on the desktop is one thing, [and] what IT might want is something else," he said. "You have to strike a balance between the two." Danny Kolke, founder and CTO of Etelos Systems, a provider of hosted Web applications, noted that many IT organizations are actually under assault by end-users who are demanding Office 2.0 features and tools. "The reason I use Spreadsheets in Google ... is because I know I can create it and share it easily," Kolke said. "IT comes along and says, 'We need control over this data.' A lot of [IT] organizations are defending their turf right now because they are get assaulted. The demand [for Web 2.0 tools] is there." The speed in which these Web 2.0 technologies are being developed -- and then moving into the enterprise -- is increasing the strife between IT and users, he added. "The market wants [office 2.0 tools] before we're ready to deliver it in many cases," he said. "We can't keep up with the demand. If you listen to the market and innovate for what they are hoping for you don't have to sell your product."
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InfoWorld - Microsoft's Popfly technology for building mashups is now available in a public beta that allows users to publish applications built on it directly to the popular Facebook social-networking site.