Michael Porter

The guys over at the Spark Blog seem to be on a roll lately with a number of nice posts.  I especially like Amit Malhotra’s post on Mobile App best practices.  Lots of companies are creating apps for the mobile web, android, iOS, Windows, and other platforms.  Most aren’t even worried about putting them on […]

Erin Moloney (@ErinE) put me onto this techcrunch article about Openera.  In a nutshell, Openera hooks up to a wide range of email accounts like gmail, Exchange, and any IMAP standard server to automate taking your attachments in email and putting them in Google Apps, iCloud, Box, Dropbox, etc.  What’s cool about that you say? […]

IBM has a nice SaaS version of their social networking tool.  It’s been LotusLive for a while but was rebranded earlier this year as IBM SmartCloud for Social.  The complete the rebrand today by changing the url. For our Business Partners that are currently taking advantage of  the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business : Client trial […]

Thanks to Erin Maloney (@ErinE) for this great article by James Dellow at Ripple Effect Group.  James starts off by asking the question about whether SharePoint is a platform for social and then delves into all the other things taking place in the world. Firstly, its important to recognise that Microsoft’s long term strategy is […]

Stuart McRae linked to an interesting article about information overload.  The Guardian Article highlights the Gmail option to essentially pause your email so you don’t feel guilt ridden by all your unread email.  I love the Guardian Reporter, Oliver Burkeman’s,  initial comments about it. There’s a new add-on for Gmail called Inbox Pause, which does something […]

Valeria Arguello on our sister Spark Blog has a short post on LinkedIn ads that was interesting in that LinkedIn gives your far more targeting and more information on who looks at your ads.  I won’t repeat everything she has to say but so click through for the entire post.   And now…my favorite features: […]

So one key question I run into constantly is how to do video in your portal site.   If you want easy then just say, “Sure it can. Just embed a link or use a Silverlight control and you’re off and running”  Then you just hope they don’t ask any follow up questions like, “Well, […]

What are the media services?  Basically it’s a quick and easy way to provide video management and distribution.  It’s cloud based and therefore fairly easy to provision additional services. Architecture Built on Windows Azure Includes live services and media services All services are available via the API The media service gives you all the machinery […]

One challenge common to any implementation of SharePoint 2010 is how to implement a theme with minimal effort. It usually requires significant planning and some cut corners to get what you want.  Fortunately, the latest release has some changes that should improve the process. Randy Drisgill and John Ross, SharePoint MVPs from Rackspace spoke at […]

Matt Feczko and Ben Wilde focused on real life scenario on how social will work.  They include: Asking and answering questions Managing multiple projects Working with documents Finding our more about people The whole concept is that social should make life easier. It should improve employee engagement, team collaboration, and business agility.  However, all of […]

Mark Kashman (@mkashman) presented on mobile and SharePoint. Like everyone else, Microsoft sees the mobile revolution with 1 billion devices, 82% of the online population using social and 50% being on the road to the cloud. When they think of SharePoint mobile they think of it in three different ways. That includes mobile browser, native apps, and […]

Mark Kashman (@mkashman), Senior Product Manager at Microsoft presented on the New SharePoint Online (e.g. as part of Office 365).  It’s currently in a preview mode so it’s only in three data centers but it will launch next year. This version is the first version designed as part of a service rather than a product […]