Julian's Blogtech

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s SharePoint has become a wildly popular application, recently eclipsing $1 billion in sales in a period of 12 months. It's jam-packed with capabilities from content management to collaboration, but has been criticized as too shallow in some feature sets.

Microsoft announced plans to fill one of those gaps today by more deeply integrating into the next version of SharePoint, enterprise search technology acquired via Microsoft's purchase of Fast Search and Transfer about a year ago.

When someone visits a website you've designed, the odds are that they don't care much about the colors, images or sounds, they're immediately looking at the text.

No matter how many bells and whistles you've built into a website, everyone relies on text to accomplish whatever they're visiting the site to do.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made an appearance at the three-day U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Caucus Retreat today to talk about innovation and, let's be real, the very bad economy and the impact on businesses like the tech giant.

Microsoft and EMC converged in New York City on Tuesday to announce a three-year extension of their alliance to work together on enterprise virtualization, storage, security and content management products.

The two tech giants are pushing the use of server and storage virtualization as a way for cash-strapped IT departments to better integrate technologies and save money. One major area of interest for both companies is cloud computing, in which computing tasks are assigned to connections, software and services over the Web.

Microsoft's Windows Live Community Clubhouse is opened to new "business" and new members. Via Windows Live Community Clubhouse, the Redmond company is building a social network of users focused on the applications and services available under the Windows Live brand umbrella. The software giant is inviting users to join the Windows Live Community Clubhouse and share with the world the way that Windows Live impacts their lives.

Earlier this week, Al Gore, Jimmy Buffet, and a famous oceanographer came together to announce a Google Earth update. Don't look for the same level of hubbub here, but Microsoft's now taking its own impressive step in this area by releasing about 100 terabytes' worth of Virtual Earth imagery.

The full list of everything that's been made available is really too long to repeat; several different types of images are circulating, plus multiple cities and counties have been covered in many countries. We'll hit the highlights, though, to give you an idea.

Communication is one of the foundational elements of a good website. It is essential for a positive user experience and for a successful website that truly benefits its owners. All types of websites are affected by the need for good communication in one way or another. Regardless of whether the website in question is an e-commerce website, a blog, a portfolio website, an information website for a service company, a government website or any other type of website, there is a significant need to communicate effectively with visitors.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division, began talking about Silverlight 3 in November 2008. With MIX09 happening next month though, the man who will be making the keynote is beginning to talk more about Microsoft's plans for its Flash alternative. He has already mentioned that Silverlight 3 is going to a pretty major update; graphics improvements like hardware acceleration, H.264 support for video, and the ability have some 3D effects are in the works. The real challenge Microsoft is facing is keeping Silverlight as small as possible while adding major features.

While server consolidation made enormous gains in 2008, these advances are only the leading edge of changes that will come in the coming year through the virtualization of the enterprise.

Gartner says virtualization will be the No. 1 technology initiative in 2009, a year when more cost savings will be sought with tangible urgency because of the down economy.

This post features 70 (!) free desktop wallpapers for February 2009, created by designers across the globe. Every wallpaper can be downloaded for free and comes in two versions: one with a calendar and one without.

Information Visualization is a hot topic. It seems like a new data visualization library or artistic visualization is released every week. As Jon Udell's article shows, we are just beginning to see how software can help us find meaning in data. So, when we set out to create this issue of MIX Online, we decided to focus specifically on interactive infographics, a fascinating application of information visualization that hasn't received much coverage.

Web Sandbox, a project of Microsoft's Live Labs, was released this week under the Apache License 2.0 license, although the company was careful to point out that the project is not sanctioned or sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation.

Microsoft released a community technology preview of Web Sandbox at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles in late October. However, more visible projects - for instance, Windows 7 and Windows Azure - got much more attention at the PDC. Web Sandbox was lost in the roar.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Visual Studio developers who want to work in PHP have a new tool. Jcx.Software, a Miami-based supplier of PHP tools, has released VS.Php 2.6, an integrated development environment.
PHP is one of several open source scripting languages --also called dynamic languages because they compile at runtime, incorporating the latest changes to the code --that's become popular in building Web site applications.

At its Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference 2000, Steven Martin, senior director of Developer Platforms and Tools at Microsoft, debunked some of the leading myths about service-oriented architecture, including SOA is dead and SOA stops at the firewall. Among other things, Martin also discussed how Microsoft's modeling strategy with Oslo and its cloud strategy with Windows Azure play into the company's SOA initiatives.

Microsoft launched Photosynth last summer, but the Web application had its real coming-out party at the inauguration. Though no one has really counted, you probably wouldn't be too off the mark in guessing that the 1 million or 2 million people who gathered to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office produced tens of millions of snapshots-making it one of the most photographed events ever. As part of their inauguration coverage, both CNN and MSNBC invited viewers to submit their photos to Photosynth. These contributions produced dozens of 3-D scenes-called "synths"-at various locations across Washington during inaugural weekend. They're absolutely mesmerizing.

Microsoft today made available Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of its ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC), a design pattern for test-driven development of enterprise-scale Web applications.

The RC, which offers several new capabilities and bug fixes, is feature-complete. The final release is slated to ship next month barring any critical issues in the RC, according to a blog posting by Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division.

Typography is elegant when it is attractive and communicates the designer's ideas. When chosen wisely and used carefully, it can be very effective in supporting the overall design. Designers are always exploring different techniques with type: some use images or sIFR to produce very beautiful typography, while others prefer CSS alone to get the typography just right.

Never before in the history of modern graphic design-at least since Gutenberg-has our common language changed so rapidly and radically, to the point of being downright exclusionary for those of us who have never read (or are incapable of using) a user's manual. Forget those silly semantic distinctions between commercial art and graphic design that crop up at design conferences-this is where the real divide lives. I really had no idea before talking with my first applicant that to speak, understand and otherwise intelligently interview a web designer-no less an information architect-I couldn't bluff my way through by knowing just a few key terms.

In spite of the tremendous expansion of the Internet, the power of the printed word remains strong and popular.

Print media is where it all began and today we take a close look at some amazing design magazines that can really boost your productivity and expand your design knowledge.

In addition to their printed versions, some magazines also offer online versions on their websites as well as PDF downloads and single issue orders. Order online or pick them up at your local bookstore.

Microsoft's open source project repository has been a smashing success considering the statistics associated with the website for 2008. CodePlex, designed to streamline the building of an open source project community by offering free hosting and the adjacent sharing and collaboration infrastructure, enjoyed a consistent growth in terms of traffic over the past year. With the exception of registered users, which grew only by 72% to 66,553, all the other metrics for the software giant's open source project-hosting website have increased over 100% the past year, compared to 2007.