SharePoint Dan

If you’re not able to attend SPSTCDC but you’re still interested in following what’s going on, consider checking out the Live Blogging stream that is being hosted by Women in SharePoint’s DC group.

The link is available here:

http://womeninspdc.org/pages/live-blogging

If you’re still interested in attending, there will be onsite registration. More information about this stellar event can be found here:

http://www.spstc.org

So often I seem to find case studies out there that discuss technical problems that have been successfully executed against leveraging SharePoint as a platform, or how to perform specific tasks – there are a slew of awesome blogs out there that are chocked full of information to assist IT Pros, Developer and Architects.  But what about the Business Executives?

There aren’t too many blogs out there that talk about the business applications of SharePoint in terms of case studies, though there are a handful that touch the surface and dive in a particular area.  And there are sessions at conferences now and then that really get into the softer side of SharePoint implementations and the success they’ve achieved – but again they’re far and few between.

Well, if you happen to be in the Washington DC Metro area on 8 October 2010, I’d suggest you check out “Executive Insights: How Three D.C. Organizations Achieved Work Management Success”. It’ll be hosted over at the Ritz Carlton Tyson’s Corner with several great speakers discussing the business value of SharePoint implementations, the approaches and methodologies taken and the return on investment. Featured speakers include Arpan Shah of Microsoft, Marie-Michelle Strah, PhD of Aquilient, Joe Snyder of Video Gaming Technologies, Matthew Fritts, MPH of Samueli Institute, and Bill English of MindSharp.

Definitely an event worth considering as an executive, technology officer, business analyst or decision maker in the SharePoint field.

Everyone’s getting in the game of cumulative updates… even the Outlook team, releasing patches pre-SP2.  Looks like the Outlook product team has been fairly busy with fixes and improvements with the Outlook client.

Check out the Outlook Product team’s blog for more information in the article “Announce the February Cumulative Update for Outlook 2007”.

I’ve downloaded the update and can say that Outlook 2007 seems a lot more responsive and seems to be a little more stable than previously.  Key information…

Outlook 2007 SP2 delivers performance improvements in four major areas:

• General Responsiveness
  SP2 reduces I/O disk usage and UI response time.
• Startup
  SP2 removes long operations from initial startup.
• Shutdown
  SP2 makes Outlook exit predictably despite pending activities.
• Folder/View Switch
  SP2 improves view rendering and folder switching.

Probably the biggest thing for me is the Shutdown speed.  While the process may continue to run in the background for synchronization purposes, over all I’ve noticed that it disconnects from Exchange more elegantly and closes down rather than lingering waiting for a connection to disconnect.

Download available through Hotfix Request.

KB 968009 – Outlook 2007 Improvements in the February 2009 cumulative update

KB 961752 – Description of the Outlook 2007 hotfix package (Outlook.msp): February 24, 2009

So it would seem that the product team decided to release a second iteration of the February Cumulative Update “Uber” edition.  This time including some sweet functionality to address Document Lifecycle (DLC), Infopath Forms Services (IFS) and Excel Calculation Services (XLSRV).

Fear not if you already installed the first iteration of the February Cumulative Update, this should be a fairly painless process.

The WSS Update information for the update (KB 961755) seems somewhat misleading pertaining to features added since it merely states that the Hotfix contains the following updates:

If you installed then you’ve already installed the previous updates as well.  Maybe I’m missing something on this, but I’m not seeing the value here on the WSS update.

For MOSS, the jury is still out as the article is not yet published.  More to come on just how simple the installs go.

Just finished updating my VM that I use for my testing and it would seem that things have turned out well per the guidance of folks like Stefan Gossner and Joerg Sinemus.

Looks like our friendly new version for WSS v3 post installation is 12.0.0.6341.  So far, so good, no problems have arisen.

So I finally went ahead and ordered a 24″ Dell Flat Panel Ultrasharp and have to say that I’m quite pleased. So now I’ve got a 24″ widescreen sitting next to my 20″ cube TFT – sweetness… now just have to get a video card with dual DVI. Any recommendations?

This isn’t necessarily SharePoint related, but just a recommendation that if you claim to be the expert on a topic, or at least a journeyman that has significant interest in a topic and some experience such that they wouldn’t be considered a rookie, I would highly recommend becoming involved with social bookmarking circuits such as Technorati, Del.icio.us and Feedburner.

And just to have a shameless plug…

Technorati Profile