Look alive. Here comes a buzzard.

In case you missed it, Microsoft recently announced that it will begin charging $1.50 to download beta versions of Office System.  According to them they are doing this to help offset the bandwidth cost for the large number of downloads they have received.

“Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times…That’s 500 percent more than what was expected.  The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers.”

Did you catch that?  500% more than expected?  3 million downloads for a beta?  The fact that there is that much interest in the market for the next wave of Office System is a great thing for folks in our field.  I believe this release of Office and all that goes along with it (SharePoint etc) will be a huge one for Microsoft and for its partners.  There seems to be a lot of genuine interest in the market and that can only be good for implementers, consultants, and developers specializing in the technology.

Oh, one more thing.  I believe MS when it says that this charge is there to offset the bandwidth cost.  In my mind, charging $1.50 is the same as charging $3.00 or $5.00.  Someone who is willing to spend $1.50 is just as willing to spend $5.00 to download.  So if MS were out to make money I believe they would have charged a little more than $1.50.

If any of you are going to be at TechReady3 tomorrow I’ll see you there.  I will be delivering a talk on Enterprise Content Management in MOSS 2007 at 1pm.  I will be co-presenting with Microsoft on a solution I helped architect and develop for MSN internal operations.

Okay. I’ve been using IE 7 for a couple weeks now and I have to say that MS has totally gone overboard with all the security BS. Every damn 5 minutes I’m getting another little pop up asking me if I really want to display some content. Here’s where I think MS is missing the mark:

1. When content is blocked and I want to know what content and why, all I get is some generic BS help content from MS about why security is a good thing and the Info Bar is helping me stay secure. It gives me virtually no information that helps me decide whether or not I want to take the big risk and show the blocked content.Just this evening I was browsing around this site and all of a sudden none of the images or CSS would download. They were being blocked by IE. But when I tried to figure out why, IE didn’t give me any information. Knowing that this site is safe and that obviously the images and CSS were being blocked (probably because their loaded on the fly or something) I figured it was fine to let them download. But someone who isn’t a web dev or computer savvy individual likely won’t know this.
2. Which brings me to my next point. Moving the decision about what is and isn’t safe to the user is not necessarily a good thing. I can envision my dad browsing to a web site and IE basically saying “uh… hey dude. some stuff here doesn’t seem that safe. think i should download it?”. And my dad is saying “why are you asking me?! you’re the computer – i don’t know about this stuff!”.

See when IE starts asking you about every little thing you just start to get desensitized to it and accept everything (at least I do). I mean when I get warnings about blocked content from sites I KNOW are safe (like wordpress for example) it makes me think that I can probably go ahead and display blocked content from other sites too. “Nothing bad happened when I loaded the content over there, it will probably be fine here too.”

It just seems to me that MS shouldn’t be asking me to make these decisions. You’re the computer. You tell me what’s safe and what isn’t.

Oh – one more thing. I got this warning today. Priceless. (click the image to see it full size)

Like most SharePoint implementers out there I typically like to modify the Site Directory for my customers. I find that the out of the box options for Region and Division are pretty lacking and really fall short of how my clients want to organize and search for SharePoint sites. Luckily, MOSS 2007 makes it quite easy to customize these options. Here’s how. Continue Reading »

Some of you may have heard that the office schedule has moved back again.  Both beta 2 technical refresh and RTM dates have been pushed back due to feedback and testing during the beta 2 period.  I actually happen to think this is a good thing and I am glad that Microsoft is making quality a priority.  I would hate to see what will otherwise be a huge release for Microsoft get mired down in complaints of stability and quality.  I am perfectly happy to wait a bit longer.

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