Posted by: kurtsh | August 24, 2005

FORBES: “Microsoft Exchange is king of email, a market Lotus Notes once dominated”

FYI although I’m sure that this is no surprise to many of you, considering the trend has been against Notes progressively over the last 5 years.

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Forbes Magazine:  Market Trends – More Bad News For Lotus Notes
http://www.forbes.com/intelligentinfrastructure/2005/08/23/lotus-microsoft-email-cz_dl_0823lotus.html

The past few years have been rough for IBM’s Lotus Notes e-mail and collaboration program. And now there is more bad news.

Two top market research firms, Gartner and IDC, have published new reports showing IBM (nyse: IBM – news – people ) lost yet more e-mail market share to Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ) in 2004.

Both research firms now say Microsoft Exchange is king of e-mail, a market Notes once dominated with more than a 60% share.

IDC says sales of Exchange grew 23% in 2004, to $950 million, while Notes sales grew 5% to $745 million. By the end of 2004, Exchange held 51% of the market, versus 40% for Notes, IDC says. That’s a wider gap than in 2003, when IDC estimated Exchange held a 47% market share versus 43% for Notes.

Gartner estimates Exchange now has a 48% market share versus 45.2% for Notes.

The Gartner statistic is a tough one to accept for Notes fans, who have been clinging to Gartner’s last survey, which showed Notes still holding a slim lead in 2003, with a 46% share versus 44.2% for Exchange.

Until recently, Notes spin doctors were still touting that 2003 Gartner figure to refute other reports showing Microsoft taking the lead. For years Notes’ most fervent supporters (mostly consultants who make a living installing and maintaining Notes systems) have insisted Microsoft was not gaining ground, and some even claimed Microsoft was bribing analysts.
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…more at source.
http://www.forbes.com/intelligentinfrastructure/2005/08/23/lotus-microsoft-email-cz_dl_0823lotus.html

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Posted in Computers and Internet

Posted by: kurtsh | August 22, 2005

PDC 2005 Industry Strategy Day – Financial Services

Invitation: PDC 2005 Industry Strategy Day – Financial Services

Please join us for the PDC 2005 Industry Strategy Day on Monday, September 12th (the day before PDC 2005 officially starts). 

This event will focus on application development and architecture topics specific to the Financial Services Industry.  The goal is to provide insight on addressing the challenges facing the industry with Microsoft’s current and future wave of technologies, and to foster community collaboration among members of the financial services community.  The event will be delivered by Microsoft and customers driving innovation in the Finance industry.   

Lunch and registration start at 11:00am, and sessions run from 12:00pm to 6:00pm.

This event is FREE to registered attendees of PDC.  Please see the below details for registration instructions.

Date and Time:

Monday, September 12, 2005
11:00am – 12:00pm    Registration and Lunch
12:00pm – 6:00pm      Industry sessions

 

Location:
Los Angeles Convention Center

 

Registration:

You can register for this event during the PDC registration process.  Please contact me for a special RSVP code beforehand.  Simply connect to http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc, and follow the instructions to start registration, and enter the RSVP code.  If you have already registered, please send an email to me with your registration confirmation number.
 

 

PDC Industry Strategy Day Agenda:

(Session descriptions are at the end of this invitation)

 

Start
 End
 Session
 
11:00 AM
 12:00 PM
 Lunch/Registration
 
12:00 PM
 1:00 PM
 General Session– Business & Technical Trends in Financial Industry
 
1:00 PM
 1:15 PM
 Break
 
1:15 PM
 2:45 PM
 Enabling Software Infrastructure in Financial Services – Entity Aggregation, Service Orientation, Workflow
 
2:45 PM
 3:00 PM
 Break
 
3:00 PM
 4:30 PM
 Building the Integrated Environment – Creating a reusable framework for consuming infrastructure and data
 
4:30 PM
 4:45 PM
 Break
 
4:45 PM
 6:00 PM
 User Experiences for Financial Services –SmartClients today and in the future
 

Transportation:

For your convenience, complimentary shuttle service will be available daily between PDC05 Conference Hotels and the Los Angeles Convention Center. The shuttle schedule will be provided at the hotel’s front desk.

Space is limited. Please register early if you would like to attend.

 
Event Session Details:

General Session – Business & Technical Trends in Financial Industry

Key industry leaders will share their views on some of the challenges facing financial services and the architectural approaches for addressing them in their strategic IT initiatives.

Session 1: Enabling Software Infrastructure

This session will cover the architecture and enabling Microsoft Technologies in addressing the industry’s biggest challenges (Data Aggregation, Channel Integration, Automation, Compliance, etc.) and delivering a common reusable software infrastructure.

Session 2: Building the Integrated Environment

How do you build an integrated environment and leverage existing infrastructure, standards, messaging and data while enabling new capabilities like collaboration, automation and live communications?  In this session, you will learn how to leverage your existing and future investments to build a reusable infrastructure for driving new scenarios in Banking & Trading.

Session 3: User Experiences for Financial Services

This session will highlight the efficiencies gained by using Smart Client technologies and new frameworks to improve the Financial Services Associate’s experience and productivity.  You can learn how the Composite Application Block and Customer Care Framework along with Office, Windows Forms and Avalon will allow for very rich and productive applications to be delivered to Call Centers, Trading Floors, Insurance Agents and others providing differentiating value in the industry.

 

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Posted in Event

Posted by: kurtsh | August 22, 2005

INFO: What’s new with Deployment in “Windows Vista”

The link below points to a nice synopsis of the deployment enhancements in Windows Vista:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/deploy/default.mspx

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Posted in Uncategorized

Posted by: kurtsh | August 19, 2005

HOWTO: Get software donated to your 509.3c-filed non-profit organization

A long time ago, Microsoft used to make donations to non-profit organizations and schools that needed things like raffle prizes or software for special projects.

The problem was that after a while, I was told that some of this software that was donated was used for purposes other than what was permitted by our contribution guidelines.  In other cases, I heard that our contributions got us in trouble with certain other organizations that "competed" with the non-profits we’d contributed to.  There was a lot of petty politics that made the process of ‘giving’ depressing.  I’m sure a lot of other corporations have run into the same problem.  We ended up HALTING all formal corporate donations to non-profit organizations because of the issues involved.  That’s the bad news.

The good news is that an organization called Compumentor in San Francisco came along and acted as a central hub for issuing donations from companies like Symantec, Cisco, Intuit, Adobe, Business Objects, Macromedia, Lotus, BEA, Verifone, ULead and of course Microsoft.  They manage who gets what, while corporations simply contribute to Compumentor’s stock of technology to donate.  This provides the necessary separation between the non-profits and the corporations that wish to donate to them.

So if you have a non-profit organization and would like to get our products (or other technology) at a discount that would be palatable to a non-profit’s budget, and you have a readily available 509.3c filed (official non-profit status filing with the government) then all you need to do is go to:

http://www.techsoup.org

There you will find a way to get technology donated, including our products.

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Posted in Computers and Internet

Posted by: kurtsh | August 19, 2005

BETA: Exchange Server 2003 SP2 – Community Technology Preview Now Available

SP2 will offer a huge leap forward in mobility and security capabilities and customers and partners can now download a pre-release evaluation for testing purposes.  This is an unsupported release that should only be used in lab or testing environments. 

DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DB3813C5-B0FA-4230-813B-902ACA775ADA&displaylang=en

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Posted in Beta

Posted by: kurtsh | August 19, 2005

VIDEO: “The Making of Virtual Earth”

Check out this video that discusses how we made the Virtual Earth site at http://virtualearth.msn.com.

VIDEO: http://www.virtualearthinfo.com/video.asp

 

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Posted in Computers and Internet

Posted by: kurtsh | August 19, 2005

HOWTO: Blog with Microsoft Word on MSN Spaces

I want to draw a line in the sand.  Some people don’t know that you can write Blog entries in Microsoft Word using WordMail in Outlook and send your entry to your MSN Spaces blog.  This is the easiest way to post blog entries using the HTML writing capabilities and the error correction facilities of Word. 
 
It’s actually really simple.  Just use WordMail in Outlook and send an email to: Username.secretword@spaces.msn.com where Username is your sign in name on MSN Spaces and SecretWord is the word you set in the Settings portion of the Administrative page of your MSN Spaces blog.
 
So start blogging, dammit!  It’s free and works great!

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Posted in Computers and Internet

Posted by: kurtsh | August 19, 2005

RANT: My life on MSN Spaces

Y’know, I like MSN Spaces.  It’s a free, simple way for me to blog.  And I’m not really subject (sort of) to the critiquing of the monitors that lord over the poor individuals on http://blogs.technet.com where saying the wrong word can cause a reprimand.  (Take a look at the number of blogs that haven’t posted in ages and the last post reads, "I have moved my blog to MSN Spaces and will no longer be posting to this space."  (And to think I alomst moved my blog to the corporate blog servers!)
 
That being said, there’s some REALLY obnoxious things missing from MSN Spaces.  Here’s a small list of things that they really should at least be beta testing because it’s not terribly hard to implement.
 
1) SEARCH:  Where the heck is the search bar for my blog?  I attempted to use the "&powertoy=sandbox" backdoor feature of MSN Spaces (read my blog about MSN Spaces Powertoys for more info) to try to implement my own search bar in my blog but to no avail.  The amount of code necesssary to implement the feature exceeds the maximum characters allowed for HTML inclusion within the blog.  The lack of a search make no sense to me being that it would encourage the use of MSN Search.  Seems like a really sad oversight.
 
2) MAPS:  Why doesn’t MSN Spaces already provide geographical mapping of my blog?  Many people use feedmap.net or other geo-blog location services to show people where my blog is been written.  I would think that this would be an obvious feature considering it would encourage the usage of http://virtualearth.msn.com.  I could also use the mapping technology to identify locations that I’ve visited or paths/routes that I’ve taken.  Again, a terrible oversight.
 
3) REVIEWS:  Why can’t I create a blog entry and automatically deem it a "review" which would allow me to identify a rating, the type of review it is (restaurant, wine, dance club, etc.) and a pointer to a picture of the location.  Places like http://www.realtravel.com have made their entire existence on this feature – I don’t understand why this would be that hard to implement.
 
Apparently, I’m not the only one that believes there needs to be some improvement in MSN Spaces:  The Dev Manager of MSN Spaces blogged about some of his personal wishes.

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Posted in Computers and Internet

Posted by: kurtsh | August 18, 2005

BETA: MSN Roaming Favorites

Sign up for this Beta Program and you may be selected to be among the first to preview a brand new MSN Toolbar feature that lets you manage, search and access your Internet Explorer favorites, even when you are away from your PC! This new feature takes navigating the web to the next level.
 
The Roaming Favorites Add-In to the MSN Toolbar lets you create a centrally stored list of your favorite websites. You can synchronize the Internet Explorer favorites from your primary PC or simply drag and drop URLs into the Roaming Favorites navigation pane.
 
We have made searching for favorites easier. You can add tags to your favorites to make them more discoverable and descriptive. The Roaming Favorites Search feature allows you to conduct a word-wheel search on the URL or tag to locate your favorites in seconds.
 
Once you have your Roaming Favorites set up, you can access them from any MSN Toolbar enabled PC. For your privacy, you will need to sign in with your Passport ID.
 
The beta is open to a limited number of participants only. After you have signed up, you will be asked to take a short survey to qualify for the beta program. We hope you will join us in this exciting opportunity to try Roaming Favorites and send us feedback that will ensure this Toolbar feature provides you and other users a great Roaming Favorites experience!
 
Please follow the steps below to apply for joining this beta program
Please note: you must follow these directions.  Using a personal or previously assigned BetaID will NOT grant you access to this survey.
 
1.  Go to http://beta.microsoft.com
2.  Sign in with your Passport.
3.  Enter Guest ID: RoamFavs  (Note: the Guest ID is case sensitive)
4.  Complete the nomination survey.
 
If you are selected as a participant, you will be sent a Welcome e-mail in approximately ten days. This e-mail will contain your unique BetaID along with information on how to download and install the software.

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Posted in Beta

Posted by: kurtsh | August 18, 2005

EVENT: Microsoft Webcast on Software Assurance changes

Okay – Microsoft is going to be making some pretty cool changes to Software Assurance, so if you’re a customer of mine and you want to hear about them via Webcase on Sept 15th, sign up at the URL below.

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Microsoft Announces Major Software Assurance Program Enhancements

Microsoft invites all customers and partners to attend one of four global webcasts live on September 15, 2005.  

Senior Microsoft executives will introduce several new technology, support, planning, and training benefits that will boost the value of your Microsoft software investment and improve the way IT professionals deploy and manage technology. Register now for your webcast.

 

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Posted in Uncategorized

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