Well, the keynote just ended and I needed to check email so I thought I’d do a quick post. A good chunk of the keynote had already been covered by yesterday’s partner-only sessions. However, Mike Angiulo publicly announced that the Office 2007 family Service Pack 1 will be available on December 11th, 2007. I guess that means we can tell the world! I’m surprised, actually, that I haven’t noticed this on any of the SharePoint blogs I frequent.
Well, it’s the end of day zero, the partner-only day here at the Madrid Project Conference. It’s been an interesting day. I’m not sure what I am allowed to say, but service pack 1 for Office 2007, which covers the desktop products, sharepoint, project server et al is very close to being available now. That was an interesting announcement, as we are looking at installing Project Server in Black Marble. I’d like to wait for SP1 - it makes sense - but because SharePoint will be patched at the same time I need to do some testing of our customisations first.
Finally, after all the excitement that Richard and Robert had in Seattle and Barcelona, I find myself in the Auditorium Hotel, Madrid for the EMEA Project Conference.
According to the multilingual sales blurb in my room, the hotel is the largest in Europe, and I must say it’s very nice. We flew in yesterday and today is an MS Partner-only day before the conference itself kicks off tomorrow.
We’re back up north after Mix:UK 07 and I thought I’d follow up my earlier post with a few thoughts on the event and it’s content.
Before I do that, however, I need to give a cheer for our guys: Jonny performed incredibly in the Guiter Hero competition to be triumphant in front of his screaming supporters, and Sam, Mat, Tom and Jonny cleaned up the the goody-bagging stakes of the Swaggily Fortunes quiz!
Well, it’s just after 3pm on day one of Mix:UK 07. I’m taking a break with a coffee so I thought I’d post.
It’s mixed bag down here (sorry - no pun intended). The technology is fantastic - the stuff that can be achieved with WPF and Silverlight is excellent. I’m still a little uncertain that usability has been sacrificed on the sacrificial alter of bling, however. To be fair, that’s more telling about the rapid-development nature of conference demos, where the wow-factor is more important, but I think it’s a very, very significant issue which should not be allowed to get lost in the excitement.
One of the last projects I was involved in before I left the University of Bradford to join Black Marble was a new design for the external web site of the institution. I’d pretty much finished the construction of the page layouts and styles before I left, but it’s only now that the site is about to go live. I’ve threatened a few people with a series of posts on how the site is constructed and although I’m not there any more it seems topical.
After posting yesterday about useful tools for development I stumbled across another little gem of a utility. IE7Pro is much more of a usability-enhancing tool but it has a wonderfully handy tool nestling within - Save Current Tab As Image. If you need to do grabs of pages for documentation or presentations and the page is more than a single screen in length this will transform your life - no more cropping and stitching!
As web development gets more and more complex having the right tools to help you figure out what’s going on is essential. I thought I’d do a quick post on the ones I find most useful. In no particular order, then, here they are.
I spent a while knocking my head against a problem with a SharePoint server farm that’s worth posting about. It’s also worth a big hats-off to our Technical Support Coordinator at Microsoft Partner Support who dredged up the article that finally pointed us in the right direction.
Still no Windows Mobile 6 update for my Orange SPV M3100, but they did release an update to WM5 recently.
Installing said update turned out to be slightly trickier than I expected. I don’t know if anybody else has experienced the same problem, but a word to the wise - don’t try the update on Windows Vista!
Douglas Coupland’s Jpod has been doing the rounds in the office of late. I enjoyed MicroSerfs, so approached Jpod with excitement.
Frankly, I’m disappointed.
It’s not the writing - I ’ve enjoyed pretty much all of his books. It’s not that the books are similar in approach and style (they are) but rather the contrast in the lives of the characters.
I think I’ve mentioned before how I’ve been updating our IT infrastructure. Company growth has meant a need for expanded services. Add to that new versions of SharePoint and Exchange, mix in a need to run virtual servers for development and you have a need for more tin.
In hindsight I should have thought of it, but even if I had, others got there first.
You may remember my problems with IPMI on our X2100 servers from an earlier posting. Today I had cause to revisit the matter, as we’re having terrible issues with the Nvidia RAID on one of our servers.
On Saturday I got the email telling me that I’d been accepted onto the Home Server Beta 2. I’m excited about this product in a way that I haven’t been about new software solutions for a while.
I have yet to succeed in upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Each time it runs through to the completing upgrade phase, gets about halfway through that bit whereupon I get stuck in a reboot cycle.
We’re slowly migrating services onto our new servers here at Black Marble. This morning we had one of those moments where significant amounts of wall kicking and teeth gnashing ensue.
