Author: Arné Klopper

Zlatan posted a very interesting post about Sharepoint and by using Google Trends, how they are already positioned very well amongst the industry leaders.

So if you are interested in Sharepoint, head on over to Zlatan’s blog and have a read on his latest post.

First with Tahoe, then SharePoint 2003 since its release hasn’t really raised too many eyebrows worldwide. As brilliant as they were as web content management platforms, they found it a bit harder to compete and make proper presence in Enterprise Content Management market, and be part of the revolutionising enterprises and bringing Enterprise 2.0 conceptual architectures.

However, ever since the release of SharePoint 2007 Microsoft has been galloping into Enterprise Content Management market and taking over lion shares of customers from known and established brands such as OpenText Livelink, IBM Filenet, EMC Documentum, Oracle ECM (formerly known as Stellent) etc. Companies with more foresight, such as OpenText and EMC, formed stronger partnerships with Microsoft in this space. For example OpenText’s official strategy was to position their flagship ECM offering Livelink with SharePoint 2007 as a front end, saying that “…well Microsoft controls the front end of everything and there is no reason to compete with them in that space…..”. OpenText was also the first one to certify SharePoint 2007 as DoD 5015.2 compliant simply by putting behind Livelink’s powerful Records Management offering.

Clever strategy to secure companies dependency on crucial OpenText technology well in time before the expected “BOOM” of SharePoint Server 2007.

All they were really doing is buying more time as Microsoft planned to make their backend offering just as powerful.

Besides better than usual Document and Records Management, Collaboration and Social Networking functionality Initial Enterprise offering of SharePoint Server 2007 featured InfoPath Forms Services as Electronic Forms offering (ECM people will know what I mean by this) and Excel Services as rich analytical, information gathering and reporting platform. Soon came integration with SQL 2005 Reporting Services (Service Pack 2 I believe) to further bolster reporting capabilities of SharePoint 2007 solutions and give Reporting Services more dimensions to work in (Collaboration, Workflows/Processes, Alerts, Better controlled Security and Distribution etc).

Before you knew it DoD 5015.2 compliance for SharePoint 2007 Records Management came out eliminating further dependency on being complemented by more established platforms to provide full enterprise solutions.

Last two updates have actually put SharePoint in front of the pack.

By incorporating PerformancePoint Server 2007 (now known as PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint), state of the art platform that takes users beyond Business Intelligence and plunges them into new age of Performance Management. This offering is not yet rivalled by any single ECM offering on the market although rival Performance Management offerings exist, separate to their ECM offerings, such as IBM Cognos, Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System (formaly Hyperion) and SAP Business Objects.

Dave Duarte posted a post titled Top Tips for Living in unpredictable times.

an extract from his post:

Here’s Taleb’s Top 10 life tips, drawn from Appleyard’s article:

1. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2. Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3. It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5. Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6. Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7. Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8. Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9. Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW, but you need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10. Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Well, thanks to Chris this morning I came to watch these two videos, which shows the state of crime in South Africa. As some of you know I am very frustrated with the current governments’ performance and acceptance that there actually is a problem with crime,service delivery and total lack of governance.

On the second video mr. Jacob Zuma (these days called ShowerHead) also gives his comments and states that the media is just exaggerating the whole saga.

I’ve previously also posted about the lack of service delivery and maintenance facing South African citizens.

When you drive towards Krugersdorp form a northern direction on the R28/N14 into town, you’ll see this advertisement board overhanging the road.

From a far it looks quite standard, but lets have a closer look and see what our friends at the ANC are doing.

According to standard municipal bylaws you need permission from the council to advertise your boards on street poles etc. to reduce pollution, and sometime your poster even need stamps on.

Well, the ANC don’t care about that !

They decided … why don’t we just stick our campaign posters on poles and power boxes all over town, much easier to spend money on cardboard posters.

Like their leader, they will probably get away with it anyway.

Can’t they look at the opposition parties and learn from them, their posters are neat and correctly placed according to law.

(look just behind the lamp pole… ha there he is one the power box as well)

There is only one truely South African word for this … eish !

UPDATE: Apparently the council has a system where you pay them a certain amount for each poster you put up, and when your period you’ve paid for is up, you go back take off the posters and recycle etc. and you then receive a large amount back from the council when you have disposed of the poster correctly, iow not leaving it on the lamp poles.  This to me is a very good system for handling this, but again we have a problem with governance.

Today marks the Birthday of Dr Seuss and Google also celebrated.

I work for a company called DVT, which is short for Dynamic Visual Technologies, we are part of the DTH group which is listed on the AltX.

This afternoon I received my weekly iWeek, and quickly scanned through the articles and came apon an advertorial by DVT….

Our company has purchased almost a three page advertorial for this episode.  One of the drives at our company is getting new talent as we are embarking on a wide variety of new projects and we need some skills!  So if you reckon you’ve got the dynamic edge, comment on this post and I’ll send you details.

The drive involved all of us in Gauteng having our pictures placed in a matrix of pictures with some gaps for YOU the prospective employee to fit in.  You can see my mug on the second row, fourth from the right.  I couldn’t supply a high quality image of myself in due time and they took pictures of me, whilst being busy a few hours into a large implementation, so I totally do not look too well, but at least I’m in iWeek!

Here is a bit closer view of my mug.

So if your looking for a new exciting challenging oppurtunity please comment and I’ll send your detials through.

At last, after three days of trying to get my new VPS setup correctly with Apache, PHP, MySQL and Subversion, at last it is completed.

On the second day of my “migration” I experienced problems with Apache where it ran out of memory, as a result of a memory leak.  I’ve never spend so much time Googling for answers to a problem I have.

So I’ve moved over all my websites and this blog, and the new server is just running beutifully!  Clean, and running like ‘n well oiled beach babe!

During this week I’ve catched up all my Linux skills again, and feel almost 133t agai. 😉

Earth Hour 2009 is a global initiative by the World Wide Fund for Nature which acts as a worlwide call to action to every individual, business and community to take a stand against Climate Change. To show your support, sign up now and commit to switching off your lights for one hour on Saturday, March 28th at 8:30pm. Originating in Sydney, Australia in 2007, the Earth Hour initiative proved more than worthwhile when it witnessed 2 million people coming together to switch off their lights for one hour for this vital cause.

Following on from this success, 2008 saw an estimated 50 million people taking part. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square, all stood in darkness, as symbols of hope for a cause that grows more urgent by the hour.

More info on Earth Hour SA site

Some nice tips given by the Gmail Team:

A couple weeks back we launched Multiple Inboxes, an experimental feature in Gmail Labs that you can use to customize the different “inboxes” you see in one view when you log into Gmail.

If you forward all your work or school email to Gmail, you can use Multiple Inboxes to see your two accounts separately within the same browser window. Here’s how:

1. Turn on Multiple Inboxes from the Labs tab under Settings.
2. Set up a filter to auto-archive all mail sent to your work or school address.
3. Customize one of your multiple inboxes to show mail sent to your other address. To do this, go to the Multiple Inboxes tab under Settings and set up one of the panes to search for mail sent to your other address.

4. (Optional) Use a “custom from” address so that replies will be sent from Gmail but as if they’re from your other account. This way, your coworkers or classmates won’t know the difference.

I use Multiple Inboxes to keep track of email sent to my college alumni address which I forward to Gmail. I used to filter, label, and auto-archive all these messages (my alumni frisbee team listserve gets tons of mail), but found that I rarely looked at the relevant labels. Now with a separate “inbox” I can see them easily without cluttering my primary inbox

Read this interesting post/article on InfoWorld last night about virtualization and it’s role in the enterprise, and if it would be an advantage to your company.

Though perhaps overhyped in some circles as a cure-all, virtualization is worth exploring to free up datacenter space, reduce costs, and maybe even keep your company up and running
Virtualization has been hailed by many as the cure to all our woes. Wouldn’t that be nice? Alas, it has its limitations — though it may do a whole lot more than you imagined it could.

Before we can really center on the benefits, we need to resolve some of the misconceptions. For example, perhaps you think of server virtualization as a great way to create savings by reducing the amount of hardware you need.

[ For the latest virtualization news and views, please check out David Marshall’s Virtualization Report. ]

Now, before you nod your head in agreement, keep in mind that that last statement may not be accurate. Imagine reducing 10 servers down to one. You might think that this results in obvious savings. But placing 10 virtualized systems onto one machine comes with a hefty price tag all its own. To calculate true ROI (return on investment), you have to first consider the cost for that solitary server, which has to be maxed out with processor/RAM/disk features. It should have a solid set of storage virtualization (mirrored drives, RAID, and so forth) and, in true business continuity form, should be replicated with data protection and disaster recovery in mind.

Read more here