Thursday, October 28, 2010

Finally, Team System on the Cloud

A few Minutes ago, Brian Harry has just announced and demoed the Availability of the Team System as Service over Microsoft Cloud for renting. Think this will be of a great benefit for lots of small, and Medium ISVs that wont to invest in licensing, admin, and operations of a dedicated Team system installation.

Sunday, October 03, 2010

SharePoint 2010 leads the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2010, Microsoftians now in an even stronger position than before

Last September, 3, 2010 Gartner has released the new portals’ market report.

The great news was that SharePoint 2010 Leads the Magic Quadrant of Horizontal Portals; heading in this, IBM WebSphere portal, as well as Oracle Solutions. Microsoft SharePoint is a consideration in more Gartner portal inquiries — over 70% — than any other vendor.

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According to Gartner: The portal market continues to consolidate, with most enterprises focusing on a core set of strategic providers. Yet, emerging demands and technology disruptions are raising the bar for value, as well as opening opportunities for new approaches and new entrants.

The Report Summary said:

The field of viable portal vendors has narrowed considerably, dropping from more than 50 vendors in 2003 to fewer than a dozen in 2010. However, the consolidation of traditional portal vendors doesn't necessarily mean the commoditization of the market. In light of pressing business needs to improve the user experience across channels, and amidst the innovations of Web 2.0 and the cloud, making the right portal choice is more important than ever.

The major technology shifts toward Web 2.0, the cloud and business versus the IT influence are galvanizing the portal market. Portals provide a single, personalized point of access to relevant information, processes and people. They appeal to business leaders as a means to improve employee productivity and collaboration, extend business processes and applications to broader audiences, improve business visibility and responsiveness, engage and serve customers, and improve relationships and efficiency among value chain partners. More importantly than ever, portals appeal to end users overwrought with too many systems to log into and too much information. Enterprise portals unify the user experience, and provide relevancy and context across disparate applications. They provide a unified user experience by spanning across on-premises and cloud boundaries, as well as business and social boundaries. IT organizations need them more than ever to pull together and aggregate disparate information, exert control and ensure compliance, and scale their ability to agilely deliver these applications to the business and users.

Looking forward, the horizontal portal market will serve as an important foundation for the emerging user experience platform (UXP). Organizations are focusing on business-level issues, requiring better engagement of users across a widening range of devices and channels, and new vendors are entering the market with alternative approaches to accomplishing the portal proposition. As portals, user interfaces, and user interaction technologies and practices have proliferated, they have evolved into disconnected stovepipes. Portal products, mashup tools, rich Internet application (RIA) tools, Ajax solutions, Web content management and mobile application development tools all target their respective platforms effectively, but they require enterprise developers to create separate user interaction models and code bases — with few, if any, cross-platform capabilities. Vendors have started to address enterprise concerns with the convergence of these related technologies. The UXP provides integration of technologies used to deliver portals, mashups, RIAs, Ajax-enabled websites, Web content management and mobile applications. This integration can take the form of a set of separate, yet integrated, products (that may or may not be delivered as a suite) or a single product. Early examples of the UXP are largely derived from portal technology, and include Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle WebCenter along with Universal Content Management (UCM), and IBM's broadening WebSphere Portal with its related collaboration and content management portfolio, which is developing toward a more cohesive user experience platform.

The importance of portals and the future of UXP are not lost on vendors; enterprise vendors are using portals to promote their most-sweeping and most-critical agendas. Many of the vendors are using the portal to promote a far broader and deeper agenda, whether it's their developer platforms and tools, content management capabilities, databases and middleware, or enterprise applications. As an inherently cloud-friendly aspect of middleware, portals are also a fundamental vehicle for transitioning customers to the cloud. The portal choice is, therefore, critical to ensure that organizations can accomplish their business goals, while ensuring vendor independence and agility.

Organizations tend to make portal decisions based on a wide range of factors, including functionality, familiarity, price, interoperability, usability, momentum among customers and the IT ecosystem at large. As portals have evolved, basic portal functions, such as user management, personalization, content management and integration, have been extended and enhanced, and new capabilities, such as social computing, analytics and business process management, have been added to respond to subsequent customer demands.

Click here to Read the full, report

Friday, October 01, 2010

Cairo PDC10: First time in Egypt Brought to you by MS3arab, Compu Pharaohs, and Microsoft

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As a Microsoft Regional Director – ME , and a co-founder of MS3arab community as well as a Principal Technical Consultant of Compu Pharaohs, have used all my communications along with the support of Compu Pharaohs, and the cooperation with the Rocking MS3arab new community in order to bring the PDC10 first time to Cairo. If you will attend , you will be able to watch the Keynote of Steve Ballmer live. Go and register. Registration is free but Tickets are about to finish up.

http://cairopdc10.eventbrite.com/