Sadly, it’s true, Ballmer announced the other day that the next version of Office won’t be released until 2010. Despite all the rumor going around about the “14″ becoming a “2009″ it appears it will become 2010. You can read more about the announcement here.
Somasegar’s WebBlog post, http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/02/19/sharepoint-tools-support-in-visual-studio.aspx;, gives a great preview of the increased and additional support for SharePoint in the next release of Visual Studio
The February 2009 CTP of the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Server v3 have been made available for download. You can get them from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b2c0b628-5cab-48c1-8cae-c34c1ccbdc0a&DisplayLang=en
Ok…this blog posting is way off topic, but I have a friend, Bryan, that I talk to and discuss things with regularly…this posting is for him and the random things we have been talking about lately. Specifically random thoughts that could actually make sense as well as some gripes we have with some online services.
1. I installed Windows 7 on my desktop the other day after such great success with it on my MacBook Pro. Well, the result, catastrophe, it’s been nothing but a headache and I’m about ready to go back to Vista on my desktop (look for an upcoming blog post on this). Bryan’s theory…Microsoft is using MacBooks as their development platform for Windows 7…based on my experience, it’s almost plausible and believable. It goes right along with how many people inside Microsoft use Google for Search.
2. Gmail labels and the lack of organization available. Those guys are all engineers, we’re anal, we like stuff organized. Have you every tried to have a highly organized gmail inbox? You can’t do it. Our primary example, Bryan and I both do 99%, if not all of our billing online. So you have all your emails relating to bills. In those bills you have Comcast, AT&T, Electric, Water, Rent, etc. Sure you can label a “bill” email Bills and Comcast, but what if you want to pull up only your Comcast bills? Go ahead, give it a try…let us know how it goes. Yeah, that’s what I thought, you can’t do it. Following that same logic, if you want highly organized/categorized emails, you have a REALLY long list of labels. Our solution, how about some “sub-labels” Google or the ability to filter on more than one label at a time would be a good start? We’re all engineers who like our organization, help us organize.
3. Microsoft new security approach – a top secret division to create viruses for the Mac. This one we haven’t seen any evidence of, and nothing to back it up. But after reading this article we wondered why not. If they are offering rewards to catch hackers rather than fixing security holes that have been found. Microsoft and Mac have always had arguments going on about the most secure OS. Microsoft obvious sells a lot more and has a lot broader user base, and therefore many more viruses and security holes discovered. So, why not create a Top Secret division of Microsoft to create viruses and exploit the security holes in Apple’s OS to make the two OS’s seem even in terms of security 
Ok, so that’s all for now, just the fun things we talk about and come up with in our spare time…feel free to post any other random gripes and conspiracy theories about technology that you may have
You may have recently read Microsoft plan to open retail stores, I’m assuming in an attempt to mimic Apple and the success of the Apple stores. I know, I’m a SharePoint consultant and my life is spent promoting Microsoft SharePoint, I run Windows 7 and Windows Ultimate on 2 different machines, and they have done a lot of positive and really good things for the personal computing industry. With all that said however, they obviously have the issues as well. I came across this article today and it was just to funny not to link to.
So, go check out 10 Ways Microsoft’s Retail Stores Will Differ From Apple Stores. It’s hilarious (or at least I thought so).
Details are starting to surface about SharePoint “14”. One of the details that has been solidified in the last couple of days is the integration of Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST Search into SharePoint “14”. Microsoft made the first step towards the integration this past June when they released FAST Search web parts for SharePoint 2007.
It will be exiting to see details of SharePoint “14” continue to emerge and the growth and expansion of the SharePoint platform and search in particular in this case.
If you follow my blog you may have seen my series of posts a while ago on moving all your SharePoint SQL Databases to a new server. This was something that was often talked about, but never had much real instruction on completing, especially when it came to the SharePoint configuration database. Recently, Microsoft has started making information available on successfully completing the move, and with a job move for me, I haven’t had the time to work on it further.
We, finally, Microsoft has finished the “Move All Databases Procedure” for SharePoint. Head over to Microsoft downloads and get the documents posted there with instructions on moving your databases. I haven’t personally tried the procedures yet, so I can’t comment on the successfulness of them, but will post something once I get the chance to test them out. So, my advice for now is to move forward with caution until there is a little more feedback on how well this works.
As you’ve already noticed, I updated the look and feel of my blog, there were several things I was becoming unhappy with using the old layout. The colors were getting old, the right column was becoming cluttered and I wasn’t happy with the organization. So, I decided to switch it up. So far I like the overall colors and layout of this new look. I still need to work on the right column to remove some things I don’t want, and add some other things back in that I don’t have there. Let me know if there is anything you like/don’t like/want to see/don’t want to see with the new look and I’ll take the comments into consideration as I continue to work on the new look.
Ironic, the day after I publish the link to the Documentum vs. SharePoint article, Microsoft releases an MSN article on integrating the two . So, for more information on how to integrate SharePoint 2007 with external document repository systems, such as Documentum, see the links below:
Integrating External Document Repositories with SharePoint Server 2007
Code for Integrating External Content Repository with SharePoint Server 2007
I know a lot of you are curious…do I go with documentum, or do I go with SharePoint. From my blog you obviously know what my preference and recommendation is, but how about someone that isn’t a SharePoint consultant or Microsoft employee? Here is a great article from CMS Watch that my boss sent me a few days ago about a horror story dealing with both documentum and SharePoint. It includes some good points as well as things to be careful of when implementing a CMS solution within your company.