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Dux Raymond Sy Talking at Sharepoint User Group UK

The charming and irrepresible Dux Raymond Sy is speaking at the SharePoint User Group UK on Thursday, the 27th August 2009 in London. Dux is the author of SharePoint for Project Management and will be in the country for a whirlwind tour to champion the cause of SharePoint on this side of the Atlantic.

Follow him on Twitter @meetdux.

Dux Raymond Sy on Sharepoint for Project Managers

Over on GMT Extra, the author of SharePoint for Project Management, Dux Raymond Sy subjects himself to fabled and feared Craig Smith interview technique and tells us how he got to where he is and what he gets from Sharepoint:

Three years later, one of my government clients found out that I was using SharePoint on a regular basis (at this point I was using Windows SharePoint Services 2.0), so they engaged me to develop a customized hands-on, in-house training program on implementing, maintaining and using SharePoint Portal Server 2003. This opportunity further piqued my interest in SharePoint and, more importantly, I saw the potential in how this tool can address various business challenges.

John Osborn, O'Reilly Editor, on Cloud Computing

John Osborn, the O'Reilly Editor responsible for publishing on Microsoft technologies, talked to me about Cloud Computing, and how it might affect Microsoft's future:

John Osborn - O'Reilly - Cloud Computing from oreillygmt on Vimeo.

Microsoft deal in Bulgaria

Two civil organizations will approach the prosecutor’s office today. The reason is the new contract, prepared by the Ministry of State Administration, for software purchase, which is going to be signed with Microsoft. This was announced yesterday by Open Projects Foundation and the civil initiative Spravedlivost (Justice).

The signal to the Prosecutor is instigated by the Ministry’s call for tender, which seeks a supplier of 60 000 Microsoft licenses for the needs of the state administration. According to the lawyer of the two organizations, Mr Ivan Gruykin, the announced procedure may be interpreted as a criminal breach of trust, aiming to favour one of the world’s richest people – Bill Gates and his company.

Apart from the Prosecutor, the organizations will approach other authorities as well, namely the Public Internal Financial Control Agency, which according to the Public Tenders Act possesses the power to stop the procedure.

The two organizations are considering how to approach the Commission for Protection of Competition, which is also a controlling authority, but only a participant in the tender has the right to make an appeal.

The order value is about 90 millions of leva, and that makes 1500 per software package - a price which exceeds the market price several times. When announcing the tender Minister Nikolay Vasilev said that he was going to organize a press conference to find out if the officials were able to use free open source software and if he was convinced, he would stop the tender. The deadline for submission of the offers is the 10th of December.

More info here.

Bill Thompson on Microsoft's Open Source Licenses

Nik Butler writes:

Bill Thompson, writing for the BBC, talks about the long hard road to Open Source.

Microsoft, having submitted two licenses for consideration of the Open Source Initiative, have certainly stirred the usual feelings of angst and concern in the Open Source community. Thompson suggests that many may view the move as some grand manouever designed to hide some other attack:

Those who see only the machinations of a corporation intent on damaging free and open source software will therefore imagine this latest move as part of a complex game of corporate chess, where the open license knight moves closer to the free software king only to disguise the real attack, coming from the patent-carrying bishops hiding behind the pawns.

In this case the pawns are provided by Novell, a Linux distributor that struck a deal over patent infringement with Microsoft in 2006.

Some credit must go to Bill Hilf, the Open Source world's Man on the inside, who works for and with Microsoft to help them understand and engage with the Open Source community.

Microsoft however seem to be suffering from the effects of their own success. Having dominated and secured the Desktop market, they have not been able to move as swiftly or as quickly into managing and securing the internet market. Control over the browsers is not enough to help Microsoft maintain control, as developers and manufacturers are finding ways to move directly between their own client applications and servers over the net.

Don Reisinger describes it as Microsoft's Albatross and also puts forward suggestions as to how Microsoft need to reconsider their current market share. With manufacturers now openly selling Ubuntu and other Open Source distributions on their desktop PCs, it's clear that the distributors are looking for ways to avoid a possible lock-in and starvation in a market which is now, if slowly, heading away from desktops as the primary or exclusive domain of connectivity and the internet.

Whilst we are nowhere near a tipping point, there are certainly trembles in the market that point to a shifting interest in investment and delivery, and history has shown that the monolithic corporations rarely survive the changes.

Access Data Analysis Cookbook

Access Data Analysis Cookbook by Ken Bluttman and Wayne S. Freeze:

This book offers practical recipes to solve a variety of common problems that users have with extracting Access data and performing calculations on it. Whether you use Access 2007 or an earlier version, this book will teach you new methods to query data, different ways to move data in and out of Access, how to calculate answers to financial and investment issues, how to jump beyond SQL by manipulating data with VBA, and more.

Office 2007: The Missing Manual

Office 2007: The Missing Manual by Chris Grover, Matthew MacDonald and E. A. Vander Veer:

Quickly learn the most useful features of Microsoft Office 2007 with our easy to read four-in-one guide. This fast-paced book gives you the basics of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access so you can start using the new versions of these major Office applications right away. It's a great way to master all 4 programs without having to stock up on a shelf-load of different books.

Seadragon and Photosynth

TED has a great video of a presentation of Seadragon and Photosynth given by their co-creator, Blaise Aguera y Arcas. Photosynth is especially impressive: it takes Flickr photos tagged with a given location (the examples here are Notre Dame and Grassy Lakes in the Canadian Rockies) and combines them to create a navigable space:

Blaise Aguera y Arcas presents Photosynth
Seadragon	Seadragon	Photosynth

Microsoft Surface Video on Popular Mechanics

Popular Mechanics have a great video of Microsoft Surface, a coffee table cum computer interface that looks great fun to use.

If it seems as though the Surface machine sprang up out of nowhere, that's only because Microsoft has been unusually secretive about it. Early designs of the table were displayed around the room as evidence of the product's long development cycle; rejected shapes included "squashed white egg" and "podium." Steven Bathiche, research manager for the project, has been involved since the beginning (in 2001) when he and fellow researcher Andy Wilson first dreamed up the idea of a tabletop computer. Bathiche spoke about the Milan project's evolution with the evident excitement of a man who's had to keep the most important thing he's ever done a secret for six years. "We've gone through several generations of this machine," he said. "The first was a proof-of-concept called T1, and we just hacked it into an IKEA table."

And there it was, partially disassembled, behind me. It looked as if they had attacked the prefab particleboard furniture from the Swedish superstore with a Sawzall, then stuffed in off-the-shelf computer parts, cameras, projectors and mirrors until it all worked. The idea went straight to the top: Once Bill Gates okayed it, surface computing moved from a heady research project to the nuts-and-bolts planning of product development.

Thanks, Simon

Book Review: Programming SQL Server 2005

Uma Kanagaratnam MBCS reviewed Programming SQL Server 2005 by Bill Hamilton for the BCS.

The chapters are well organised and kick starts with an overview of the new and enhanced tools and command line utilities. The mid-section looks at SQL server management objects in great detail. SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) is a collection of objects that are designed for programming all aspects of managing Microsoft SQL Server it surpasses the database management functionality of SQL DMO used to manage SQL server 2000.

The book is easy to read and I would recommend it as a useful resource. The author has highlighted sections where he has made a suggestion or provided a general comment which is valuable.

Score: 9 out of 10          Read on