Differences between SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 offers significant improvements over SharePoint 2007.  We found three particularly useful links that describe the differences...   More »

Extending SaaS Platforms With Azure

There is a huge opportunity right now for business software developers to capitalize on the emerging "Software As A Service", or "Cloud" application leaders by building extensions and cooperating services. Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform provides an ideal platform for these types of complimentary solutions. For example, Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM Live and a slew of other CRM cloud services are only one class of cloud applications begging for add-on services. Each of these has stren ...   More »

Using Your Wordpress Site As An OpenID Provider

In looking to try out yet another social service this weekend, I was presented with the following choices for login: I never liked the idea of letting one of the major brands own my web identity so I’ve always set up a new ID on every site I’ve every gone to. As a result, I manage over 96 primary passwords and another 152 old or less used passwords, all different. This is crazy, of course, so I finally decided to look into OpenID since it was offered in this case. The way ...   More »

RFI: PC and Mac Based Virtualization

This post is the third in a series on virtualization: Introduction, Platform (Servers and PCs), Desktop, Application, and Cloud A special case of platform virtualization is the ability to run a server or desktop operating system in a virtual environment on a PC or Mac. Running Windows on a Mac via Parallels is a key example and represents one of the common uses of this. The main categories of uses include   Alternate OS for Access to Apps: Since software is typically OS spe ...   More »

RFI: Platform Virtualization and Virtual Servers

This post is the second in a series on virtualization: Introduction, Platform (Servers and PCs), Desktop, Application, and Cloud Of my four rough categories of virtualization, platform or server virtualization is usually what comes to mind first. I use the term platform since this can be done in special situations with PC operating systems, not just server, but I’ll cover those in my next post.   Typically, instead of running a server operating system like Linux or Windows Ser ...   More »

RFI: Virtualization

This post is planned to be the start of a series of posts on the various types of virtualization, helping to address some questions I’ve been asked recently on the topic. I’ll start things here with a high level view of virtualization in general and will do a deeper dive into each area in future posts. At its root, virtualization involves creating a special software environment to run a computing service (a server, desktop, application, etc.) that is a step removed or isolated fro ...   More »

Great Business Podcasts

Here’s a quick review of business related podcasts that I’ve been listening to recently. Spring road construction has done wonders for my podcast listening time! Side tip: I now listen to almost all informational podcasts and audio books at 2x speed. I found that you quickly get used to the pace and get through more content. I’ve been doing this for months now and I already wish I had more speed control and could go faster.   Harvard Business Review IdeaCast ht ...   More »

Custom Applications in Microsoft’s Clouds

Microsoft provides at least two solution platforms in the cloud that I’ll talk about here to address some recent questions I’ve gotten. The first is Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s premier cloud application platform. The second is Dynamics CRM Online, which I see showing signs of developing into a special case cloud-based business application environment of its own. First a definition of "cloud" in this context: There are various ways to virtualize platform layers in h ...   More »

SharePoint in Plain English

The Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog pointed out this video recently that takes a stab at explaining SharePoint to a business user in everyday terms. I’ve been challenged in trying to do the same thing with business contacts who haven’t encountered SharePoint before mostly due to the vastness of what SharePoint offers and encompasses today.   This video kicks off that discussion. Here are a couple other points I tend to bring up to describe SharePoint and some of the kinds o ...   More »

Microsoft xRM – What It Means For Business

At Microsoft’s July partner conference much time and energy was spent introducing xRM, including this video:   With this, I’ve had more than a few questions from customers and partners about what xRM is and what it might mean to their business. I’ll try to answer that here from a business perspective, saving the technical perspective for future posts.   Background Microsoft developed their Dynamics Customer Relationship Management (CRM) sales software  f ...   More »