Today Microsoft announced a new step forward for one of its Software as a Service (SaaS) initiatives, Microsoft Online Services, with online betas of Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.

SharePoint Online and Exchange Online can be accessed only by companies who register for the online beta.

Redmond announced Microsoft Online Services in September of 2007 for businesses with more than 5,000 users, but now says that the service is open to companies of all sizes. Exchange and SharePoint are the first major Microsoft software releases on the platform, which also offers calendaring, e-mail, Web conferences and other online tools via Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.

"With Microsoft Online Services, businesses can deploy software as a subscription service, from servers they manage on-site, or a combination of the two, depending on their specific needs," said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in a statement released to the press. "In the future, customers and partners should expect to see this kind of choice and flexibility for all of Microsoft's software and server products."

Companies are able to choose whether they want to use the entire service or buy products a la carte. Subscriptions to Microsoft Online Services also include the server version of the online software purchased, and today Microsoft announced that those with Software Assurance can purchase the user subscriptions to the online service at a discount.

The service is expected to exit the beta stage and go live in the second quarter of this year, the company said.

Microsoft made this announcement days after rumors hit the Web that the company is planning to unveil significant SaaS and cloud computing initiatives during the next few weeks.

More information on Microsoft Online Services can be found here.

Resources for Microsoft partners regarding the service can be found here. According to Microsoft, partners that have signed on to support Microsoft Services Online include Unisys, Atos Origin, BT, Getronics, Evolve Partners and HCL Technologies.

 

Microsoft said that it's giving away Search Server 2008 Express in release candidate form to anyone who wants it, just by downloading directly from Microsoft's Web site here. The Express version is the sibling to the enterprise-strength version of Microsoft Search Server 2008, which the company debuted at an enterprise search conference in San Jose, Calif.

According to a press release issued by the company, Search Server 2008 Express packages up the enterprise search capabilities found in SharePoint Server 2007. With it come free connectors for searching among data and documents in EMC's Documentum and IBM's Filenet document management systems. Microsoft says that it's working with other partners to provide more connectors and federated search features that support the OpenSearch standard.

Jonathan Kauffman, general manager of Microsoft's Enterprise Search group, points to several other key features of the Express version in his blog: "relevancy tuning, security-trimmed search results and great out-of-the-box administration and reporting." What's also noteworthy, says Kauffman, is that Express also imposes no limits to the number of documents that can be indexed and searched.

Microsoft Search Server 2008 itself will be available to the general public in January, and only to Microsoft's volume licensing program customers; that version, according to the press release, adds enterprise deployment and scalability options.

To read more about Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express, click here. To read about partners developing federated search connectors that will work with Search Server, go here.

 

From the sharepoint Team Blog:

The first twenty of the "Fabulous 40" Application templates for sharepoint 2007 and wss v3.0 have been published(http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/default.aspx).

Also, checkout the previously published GroupBoard Workspace 2007(http://shrinkster.com/lm1).

 

Excerpt from the Sharepoint Developers’ Blog:

Today Microsoft announced the naming and packaging for the next release of the Office system products including Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Designer 2007. Please check out the press release materials.

Most of the stuff in the materials is self-explanatory, but I thought I'd talk about the evolution from "Office SharePoint Portal Server" to "Office SharePoint Server" as people might wonder about it. First, we thought simpler was better - it is one less word! Second, the features above WSS are expanding so much - the new CMS \ SPS integration and other portal, content mangmenet, collaboration, search, business process and intelligence features - that we thought "portal" was a little narrow to be the umbrella name. We also made the investments I talked about the Light-Up Not Just Roll-Up post to make sure these features applied to all the sites in your organization not just top-level portals.

I do want to make sure though that the support for portals does not get lost in the change. In particular, I would particularly highlight the new CMS features (err Office SharePoint Server Web Publishing features - gotta get used to that), personalization and MySite capabilities, LOB integration and enhanced internet and extranet support (things like pluggable authentication) that expand SharePoint's value is the leading enterprise portal solution.

The other thing that I get asked about a lot is the difference between SPS and WSS. There is a good overview here but I think think this gets simpler in the next release with all the extra features and light-up support. We did think about not using "SharePoint" in both Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server but we felt that would caused confusion because Office SharePoint Server is so clearly built on WSS.

Lastly, since it is a common question, Beta 2 will be available in the first half of 2006 - please register for that at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview - with final release by the end of 2006.

 

 

Microsoft announced Windows Desktop Search (WDS) for Enterprises today at IT Forum. In a nutshell, it provides the same functionality that WDS does today with the management tools for IT Pros to deploy this across an enterprise. It's part of Microsoft's vision for Enterprise Search - allowing people to find the information they need while they work. You can find more information at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch/enterprise/default.mspx.

WDS integrates with SPS 2003 for enterprise search quite nicely! Information workers can create a shortcut to launch a browser and display the SPS search results. You can also create a button that does something similar and use group policies to deploy it on the different desktops. I use WDS every day... quite frankly, it's saved me a lot of time personally.

What's quite interesting, and something you probably won't see in press releases, is that WDS and SPS share the same common full-text search engine. This is especially useful for a couple reasons: 1) we're working together and with MSR to really fine tune the engine for Enterprise Search (vs. Internet search) and 2) WDS and SPS share a common extensibility model. That is to say, specifically, if you develop an iFilter or Protocol Handler, you can deploy this on WDS and/or SPS 2003.... the good news is that the next evolution of desktop search AND portal search will respect iFilters and Protocol Handlers you develop today.

As for the next version of search functionality in SPS 2003 - it's in the Office "12" timeframe. We're focusing on relevancy, user experience, searching across structured and unstructured repositories, manageability and scalability. Needless to say, relevancy is right at the top - a lot of focus has been on Enterprise Search algorithms.. and we've noticed through a lot of research that what works on the Internet, isn't ideal for the Enterprise. I'll write more about this later... keep your eyes open for Enterprise Search in Office "12" when the public beta comes out Spring 2006. You will be very pleasantly surprised!

Read More

 

Microsoft Corp. and Open TextTM Corporation announced a new strategic relationship to optimize Open Text's comprehensive Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions for the Microsoft® platform. This effort will take advantage of both companies' global scale and complementary products to enable ECM solutions in large, complex customer environments.

As part of the announcement, Open Text, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, becomes a worldwide ECM partner with Microsoft. By deepening the relationship between Open Text and Microsoft, the companies will work to enhance Open Text solutions in ways that combine the power of the Microsoft platform and Open Text's deep understanding of the ECM needs of large enterprises. The resulting end-to-end solutions from Open Text, which will include vertical-market offerings in financial services and government, will help companies address the complexity of managing an ever-growing volume of online information, a major source of productivity loss and compliance risks.

With today's announcement, Open Text is also introducing two new solutions that use Open Text's Livelink ECM suite and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. The expanded relationship and new solutions were unveiled to customers at Open Text's LiveLinkUp Orlando 2005 user conference, underway this week in Orlando, Fla.
 
Read Press Release

 

Some additional links:

• MSFT WSS v2 SP2 Download
  
• MSFT KB Q894903: updating a WSS ASP.NET 1.0 virtual server -> ASP.NET 2.0
  
• WSS Admin Guide updated for SP2: CHM | HTML

Via Andrew Connell

 

 

The long-awaited update to Oracle's (Quote, Chart) Collaboration Suite, version 10g, is now available, representing the company's first big step into enterprise content management (ECM).

Collaboration Suite 10g, which previously went under the code name Tsunami, is the third generation of the product and includes two new features: Content Services 10g and Oracle Workspaces.

Officials said the update tackles and addresses the problems casual users have encountered with managing the unstructured data like spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations on the network with co-workers.

Content Services is the successor to Oracle Files and was designed with service-oriented architectures (define) in mind, said Rich Buchheim, Oracle content product and strategy senior director. This way, information can be stored once and used in a variety of ways throughout the enterprise, whether through an application or browser.

"It really is, if not the first, certainly one of the first content management solutions that can be truly deployed across the entire enterprise," he said.

The suite ties that structured and unstructured data along with a number of collaboration tools through Workspace to make it easier for customers to work together, whether they are in the cubicle down the hall of company headquarters or at a remote office in another country.

It ties together documents with calendaring, instant messaging, e-mails, web conferencing and discussion forums and is tightly linked with its other software products -- in this case Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g -- to provide a centralized area for all company documents.

That provides simplicity over Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) SharePoint Server, which Oracle is targeting as its primary competitor in the space, according to Bob Shimp, Oracle vice president of technology marketing.

Rather than individual SharePoint servers separated by project teams, he said, everything is located under one Oracle database that ensures everyone on the network is using the same information while reducing business risks like regulatory compliance, security and reliability.

"We're going to go quite aggressively against Microsoft SharePoint, we're going to go out there and take this market and convince our customers that they don't want to have these highly distributed systems," Shimp said.

Oracle finds itself coming late to the ECM space. There are already a number of ECM providers with established products, companies like IBM (Quote, Chart), EMC (Quote, Chart), Interwoven (Quote, Chart) and FileNet (Quote, Chart).

Officials doesn't see it that way, however, saying they will be working from the IT departments of existing customers and out into the marketplace as the suite gains popularity.

Cost for the suite will run companies $60 per named user, or $45 for individual components of the suite, for a perpetual license. Support and maintenance costs are figured separately.

Via Internet News

 

 

Microsoft has release more than thirty new SharePoint applications. Application types include Help Desk, Performance Reviews, Employee Timesheet and Scheduling, Change Management, and Travel Request. All of the applications are downloadable free from TechNet.

The applications are site templates that can be uploaded to a SharePoint site template gallery.   You can read more and download the applications from they’re website at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/wssapps/default.mspx

Via TheServerSide.Net

 

This Support WebCast presents the integration points between Microsoft Project Server 2003 and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003. The WebCast reviews the integration between Project Server 2003 and SharePoint technologies as they are installed the first time. The session also discusses several extensibility scenarios. These include indexing and searching across all Project Server Web sites and using the Project 2003 Web parts in a portal page.

Tuesday, May 3 2005, 1p ET (GMT-0500) - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=896711

[Via Andrew Connell's Blog]

 

The Neverfail Group is shipping its Neverfail high-availability solution for end-to-end support of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server environments.

Neverfail for SharePoint monitors SharePoint Portal Servers, watching for changes in content made by collaborators and other users, and making sure those changes are backed up. Additionally, the product protects all information sharing applications and servers that host SharePoint content, whether it resides in SQL Server, Exchange Public Folders, or on a file system, according to a statement from the Austin, Texas firm.

“If a problem occurs, Neverfail for SharePoint can take a variety of pre-emptive, corrective actions without resorting to a full system failover. In extreme cases, a non-disruptive, seamless failover to your secondary server can occur automatically and transparently to your users,” the company’s statement says.

Based around a “heartbeat” feature that lies at the core of the product, Neverfail continuously replicates changes from the active server to a passive one, which can be located locally or remotely from the active server. In the event that a switchover occurs, when the primary server comes back online, Neverfail automatically resynchronizes the servers and their data.

Upon installation, Neverfail for SharePoint intelligently discovers all application files, registry settings, services and data associated with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and collaborative servers. During operation, it monitors all key applications services and performance attributes of the operating system, the server hardware, and all collaborative servers and can provide proactive, pre-emptive problem resolution short of a failover in many cases, the company says.

Neverfail for SharePoint requires Windows Server 2003 with 2 gigabytes of free hard disk space, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Standard or Enterprise editions, and it also requires two network cards per machine.

[Via RedmondMag]

 

Like many organizations, much of the collaborative work we perform at Crowe Chizek is done using electronic documents. In years past, we stored many of the documents we utilized in file shares, which had a number of limitations for collaboration. Our biggest challenge was organizing the file shares in an intuitive fashion.

Our company wanted to build a workflow process around the task of approving new clients. A workflow is a series of tasks performed to complete a particular goal. We perform financial services, so client approval is important for risk assessment and regulatory compliance. We began turning to online collaboration tools to organize our processes. Often, online collaboration is performed as a part of a workflow process.

Requirements for our client approval process essentially amounted to review and approval by various individuals within our organization. The approval routing was dynamic and based on the group making the client approval request. We decided to use SharePoint, the Microsoft standard for online collaboration, for the document receptacle, but we realized we needed to augment it in some way to incorporate workflow in the process. We wanted to utilize the power of our InfoPath 2003 installation to quickly design forms. InfoPath stores its data as XML documents.

More....

 

SharePoint Services' extensibility offerings begin with Web Parts, ASP.NET-based building blocks users can assemble at runtime into customized pages that meet their specialized needs.  In addition to this, each SharePoint site and its contents are accessible via managed code and Web services, delivering Web sites as programmable objects.

Find more information here....

 

Learn what it means to "brand" a SharePoint Portal Server site, and about the different types of branding you can apply to a portal site to reflect an organization's identity. Go on for a step-by-step example of branding in Branding a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Site: Part 2, How to Apply Your Own Corporate Brand.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_SP2003_ta/html/Office_SharePointApplyingCorporateBrand.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_sp2003_ta/html/Office_SharePointHowToApplyBrand.asp