Category: sharepoint

Posted on

Microsoft BPOS: Sharepoint Online 2010


Sharepoint 2010 is due for release around April time 2010 and the Online version will become available through BPOS around September time I do believe.

When the 2010 version of Sharepoint (and Exchange & OCS) hit online, they will be SO much more fully features than the current 2007 versions; they will in fact be almost the same! This will be especially notable with Sharepoint as their is a large disparity at the moment:

Read Comparison of Sharepoint Server & Sharepoint Online

Sharepoint Online 2010 will include all the Business Intelligence (BI) aspects such as:

  • Excel Services
  • Forms Server
  • Dashboards
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)

and more 🙂 As a BPOS Partner this is great news…the BI features are becoming more interesting to more people and not having these features can be quite a big barrier to Sharepoint Online adoption. That’ll all change next year which is great news 🙂

Licensing

Wave 14 will bring some changes to the BPOS licensing too…there will be Standard and Enterprise USLS…just as there are for the on-premise CALs.

However, the split of features between the 2 will be decidedly different. The Enterprise CAL will include:

FAST Enterprise Search

There are also rumblings that it will include some part of, or ways of linking to, Microsoft’s Data Warehousing technology “Project Madison”. This would certainly fit with the BI capabilities inside Sharepoint…

I’ll be doing a post dedicated to Madison soon so keep your eyes peeled for that 🙂

This is all great news, for partners, customers and Redmond as, come H2 of 2010, Sharepoint Online will be a formidable challenger in the world of S+S/SAAS BI and should be pretty great. I, for one, am excited 🙂

Props to W Cornwill for the Britney pic!

Posted on

Microsoft Semblio


Microsoft Semblio is a new iteration of their development platform which utilises .NET and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and is specifically targeted towards the educational market.

Semblio can be used to create information rich, graphically engaging, immersive learning materials using a wide range of multimedia, all aimed at enhancing the learning experience for students (and indeed, the teaching experience for teachers!). As it is based on the .NET Framework:

“it works across software, services, and learning management systems.”

However, it isn’t just for developers. The Semblio assembly tool, which will ship with Office 2010, will:

“allow multiple content types to be combined into a single, rich, multimedia presentation, all in a single, familiar, and easy-to-use Microsoft Office-like application”

image

This has got something of a Web 2.0 “mashup” stle about it and will certainly be familiar and more engaging for students than more traditional methods. This next screenshot shows the kind of interactivity that can be expected:

Semblio screenshot1

Using the slider to increase/decrease the temperature and seeing the effects on the water…

Benefits:

This can either mean that schools will have the ability to create exciting learning materials in-house as well as making it easier for partners to create such materials too. You can:

  • Increase the value of your content by enabling educators to customize materials to their specific requirements.
  • Engage today’s students and foster exploratory learning with packaging and arrangement of dynamic, interactive, and rich instructional material.
  • Improve efficiency during content creation by enabling nontechnical subject matter experts to participate in the content creation process
  • Reduce the cost of going digital by creating your content once, then delivering it to all customers regardless of platform.

To me this looks like a great new addition to the Office suite of products and also a great addition to schools, for students and teachers alike. Having been on visits to various schools this year, it’s clear that they’re much more advanced that back in my day (!) and can sometimes rival corporations when it comes to technology adoption.

VLE’s (Virtual Learning Environments) such as Moodle, and products such as Sharepoint have made big changes to learning over the past few years; and I can see Semblio really making a mark. These interactive lesson modules delivered in Moodle accessed via Sharepoint would give a great experience for students at home/learning remotely.

I’d be interested to hear what people involved with Education think about this…be it students, teachers, IT managers, suppliers, coders etc 🙂

Get Started:

Download the Semblio SDK.

Download Visual Studio 2008

Get familiar Service pack 1 of .NET 3.5 platform

Get familiar with WPF

If you want to get more in-depth, grab the programmer’s guide here.

Other Links:

Semblio: How it works

Semblio Blog

Posted on

Licensing Sharepoint in Education


Microsoft licensing can often be a confusing subject and it is perhaps in the education arena where most confusion can occur, with it’s mix of staff, students, parents, connected yet separate academic bodies etc. I today saw a great post on Educational Sharepoint licensing that helps clear up some confusion and show the extras that Microsoft can offer.

The most basic schools licensing covers staff and students while at school, but you can also purchase separate “Student” CALs which cover them for access from non-school owned (I.e their own) PC’s and so access from home. Where students are covered in this way, the Sharepoint Server access is extended to the student’s parents/guardians without any extra licences being needed.

So a customer can prove that they are entitled to this right, they can download the “Parent/Guardian CAL grant letter” to keep in their records here.

Parent-Guardian CAL Letter.

This applies to licences purchased via Open Academic, Select Academic, Schools Agreement and Campus Agreement.

Another great benefit is the “External Connector Grant“. If an educational establishment has:

  1. A product for which an External Connector licence is available (Exchange, Windows Svr, Sharepoint etc) and
  2. Covered all faculty/staff with CALs and
  3. Covered all Student s with “Student Option” CALs too

then access rights will also be granted to:

  • Prospective Students
  • Alumni
  • Student/Staff at collaborating Academic and Government bodies

at no extra cost!

Again, a grant letter can be downloaded to prove entitlement to this benefit here:

External Connector Grant Letter

This benefit is available via Schools Agreements and Campus Agreements.

These are two excellent extra benefits that MS licensing provides that will certainly help make it easier and cheaper for schools to have a truly collaborative environment. However I do think MS need to do a better job at publicising things like this or, at least making sure all their Partners are fully aware of them but that said-it’s good to see that the benefits of MS volume licensing just keep coming 🙂

The source post on the MSDN Schools blog is here.

Website Powered by WordPress.com.