Top News Stories
Collaboration is the Key (redOrbit)
Have you ever watched a teenager carry on multiple conversations on Facebook? Younger people seem to instinctively know the value of pooling resources. They tend to share information more easily than their elders do. At a corporate level, working together toward a common goal is called collaboration. The concept is gaining ground among successful companies, which see it as the cornerstone to improving business process and attaining business goals. Those goals could be anything from completing an annual budget to building an airplane.

Profile: Social Media with Awareness Networks (CMS Wire)
The Social Media industry seems to get just a little bit bigger every hour and it’s amazing how many different vendors can come on the scene and offer products and solutions that can help us design and build communities of one sort or another.

Finding Out If SharePoint Is Right For Your Organization (InformationWeek)
With a quickly growing market share and a broad set of functionality, SharePoint has become one of Microsoft’s most recent success stories. For almost any organization considering an investment in an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform, SharePoint is probably somewhere on the short list. But like anything else, one size does not fit all, and SharePoint isn’t a silver bullet to meet every organization’s needs. So how do you find out if it will meet yours?

Why Google Has Lost Its Mojo (NetworkWorld)
Google has gone from innovative upstart to fat-and-happy industry leader in what seems like record time. Put simply, the search giant has lost its mojo. That’s good news for Microsoft, and it could affect how you use Google’s cloud computing services.

What’s Behind the Cloud (WebHostDirectory)
With cloud hosting being browser-based means you don’t always have to be sitting at your desk in the office to access cloud services. To access most cloud computing services all you need is a Web browser, whether it’s a word processor , your e-mail, or something much more complicated, such as your sales system, just as you would access a Web site.

Office 14: Alpha Testing to Begin Before Year-end (ZDNet)
While Microsoft has made a few public and well-calculated moves to prepare the way for Windows 7, the company has said almost nothing (at least intentionally) about Office 14.

SharePoint Adds Improved Faceted Search And SQL 2008 Support (InformationWeek)
The past week or so has seen the release of a few enhancements and tools of interest to the SharePoint community — improvements to faceted search, support for SQL 2008, and a third-party tool to help calculate SharePoint’s total cost of ownership.

PHASE 2’s New ‘Zero Sign-In’ Makes Getting to Work Even Easier (BusinessWire)
PHASE 2 International (phase2int.com) announced today that it is making available a new ‘Zero Sign-In’ option to make SaaS application access and availability even easier and more seamless. Available now to all PHASE 2 International clients, the Zero Sign-In option signs users in to all of their hosted applications automatically upon power-up of their computers.

Around the Blogosphere
SharePoint on Virtualization (dwinter’s [MSFT] WebLog)
You may have noticed the post on the SharePoint Team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/08/18/update-on-virtualization-support-for-sharepoint-products-and-technologies.aspx) announcing support for Hyper-V based virtualization.  There are however many things to know about the extent of what is supported.  Obviously we will be supporting our own Hyper-V solution, but beyond that, we will also be supporting SharePoint running within SVVP certified solutions.

The First SharePoint Cowboy Podcast (Binary Wave)
When I was in the UK a few weeks ago I sat down with my good friend and fellow SharePoint MVP Nick Swan to record an interview for the SharePoint Podshow. We talked about a wide range of topics, including my favorite subject, SharePoint performance, and it was good fun. Give it a listen and try to navigate the rough waters between Nick’s proper English accent and my sloppy Redneck drawl to get to the meat of the discussion. I think we even said some interesting things – who’d a thunk it?

Trouble Installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1? A Simple Solution… (Andrew Connell)
While I had no problem installing VS2008 SP1 on my virtual machines, I’ve been having a heck of a time installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on my host OS ever since it came out. Since it shipped as an ISO, I simply mounted it using a virtual DVD drive. However every time I tried to install it, it would error out. I dug into the log file and found the following:

Beginners Guide to Test Driven Web Part Development (21apps | and the point is?)
We are very pleased to announce the publication of our white paper Beginners Guide to Test Driven Web Part Development.

Creating New SharePoint Views for Fun & Profit (SharePoint Blank)
A funny thing has happened in the course of my learning –and blogging my learning– of SharePoint:  it’s starting to create more work for me.  It used to be that my status as a newbie got me out of loads of SharePoint tasks.  This is no longer the case now that I am the proud possessor of a Certificate of Completion from Mindsharp’s Power End User course.

SharePoint Events
August 25-29, Sydney, Australia, SharePoint August Training Summit
August 27, Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland SharePoint User Group
August 27, Melbourne, Australia, MOSSIG
August 27, Wellington, New Zealand, Wellington SharePoint User Group
August 28, Phoenix, Arizona, Arizona SharePoint Pros
August 28, Auckland, New Zealand, Auckland SharePoint User Group

September 1-3, Auckland City, New Zealand, TechEd New Zealand
September 2, Chicago, Illinois, Chicago Microsoft SharePoint Business Strategies Group
September 3, New York, New York, NYC SharePoint User Group
September 3-5, San Francisco, California, Office2.0 Conference
September 4, Washington, DC, Federal & Military SharePoint Users Group of Washington D.C.
September 4, Kansas City, Office Developer User Group of Kansas City
September 8-9, Stockholm, Sweden, SharePoint & Exchange Forum
September 11, San Francisco, California, San Fransico SharePoint Users Group
September 11, Bellevue, WA, Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group
September 11, Reston, Virginia, SharePoint User Group of Washington, DC
September 11, Brookfield, Wisconsin, SharePoint: What Can I Do With It?
September 12, Brisbane, Australia, Brisbane SharePoint Usergroup
September 15-17, Washington, DC (McLean, Virginia), Best Practices SharePoint Conference
September 18, Columbus, Ohio, Central Ohio SharePoint User Group
September 20/21, Waltham, Massachusetts, New England Code Camp 10

October 9-10, Tulsa Oklahoma, Tulsa TechFest
October 25-26, Los Angeles, California, SoCal Code Camp
October 27-30, Los Angeles, California, Microsoft Professional Developers Conference

November 3-7 and 10-14, Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft TechEd
November 10-13, Las Vegas, Nevada, SharePoint Connections Conference

January 26-28, San Francisco, California, SPTechCon

* Please contact Chris Dooley (chris.dooley@bamboosolutions.com) to include your event in our listing.

Microsoft Updates
Search for Items or Files in a SharePoint List or Library (Microsoft)
After you connect a SharePoint list or library to Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, you can search for list items or files, such as your Microsoft Office Word 2007 documents. You search the content on your SharePoint site similar to the way that you search an e-mail message or other items that you create in Outlook.

Open, Edit, and Update Files From a SharePoint Site (Microsoft)
You can connect to a library on a SharePoint site by using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and browse, edit, and even search the files. After you connect your SharePoint library to Outlook, you can work with the files on your hard disk, even when you are away from the office.

Track Updates to a SharePoint Site (Microsoft)
You can use Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to track updates and manage notifications from a SharePoint site.

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