BlueTie Takes On Office365 in the SMB Enterprise Collaboration Market

BlueTie Takes On Office365 in the SMB Enterprise Collaboration Market:

"BlueTie’s Smartbins

"Smartbins offers some of the functionality of SharePoint Online in that it enables users to put files into the cloud and share them with designated users who can access them anytime and from any place.

"It also lets users tag files with contextual information rather than forcing them to bury them in assigned folders. Files can also be placed in workflows required for business processes.

"While that’s very useful and a considerable addition to BlueTie’s cloud email offeringsthat also compete with Microsoft, in the current climate the real differentiator is going to be price. This is where the reseller restructuring comes in.

"The first thing BlueTie has done is to build a reseller program that is specifically for Smartbins. It also created a ‘white-label’ system whereby resellers will be able to brand Smartbins as their own. According to BlueTie, the Smartbins program can offer partners margins ranging from 40 percent to 60 percent, free API integration and a dedicated team for support."

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

I got the message "Windows SharePoint Services Web Application Required on Farm, not running Upgrading", and here is the fix that worked.

Recently a SharePoint 2007 server farm I had been working with for some time stopped giving any of my users access. I check IIS and all the premissions were as they should be for all the Web Servers, but any account that could access it the night before stopped working.

Looking at the services in Farm I noticed this error

Windows SharePoint Services Web Application Required on Farm, not running Upgrading

Turns out the solution is a simple bit of command line, but not STSADMIN but psconfig. I wasted some time trying to find the STSADMIN fix.

Well the solution was rather simple,:

• I just open the CMD command line editor in Windows Server.
• I used the CD command line to get to the BIN file C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN on my machine.
• Typed the command psconfig -cmd upgrade -force

This then runs for a few minutes and afterwards problem was solved.

Microsoft taking positive steps to move Surface to mobile and tablet market

Microsoft Takes Surface To LCD Displays | nwinnovation.com: "Microsoft said today that it is unveiling its latest generation of Microsoft Surface, the firm's touch sensitive user interface and display technology. Microsoft said that the firm, along with Samsung Electronics, is introducing a new LCD display, the Samsung SUR40, which incorporates Microsoft Surface technology. The new product is targeted at corporate customers. Microsoft said that so far, Dassault Aviation, Fujifilm Corp., Red Bull GmbH, Royal Bank of Canada and Sheraton Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. have agreed to deploy the product. Microsoft said the new Samsung SUR40 has a 40-inch display with 1080p high definition support, and can be used bot horizontally or vertically."

Microsoft taking positive steps to move Surface to mobile and tablet market. Surface is a wonderful concept that could expand the nature of mobility and Web 3.0. Rather than just having to carry a web device with you all the time, Surface offers the opportunity to have Internet information "surfaced" all over our environments, touch ready.

The potential of even a small blog

Share the Point is not one massively popular blog, but I did catch a moment where a small community of users were watching the page at once. This graph can show the extensive reach one person with a blog, a little knowledge, and a lot of motivation can reach a global audience.

Recommending SharePoint.Sharon

I am not sure if it is normal for bloggers to recommend each other as a community or to compete for views as companies, or do both, but there is a blog I really simply must recommend for an excellent expert Sharon Richardson.

SharePoint.Sharon should be regular reading for people trying to make sense of the SharePoint world all the way up to administrators of large farms. I have no idea how Sharon keeps this up to date on the product but she does.

If you still bookmark things you should bookmark this, or maybe follow her twitter at @sharepointguide http://twitter.com/#!/sharepointguide

Yahoo! Developer Network on Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/yahoodevelopernetwork

If you are using Yahoo! Development tools there is a site on Facebook where you can get support. They seem to be pretty responsive to issues. Interesting that Yahoo! is making such excellent use of Facebook to keep in touch with users. But I also find the best SharePoint networks are on Facebook.

This is all part of a larger trend of Facebook evolving from a "friends" contact network limited to top end Universities and then families and friends, in to a global and agile social networking tool.

If only they would come out with a good iPad app!

The Economist 2.0: Economist Magazine embraces Twitter

The Economist magazine is probably the best source of graphics on the planet. If you want to see any economic of social trend visualised here is the place to do it, and now the Economist has a TwitPic page where you can browse these amazing graphics.

More Proof Facebook is in the Microsoft Camp!

As if you needed more proof that Facebook is in the Microsoft camp against Google here has got to be the final piece.

As you see the foursquare site shows your geo-location in the rich Google maps. Google Maps is, frankly speaking, still light years ahead of Bing maps or Microsoft Virtal World. But when you post this link to Facebook:



The information is shown in a bing map over a Google map. Clearly an intention to use Microsoft over a better more establishd Google product and further proof that if Microsoft has a future its in Facebook.

The thing is, if one buys the other it is no longer clea that it will be Microsoft buying Facebook. But Microsoft is pretty smart to move on from the failed effort to get Yahoo and move on to something really big. Though a Facebook merger with Microsoft would be a pretty scary Monopoly.

Windows Live Alive?

Well perhaps its kind of nice to just go to Facebook in another window. Perhaps Windows live can make it as a portal of all my social sites but somehow I don't think Microsoft is really going to make it big with a Portal. This was Yahoo's play a few years ago.

Windows Live Mail Provides "Newsgroups"

We really like like the Windows Live Mail client for Windows 7. The ability to hold multiple email accounts makes it a very useful tool, and the new feature of grouping emails by discussions meets the promise of Wave without all the failure of Wave stuff.



But near the bottom we saw something out of 1994: Newsgroups. Nostalgia led us to click and see what it did.



But the walk down memory lane was short lived. None of the Microsoft Newsgroups loaded up. Not sure if a newsgroup has any value at all in the age of twitter and Facebook. Which leads to the main question: why does Windows Live mail not just let import my streams from twitter or my emails from Facebook? Now that would be cool.

Microsoft Live Writer for Windows 7

Microsoft Live Writer for Windows 7

Microsoft has given some gifts for the new year.

Some, like new controls for your children’s web access is of no value to me.  Other’s like “mesh” seem kind of pointless. It allows me to synch data from my IE and Outlook together on the web.  If you don’t use both the point is kind of lost.  But if you use IE and Office you might want to use Mesh to backup your key data and style.

 But Windows Live Writer promises a nice blog tool.  I like Blogger’s service because it is fairly easy to use, and I have been using it for over 8 years.  But editing tool is a bit weak, and linking it to Google Docs has never been useful to me. 

Microsoft Live Writer gives me a Office 2010 tool to write blogs with, which is something promising.  Especially compared to the very limited Picasa function I usually use. 

Will 2011 Make or Break Microsoft?

There is not question that Microsoft is in a bit of trouble, and has been for some time since Google took the search space.

So far Microsoft has been lucky in Google and Yahoo. Google has not had the luck many people had imaged producing a rich set of apps for the web that would get people to stop using Microsoft products. Google Docs did not kill office, Google Search did not replace the need for Enterprise Search and Google Wave did not end up being a SharePoint killer.

But Microsoft right now is profiting as more on leverage and luck than innovation. When the new Office Web Apps came out the impressive thing was that Microsoft had produced an excellent Web Based App.

This year we saw MSN (once the main social network in the world) have to make a deal with Facebook Social Graph to keep MSN IM relevant. Bing is now forced in to a period of heavy advertising to try and crawl search market share it never should have lost to Google, and don't even start to talk about mobile.

Frankly speaking, SharePoint is in danger of a future real Cloud service. People are talking about a Facebook like SharePoint experience, but I am not entirely sure it would not be easier to build a SharePoint like Facebook.

Microsoft really has to start thinking hard and thinking fast. It can't count on Google's failure to execute in the Enterprise space forever. With the Cloud the now clear line between Enterprise and Web might soon vanish, and Microsoft presently has lost that war.

Over the coming year of two the very survival of Microsoft as a technology leader will depend on a few features:

1. Office 365 much launch and be effective, even if it cuts in to Office revenue
2. NO MORE VISTAS!!!! Windows 7 must be enhanced in a way that makes it a better link to the Internet NOT a tool simply to stop change from the ICT infrastructure.
3. Windows 8 Mobile MUST be the best. I am will to go on the line right now and say that Windows 7 Mobile is going to be a flop, but not as destructive as earlier versions which did massive harm to Microsoft reputation.
4. Microsoft must get a Table
5. The partnership with Facebook must be strengthened at the expense of Google with Twitter and Google forming an even better counter relationship.
6. To sum up Microsoft must stop seeing the world in terms of Windows and Offices.

Microsoft has had some major failure in the 21st Century after a wonder 1990s. Office 2007 and 2010 Ribbon did as much to confuse as help users. MSN has been a bomb. Vista was a catastrophic failure and .NET release has been confusing, the install clunky, and the outcome has been a bloated system which seems more concerned with outdoing Java as king of the Geek work that providing a platform for rapid maintainable development.

With the rise again of the Tech Start up and VC market Microsoft could face more than just Google in the near future.