My Digital Life

Another thank you to Steve Clayton for pointing out that the Office Labs site has gone live.  It looks like there are some great tools to try out there.

I’m a big fan of Tablet PC’s and having just installed InkSeine, I have to say it’s very cool.  I use OneNote quite a bit to take notes in meetings, so apps like this always catch my eye.  The GIU is easy to use and I like access to search results.  I can easily see myself missing some of the functionality when I use the full blown OneNote app - if you’re using a pen why would you ever need drop down menus?  There are a few things missing at the moment, but hopefully they’ll get added over time.

If only HP would make an up to date version of their old TC1100 slate tablet!

The other stand-out thing for me was SharePointPedia.   I know there was talk some time back about making Sharepoint the way MS presented communities for products.  The idea being each product team  would have a Sharepoint site under sharepoint.microsoft.com with forums etc.  I’m not sure how far that initiative got, the only other site I’ve seen there is for Sharepoint itself, but the ‘pedia site has always had pretty good content. 

With this sort of site I guess a lot depends on how many people find it and use it.  Having worked with SharePoint in the past and seeing how quickly best practice evolves and changes, any resource MS can use to speak directly to customers has to be good. 

It’s good to see this sort of ‘labs’ stuff out there in the open.  Hopefully there’s more to come.

Seeing as I’m involved in getting a new Data Centre at the moment this post over on ZDnet could my eye.  Looks like HP is to target a ‘data centre as a service’ product at enterprise customers. 

I’ve heard bits about this for a few years now - HP account managers will bore you silly with stories of renting computing time to Shrek - but this is the first I’ve heard about an actual product.  It sounds like there are four favours of service on offer initially:

1. A compute intensive service for number crunching applications (the Shrek example!)
2. A SAP 6.0 optimised service
3. An Exchange optimised service
4. A more generic Windows and Unix application server service

From what’s described it looks like a decent start, it’ll be interesting to see whether they start offering additional specific configurations.  Something for SharePoint would probably be a good start.  As it takes off within bigger companies more people will start grappling with the infrastructure required to run SharePoint in a big way and look for service solutions.