So perhaps a new look and feel will revive my interest in bloggin'.
The Microsoft MOSS 2007 conference is a success for Habanero...we sent 8 folks down to the conference, and as a collective, we've learned a lot. We've also had a great time hanging with our clients, and seeing their eyes light up on cool stuff. Some of the highlights include:
Microsoft blueprint for Silverlight announced. The keynote showed some stuff that General Mills was doing with Silverlight and search. I am convinced this is the future of the enterprise search experience, and I'm going to avidly pursue figuring this out.
Community Kit for SharePoint. It's interesting. Clients don't like 3rd party products (to extend SharePoint). They're concerned about company longevity & pains related to installing, configuring and sustaining a 3rd party product. But boy, are they excited about free code. The community kit presentation highlighted some exciting upcoming features that are extending SharePoint's out of the box experience around blogs, wikis and other social, web 2.0ish kind of features. Export to and import from Word in the "upgraded wiki" features are pretty damn hot lookin'.
Advanced Search. There's a lot of buzz around search here. Not only because the free search was announced, but because of the crazy stuff that people are doing on MOSS search and the recent acquisition of FAST from Microsoft. As soon as that deal is final, expect some amazing stuff. Did you know that for enterprise users (not home users) google, yahoo and msn only own 30% of the Internet enterprise search market [Chris got this out of a analyst presentation]? This means products such as FAST make up the majority of searches that users within companies perform. INTERESTING.
Social Web 2.0 Tools. It's great to see a broader user community get excited about these tools in the workplace. I did a presentation to a bunch of Records Managers a few weeks ago to talk about social networking and collaboration tools and how we are seeing them used in the enterprise (and the RM challenges they cause), and I thought...holy cow...get up to speed on this stuff people! It's good to see some excited big ticket executives talk about the importance of these technologies within their companies.
Records Management on SharePoint 2007. I'm not crazy. There is a HUGE market here. General Mills, DAFRA, and some other big organizations gave presentations on what they are doing within SharePoint specifically around Records Management. One person in the audience asked "so are you locking down fileshares then?". Ahrg...some people just don't GET it. If you're creating a solution that is so bad that it forces people to want to use their old stuff, then perhaps it's your solution that's the problem, not the fact that the old stuff is still available. Anyway, I digress. I'm really happy about the progress we've made in this area and confident there's a good message on how these two play nice together. Certainly a blog topic to kill all blog topics.
Dude, Habanero rocks. Yet more validation we are rocking at Habanero. Besides sending more people than any other consulting company in the world (a guess, but I'm pretty sure this is accurate). We are WAY, WAY ahead of the general user community in SharePoint Information Architecture, designing a brand within the MOSS framework, architecting for large scale inter-continental deployments, user training, governance and having a kick ass framework for developing custom code solutions [see press release on Habaneros.com].
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