July 2007 - Posts

• Partner Conference Day -1

  After a landing I'd rather forget, which might actually be a good one in Denver (lucky I recently learned that modern passenger jets are designed to land at up a to 45 degree angle to the runway!), we arrived in Denver last night (depending on where you are). Today was pre-partner-conference-event-day (I'm pretty sure there is a catchy acroynom, I'm just not sure what it is!). Today was a day of meetings and MS Partner 101 - I think that means I am officially assimilated! We had a good meeting with several key members of the Microsoft Information Worker Partner Team, which was great - very synergistic (if that is a real word) with what our philosophy around SharePoint and Office is. And then a fairly indepth look at what the value that Microsoft adds in terms of an organisation to be partnered with - there were actually some surprising results here in terms of rankings in market share and growth. After which in the midst of several thousand Partner (approx 7,000 I think) we ran into Bjarne. About 48 hours of travel between us - but only 6 degrees of separation. Then, after a rest (read: email check) it was off to the welcome reception, shortly followed by the Australian Welcome reception and drinks and a free (possible hijacked) Limo ride around the sights of Denver! Looking forward to the sessions tomorrow, especially the one on MOSS Search...   Posted Jul 10 2007, 05:20 PM by adrh with no comments Filed under: MOSS SharePoint Partner Conference

• The Dark Side? MOSS on a MacBook Pro!

  I may as well admit it, I have been seduced by the power of the Dark Side (that should generate the 5,911 Google hit for that phrase and maybe knock Google off the top few spots in Live Search! ). After much research I decided on one of the new MacBook Pro's as my new laptop for work. I've never been a fan partly because of the proprietory (near predatory) nature of Apple, and partly because of the price. However, in my research I discovered that the new ones are fast (mine is Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM and 160GB Hard Disk), light (about .5 kgs lighter than similar spec'd notebooks), pretty standard (SATA drives, DDR2 RAM), can run any OS you want (using Bootcamp, Virtualized with VMWare Fusion or Parallels). On to the SharePoint bit - I installed bootcamp on MAC OS, created the drivers disk, ran the Windows install wizard, put in the Vista DVD, 10-15 minutes later put in the Bootcamp drivers disk (created at step 2) and voila VISTA on a Mac, complete with all peripherals (including the iSight camera which surprised me!). I won't go into details, but being sad about the fact that 32-bit Vista would only see 3GB of my 4GB, I tried 64-bit Vista which was NOT so good - drivers didn't all work. I suspect/hope that the final release of Bootcamp might fix that tho... Next step, installed Virtual Server 2005, copied over my images and then started them up (note the use of 'them'). I ran 2 MOSS servers (one domain controller with AD) AND played a little Halo 2 (eval) at 1440x900 just to see if the machine was up to it - it was. So, I'm off the the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference next week in Denver complete with shiny new Mac! I hope they let me in (I'll take some kiddy stickers to cover the logo just in case - although it'll take more than that to disguise it)! Oh, and just in case this feels in any way like a review (It's not meant to!) - My opinions do not reflect those of my blog host, SharePoint Experts.   Posted Jul 05 2007, 12:11 PM by adrh with 4 comment(s) Filed under: SharePoint MacBook