TechEd 2007: New Office Live Meeting Will Enable Multi-session 'Events'
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ON THE SCENE - Product managers at TechEd 2007 here gave BetaNews an early glimpse of Microsoft's next videoconferencing application, which will tie into both Office Communications Server (which we saw in detail at WinHEC three weeks ago) and Microsoft's own subscription-based conferencing services.
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InfoWorld - 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.
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The lobby of the Palace Hotel was a hub of activity after lunch yesterday. The picture to the right hardly does it justice. A constant stream of friends, a wide variety of ages and backgrounds, flowed through.  It was unlike anything I had seen before, likely because this conference was held in downtown SF, and not San Diego or Phoenix, and a facet of what we'll have when the Newsroom of the Future is up and running. Every city will have one, but San Francisco will probably be first.  Here's a video I took last week at CUNY that gives another perspective. Lots of tables, video screens, a stage, radio and TV equipment. What you can't see is that the room was saturated with wifi, and while it didn't have a huge presence on the Internet, it could have.
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If you're looking for new workplace collaboration tools, keep your eye on the Office 2.0 Conference this week.
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Thanks to some new developments in document standards, Office 2007 users will be able to share files with open-source office apps and online productivity suites from the likes of Zoho and Google. In Monkey Bites.
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Microsoft on Thursday will release a Technical Refresh build of Office 2007 Beta 2, which originally debuted to the public in late May. The update brings to the table a number of performance and reliability improvements in all Office applications.
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Microsoft, along with 24 other vendors, has formed a group that will hold technical meetings and joint testing sessions in an effort to foster improved interoperability between their products.
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(InfoWorld) - Welcome back to the great Office Server smorgasbord. Thereâll be a related review soon covering a couple of open source answers to SharePoint, including Liferay and Plone. And come October, youâll be seeing a fully graded review of the release versions of Office Communications Server and Exchange Server 2007. [ See our Special Report for parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series. ] Meanwhile, weâre topping off this four-part series with a look at how MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) and Project Server 2007 combine to give project managers a better handle on team management. Project 2007 This isnât a review of the Office Project 2007 client, but weâd be remiss if we didnât run down a few of its newer capabilities before moving to the server. The 2007 client incorporates the new ribbon-style UI contained in most of the other Office 2007 client applications. This is intended to make the UI easier to learn for new users and faster for experienced users, but weâre only lukewarm on its success in those endeavors. The new ribbon doesnât seem to decrease complexity as much as it simply reorganizes it. Features and concepts will still need to be learned, and experienced users will still need to figure out where those same functions are located in the new UI. Youâll find two basic flavors of the Project client (Project Standard 2007 and Project Professional 2007) bolstered by a third (Project Web Access 2007) once youâve installed Project Server 2007. Only Project Standard can be run as a stand-alone client application with full functionality. Both Professional and Web Access require Project Server on the back end -- Professional so you can access all its features, Web Access so you can access it at all. Standard and Professional carry most of the same features for basic project management, including project editing, all the calendar views and task creation capabilities, etc. Web Access really only allows Gantt chart views and task creation at this level, though if the OLAP capabilities provided in the new Project Server 2007 appeal to you, then Web Access is the only UI that will let your users access those features. Where Standard and Professional begin to differ is in team management. Only Professional gives project managers full resource management features, including team assignments, collaboration support, and specific things such as timesheets. Also, only Professional can make use of the capabilities provided by SharePoint when it and Project Server are combined for better back-end data access. Customizability, however, is a mixed bag, so shop carefully. You can customize Project Standard to a certain degree using Visual Basic for Applications. However, only Project Professional and Web Access can make use of the much beefier API offered by Project Server. Additionally, should project managers want to use the new Serverâs permissioning capabilities, they will have to turn to Professional and Web Access as well. Finally, Project Server can only be administered from the Web Access UI, unless youâve combined it with SharePoint, in which case it can largely be managed from SharePointâs central administration screens. For the most part, Microsoft has ensured that Project Professional is the required client version to make use of Project Server 2007. While the Web Access UI is somewhat functional, itâs really only good as an executive-style viewer of team project data and as a feature add-on to the fat client interface. Project Standard is good only for single-user project managers. Project Server 2007 and MOSS Architecturally, Project Server 2007 runs a middle road between Office Groove Server 2007 (which doesnât need SharePoint at all) and Office Forms Server 2007 (which is wholly contained in SharePoint Enterprise). Project Server is definitely its own entity, but one that can be enhanced in combination with SharePoint. Specific points of enhancement include integration with the Windows Workflow Foundation, document libraries, organizationwide search capability and team work site orientation. To clear some confusion right off the bat, however, MOSS includes a list feature called Project Tasks, which offers some Gantt-style features. This is an independent feature, however, and has no relation or connection to Project Server 2007. If you want to upgrade an existing Project 2003 server to Project 2007, you are in for some detail work. There are no easy wizards here. Migrating data is done via a special .ini file with a series of possible switch parameters that must be configured using a text editor. And, by the way, this step is mandatory. Youâre not going to get away with running a 2003 Project Server next to a 2007 Project Server and waiting until the data migrates itself through user interaction; Project Server 2003 and Project Server 2007 canât communicate, so the upgrade process is unavoidable. Once youâve upgraded, itâs time to connect your existing Project Server 2007 farm to a new or existing MOSS farm. This isnât just a straightforward matter of enabling communication between the two, however. Your first task in this scenario is to move your Project Server machines into the SharePoint domain which unfortunately means you will need to take the SharePoint farm down for this operation. The Project Server 2007 disks will need to install files on each SharePoint Server with front-facing client functionality. Once installed there, each of those instances will need to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies wizard. After that, youâll need to decide which of those machines will become actual Project Server application servers. Only on the Project Server application servers will you need to enable the Project Application service from the Central Management console. This all sounds involved, but Microsoftâs documentation makes it a fairly easy step-by-step process. The tricky part is managing your planning process properly so you know which services need to be enabled and where. Once all that work is completed, youâre still not done. Now, SharePoint is going to want to control the management of all team work sites. So the team sites youâve configured under Project Server will need to be migrated to the MOSS machine as well. After that, youâll also need to unhook Project from its internal configuration manager and wire it into SharePointâs equivalent. Again, Microsoftâs docs make this a fairly simple set of steps, but if youâve got a choice, installing Project Server within a SharePoint farm right from the start is easier. Finally, all the clients who were looking to Project Server for their team sites will need to be pointed at the new sites running off SharePoint -- thatâs the easiest part. You will need to remember that any clients looking to access Projectâs SharePoint features will still need to have the Office Project Professional 2007 client installed. We suppose thatâs reasonable given the nature of Microsoft, but we were actually hoping to see some included viewer functionality within SharePoint that would allow non-Project client users at least to see certain Project files even if they couldnât alter them. Even with the Web Access UI, however, that doesnât seem to be possible. New interfaces and features So after all this installation hassle, what does Project Server 2007 really give you? First, it smartens up your Project Server team work sites. These now have access to SharePoint-managed permissions, document libraries, communication capabilities, and search indexes. SharePoint users will be able to access Project data, not just to simply manage projects but also as part of SharePoint workflows. On a more granular level, we also enjoyed the new Project Web Access look and feel, which can run off a stand-alone Project Server or off a SharePoint Project application server. This has been updated to meld nicely with the new SharePoint UI. Microsoft has also updated the Project Server permissioning system. Administrators now have control over a number of new features, including calendar and Web views, feature add-ins, and specific data views. Itâs a powerful new set of security controls, but administrators will have to endure a learning curve to take full advantage of it. Microsoft has also taken a number of features from Project Server 2003 and beefed them up. Youâll find deeper Outlook integration via the new Outlook Add-In. This gets installed on a user-by-user basis via their Web Access accounts and amounts to a smarter Outlook sync feature. Once installed, it allows users and administrators to use Outlook as another interface for Project. That means project line items can show up as tasks or calendar items and be tracked all the way back to Project Server. Outlook can also act as a timesheet interface with its data again tracked by administrators via Project. Reporting is the recipient of another big upgrade when using Project Server 2007 because its reporting capabilities can now make use of data gleaned from not just Project clients, but also Project work sites and SharePoint work sites and document libraries. Users then get the ability to arrange that data in whatever reporting front end fits their needs: Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007, or Excel 2007. Install the Cube Building Service and your users will be able to access Microsoft SQL Analysis Services to build OLAP-style views for deep drill-down on Project data. This can be viewed using Project or using PivotTable features in Excel. Moving from project to project also gets a boost with customizable templates. Project Server comes with several out-of-box project templates, but these can be edited for specific needs or even created from scratch. Templates cover look and feel for users on the client as well as what they see on the team work site and even what they might see in outside applications such as Excel. Even better, templates run right down to the individual field level, meaning that a template can actually map data relationships between a task field in Project 2007, for example, and a reporting field in Excel. Out-of-box templates cover basic project types for a variety of vertical industries, such as construction or technology R&D, but can easily be tweaked for more specific tasks. This lets your company build a library of templates that project managers can use to quickly get a project moving. There are more features in Project Server 2007 than we can fully cover here (new cost and budgeting features, for instance, as well as slick integration with Office Project Portfolio Server). But as a stand-alone upgrade to Project Server 2003, itâs already worth the trouble. Combined with SharePointâs capabilities, it can be downright amazing in its integration of project management functionality and tracking in projects that never had these benefits before.
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Watch video of some the brighter ideas to stream through the DemoFall conference in San Diego. Also: HP in the hot seat.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talked publicly for the first time on Monday about the next big Office release, code-named Office 14, which he said will give users new ways to access their applications online.Microsoft won&#39;t provide the full functionality of Office online, but it will offer limited capabilities to view and edit the data in Office applications. It already does this for its Outlook e-mail client with a product called Outlook Web Access, and it will offer similar capabilities for other applications in Office 14, Gates said in a speech at the Microsoft Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, California.&quot;Outlook Web Access is not the full version of Office, but if you want to go into a kiosk or an Internet cafe and browse and connect, it gives you plenty of functionality,&quot; he said. &quot;As we look at all the modules [in Office 14], we have in mind the equivalent of Outlook Web Access,&quot; Gates said.It was the first time Microsoft had confirmed the &quot;Office 14&quot; moniker for the next release, although the Windows enthusiast Web site AeroXperience reported that fact recently, citing an internal Microsoft document. It also reported that a beta of Office 14 would appear this year with commercial release planned for 2009.Gates offered no timeline Monday and addressed Office 14 only briefly at the end of his speech, which focused on how developers can extend the current version of Office. He was answering a question from a developer in the audience who asked when Microsoft would provide full online access for Office in the same way Google does for its Google Apps service.&quot;There are lots of ways I can get to your Office data, but nothing compares to Google,&quot; the developer said.Google Apps is used mostly by smaller businesses today, but it is seen as a potential competitor to Office despite having more limited functionality. Microsoft, which makes much of its profits from its Office desktop software, has been criticized for moving too slowly in getting the applications online.It will take another step in that direction with Office 14 by offering Outlook Web Access equivalents of other Office applications such as Excel. &quot;If you look at spreadsheets, maybe you&#39;ll not be able to set up all the data models [online], but you&#39;ll be able to read documents, change a few assumptions, and try things out,&quot; Gates said.Outlook Web Access is a part of Microsoft&#39;s Exchange Server 2007 software, and it was unclear how the other Office 14 applications would be packaged and delivered. Gates did say that SharePoint Server, which is becoming more closely aligned with Office, &quot;will be able to render a greater set of Office documents in an HTML environment.&quot;
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On the PHP-GTK Community site today, there's a call for speakers that's been issued for the upcoming Forum PHP 2007 happening in Paris (September 21st and 22nd).   They [the organizers of the conference] are looking for French speaking experts, who want to share their know-how and enthusiasm. This two day conference features one technical day, with the most advanced PHP techniques and a business day, with case studies and examples of successful projects..   The theme for the conference focuses on the latest generation of clients and databases in PHP. Those interested in submitting a talk should check out the guidelines the groups given including the deadline and what kinds of "perks" speakers get for presenting.
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SAN FRANCISCO, June 7  /PRNewswire/ -- CMP Technology today announced the sponsors for Enterprise 2.0 2007, formerly the Collaborative Technologies Conference, taking place June 18-21 at the Westin Boston Waterfront.
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New product for Office is aimed at getting more people within each business to use Redmond's software.
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The TC40 conference, which (important caveat) I did not attend, had a big impact on the space I occupy. Sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on Techmeme, but it is important, and for the two days of TC40, most of the top articles had something to do with the conference. Yet most of the people in the TechMeme loop were not there. This makes me wonder if we can do better with these conferences that become the cursor for a few days. And the answer is of course we can. But it may mean reconfiguring the conference to take the emphasis off the people in the room and put it on the people on the net. As Jim Forbes points out, if you wait for hotels to change, you're going to wait a long time. They're not really in the conference business, they're in the bedroom business. So anything that keeps people out of the hotel is likely to stay out of the conference -- like really terrific networking. So that suggests a different approach, one that does not rely on hotels.  I've done four conferences, three of them at universities, and one at CNET in San Francisco. At two of them, we hosted as many people as they did at TC40, because we had multiple tracks, and a very large facility. And the last three were all very much present on the net. The first, not so much. If I do another conference, we'd try to push the envelope on the net side of things, and probably not try to host as many people in person. Instead of 500 to 1000 people, I'd try for 50 to 100 people. Kind of a middle-ground between the experts at the TC40 conf, and the audience. More like a TV studio than a conference. Everyone would be either a blogger or reporter. All would be encouraged to participate. And everyone would lead a chat room, or a blog comment section, or a video track. We could have much more diverse video nowadays, because of services like justin.tv and ustream.tv, and I'm sure many others, who provide outbound bandwidth. All we'd need at the facility is enough bandwidth to connect to these services, and if you're not at a hotel, that's not at all hard these days. You could do it at Stanford or Cal, or even the Hillside Club. If you're not deep inside a building with thick walls, EVDO can serve as a backup. If you can't get on through the LAN, try a WAN instead.  I'd also like to see less of a focus on the interests and success stories of venture capital. Something has really changed, even the VCs seem to know it. Money is undifferentiated, so why pay so much attention to what the money people say. Let's get people with big ideas to contribute them, and to disagree with other people with big ideas. That's not to say I'd exclude the money people. But I would insist that they be people who are participating in the networked conversation, not just at the show, but 24 by 7, on blogs, on Twitter, on whatever. I had this discussion with Loic last week. I didn't think and still don't think that it was a good idea for him to have French politicians speak at LeWeb last year. I didn't think it was a good idea for Chris to invite John Edwards to speak at Gnomedex in 2006. Why? Because these people don't have blogs, they don't understand the net. They want to use it, for sure, to get money and votes, but they don't have a vision for it, beyond that, so what they have to say is uninteresting. "Give me money. Vote for me." That's all they say. If they want to come, great, let them listen and ask questions. And look for politicos (as with the VCs) who are making a difference on the net. People like Fred Wilson or Paul Kedrosky, for example. I'm sure there are many more. And I'd work to develop more ways for the back-channel to participate, to come to the front. That's the key to the future of conferences, how to extend them into the net, so the communication path is every way imaginable, not just from the venue out to the world. I want to feel like I'm in a nerve center, whether I'm at the venue or sitting in my living room in Berkeley. I had that feeling, btw, or an inkling of it, watching the AlwaysOn conference eariler this year, which had excellent presence on the net, real-time. The TC40 conference promoters, amazingly, actively thwarted the back channel. I don't know what their thinking was, but I think it was wrong.  Maybe someday these conferences could host real-time development, where media hackers put together new communication systems and deploy them before the conference is over. The moon mission approach to development, if you want to get something done quickly, make sure you know where you're going and are excited about it. Sometimes it's amazing how quickly these things can bootstrap. I'd also like to see a mix of interviews and debates, and open discussion. Dinners in every major city that wants to have them. The truly great tech conferences of the future will be world wide events, as the web itself is world wide, and will be inclusive, not exclusive, and cost very little to participate in, if not $0. Mundeemo: "Don't forget a row of suicide booths.."
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Blog: A rundown on the "San Francisco-Style Video Innovation" panel at the Web Video Summit.
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Microsoft plans to hold its first-ever conference for Microsoft Office software developers, the company announced this week. The conference, scheduled for February 2005, is part of a growing effort by the
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InfoWorld - Holding focused meetings, also known as &quot;sprints,&quot; over several days to develop, test, and document software is proving very helpful to the open-source Plone community in quickly adding more functionality to its content management software.