Another important point from that post is Microsoft has clarified their position on supporting Public Folders. They will support them for 10 years from the release of the next version of Exchange 2007. Let's assume the next release is in 2011. I am assuming this because the previous release to 2007 was in 2003. That means support for public folders will continue until 2011 + 10 = 2021. So will be thirteen more years of Public Folders support.

This is from the SharePoint blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/04/01/updated-exchange-public-folder-vs-sharepoint-guidance.aspx

They say it is difficult to migrate complex environments from Exchange to SharePoint, and there are differences in functionality. For example, SharePoint calendars do not have the sophisticated tools for inviting attendees to events like in Outlook/Exchange. Of course, I would merge SharePoint and Exchange if I could, Mail and Calendars belong in SharePoint in my opinion.

I still think consolidating your information management in SharePoint is a better long term strategy, but there is not the short term urgency there once appeared to be. A gradual migratio is the best bet.


And here's a useful link, it explains what SharePoint means by a Property, Column, Field, Content Type etc.

http://blogs.msdn.com/andrew_may/archive/2006/06/14/SharePointTermsColumnsFieldsProperties.aspx

Labels: Public Folders.

Microsoft recently published some new guidelines on whether companies should be implementing Exchange Public folders or adopting SharePoint instead. (http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/04/01/updated-exchange-public-folder-vs-sharepoint-guidance.aspx) What interests me most about this is the idea that certain overlaps between products could be removed in this way and give Microsoft a more coherent software platform. For the idea of software as a service, the the functionality in different applications should compliment each other not clash or overlap, and be available via one interface. I see that as being SharePoint. So, if we way goodbye to public folders, which overlap with SharePoint Document Libraries and Calendars, what's next?

I'd like to see the overlaps with project server removed. MS Project is good for managers leading a process, assigning resources, tracking progress. SharePoint is a tool for the people they track mainly. There is some syncing between the two, but I think there should be only one source and interface for the information, no more need for syncing.

My least favourite Office app is Outlook, it's slow, has a horrible warren of tabs and menus if you are trying to change something, and it should seamlessly work with SharePoint. If I had my way I would scrap Outlook and users would simply pick up their email via a SharePoint list that others can share, workflow on etc.

SharePoint is the Office platform, or should be in time.

The most common question asked by users once SharePoint is deployed is "What do I use it for?" If specific business tasks have not been mapped to SharePoint, it is in danger of not being adopted to the extent it could be. Microsoft helps generate buzz around SharePoint in general, (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/gearup/Pages/General/BuzzKit.aspx) but if the organisation has not spelled out to people what they specifically should use it for in realtion to their actual day to day work, it is expecting to much I think for people to make the creative link to to what they could use it for.

Rollout or adoption is a plan where you review what users do every day then work out how they could do this better with SharePoint. This not only makes sure SharePoint is adopted, it means you can track how well it has been adopted. You can track how much users have moved over to the new methods more accurately.

Microsoft and Google are both creeping closer to the world of distributed applications that the internet promises. But both fall short. Office Live Workspaces and Google Sites are too much "in the cloud" and do not integrate into businesses enough. I want to log in anywhere in the world and be online to all my business data, and that experience to be the same as sitting at my desk in work. This requires a few things:

• Integrated authentication. I want to log in once only.
• A distributed storage platform, that is secure and managed.
• Once integrated application to write and share information.

• Imagine one application that allowed me to write emails or documents or tasks or calendar events or contacts and associate them with a project space that others could also access and search.
• It could have reports, auditing, retention policies, search and workflow if needed.
• I could access it via the internet from anywhere and my internet browser and a username and password would be all I needed to use it.
• I could track all the people involved easily and know what other things they are working on. These people could be anyone, not just people who work for my company.
• My profile stays with me and contains everything I need including my work history (a dynamic CV constantly growing) to my social life, relationships, medical and legal documents, banking, insurance, bills I have to pay, everything.
• I could pull in data from any other location I wanted, either my company or the public domain.
• I could access it from my mobile device or a desktop device, it wouldn't matter, and there would be no need to sync changes between devices since all changes were made directly.
• There would be no need to upgrade, update, patch whatever because the application would be constantly evolving.

Imagine that!

In my ideal world, there would be only one application to do all this, not 10 or 20 like there is now. Who would own and run it? The people of course. this would be too much power for one company. Look what happened with Enron. Like with transport, communications, medicine and the law, these things have to be a mixture of government regulated but privately subcontracted. Ultimately the people would "own" the system and their own content. So SharePoint has the potential to be much bigger and more pervasive in our society than it is now. Time will tell.

Here are some links to user-led training Microsoft provides free:

http://blogs.technet.com/daven/archive/2008/02/21/more-free-training-for-sharepoint-2007.aspx

Labels: Training

Why does SharePoint need FAST?

The answer, according to Russ Houberg is the relevancy, and what happens to the quality of your search's results as you scale up the size of your index. At the moment, 50 million documents is SharePoint's ceiling, and it needs to be higher because the amount of content we are generating is growing all the time. Back in the 90's Altavista was a good search engine, but as the Internet grew, the relevancy of the results it came back went down. With Search Server 2008, SharePoint will have federated search, so soon the amount of content SharePoint can handle will be much more than 50 million, but to keep the quality of the results good, something like FAST is needed.

As a recent press release said "Together, FAST and Microsoft are dedicated to delivering truly relevant, scalable and security-enhanced enterprise search solutions that drive business value for customers." Note the first two there: relevancy and scale. They go hand in hand.

Labels: Search