Office Live, SharePoint for everyone

The Office Live Workspace Beta gives you the ability to create collaboration workspaces. You don't have MOSS 2007 DM yet, but it provides basic collaboration from WSS 2 and WSS 3 is a nice user friendly UI.



And the killer app is, it connects to Office 2003 and 2007. You can edit your word documents in word on your computer and manage them in the Cloud.



Saving still has some security problems. If y0u have ever run SharePoint without Active Directory you will be familiar with what Security is like in Office Live. I don't know if people will find this confusing. Microsoft needs to improve Cloud Security, the process is much more seamless in Google Docs.



Having to log-in via Office when you are already logged in via Office Live in a browser is a problem that Microsoft, who owns Windows anyways needs to get around. The problem here is key security, if the browser could launch an app that could then contact a web service it better be secured very well.

http://workspace.office.live.com/

More on Facebook

I find facebook to be the most innovative new web offering and see it as a key future technology with collaboration and knowledge management. I am betting that Sharepoint and facebook are a match made in heaven, so watch this space.



The founder of Facebook says the social network will return to its previous terms of service regarding user data.

In a blog post Mark Zuckerberg said the move was temporary "while we resolve the issues that people have raised".
Users had complained after new terms of service seemed to suggest Facebook would retain personal data even if someone deleted their account.


Mark Zuckerbert is the founder of Facebook

Originally defending the changes, Mr Zuckerberg had said it was to better reflect how people used the site.

He had said the changes were made to ensure that if a user deleted his or her account any comments or messages he or she had left on a friend's Facebook page would not also disappear.

What don't you like about SharePoint?

I sometimes get asked what I think is SharePoint's weaknesses. No software is perfect and I would rather think about conditions under which you should probably think either about another product or and extension of SharePoint.

The 3 main "problems" I see with the current SharePoint are as follows:

1. Accessibility. This makes me rather sad actually because accessibility is not just about getting disabled people to see your site, but about good structured sites. Sadly the HTML produced by SharePoint is requires massive effort to make accessible to AA or AAA standards.

2. Graphics. Basic modifications are much better in MOSS than under SPS 2003, but still SharePoint is one of the harder tools to make look the way you want. I used to work with Senerna's Collage WCM tool and even now MOSS 2007 publishing features are far inferior.

3. File Plans. SharePoint RM does not support MoReq or TNA FilePlan trees structures. Since almost all existing RM solutions use complex filepans using MOSS as an RM replacement will be very difficult.