I am at a Microsoft event in Christchurch (New Zealand), co-presented by Intergen New Zealand . The event is focused on how to use various Microsoft technologies for emergency response. You can learn more about the initiative at Microsoft Citizen Safety Architecture, at www.microsoft.com/csa . The architecture describes how to use various Microsoft technologies to support agencies and organizations focused on citizen safety. There's about 50 people here for the 2 hour session.

I thought I would offer some comments on some UC predictions offered by Gurdeep Singh Pall, who heads Microsoft's UC group: No Jitter | Microsoft: Gurdeep's UC Predictions single identity with presence at the core is spot on - but it makes you wonder why Microsoft does not openly share its rich presence information? 1. UC gets unified The term "unified communications" has long been muddled and miss-used, and the problem is made worse by vendors who slap a "unified" label on products that are anything but.

Microsoft is trying to "have it's cake and eat it to". Cloud does not make it any easier for Microsoft to deliver business capabilities defacto any faster if (1) internally, the development cycle remains the same and (2) there are no specific architectural changes to allow different collections of components to be released at different pace rates.  While there is a level of irrational exuberance right now at the conference given all the changes in this release (there is a lot in SP2010 to like), business and IT Jeff Teper, Corporate VP; Kirk Koenigsbauer, GM Question:

Microsoft (103) Whilst you may engage them in a photo-sharing site or a mobile social network, you benefit most when you then provide a place for them to go to. Tags: Matt Rhodes Social Media altimeter group Brand Business charline li co-creation customer communities EBay facebook freshminds FreshNetworks Google Microsoft online communities online consultation social media social networking starbucks Thomson Reuters Twitter Virtual community web2.0 Image by communista_unicorn via Flickr There are some great examples of brands using social media that we use a

we are seeing a point in history in which the mobile handset manufacturers and their partners are using OSS and collaborative development to ensure they do not get trapped in the narrow margin price war that caught the personal computer (PC) original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the previous technology wave. For non-technical people, the flow of announcements from the mobile telephony world about their adoption of ‘open’ platforms is quite difficult to follow, I think. So the following article is particularly welcome: - The Arrival of the Mobile Internet Thanks to the Economics of Open Source Software , Stephen R.

world was reeling this week, after Microsoft slapped it round the chops with a real-time search double-whammy. Whammy one: Microsoft has inked deals with both Facebook and Twitter, allowing status updates to be integrated into the Bing Search engine. Microsoft and T-mobile now claim they have recovered most, if not all, of its Sidekick users' missing data. Welcome to eModeration's digest of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media. This week we have capitulated to popular demand: we will now be posting bite-size morsels

A couple of the Microsoft guys in Ireland were showing off the new HTC HD2 smartphone with Windows Mobile 6.5. And I'm still waiting for more details on SharePoint Workspace Mobile. Thus the question is : Have the new capabilities in Windows Mobile 6.5 While they were willing to show it , they weren't willing for me to leave with one myself! A

Microsoft announced this week (Monday, March 2, 2009), that its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), was available for trial in 19 countries. My guess is that Microsoft went with Live Meeting because the OCS version of web conferencing has a limit of around 250 participants, and perhaps there were technical issues. Longer term, I think Microsoft has to rationalize Live Meeting and OCS web conferencing as the collide in the It disclosed Office Communications Online would be available in April 2009. I

These are starting to realize that real user needs are not necessarily satisfied by the usual "more complex software-requires more complex hardware-enables more complex software" cycle that has been promoted so heavily and for such a long time by the "Microsoft/Intel-ial complex". Tags: laptops mobility Digital Divid Since yesterday, I am the happy owner of an Asus Eee laptop . No, No, it's not yet another machine with more cycles, megabytes, and features.

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is a disappointing platform for social computing in my opinion. My position for some time has been that the next release will be a tipping point for Microsoft's social computing efforts. Either Microsoft "gets it right" and delivers a forward-looking release with significant improvements that transforms SharePoint into a market-leading social computing platform, or it delivers a release that has only incremental improvements to existing Rather than list off a "top ten" list of predictions for 2009, I thought I would briefly layout some topics and areas that business and IT decision-makers should pay attention to when formulating Enterprise 2.0