Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

While analysts say the social software in SharePoint lacks the functionality and usability of competitor products, its tight integration with existing Microsoft systems such as Exchange and Office makes it an attractive buy for IT departments looking to capitalize on the Web 2.0 movement while still utilizing the technology tools they already have inside their companies.

For its part, Microsoft boasts a staggering rate of adoption for SharePoint. According to Rob Curry, director of SharePoint, Microsoft has sold around 100 million licenses of the product

Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology.SD Times has viewed internal Microsoft documents that outline Midori’s proposed design, which is Internet-centric and predicated on the prevalence of connected systems.

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

WSO2 is releasing on Monday WSO Mashup Server Version 1.5, an open-source product for deploying mashup services featuring Google Gadgets support and interfaces to relational databases and other data sources.

The mashup server uses JavaScript to describe logic for acquiring information, combining data, and exposing it to a user. Information can be acquired from sources such as Web services and scraped pages and published as a new Web service, feeds, Web pages, or notifications. Version 1.5 features stubs and templates for Google Gadgets, which can be hosted within Mashup Server or externally such as in an iGoogle page. A beta dashboard add-in is featured for hosting Google Gadgets within Mashup Server. Google Gadgets enable dynamic content to be placed on a Web page. Data services enhancements provide Web services interfaces to relational databases and other data sources such as Excel spreadsheets and comma-separated values.

But it’s not all roses on the SharePoint front — especially when it comes to the growing trend by customers to use SharePoint not just as a set of loosely integrated applications, but as a development platform in its own right. A couple of new studies highlight the potential risks of which customers should be aware when betting big on SharePoint.

Apple’s Trojan horse in multi-platform, multimedia runtime is a piece of open source technology that’s already on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Adobe Flex/AIR, iPhone, iPod touch, Nokia S60 smartphones and Google’s new Android/Open Handset Alliance, with 30+ partners around the globe: WebKit 3.0.

Connectivity The marketplace is very fragmented. To reach every device you have to target about 14 different platforms. Not every development team has the resources to build it for every platform. We believe over time the browser on mobile devices will be the entry point for many applications. But today the majority of mobile phones don’t have the browser that can do it. Android is an open source world class mobile stack. We hope the industry will adopt it. The WebKit browser comes with Android.

WebKit’s core JavaScript engine just got a new interpreter, code-named SquirrelFish. SquirrelFish is fast—much faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter. Check out the numbers. On the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, SquirrelFish is 1.6 times faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter.

Remember the crucial test for an RIA is will the app run offline and online on every platform its used on. Like Microsoft’s current support for HTML/CSS/DOM standards, Redmond is the most seriously deficient of RIA providers as well. Beginning to sound like a broken record ? Well lets see exactly what Redmond is promoting. What Developers Should be Demanding of Redmond Steve Apiki has written a piece on Nine Silverlight 2 Features Not to Be Missed. Here is what Web 2.0 developers should be demanding of Microsoft before they even consider Silverlight

A second survey showed that basic PC and network hardware, as well as professional services providers, would bear the largest proportion of spending cuts. It also showed that CIOs planned to emphasize economizing measures over investments in new technologies, with cloud computing emerging as the last item on their priority lists, despite the hype around it.

The CIOs indicated that server virtualization and server consolidation are their No. 1 and No. 2 priorities. Following these two are cost-cutting, application integration, and data center consolidation. At the bottom of the list of IT priorities are grid computing, open-source software, content management and cloud computing (called on-demand/utility computing in the survey) -- less than 2% of the respondents said cloud computing was a priority.

I agree with DonnieBoy. Microsoft will try to leverage their MSOffice monopoly to dominate the newly emerging marketplace of Web-Stack and Cloud Computing solutions. I also believe that for Microsoft, the final pieces of this puzzle fell into place on March 29th, 2008 with ISO approval of the MSOffice-OOXML document format.

For many years, Java and web developers alike have had to explain to the unwitting that JavaScript had absolutely nothing to do with Java. It was one of the great marketing gaffes of the mid-90s. They were no more alike than chalk and cheese. But in the last six months, I've had to lay down my placard and walk away from the picket line with a smile on my face and a skip in my step. Finally Java has been put into JavaScript.

It is the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world, but how is it best defined? I refer of course to 'Cloud Computing' - the phenomenon that currently has as many definitions as there are squares on a chess-board. To try and narrow it down we bring here a round-up of some recent attempts to bring welcome precision where there risks being unnecessary vagueness. Enjoy!

If you take public money to buy art, you should make that art available to the public using the best, most efficient means possible. If you believe the public wants to subsidize the creation of commercial art-books, then get out of the art-gallery business, start a publisher and hit the government up for some free tax-money.