Office 2.0

SharePoint Gets a Web 2.0 Facelift

antonio@inspectorit.com — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:00:00 GMT

"Microsoft is unveiling a series of upgrades and additions to SharePoint that it believes will appeal to business users as well as to individual consumers."

This is a direct result of the recent Microsoft announcement of the strategic alliance with Atlassian and NewsGator.

Atlassian's Confluence product is making its way into the SharePoint's stack by way of a plug-in. This plug-in allows information to be shared between the Confluence Wiki application and SharePoint.
A beta version of the plug-in is available here.

NewsGator's Social Sites product built specifically for SharePoint will add more functionality such as an improved RSS Reader, Feed Manager, Tagging and other Web 2.0 and social networking widgets.
NewGators announced the general availability of Social Sites at the Web 2.0 Conference on October 17th, 2007.

Microsoft Adds Web 2.0 Enhancements To SharePoint
June 20, 2007: TechWeb, David Gardner
Read Gardner's interview with Derek Burney, General Manager of SharePoint Platform & Tools, on the Web 2.0 technologies Microsoft is delivering under the SharePoint platform. The article also references how customers like Hawaiian Airlines and the Body Shop are using SharePoint Server 2007 for their external facing websites.

Microsoft does 'social computing' with SharePoint
June 19, 2007: CNET News.com, Martin LaMonica
Microsoft announced Community Kit for SharePoint, a Web add-on that enables businesses to take advantage of "Enterprise 2.0" services, such as enhancing a blog's look, better wiki tools, and a tag cloud feature.

Most business tech pros wary about Web 2.0 tools in business
February 24, 2007: Information Week, Nicholas Hoover
This article discusses the concerns enterprises have about the security, return on investment, and employees' adoption of Web 2.0 business tools. It also mentions how different corporations are using SharePoint and other Microsoft products to improve their collaboration platform.

UI vs Function? Think again!

antonio@inspectorit.com — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

As it turns out, technology adoption is directly related to the user's experience.

Ben Gardner agrees. Ben works for a large blue chip pharmaceutical company in the UK. Ben has a very difficult job as he is responsbile for getting corporate users to adopt Windows Sharepoint Services.

He made an interesting post where he says:

If I'm going to have to promote SharePoint in my organisation then this sort of skin job would be a god send. I realise that out of the box SharePoint can already do most of this but this re-skinning brings a intuitive UI to the SharePoint functionality. Lower training and customer delight.

As you can see, he is happy to have stumbled upon a service offering called BT Workspace developed by SMBLive ().

BT Workspace is a simple, powerful product that also adds an elegant user experience. Anyone wanting to make Sharepoint more interesting and intuitive for everday users should definitely signup for a free BT Workspace to experience what Ben has. If you are then interested in rolling this out to your internal organization the give us a shout!

British Telecom Launches Tradespace Beta

antonio@inspectorit.com — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 03:31:39 GMT

BT Tradespace Beta Now Available

British Telecom and SMBLive yesterday released the public beta of BT Tradespace (www.bttradespace.com). With BT Tradespace, small businesses can use the power of social media to promote themselves online, and can communicate with prospects and customers through blogging, podcasting, click-to-call, and text messaging.

The Latest Example of SaaS Innovation for Broadband Service Providers...

BT Tradespace is the latest example of how SMBLive continues to develop channel-ready Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools designed to help millions of small businesses work more effectively, attract more customers, and grow revenue -- with absolutely zero IT required.

Other examples of SMBLive products include BT Workspace (www.btworkspace.com) and TELUS ePoint (www.telus.com/epoint).

About SMBLive

SMBLive's (www.smblive.com) mission is to solve the historical challenge associated with the high cost of distirbuting software to millions of small businesses. We build applications that are (A) simple-to-use and right-sized for the IT-less nature of the small business market, and (B) optimized for massive distribution through incumbent service provider channels like British Telecom (www.bt.com) and Telus (www.telus.com).

CentralDesktop: Security Bug or Feature?

antonio@inspectorit.com — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:21:00 GMT

Do you own a CentralDesktop Workspace account?
If you do, then you should seriously reconsider your options!
If you do not, then read on and judge for yourself whether or not you should become their customer.

I was in the midst of evaluating CentralDesktop's document library when I stumbled upon the fact that any document I upload on that library is accessible by anyone. And by "anyone", I mean just that. You do not have to be authenticated to see this file, do ya? No kidding, the file you just saw is on my Company's Document Library on CentralDesktop (here is the actual url: http://www.centraldesktop.com/home/viewfile?guid=C0152ACE3BC744037F563F71D50E72F0&id=115259)

This is serious and potentially damaging stuff going on here, I mean, what if I had customer credit card numbers in that document? What if I had my employees Social Security numbers... geez... this is absolutely nuts! There are a lot of businesses out there actually using this application without any knowlegde of this issue. Or is this a feature?

Hmmm, let's examine this. I signed up for an account and went on to create a Project Workspace. The screen shot below indicates clearly (it is even highlighted for heaven sakes) that this workspace is protected and accessible by invitation only.

However, the opposite is true. I proceed to upload a document (sure, grab all the credit card numbers while you are it) only to find out that it is not password protected not accessible by invitation only.

One thing is for sure, bug or feature, this is clearly not the tool I rely on for my business. You, on the other hand can draw your own conclusions.