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Whats coming in tech?

I see a pattern of emerging technologies in the Internet. You can always tell an emerging Internet technology because it is battered by a mass of bad press. But if you look at the details you see solid growth. Anything the media loves is in trouble.

Right now certainly SharePoint, collaboration and BI are hot, but what is coming in 6 months:

I see Second Life taking off
Twitter is suddenly hot
and all VR is taking off
Facebook is pretty established and replacing LinkedIn

Just my own humble opinion

Robert Hooker

Brining the Linux micro into Mesh

I have GPE miniLap Top. I hope windows 7 can get this small but if it does I will then be pushing to develop lap tops with DSL or Puppy Linux that go even smaller.

The software industry is going in two directions right now: massive servers and small clients. Microsoft may have assumed it was going to have ever growing clients forever and was in a bad position for the start of the nanoworld But it is starting

Again by following a rational plan to improve mobility and go more green I am again on Google docs and not Office Live. This puts me in the strange position of wanting to use Microsoft Live but not being able.

Yahoo releases friend-finding service

Yahoo releases friend-finding service

(CNET) -- Taking a different approach to Google's Latitude software, Yahoo has released a Facebook application called Friends on Fire that lets people share their location with each other.

Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 cumulative update package: February 24, 2009

Cumulative update packages for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 contain hotfixes for the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 issues that have been fixed since the release of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 cumulative update package: February 24, 2009

Note This build of the cumulative update package is also known as build 12.0.6341.5000.

We recommend that you test hotfixes before you deploy them in a production environment. Because the builds are cumulative, each new update contains all the hotfixes and all the security fixes that were included with the previous Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 update package.

Important notes about the cumulative update package

• The 2007 Microsoft Office hotfixes are now multilingual. Therefore, there is only one cumulative hotfix package for all languages.
• 
  
• One cumulative hotfix package includes all the server component packages. The cumulative update package updates only those components that are installed on the system.

Web 3.0 Product for BI

This guy does one thing and we have to hear from his from the rest of his life

Sir Tim Berners-Lee keeps milking one technological implementation rather than say doing something new.

The founder of the World Wide Web says the pace of innovation on the web is increasing all the time.

Social Networks / Email

Technology editor, BBC News website, Texas

Status updates on sites such as Facebook, Yammer, Twitter and Friendfeed are a new form of communication, the South by SouthWest Festival has heard.

"We are all in the process of creating e-mail 2.0," David Sacks, founder of business social network Yammer said.

Tens of millions of people are using social networks to stay in touch.

The growth in such services is being heralded as the start of the real-time, pervasive web.

'New communication'

Mr Sacks said: "What people want to do on social network these days is post status updates. We think it's all people want to do."

Yammer is an enterprise social network, designed to facilitate communication within companies and organisations.

It is one of a growing number of services that lets users share micro-updates. Other services have a richer mix of content, including sharing photos and video, and allowing comments from people within your social network, building a so-called activity stream.

"I think it's a new form of communication; not quite e-mail, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavour to it," said Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed, and the creator and lead developer of GMail, while at Google.

FriendFeed lets users share content from other services, such as Twitter and Flickr, and comment directly on the postings in real-time.

Simplicity and ubiquity

With more than 175 million users Facebook is the dominant platform for status updates.

Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at the firm, told BBC News: "It's been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate.

"You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn't know if your friends even wanted to see it.

"Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it."

The simplicity and ubiquity of some of these services is beginning to see activity feeds and status updates replace many of the uses to which e-mail was once put.

Mr Sacks said: "It's no coincidence that these products are all looking like e-mail.

"These products are all standardising around a message form at the top, and the inbox which is a feed then folders around the side."

'Open system'

The problem with the current crop of status update services is that they are to varying degrees interoperable.

For example, while Twitter can be used to power a status update on Facebook the same is not true in reverse.

"We want to see a more open system where everything links together, the same as it does with e-mail," he said.

While e-mail has common protocols which allow people to send and receive messages even if they are with different services, such as Hotmail or GMail, the same is not completely true with status updates and activity feeds.

There are some standard protocols but the rapid development in the complexity and breadth of activity feeds, to include comments and ratings, has led to a series of walled gardens.

Dare Obasanjo, a program manager at Microsoft, said the firm was working on a set of standards.

"You need to give sites permission to get your data," he said.

'Hard to compete'

The complex nuances of relationships on social networks, with users having different degrees of openness with different friends or followers, further complicates the introduction of standards.

Facebook has also been accused of being unwilling to open up its system and work with other status update firms, and there is a belief among some that the social network is enacting a "land grab" in an effort to become the de-facto platform.

Mr Sacks said: "On the consumer side Facebook could become the one site for all social messaging. That becomes very hard to compete with."

But Mr Buccheit said he believed the different firms were moving towards a more federated system.

"There will be no separation between Facebook and Friendfeed and Twitter."

Mr Steinberg said: "We are totally happy to interoperate with other sites."

He told BBC News that interoperability wasn't necessary for activity streams to become a global messaging service.

"It's definitely something and a pretty cool thing we would like to enable. Conceptually it makes a lot of sense.

"It's in our interests to let people share. Twitter has had a lot of success in letting people taking their data and sharing it externally.

"We'd love to be able to let people tap into that."

Okay this is BI

Okay maybe you BI was someone sent you an Excel spreadsheet in Outlook. Its not your fault that you were drawn in to the dark side of knowledge construction, waisting resources and working in isolation on documents that evolve away from central visions and purposes.

Loading that spreadsheet in to a document libraruy is something of an improvement, but not much.

BI need to follow a set of polices:

1. Single version of the truth
2. Clear representation
3. Controlled access
4. Real time exploration.

InSource gave a great NHS presentation on BI and Microsoft and it was great to see a Gold Partner who sees the light. BI is not installing SharePoint with some KPIs and going off to a Star Trek convention.

The graph above shows very clearly a vision of BI. You need some basic technologies no matter what:

SQL, (pretty cheap)
Reporting and Analysis Server, (free with SQL)
SharePoint, (If you wnat to do BI is costs, sorry)

but the BI answer is still open. One thing I hate in IT is having to think about the product. You go with Microsoft because you want to buy stacks that you can service and support.

But the BI story in Microsoft is still in focus. It will be interesting to see how the next SharePont resolves things. But the sad reality is BI is something you have to spend lots of time with.

By lots of time I would say 100 man days on the initial analys and building the framework and deciding how you are gong to present BI. I also will be frank, though analys and reporting servies come with SQL you are facing added license cost either buying a BI product or using more expensive CALS from Microsoft.

Get off my facebook?

How common is social network partner swaps. Well for my part I know use my wife's Second Life avatar sometimes, and she surfs facebook with my account. My primary email gobully@hotmail.co.uk is in fact her account.

Guts

Today I relieved something when I was looking for a shop me and my wife found last weekend.  As I was finding it I saw clearly that I am good at remember not because I have some attribute called "memory" but rather because I am kind of a arrogant gutsy person who is willing to push his vision and in time find his way.

If you asked me the best attribute you need in getting a SharePoint take-on I would say guts, you need the guts first to ask people to change the way they work, to get people to work together in a culture run by the ideology of utter independence.  We are trained to think we work alone and SharePoint reminds people that value is collaboration.

You also need the guts to do it right.  SharePoint has some great ways to do things, like BI in Excel Services and wikis, but you need the guts to use the right tool for the right end.

If the requirements are meet by Excel services you need to stick to your guns and use Excel Services.  

BI is BI

Just had a facebook chat with a friend who is using SharePont for a massive US company.  One thing that came up was that many firms use content management to store massive Excel docs with links to SQL databases.

Just to rant a bit, this SHOULD be done using a BI feature: ProClarity, Reporting Services, or Excel Services.  Companies fail too provide proper support with SharePoint rollouts.

To a company using MOSS please get a Gold Partner and Strategic Partner.  Try to find someone who can do more than just listen and say yes.  These days IT consultants are told to listen and collect requirements.  Is this what you need?  If you are like 90% of firms I have seen you need someone to tell you how you should do it.  Get a partner or, if you can find them, staff who have the guts and knowledge to guide a true MOSS takeup.