Microsoft’s TownSquare internal social network provides employees with feeds and updates about their colleagues

At the request of its SharePoint and Office product development teams, Microsoft ’s Office Labs operation has created and is testing a prototype of an internal social network that can provide employees with feeds and updates about their colleagues.

Chris Pratley, general manager of Office Labs , is slated to disclose details of the prototype — called TownSquare — Thursday at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. He spoke to Computerworld about the project, which was launched in January and has already been used by about 8,000 Microsoft employees.

With a layout that is strikingly similar to Facebook.com’s (in which Microsoft invested $240 million in October 2007), TownSquare is fueled by enterprise news feeds that use Web services to query SharePoint for public information, such as promotions and company anniversaries, about an employee.

TownSquare also notifies users when a document or file is modified. Users can customize their feeds and monitor who is receiving information about them.

In early January, Pratley’s group told 100 Microsoft employees about the network. Since then, 8,000 employees who learned of TownSquare by word of mouth have visited the network at least once, Pratley noted. About 700 use it daily.

Some Microsoft customers, which he declined to name, are testing the TownSquare network for use in their companies.

Office Labs works as a sort of advance development team that tests technology concepts suggested by employees and, as in this case, development teams. Pratley stressed that TownSquare is not a product, but a platform to test the technology concepts. By hammering out the various likes and dislikes of its users before releasing a product, “We’re trying to get version three goodness into a first release,” he added.

“We have instrumentation ?so we know which things people use,” Pratley noted. “We share that with the client teams we work with. They take the knowledge about usage so they don’t make so many mistakes in product design.”

Many third party vendors have targeted SharePoint as the core data source for information to feed their enterprise social networking and other Enterprise 2.0 applications. Several have announced upgrades to their products or new integration with SharePoint this week at the conference.

Anecdotal evidence has shown that employees like the TownSquare tool, Pratley noted. Employees especially appreciate being able to monitor the creation and editing of documents by colleagues, he added. One employee used the network to find a sponsor within Microsoft to fund her trip to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

“That is the kind of information that spreads through an enterprise social network,” he said. “By posting it out there, the people interested can pick up on it, and other people can ignore it. It’s a way to keep in touch in a social way with people you work with.”

Like Facebook , TownSquare also includes a photos of users and allows them to note when they are away from their workstations, such as at a meeting or in the cafeteria for coffee.

While some employees have expressed initial surprise at all the information that Microsoft has about them in its intranet, once people see the type of information that is included in the feeds about them, “they see it’s pretty safe stuff and say okay,” Pratley said.

By Heather Havenstein, Computerworld

By Kevin McLaughlin, ChannelWeb
9:00 PM EDT Mon. Jun. 09, 2008

From the June 09, 2008 issue of ChannelWeb In the latest salvo of its ongoing war against software piracy, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) late Monday announced the filing of 21 lawsuits in federal court in 14 states against resellers who it claims have been illegally distributing its software.

Sharon Cates, an antipiracy attorney at Microsoft, says many of the resellers targeted have been using a tactic known as hard disk loading, which involves taking a single piece of software and loading on multiple PCs, and then selling those PCs to unwitting customers.

In this scenario, not only do customers run the legal risks involved with using unlicensed software, they also lose out on upgrade rights, access to technical support, and key security protections, Cates said. Hard disk loading also leads to Microsoft’s honest channel partners being undercut by unscrupulous resellers, she added.

“A lot of people don’t know what kind of media they are supposed to get when they buy a PC, and that makes it easier for the software pirate to fool customers,” Cates said.

Cates says software piracy continues to be huge problem for Microsoft, which has been diligently tracking down those who distribute counterfeit or improperly licensed products as part of its ongoing Genuine Software Initiative.

While today’s lawsuits are civil cases, Microsoft has also been pursuing criminal cases against certain resellers. In August, a U.S. district court handed out a 46-month prison sentence in a criminal case to a Georgia man convicted of using fake certificates of authenticity to sell pirated versions of Microsoft software.

These efforts are beginning to have an impact on the software giant’s bottom line: Last November, Citigroup enterprise software analyst Brent Thill predicted that Microsoft’s efforts to battle software pirates could add up to an extra $1 billion in fiscal 2008 revenue.

NEW YORK (AFP) - Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy Yahoo will send it searching for new allies and likely see Yahoo’s share price plummet, leaving Internet giant Google the big winner, analysts said.

Microsoft announced Saturday that it had given up its quest for the struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo, which rejected Microsoft’s offer even after it raised the original bid by five billion to more than 46 billion dollars.

The announcement ended three months of overtures by the software giant, which wanted to merge its Internet resources with Yahoo’s worldwide offerings to gain ground on undisputed online advertising juggernaut Google.

Google meanwhile has increased its share of the Internet search engine market and multiplied its innovations. The firm recently also announced a way to refine its image searches, based on technology that recognizes images, not text.

Analysts believe moreover that the Microsoft-Yahoo talks have benefited Google, and suggest Microsoft did well to cut them short.

“Microsoft did the smart thing — they walked,” said Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle. “Yahoo’s stock price is going to come down like a rock on Monday.”

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Microsoft’s controversial bid to have its Open XML format fast-tracked as an ISO standard has turned into a riot, according to a leading analyst.

Speaking at a Microsoft-hosted event, analyst David Mitchell revealed he used to lecture police on riot control, before eventually becoming the senior vice president of IT research at Ovum. “I thought I would never come back to talking about riot control until I got into the Open XML debate,” he claimed.

Mitchell said that people involved in riots fell into two camps: “decent orderly protestors and nutters”, and claims that both are participating in the OOXML process. “There are a number of comments that are decent technical debate,” he said. “There’s also a fair amount of radical activists who are protesting just to cause disruption.”

“I feel like getting hold of people and saying ‘get a life’,” he adds. “It’s only a document format. It’s just got too silly.”

Mitchell claims that opponents of OOXML have resorted to intimidation. “People have been trying to track down what hotels people have been staying at for the BRMs [Ballot Resolution Meetings]. Many voting decisions are not taken until the day. If you’ve had no sleep on the night before a vote [because of noisy protests], you might change your voting behaviour,” he said.

Conspiracy theory
The Ovum analyst also claimed that opponents are making a mountain out of a molehill over minor flaws in the standard. “Just because Microsoft makes mistakes it doesn’t mean it’s up to something,” he argued. “People build specifications, people build software, people make mistakes.

“Microsoft is not perfect. If some of the things said about Microsoft were true, Microsoft would have to be an awfully lot better organised than it is.”

Mitchell also attacked the ‘no’ voters who can’t justify their actions. “If people vote no or yes you would really like to know why. I have spoken to some people who’ve voted no and asked them why and they said ‘because we don’t like it’. If people are representing their country they should be able to more clearly defend what their national technological position is.”

“This a relatively simple process - it’s got way out of hand” he added.
Fanning the flames
Mitchell finally offered his hosts some advice, cautioning them to “chill out” when the criticism reaches fever pitch. “The more you fan the flames the more it gets worse. If you get upset personally and react to it, it gets worse.”

Sadly it appears Microsoft hasn’t taken the analyst’s advice. Included in its gargantuan press pack for the event is an eight-page document entitled “Open XML and ODF Adoption: Separating Fact From Fiction” which contrasts the so-called “FUD” from Microsoft’s opponents with Microsoft’s “facts”.

The third page of the document claims that “Microsoft has never opposed [rival format] ODF before governments, ISO, or elsewhere.” Page seven then lists the positions of various US states on document formats, which includes headlines such as “Oregon: ODF is too expensive to implement” and “Texas: ODF implementation costs too high and credibility too low.”
Author: Barry Collins

Yahoo rebuff sets up tense battle with Microsoft
Next move unclear; some analysts expect higher offer from software giant

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc.’s rejection of Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited takeover bid left investors guessing the next move in a tense mating dance that may hatch a more imposing challenger to Google Inc. or disintegrate into a bruising brawl.

The rebuff, formally announced early Monday, wasn’t a surprise because Yahoo had leaked its intention over the weekend.

As expected, Yahoo’s board unanimously decided to spurn Microsoft after concluding the offer — originally worth $44.6 billion or $31 per share — “substantially undervalues� one of the Internet’s prized franchises. The cash-and stock deal is now valued at about $40 billion, or $28.91 per share, because of a drop in Microsoft’s market value.

But Yahoo didn’t raise antitrust concerns about the proposed deal and included language that seemed to invite a higher offer from Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker.

“The board of directors is continually evaluating all of its strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all stockholders,� Yahoo said in a statement.

Microsoft, though, didn’t seem inclined to raise the bid Monday, releasing a statement describing its current bid as “full and fair.�

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A January Netcraft survey estimates that there were last month 155,583,825 WEB SITES ON THE INTERNET. Two other interesting data points: 1) Growth had slowed from 5.4 million new sites in December to just 354,000 new sites in January; and 2) Apache serves, which have been in the lead but suffering a long decline has been surging lately, and at the expense of Microsoft.

Read Full Detailed Review

Active/Passive RFID ROI versus Bar Codes

 

Majority of RFID applications can yield a positive ROI. But, that is not the question. The questions should be “Can you get the same ROI by using Bar Codes?”. For most applications the answer is YES. This is especially true for Passive RFID. The performance of Passive RFID has been over-hyped and confused with that of Active RFID. There, simply, is not enough difference in performance between Passive RFID, and Bar Codes to justify the additional cost.”

Certainly, it seems Active RFID is where the real action is, as these quotes from IDTechEX’s recent Review of 2007 in RFID explains:

“Active RFID accounted for about 13% of all RFID expenditure in 2007, but this figure was depressed by the huge Chinese national ID card scheme, which involves passive RFID. Look at the IDTechEx Knowledgebase and you see a more meaningful picture for the future, given that the Chinese ID card scheme has now peaked in deliveries of both cards and infrastructure. A remarkable 32% of projects added in 2007 involved active RFID, taking the cumulative figure to 22%. Little wonder that over 20% of both RFID fund raisings and RFID acquisitions in 2007 involved companies somewhere in the active RFID value chain. The IDTechEx conference Active RFID and RTLS, the only one of its type in the world, also grew strongly in attendance and number of exhibitors in 2007. RTLS is mainly driving this burgeoning active RFID activity. For instance, Ubisense, founded as recently as 2003, already has over 200 clients.

“Active RFID will now be powered by two waves. RTLS is the first wave, with 2007 seeing the first major deliveries, including about 100 healthcare facilities adopting RTLS. Ubiquitous Sensor Networks will be the second wave but it has yet to begin in any serious manner. Indeed, some applications will merge both capabilities.

“Politicians like to do exit polls so let us try one too. The last 50 projects entered into the IDTechEx Knowledgebase in 2007 came from a remarkable 25 countries. Active RFID was used in 40% of these projects and passive UHF and HF were responsible for 28% each. Make of that what you will.”

I’d be interested in other views on Chris’s assertion that there isn’t enough difference in performance between Passive RFID, and Bar Codes to justify the additional cost. Do you agree? Is Active RFID the future? And where does Passive RFID go from here?

Configuring Visual Studio to Debug .NET Framework Source Code
It’s finally here - the launch of the .NET Reference Source project. This post (hopefully!) contains everything you need to know. Over the past few weeks, we ran a pilot of this feature and collected lots of great data that helped us work through some issues and understand where people were likely to have problems.

First, though, if you have any problems, please make sure you’ve followed all of the steps exactly as described. If you’re still having problems, please check the FAQ/Troubleshooting section at the bottom. If that doesn’t work, post a comment below and I’ll look into it.

BASIC SETUP
Note this functionality is not available on the Express versions of the Visual Studio 2008 products.

1) Install the Visual Studio 2008 QFE. This Hotfix just updates a DLL that’s part of the Visual Studio debugger that fetches the source files, more details on the download page.

UPDATE: If you get an error installing the Hotfix , try inserting your VS 2008 DVD and then running the Hotfix EXE again. We’re looking into the root cause - it’s related to having a prior version of VS 2008 (e.g. Beta 2) installed on the machine. But this workaround should allow the Hotfix to install properly.

UPDATE (1/18): There were some problems with the QFE link above that have been addressed, sorry for the inconvenience, it’s fixed now.

2) Start Visual Studio 2008 and bring up Tools > Options > Debugging > General. If you are running under the Visual Basic Profile, you will need to check the box on the lower left of the Options Dialog marked “Show All Settings” before continuing (other profiles won’t have this option).

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