Using host headers with your head

Okay, I think most of us SharePoint "people" already know that a web application can be given a host header. A host header is a FQDN or Fully qualified domain name. If we are on good talking terms with our DNS experts we can get FQDN URLs like https://portal.company.intranet.com.

Okay, so what can we do with this?

One of the problems with developing Enterprise solutions is that you have clusters of experts who maybe speak to each other for an hour and pass paper work around. For a SharePoint person a FQDN is just something they need to make host headers work.

But to a DNS expert FQDN open the ability to strucutre a intranet space. The FQDN provides an "exact location in the tree hierarchy" of the DNS, which means that a large tree or cluster of names that will help the user understand the Intranet.

Let us say our company intranet has a domain name ourcompany.com. Using DNS FQDN we can define, in DNS, names like portal.ourcompany.com, hr.ourcompany.com, collaboration.ourcompany.com.

By planning this tree out with our DNS team as part of the Information Architecture of SharePoint we can make the structure of the intranet more logical and easier to use.

Americans Consume 100,000 Words, 34 Gigabytes Of Content A Day (STUDY)

Americans Consume 100,000 Words, 34 Gigabytes Of Content A Day (STUDY)

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BBC News - Science goes back to basics on AI

The Mind Machine Project will return to the basics of AI research to re-examine what lies behind human intelligence.

Spanning five years and funded by a $5m (£3.1m) grant, it will bring together scientists who have had success in distinct fields of AI.

By uniting researchers, MIT hopes to produce robotic companions smart enough to aid those suffering from dementia.

"Essentially, we want to rewind to 30 years ago and revisit some ideas that had gotten frozen," said Neil Gershenfeld, one of the scientists leading the MMP and director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.

BBC News - Science goes back to basics on AI

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Talks Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology

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BBC News - Online retailers predict record sales on busiest day

Online, the signs look good. Sales were up 17% last month compared to the same month the year before, the British Retail Consortium said.

BBC News - Online retailers predict record sales on busiest day

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JUNE

The official published word from Microsoft regarding the release date of SharePoint 2010 remains (as it's been since at least the SharePoint Conference) no more specific than, "first half of the year."  Having said that, however, unnamed though reportedly reputable sources began saying recently to expect the official release to occur in June, and Ars Technica has followed up on the mounting anecdotal information with a Microsoft spokesperson, who responded on the record that, "We expect Office 2010 and related products to be generally available in June 2010."

From Bamboo Nation

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Billion pound NHS computer project could be scrapped, Chancellor says - Times Online

After the withdrawal of Accenture and Fujitsu from the project due to spiralling costs in 2006 and 2007, hospital trusts in the South of England have recently been encouraged to buy systems “off the shelf” from a list of other suppliers.

....

The Conservatives have called for a moratorium on Government IT projects, should they win the next election.

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said today: “After seven years Labour have finally acknowledged what we’ve said for years, that the procurement for NHS IT was costing billions and not delivering. The opportunity cost to the NHS also measures billions of pounds.

Billion pound NHS computer project could be scrapped, Chancellor says - Times Online

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Uphill Waving

I just had an interesting MSN IM chat with an former co-worker and fellow geek about augmented reality, virtual reality, geo-position, and various other things. In the middle of it I asked "why are we not waving this?". The stuff was pretty good, I could imagine we would both want to develop it and work the ideas later, and yet we just IMed it, which is pretty close to letting it just die there.

So Google Waving has to work against established patterns of real time communication (IM) and non-real time (email, Facebook, Twitter). These other patterns are very established and Wave might just be too late to have an impact.

We did promise we would try to Wave rather than IM, but so far not much of anything.

Team Sites 2010 Review

http://www.wssdemo.com/

A team site looks pretty much like a team site from 2007 and even 2003. Probably no point messing with success. Everything is where you think it should be.




A big change is the ribbons, which mean you load documents up using the ribbon. In 2010 you can't escape use of the Ribbon, its central to collaboration tasks. Therefore it does not make sense to migrate Pre-Office 2007 users to SharePoint 2010.




Silverlight offers some great opportunity, but it is my experience that SharePoint is not tightly integrated with Silverlight in 2010. Make 2014?

Wave vs SharePoint, the battle is on or over before it starts?

Frankly I am not sure where the meme that Wave would confront SharePoint came from. Google already has an alternative to SharePoint function in Google Docs, an alternative which has flopped so far. Looking above you see Wave, which is a very interesting mixture of email, chat and IM. It could be a very powerful collaborative tool, but its rather unstructured. I imagine we will see people creating all kinds of interesting things out of Waves just like we have seen new uses of Twitter emerging from what seemed like a silly tool.




SharePoint 2010 remians a more structured conventional tool. Generally I find SharePoint comes in an replaces something already in place. Companies could be sharing documents via a EDRMS system or on files and will move to Document Shares to reduce cost or make easier. Blogs will be moved to SharePoint. Sometimes even WCM.



SharePoint collaboration is by its nature slower than Wave. SharePoint is not a real time tool, it is a collaborative tool like a library can be a collaborative tool. You check out your document, make your changes, check back in. An old established process just made faster and more automated and extended to the entire Enterprise. There is nothing really new in Web 2.0. My mother essentially had the job that SharePoint does for years.

It is possible that if people start using Wave they may find they need less of the total SharePoint stack. And don't get me wrong Wave is really cool, but at present I am having a hard time finding a better use for it then MSN. In fact so far my Waves have moved to MSN.

A brief overview of teh path to MOSS 2007.

SharePoint_History.jpg (JPEG Image, 566x800 pixels)

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Paradise

Anims

The tropical paradise is such a over used illusion of Second Life one can see it as a kind of nightmare. The tropical island plays both roles on our imagination. It can never just be a place, a atoll of islands in the South Pacific is either a prison of a paradise, a place to be cast away at crawling with Japanese soldiers who don't know the war is over or topless girls whose fathers invite you to have sex with them.

For the millions of people in the developing South Pacific Second Life must seem a kind of strange place, where the tourists images of their reality are made real, and the true conditions of life on volcanic islands with developing economies are invisible.