Tag: microsoft S+S

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Embed YouTube in PowerPoint 2007


I now know how to embed YouTube clips into Powerpoint 2007 slides. It is amazingly easy and just as useful 🙂

Thanks to a tweet from @jamestutt which pointed me to this link I can now harness the power of YouTube in my presentations-just today I delivered one where this was a perfect fit.

How to embed YouTube into PowerPoint 2007:

Steve Clayton blogged about a brilliant video from CommonCraft that explains Software + Services very succinctly in less than 4 minutes, and I needed to create an internal S+S training presentation-so I used that. Initially I just had a link to the video on YouTube so the presentation was interrupted while it went off to the YouTube site, but now it’s all contained within the .pptx; giving me a much smoother, more professional looking session 🙂

Common Craft S+S Video:

I think this holds the record for the most links in one post!

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Microsoft BPOS-A first hand look


Today I was finally able to set up our test account for Microsoft BPOS and it was definitely worth the wait. I’ve not been playing around with it for long but already I’m highly impressed with the amount of features and how easy it is to use. All the most common options you will need, such as create site, add user, increase storage are contained in easy access menus and are pretty much exactly where you’d expect them to be 🙂

Within 5 minutes I’d added users to the system, created a new Sharepoint Site Collection and then added said users to the Sharepoint site…and I’m no Sharepoint Administrator! I then proceeded to add multiple documents to the Sharepoint site which was easy and very quick-just as quick as an on-premise solution as far as I can tell.

There are some things missing such as Excel Services, forms etc as well as the ability to run custom code, so it won’t fit everyone-but on the whole it covers what people need very well.

Moving on to Exchange, I’ve just signed in to OWA and without having to do any configuration either as a user or admin (other than setting the size of the mailbox), I’m up and running and firing emails off all over the show 🙂 

For business that want to run BPOS alongside their existing on-premise installations, it is very simple synchronize your Active Directory (AD) and/or Exchange Global Address Lists as well as migrating existing mailboxes across to Microsoft Exchange Online. These are all done via wizards and having seem them demonstrated at TVP, they’re pretty simple to use.

I’m very impressed with the user interface and the general “flow” of the entire BPOS suite site, from the perspective of both an admin and a user. My gallery of screenshots can be found here.

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I want to thank Hugh Mcleod and Steve Clayton for this great S+S diagram!

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SalesForce.com outage


Over at The Register, they have tell of a Salesforce.com outage that struck today and left over 900,000 people unable to access their apps and data for about an hour today, starting 12:00 pm PST (so about 20:00 GMT).

While it perhaps hasn’t affected many UK companies, having that many business users, particularly in the States offline, “paralyzes a small fraction of the world’s economy” to quote El Reg. In these tough economic times to have almost 1 million man hourswasted in a day (and that’s just the directly affected number, the knock on could well increase that number significantly) isn’t a particularly great advert for SAAS.

It does however help strengthen Microsoft’s strategy of Software PLUS Services (S+S), rather that Software AS a Service (SAAS). Microsoft’s S+S is based on users having some software installed on-premise and then complementing that with online services so if a Salesforce.com style outage was to hit Microsoft-customers would have a much better chance to stay productive. Perhaps they wouldn’t have access to ALL the features but some are definitely better than none!

See my first impressions of using Microsoft’s S+S BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) here.

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