Lots of changes from Microsoft is expected to come in the next few years through its Unified Communications push. CMS Wire is the first site I saw that I saw mentioning that the new SharePoint will be called SharePoint 2010.
Finally. Microsoft has come forward with some news about the next version of SharePoint.
First, we have an official name: SharePoint 2010. Not overly innovative, but at least we can all agree on what to call it now.
Last week, Socialtext's Eugene Lee forwarded a link on Twitter with SharePoint as the focus of the article. The SharePoint article is titled, SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools and the author discusses the frustration enterprises and site developers have with the Microsoft product. There is some truth in the article as I've heard from many people discussing their concerns about SharePoint lacking quality Enterprise 2.0 features or causing vendor lock for their organization. However, the article borders slightly on the side of a rant on SharePoint and I've allowed it remain in a tab on my browser for quite awhile while I pondered what I wanted to take from the article.
I think the frustrations the author describes about SharePoint isn't a SharePoint problem. And the author describes the issue very well without recognizing it's just not SharePoint that drives organizations crazy.
SharePoint does some things rather well, but it is not a great tool (or even passable tool) for broad social interaction inside enterprise related to the focus of Enterprise 2.0. SharePoint works well for organization prescribed groups that live in hierarchies and are focussed on strict processes and defined sign-offs. Most organization have a need for a tool that does what SharePoint does well.
This older, prescribed category of enterprise tool needs is where we have been in the past, but this is not where organizations are moving to and trying to get to with Enterprise 2.0 mindsets and tools. The new approach is toward embracing the shift toward horizontal organizations, open sharing, self-organizing groups around subjects that matter to individuals as well as the organization. These new approaches are filling gaps that have long existed and need resolution.
The problems identified with SharePoint can easily be said about many enterprise applications out there. Many of the enterprise suites provided to the market traditionally offered turn-key solutions in an effort to deliver a single integrated solution for the customer. These integrated suites can and do create "vendor lock" but that isn't the sole goal of enterprise products being delivered by such companies as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle. The customers asked for efficient and effective enterprise solutions and the big software companies responded by providing the expected tightly controlled software platforms (historically a good thing) along with terms of licensing, predictable pricing, training, and infrastructure support.
Although Firefox is my choice for Internet browsers, I do use Microsoft's Internet Explorer from time to time. Yesterday, I installed the release candidate of Internet Explorer 8.
I can't say I'm a big fan of their "Web slice" approach as it feels like I'm ramming Google Desktop via RSS feeds down the browser's favorites bar. Who know though, perhaps the slice approach will grow on me. However, I am a big fan of Microsoft creating a more compliant and less buggy browser and IE8 seems to fit the bill. If IE7 was a good step in the right direction then IE8 gets Microsoft's users pretty close to the destination.
Meanwhile, my rant to all the IE6 users. I can't believe that about a third of Microsoft Windows users are still using IE6. Shame on you if you are still using that insecure, buggy, and non-compliant browser. Microsoft doesn't even want you to use that browser...and yet you're still stuck in the stone ages. I have a theory that IE6 is symbolic of the problems of complacency at Microsoft and those companies/users that are still on that browser. IE8 arriving on a modern Windows desktop near you and you're still on IE6? Give me a break!
Not long ago I wrote that KDE 4 might produce enough changes to its look and feel to help Linux become more Mac-like. At the time, Windows Vista seemed to be trying to move in the same direction. Interestingly, someone has noted that Windows 7 now appears to be moving towards Linux's direction with the Windows desktop looking more like KDE 3.5.
In keeping with tradition, the following are seven articles that were posted here at CMSReport.com and received less attention than I had hoped. Either the reader didn't show up to view the article or there was little discussion on the subject matter. I'll let you be the judge on whether these articles deserved the obscurity they received in 2008.
A recent blog post from Sarah Parez tries to answer some "want-to-know" questions on the upcoming Microsoft Office Web Applications. With software as a service becoming more popular, Google has quickly become a competitor of Microsoft's Office Suite with its Google Docs. Microsoft is aggressively fighting back by making its Office software available via the Web browser.
Gizmodo published their first impressions of the Windows 7 operating system currently being developed by Microsoft. Microsoft allowed developers and reviewers get a sneak peek of this Vista replacement during this week's Professional Developers Conference. Gizmodo and other tech blogs have indicated Windows 7, although still incomplete, looks to be a better version of Windows than Vista. Improvements in boot-up time, work-flow, performance, and user interface all take center stage with this new version of Windows.
The single reason enterprises with Windows networks prefer Internet Explorer over Firefox and other browsers: Group Policy.
For those of you who might be new to Group Policy, here is a quick background. Let’s first assume you use an Active Directory environment to administer the computers in your corporate network. If that is the case, Group Policy provides a wide set of policy settings to manage IE8 after you have deployed it to your users' computers. These settings are locked down and cannot be changed by users, as they are always written to a secure tree in the registry.
Microsoft has never said that they would drop support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) after the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3. However, I've often wondered if it would be to Microsoft's advantage, as well as beneficial to their customers, if they did drop the IE6 support. With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) now the status quo for most non-Enterprise users of Windows and IE8 development underway, what better opportunity is there to end support for IE6 than now?
There is no question that Microsoft is supporting IE6 in the next service pack. Jane Maliouta, Microsoft's Deployment Project Manager for IE8, addressed IE6 support with XP SP3 in an IEBlog post on IE and Windows XP SP3.
XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains a roll-up of the latest security updates for IE6. If you are still running Internet Explorer 6, then XPSP3 will be offered to you via Windows Update as a high priority update. You can safely install XPSP3 and will have an updated version of IE6 with all your personal preferences, such as home pages and favorites, still intact.
So the question remains, just how long does Microsoft plan to support this 7 year old browser? From as near as I can tell, support for Internet Explorer 6 is tied to the life cycle of the Windows XP operating system. Mainstream support for Windows XP is currently dated to end in April 14, 2009. So that means Internet Explorer 6 will have been on the desktop for more than eight years! While enterprises may take comfort that product support for Windows XP and IE6 has lasted so long, consumers and the rest of the world have since moved on with the changing world.
On Monday, Microsoft announced from their IEBlog that they were reversing their decision for how Internet Explorer 8 would be compatible with Web pages designed for Internet Explorer 7 as well as Internet standards. You may recall that earlier this year Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 8 in "Standards Mode" would actually be rendering pages in Internet Explorer 7's "Standards Mode". If you really wanted to have IE8 follow the latest standards then you would need to insert a special tag to your pages.