Peter Verster

Improving Business Productivity with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

15th June 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) is at the core of the revolutionary next generation of Microsoft’s collaboration platform: the 2007 Microsoft Office System. As such, it offers an integrated suite of server capabilities that can provide a significant improvement in organisational effectiveness. It does this by accelerating shared business processes and by facilitating information-sharing, tracking and retrieval across internal and organisational boundaries for better business insight

Joined by a speaker from Microsoft, I will on the day demonstrate how the new platform can help bussiness be more porductive. Drawing inspriration from the white paper written by Bill Gates in 2005 themed The New World of Work 

Microsoft Event

18th February 2007

On the 2nd of March 2007 I'll be speaking at a public event at Microsoft Edinburgh. The aim of the talk will be to introduce Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 known as MOSS to the members of the public sector. I'll focus on general topics such as collaboration and more advanced topics such as Windows Workflow Foundation, Business Processes with InfoPath Forms, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Records Management. Fellow speaker Mark Harrison will also be present.

The need to Respond

27th November 2006

Businesses operate in a global, rapidly changing environment. They have to respond to emerging markets and new opportunities and the appearance of competing products and services. For this reason software, an essential part of almost all business operations, needs to be developed or adapted quickly to take advantage of new opportunities and respond to competitive pressures. Over the next few weeks I will explore the options available in the form of products that does have an impact and provides an edge to businesses. Find Part 1 of a series of articles I hope would illustrate these  on my blog.

SharePoint Excel Services

26th November 2006

Excel Services is brand new addition to the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server(MOSS) family and provides users with a server version of the much loved Microsoft Excel. It does provide some significant new features such as scalability, zero footprint client usage through web-based UI and a Web Services API for integration with applications.

This new technology puts power into the hands of the business user, giving them the opportunity to define business rules and deploying them as part of enterprise applications. Developers now have the opportunity to focus on the problem at hand rather than developing yet another User Interface for the end user to make sense of.

Extensibility comes with some surprisingly interesting “if we can’t beat them join them” concepts. Data integration to external sources not confined to the Microsoft product stack can be easily integrated into a Business Intelligence Application while problems better solved in code can be integrated through the use of User Defined Functions (UDF). Finally the Excel Services server components are scalable and the rendering and calculation engines can be separated and deployed into a load balanced environment.

See a discussion of the basics in the following Article

Windows SharePoint Services vs Public Folders

18th February 2007

Exchange 12 has launched and after seeing the demo I have to say I’m pretty impressed, talking mailboxes and all. However the evil that is Public Folders will be supported for the next 10 years, most of my clients are replacing it with Windows SharePoint Services v3 (WSS), or the 2007 edition. This seems to be the correct thing to do as the functionality is similar and does not require a client like Outlook to make these available.  The first step to do this is to enable document libraries to receive email in WSS. This is not as easy as one might think especially if you have Exchange 5.5 floating around. I have however created a simple guide to do this configuration in the following article.