Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Windesheim Flevoland kiest voor Winvision en Newsgator

Gepubliceerd: 31-05-2011
Persbericht van: Winvision

Nieuwegein, 31 mei 2011 - Windesheim Flevoland, de nieuwe hogeschool in Almere en Lelystad, start het nieuwe studiejaar in september 2011 als eerste onderwijsinstelling in Nederland met Newsgator, een social media-toepassing binnen de SharePoint2010-omgeving van de instelling. Winvision, ICT-dienstverlener gespecialiseerd in Microsoft Technologie, is bij Windesheim Flevoland samen met de hogeschool verantwoordelijk voor de implementatie van dit interactieve leer- en samenwerkplatform.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

The “Post-PC” Era: It’s Real, But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does

Computing is changing. The news last week showed that loud and clear, as Microsoft bet big on Skype’s voice and video technology and Google announced partnerships with Samsung and Acer to build laptops running its Chrome operating system. These developments point to a future where computing form factors, interfaces, and operating systems diversify beyond even what we have today. The “Post-PC Era” is underway, but its definition is not self-evident.

First, some history. “Post-PC” has been a buzzword in the past few months, since Steve Jobs announced at the iPad 2 launch event that Apple now gets a majority of its revenue from “post-PC devices,” including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—a major milestone for a company that was originally named “Apple Computer.” The phrase was also part of the public discourse in 2004, when IBM sold its PC unit and former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz told The New York Timesthat “We've been in the post-PC era for four years now,” noting that wireless mobile handset sales had already far surpassed PC sales around the world. In fact, the “post-PC” concept is more than a decade old: In 1999, MIT research scientist David Clark gave a talk called “The Post PC Internet,” describing a future point at which objects like wristwatches and eyeglasses would be Internet-connected computing devices.

So what does “post-PC” mean, anyway? It doesn’t mean that the PC is dead: Forrester Research forecasts that even in the US, a mature market, consumer laptop sales will grow at a CAGR of 8% between 2010 and 2015, and desktop sales will decline only slightly. Even in 2015, when 82 million US consumers will own a tablet, more US consumers will own laptops (140 million). But, as Forrester explains in a new report out today, it does mean that computing is shifting from:

Stationary to ubiquitous. Contrast the experience of computing on a desktop PC, in one place with a clear start and finish time, to that of the anytime/anywhere computing done on a smartphone or tablet. Ubiquitous computing is also more context-aware computing, aided by sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, and geolocators in smartphones and tablets.
Formal to casual. In contrast to PC interactions with a formal start and finish time marked by booting up and shutting down, instant-on/always-on computing on smartphones and tablets fills in-between moments like standing in line or watching TV.
Arms-length to intimate. With desktops, computing is literally an arms-length activity. With portable form factors like laptops, netbooks, and tablets, computers become something consumers keep close to their body, and they use them in intimate places: The No. 1 place all three devices are used in the home is the living room, followed by an adult’s bedroom.
Abstracted to physical. The mouse/keyboard paradigm relies on an abstracted interaction with content. Touchscreens like those on smartphones and tablets enable direct physical manipulation of content in two-dimensional space. Cameras with facial recognition, voice sensors, and motion sensors like those on the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 permit an even wider range of physical interaction with devices, where a user’s body and voice become the controller.

There are a host of technological innovations that make the post-PC era possible. Form-factor diversity enables computing in more contexts. Flash memory eliminates computing downtime. Wi-Fi and mobile broadband networks permit continuous connectivity. And cloud services support computing across multiple devices.

These technological innovations fuel social change, and vice versa. As people conduct more of their lives online—shopping, banking, entertainment—we require more computing in more places. The rise of social networking requires real-time connectivity to manage our relationships. And eroding work-life boundaries means that consumers demand devices that can do double-duty in their work and personal lives.

So where is this all going? In the post-PC era, the “PC” is alive and well, but it morphs to support computing experiences that are increasingly ubiquitous, casual, intimate, and physical. The new MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9 demonstrate PCs going in this direction. In the post-PC era, PCs are joined by smartphones and tablets, as well as future devices like wearables and surfaces. Imagine computing via a heads-up display embedded in your eyeglasses or contact lenses or learning about breaking news updates from a change in your electronics-embedded clothing. The products that will win have yet to be determined, but the underlying technological and social changes that will drive the post-PC forward are already here.

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Wednesday, May 18, 2011

10 More Things You Never Knew You Could Do On LinkedIn

There's a lot of buzz surrounding LinkedIn's IPO this week.

And with good reason. LinkedIn isn't just incredibly valuable on paper. There are also a ton of great features that users can take advantage of.

We put together 10 more of our favorite tips and tricks for LinkedIn. Give them a shot.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/more-ways-to-make-the-most-out-of-linkedin-2011-5##ixzz1MmrNUDsY

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

In the clouds with Office 365

Posted by John Stokdyk on Mon, 16/05/2011 - 12:27

Microsoft Office 365 is an evolution of Office 2010 Web Apps that makes four key Office products available via the net: Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus access to the Microsoft SharePoint web portal system and Exchange.

Where Office Live was more of a personal Cloud that gave you access to the Office tools, Office 365 is a corporate environment that, within the beta system at least, will let you cater for and collaborate with up to 25 colleagues.

The Exchange option is particularly interesting if you’re a small company using a standard POP internet service. Exchange gives you the ability to administer and archive all company email in one place and to synchronise diaries and tasks between team members. This is a boon if you haven’t got it, but will require much more careful management if you’ve already made the move to Microsoft Exchange, but want to link into Office 365 too. For example, will you have to decide which acts as the “master” system, and which the slave that synchs into it?

With so many facilities on offer, Office 365 looks like it might be capable of supporting an entire company’s administrative technology needs. However, our IT support crew might get a little touchy about some of the things it lets you do. For their sake, I won’t try to take over administration of our email system. Instead this introductory article will explore what exactly is available and how it works during the initial encounters to give members an idea about whether it’s worth exploring for their own uses.

More coverage on detailed projects and processes you can achieve with Office 365 will follow in the coming months.

As I mentioned to FirstTab, we’ve been keeping a close eye on Windows Live developments in recent years. But I came up against a technical roadblock in Windows Live when I tried to share my hefty Fantasy Football player analyser with colleagues; it was too big to display in a browser Window.

The big test for Office 365 would be to see whether it could cope with this real-world scenario, and if it could support cross-platform access from my partner’s Mac, or from BlackBerry and iPhone devices. It was brilliant to be able to log in from a Mac (using Apple's Safari browser, even) and create a Word document. Unfortunately, when it came to the 33Mb football KPI dashboard, the Office 365 Web App was just as uncomfortable handling it as Office Live.

My first encounter was fraught with a few other frustrations. After going through all the hoops to get a WindowsLive ID and access Windows Office Live in the past, the universal passport doesn’t work with the Office 365, so there’s a new ID and password to remember, plus a new domain the system creates for you @onmicrosoft.com.

What it offers

Home: a base for uploading and sharing documents with up to 25 colleagues; this page is also where they will need to connect their desktop apps to Office 365.
Access to Office Web Apps, including Outlook to manage your email and calendar.
Team Site: a website hosted by Microsoft SharePoint, but incorporating similar design and management tools as the Windows Live web-hosting service.
Lync Online, a unified communciations environment that lets you send and receive instant messages (IM), run peer-to-peer audio and video sessions, and display presence information about team members.
Admin section: for adding and managing users, and accessing Microsoft support resources when you need them.
The Web Apps have fewer menu tabs and options tha the usual desktop Office programs. Excel just has File, Home, and Insert tabs, so there is no access to pivot table tools or macros. If you want full access, there is an "Open in Office" option for each application.

To get full integration with your desktop apps, you need to download and run an Office 365 set up program. If you already have the Office suite installed, this step adds a minor element of duplication but once you have configured the SharePoint component to work with Office 365 it will let you access and work on the documents in your shared web portal.

However, after agreeing to the licence terms, the first stage of the installation started to upgrade my desktop version of Office. Remembering Simon Hurst’s experiences with the beta version of Office 2007, which wiped out his existing Outlook in-tray when he installed it, I decided this was as far as I could take my test drive without consulting the IT support team and the Office 365 user forums.

If you do want your on-premise and on-line Exchange email systems to co-exist, Office 365 has a Custom Plan wizard to help create a custom pilot scenario and deployment plan, so you can test your deployment strategy with a small number of users before rolling it out fully.

My intitial experiences confirmed something that was evident from the outset: if you’re setting out to build an IT infrastructure for your organisation from scratch, Office 365 has a lot going for it. While it will also provide the means to integrate your existing desktop Office programs, documents and email into a Cloud environment, you’ll need to do some careful research and planning to manage the process smoothly.

The Cloud movement has revved up significantly in the past few months, particularly with Google threatening to unleash its operating system-free Chromebook machine, which dispenses with all the administrative overheads. Microsoft has got a stranglehold on desktop users, and Office 365 is designed to keep things that way. If you’re comfortable with the Microsoft conventions, processes and interfaces, it’s a very generously featured suite that should make you more productive on the move, but it remains a monolith that demands your undivided attention.

The nature of fast moving Cloud developments is that there’s always an even better, cleverer and faster solution just around the corner. To put it in the terms we used to use for business and practice applications, Office 365 is very much an “suite” that promises to take care of everything for you. But it’s going against the emerging trend for users to opt for “best of breed” Cloud applications.

Find out more about Office 365 yourself - sign up for the beta test version here.

Social By Design

Social By Design
By David A. Kelly


Businesses make social computing work with Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g.

For world-class companies, social networking and enterprise social computing aren’t a diversion. They are now part of the fabric of enterprise computing enabling the new social enterprise.

Take the case of London, England-based infrastructure group Balfour Beatty, with 50,000 employees in more than 1,200 different locations across 80 countries. For Balfour Beatty, social computing and Enterprise 2.0 technologies aren’t about the latest tabloid gossip; they’re about connecting employees, partners, customers, and projects more effectively, efficiently, and productively.

“Social computing services with Oracle WebCenter are all about being able to service the client more effectively by better coordinating our divisions and our people,” says Lee Wheelhouse, knowledge sharing and collaboration solution manager at Balfour Beatty. “Oracle WebCenter isn’t just a technology project for us. It’s a key strategic initiative for our company.”

Not surprisingly, Balfour Beatty isn’t the only company taking a second look at how to integrate social media into the enterprise.

“Enterprise 2.0 is really focused on the idea of taking all the tools that were developed for consumers, such as blogs, wikis, and so on, and using them in an enterprise environment,” says Brad Shimmin, principal analyst for collaboration platforms at Current Analysis, an analyst firm based in Sterling, Virginia.

“It’s not just about repeating the social networking functionality that exists in the consumer space with sites like Twitter and Facebook,” says Shimmin. “It’s about creating similar opportunities for collaboration and engagement within the context of an enterprise application. The new social computing capabilities of Oracle WebCenter Suite allow the platform to behave less like a one-way street where you’re an ERP [enterprise resource planning] user merely gathering data, and more like a conversation with your peers or other people in the context of a business process.”

In effect, the social enterprise is about engaging customers, users, and partners in two-way communications.

“There’s really a shift from the traditional portal market, where users were accessing multiple applications through multiple interfaces, to one that’s more of a rich Web experience—providing a modern, common user interface with Web 2.0 and social capabilities and richer integrations to back-office applications—that’s all seamless and transparent inside the application,” says Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle. “That’s exactly what the latest release of Oracle WebCenter Suite provides.”

Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Updates

The latest release of Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g provides a range of new capabilities focused on enabling organizations to leverage and seamlessly integrate social computing and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into a converged platform for internal and external applications and services. A few of the key enhancements to Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g are

Enterprise mashups. Enhanced user interface options allow developers to use development tools such as Oracle JDeveloper to create applications and data controls and allow business users to employ Oracle Composer to assemble and leverage them.

Content management. The new release provides new levels of security for content as well as workflow capabilities and direct access to Oracle Universal Content Management.

Personalization. Users can now leverage the WebCenter Personalization Server feature in Oracle WebCenter Suite to control dynamic delivery of content, information, and experience through personalized views.

Search and discovery. Oracle WebCenter Suite now provides direct Oracle Secure Enterprise Search crawlers for all Oracle WebCenter Suite content.

Analytics and management. New Web analytics services and dashboards allow users fine-grained visibility into processes and data. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g also now supports direct integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.
Over the past few years, Shimmin has watched how these traditionally consumer-oriented technologies have affected portal and collaborative solutions such as Oracle WebCenter Suite.

An Integrated Approach to Enabling the Social Enterprise: Oracle WebCenter Suite
Oracle WebCenter Suite is the modern user experience platform for the enterprise and the Web, enabling organizations to evolve portals, composite applications, extranet sites, and more by delivering a dynamic, seamless user experience.

“Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a user experience that’s really the blending of traditional Web applications with social computing capabilities,” says MacMillan. “We have customers that want to engage their customers and partners by combining traditional application data with things like wikis, blogs, and activity streams. So now we provide those social components as part of Oracle WebCenter Suite.”

Oracle WebCenter Suite’s user interface is based on the common user experience architecture that’s shared across Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware products, and more. “If developers are using Oracle Application Development Framework, then they’re automatically using the common user experience architecture, which means that any components they’re developing can be brought natively into Oracle WebCenter Suite,” says MacMillan.

Shimmin considers Oracle WebCenter Suite as something like a Swiss Army knife—it has all different types of tools and technologies built in to handle all different types of social enterprise scenarios.

Snapshots

Balfour Beatty
Location: London, England
Revenue: £10 billion in 2010
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g, Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Application Development Framework, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle Identity Management
“Oracle WebCenter is the type of solution that, whatever needs you have, whether it’s internal or external facing, whether it’s fairly basic like content management or something that requires custom development, [Oracle] WebCenter has the required technology built into it,” says Shimmin. “Oracle WebCenter has always been good at enabling organizations to make portals and expose information in a secure and governable way. But over the past few versions, Oracle’s been able to take the best technologies from its Sun and BEA acquisitions and draw them together to make Oracle WebCenter more flexible and better suited for external- as well as internal-facing scenarios such as customer relationship management and call center applications.”

Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 Solution
Balfour Beatty is putting Oracle WebCenter Suite’s combination of traditional IT capabilities and new Web-focused features to good use.

“One of the reasons why Oracle WebCenter and our Enterprise 2.0 strategy are so important to us is because of the size and scale of Balfour Beatty and the depth and breadth of our expertise,” says Wheelhouse. “Our customers have an expectation that we can share our in-depth knowledge seamlessly across our business and around the world. Oracle WebCenter is beginning to help us do that more effectively.”

From an IT perspective, Balfour Beatty is composed of federated and very autonomous business units around the world, each with its own IT capability for things such as infrastructure and desktop support. Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0, social media-enabled Oracle WebCenter Suite portal has been designed to securely connect its employees across geographic and operating company boundaries and will allow them to collaborate, search, and share best practices in a business-oriented environment. It’s a good example of how and why organizations are adding social media to their mix of enterprise solutions.

“The challenge for us was to provide a platform that can span all our business units,” says Wheelhouse. “We needed a scalable, user-friendly solution that could interface with local systems to share information, while enabling greater collaboration and information sharing across geographic and operational boundaries. That’s where Oracle WebCenter comes in. Oracle WebCenter will be our global, scalable Enterprise 2.0 solution.”

Enterprise Requirements
Integration with back-office solutions was critical for Balfour Beatty’s global portal. Back-office systems are great at handling and supporting clearly defined business processes like procurements and HR processes, but social applications are something more creative and somewhat less predictable.

“We see Oracle WebCenter eventually giving us the best of both worlds in that we can support core business processes and functionality from back-office systems, and at the same time we can implement collaboration and social media interaction,” says Wheelhouse. “As a company that’s founded on expertise, we need to enable our people to reach out to knowledge experts, and that’s a creative process that requires the right type of social networks. The power of Enterprise 2.0 is connecting people that wouldn’t normally find each other.”

A key reason Balfour Beatty chose Oracle WebCenter Suite as its Enterprise 2.0 solution was the product’s ability to integrate traditional applications and business processes with social media, social computing, and Web-oriented requirements.

“The vision for us is to be able to break out of traditional business processes and into a collaborative, social environment to solve problems, and then go back into the business process with the results,” says Wheelhouse. “But it needs to be done in a seamless way.”

Another important aspect to integrating social media capabilities is ensuring that they meet enterprise standards for security and compliance. “For our purposes, the social media content created in Oracle WebCenter could be just as important as the corporate records, so it is subject to the same security policies, retention policies, and management policies,” says Wheelhouse.

User experience and the user interface were also critical to Balfour Beatty. “We wanted to create something that didn’t involve lots of training, wasn’t complex, and was effective,” says Wheelhouse. “What’s good about Oracle WebCenter is its flexibility and its ability to let us create a compelling, intuitive user interface for our solution.”

Next Steps

LEARN more about Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g

Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Webcast

Oracle Portal, User Experience, and Enterprise 2.0 Resource Library

But Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 solution isn’t just about social connections and business processes. It’s also an effective way to reduce costs and increase productivity.

“Social media portals are a great way of communicating group and divisional initiatives and news, and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities are a great way of filtering all that information,” says Wheelhouse. “There are a lot of ways in which social media can make communications a lot more targeted and enable us to share technical expertise and innovation.”

The Dawn of the Social Enterprise
When it comes to portals and connecting with customers, the future doesn’t look like the past.

“It’s a very different landscape than it was just a couple years ago,” says Current Analysis’ Shimmin.

And although many things will change in the technology landscape over the next few years, one thing is certain: most companies will integrate social networking and social computing capabilities into their enterprise IT strategy.

“In the last two years, we’ve seen the reshaping of portals to be much more capable, much more social, and much more collaborative environments for serving enterprise IT,” says Shimmin. “They’re no longer simply a space where you have pull-down menus to access HR documents. They still do that, but now they also have integrated, collaborative, social networking functions that allow companies to develop stronger customer relationships, optimize employee interactions, and gain greater insight into market trends.”

Systems of Engagement

Organizations have had transactional systems of record for decades. From accounting to sales to human resources, enterprise applications that can keep detailed records of transactions have been refined and perfected.

But business—especially today’s business—isn’t just about individual purchases or transactions. It’s not just about what’s being sold to customers. Today’s business is about the people doing business, how they communicate, and what they need next to do their jobs.

That’s where enterprise social computing and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities come in, along with solutions like Oracle WebCenter Suite.

“It’s really about connecting the people aspect and the engagement aspect of what organizations are already doing in their transactional systems,” says Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle. “I think with enterprise social media, that there’s an opportunity to drive both business productivity and business innovation.”

In effect, organizations are moving beyond their traditional systems of record to systems of engagement. These systems not only keep track of what’s purchased and when but also where the customer came from and why, and what else—or who else—in the organization should be connected with him to derive the maximal value.

“There’s a convergence of transactional systems and systems of engagement that can help organizations have a complete view of the customer and their points of interaction with an organization,” says MacMillan.

“There’s a strong benefit to line-of-business and process owners engaging people beyond the process and beyond the individual application transactions,” says MacMillan. “And that’s what Oracle WebCenter Suite is really designed to do.”




David A. Kelly (davidakelly.com) is a business, technology, and travel writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.