Good insights into corporate blogging
Dave Pollard has a good introduction to corporate blogging, here. Dave’s work is consistency good and he also tends to get great comments which complement the posts.
Author: Steve Richards
Microsoft and RSS – a dream coming true
I have been writing about RSS for about a year now and my vision for RSS is highly congruent with Microsoft’s. However I have only learned that this is true today, as I have seen Microsoft’s RSS strategy unfold. Whilst I am not surprised by the announcement I am relieved as I truly believe that making RSS a subscription protocol that supports many different application types will revolutionise the way we work, and make all of our lives just so much easier.
I can see Microsoft themselves going wild and RSS enabling everything, especially everything in Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Portal Server search, Windows event logs, Exchange Email and Calendars, Exchange Public Folders, Windows File Systems etc etc and the opportunities for an event driven interface to a myriad of business applications is mind blowing. In addition Microsoft make a good point that our feeds will also be a great source of information to the machine learning software that runs on our PC’s and acts as virtual agents on our behalf on the Internet, and will be even more powerful if they actually track which feeds we read. The potential for agents that really help us prioritise the information overload will …
I love the graphics on this site
and its approachable feel. We corporate sorts can learn a lot.
Great interview on Longhorn
This is a great interview on Longhorn. Some bits I liked:
better security with application compatibility!
As you well know, most users on Windows XP run with administrative privileges, and this is because the system didn’t partition itself well. This is one of the legacies that were inherited from Windows 95. Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP all have the security built into them, but the problem is that in many of the applications that were designed to run on Windows 95, you have to relax the security in order for them to run, which meant that the people had to run as administrator. We’re just getting rid of all the user level classifications in Longhorn. We have shimming and other capabilities that we’ve done with our applications like file virtualization, registry virtualization and other characteristics that allow applications that want to write to administrative parts of the system to think they are writing to those parts, while all along keeping those parts isolated and virtualized to the instance of that application.
Search done right, like apple, I particularly like the fact that they are doing desktop search in a way that makes sense on the desktop, rather than …
Different technologies for Forms
This is a useful post on technologies for creating and capturing form data. Too many technologies of course. Interestingly no mention of OOo
Values
I recently came across the company AES. I don’t know much about them, but I was very impressed by their values. I wish more would emulate them! Most impressive they appear to actually live by them as well!
Fairness – We work with people in a way that’s fair and just. AES people intend to treat fairly our customers, suppliers, stockholders, governments, the communities in which AES operates, and other AES people.
Integrity – AES people strive to act with integrity. Our people accept responsibility for their actions, and are expected to act with integrity in all circumstances. They honor their commitments to customers, to partners, and to the shareholders who make the company’s efforts possible. They develop or access the right knowledge and skills to make informed, balanced decisions that advance the interests of the entire enterprise.
Social Responsibility – AES people strive in all cases to act in a socially responsible manner and believe that working to fulfill AES’s mission is one of the important ways to do this. In addition, we are committed to being involved and constributing corporate citizens in the communities we serve.
Fun – AES people desire that fellow employees and those with …
Presenting from my Treo
I will be getting a Treo 650 in 2 weeks time, I already have a personal 600, but this one will be provided by my company and will have wireless email, calendar and address book. I am really looking forward to it. I will also get to play with a Margi presenter-to-go kit, which should be fun, I have never been convinced of the benefits of presenting from a PDA, but it will be interesting to experiment.
One of the reasons I have always liked wireless email is that I always forget to sync my PDA’s, the only one that was ever up to date was my Backberry and it was never in its cradle and the only time it synced to the PC was during a SW upgrade.
Great utilities site
I recently refreshed my utilities by browsing through Scott’s great site strongly recommened. These are the ones I use:
- Notepad2 (Scite also uses the codebase) – A great text editor. First class CR/LF support, ANSI to Unicode switching, whitespace and line ending graphics and Mouse Wheel Zooming. A must. Here’s how to completely replace notepad.exe. Personally I renamed Notepad2.exe to “n.exe” which saves me a few dozen “otepad”s a day. Here’s how to have Notepad2 be your View Source Editor. Here’s how to add Notepad2 to the Explorer context menu.
- Windows Desktop Search – The betas were rough and tended to lock up, but the free final edition is tight. I can finally bring up a file almost as fast as I can think about it. One important note that sets it apart from Google Desktop Search is that the items appearing in the result window are first-class Explorer Items. Right click on them and you’ll not only have all your context menu extensions, but also Open Containing Folder.
- TaskSwitchXP and/or TopDesk – Two better ways to ALT-Tab and Task Switch in Windows. Don’t confuse TaskSwitchXP with the old PowerToy. This one is fast and powerful. …
Microsoft’s new XML formats, the power of the container model
In this post I explained that I, along with a few thousand others, was pretty excited about Microsoft’s XML format developments. I also pointed to Brian Jone’s blog which is proving to be a great recourse. At Tech ED Brian gave some demonstrations showing the power of the new format, stressing the benefits of the ZIP container format and the fact that different parts of a document are represented as different objects in the ZIP container. Read for yourself, or read on and see some of the examples which are pretty cool.
- Updating a diagram in a spec: I showed an example of taking a technical spec with an old diagram, and outside of Word I swapped it out with a more up to date one. The main purpose of this wasn’t to show that an end user would do that to their files, but instead to show that people could easily build solutions that push relevant pieces of content into files.
- Removing comments: Most people that manage collections of documents or deal with publishing documents have seen the problem that can occur with extra information in their files. I took an example of a whitepaper with a bunch …