SharePoint 2007 in October?

I know this is not news to the well connected, but after the recent announcement on the delay of Office and Vista, I thought this CNET article was interesting. CNET is stating Jeff Raikes is still committed to delivering Office 2007 (includes Office SharePoint Server) in October of this year. The consumer business has to wait until Vista is released in January.

http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-6054088.html?part=rss&tag=6054088&subj=news

I was in Redmond this week attending Office Developer Conference 2006 where Steve Sinofsky co-presented with Bill Gates as keynote. Steve spoke as if he was leading the Office team. Ironic that he was walking around the conference knowing the next day he would be announced as taking over the Vista group. I didn't even hear a whisper before the announcement. I guess I'm just a small IT fish in a big Microsoft ocean.

Notes from Office Developer Conference 2006 Part 1

Today was the last day of the Office Developers Conference 2006 which covered mainly the next version of Office - Office 2007. I will comment on what I learned from sessions in a future post but want to comment on an Ask the Expert's lunch session with Gurdeep Singh Pall. Gurdeep is the Corporate VP of the new Unified Communications Group. With the conference not under NDA, I can share what Gurdeep had to say.

Gurdeep talked about Real-time collaboration and focused on Communicator and LCS. He even talked about the next version of Communicator and LCS. He gave us a couple statistical and personal tidbits I found interesting including:

• 7 out of 10 phone calls at work go to voicemail.
• The LCS growth trajectory is higher than Exchange.
• Microsoft's RTC investment is double that of the next version of Exchange
• Sales teams don't know how to sell the value of telephony because they are never in the office having that need.
• Calling people on a cell phone is an intrusive and many times inappropriate action. For example a sales person could be in an important meeting with a customer and gets interrupted by a phone call. Better presence functionality will alleviate that issue.

Gurdeep discussed how a user will be able to start an IM thread from an email using embedded presence. This can be done in Office 2003. In the new version, when you use the "send to email" function of the next Communicator, metadata will be added to the IM history thread email that will tie it back to the email thread. Fantastic.

He spent alot of time on AJAX that will allow developers to add the presence gumdrop to .Net applications and web applications without requiring office or communicator to be installed locally. The future version of LCS will provide each LCS user their own "presence document". This is an XML file where the user can ACL their presence effectively allowing the user to show different levels of presence to different contacts. There were 2 other sessions on RTC and Office 2007. I hope to share that information in a future posting.

Office Communicator Issues with Vista Feb CTP

Somebody was nice to enough to respond to a call for help on Blogcastrepository regarding issues with Office Communicator installing on the latest build of Vista.

The "hack" requires disabling User Account Protection (UAP) which seems to be causing quite a ruckus in installing applications on Vista. I have pasted the meat of the solution below for convenience.

1. Press WinKey (the flag key on your keyboard) + R and type secpol.msc. (Without the quotes).
2. If asked to permit Microsoft Management Console to run, allow it.
3. In the Local Security Settings window, in the left hand pane, navigate to Security Settings, Local Policies, Security Options.
4. In the pane to the right, scroll all the way to the bottom.
   Set the first two User Account Protection items to No Prompt, and Disabled on the remaining three items.
5. Close the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), and if you are asked to save the settings for Console1, press No.
6. Reboot or log off and log back in to enforce the new settings; or alternatively open an elevated Command Prompt and type gpupdate /force (without the quotes), and then press Enter.
   
   We had to reboot the machine as the gpupdate /force did not work for us.