Office 365 Announced

October 27th, 2010 -- by John Ano

Microsoft recently announced Office 365 has gone to beta testing. If you are hearing about it for the first time, Office 365 is Microsoft’s next step in evolving toward cloud-based products and services. At its core are the cloud versions of flagship products SharePoint and Exchange. Also included is Lync, the new brand for Office Communication Server and Live Meeting. None of these products are new to the cloud – they have been offered via Microsoft Online Services for the last two years as the Business Productivity Online Suite or BPOS. bluLink has used BPOS since the beginning, and we’ve been very pleased with the offering and SLA.

Part of the excitement with Office 365 is the upgrade of each server to the 2010 version. It’s no surprise we are most excited about the enhancements SharePoint 2010 brings to the cloud, but there are some great new capabilities rolling out with Exchange 2010 Online and Lync.

Rounding out the Office 365 offering is something new: Office Web Apps. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will soon have an online version that will let you work with documents directly in the browser, and tightly integrate with SharePoint 2010.

Even though the official release date is not set, Microsoft forecasts general availability of Office 365 in 2011. Beta 1 is underway, and we are talking with partners and customers about planning and adoption strategies now.

I’ll be bringing more news and technical deep dives in upcoming blog entries.

To learn more, visit http://office365.microsoft.com.

Tags: BPOS, Cloud Services, Office 365, Office Web Apps, SharePoint 2010
Posted in Announcements, Cloud Services, Enterprise 2.0, Office 365, Office Web Apps, SharePoint 2010 | No Comments »

Visio Services

August 1st, 2010 -- by Clint Skullerud

One of our current projects required managing a global process library so Visio Services seemed to be a great approach based on the interactive and metadata requirements. After some steep learning curves around the new Visio Services API we delivered a POC that was well received. The tool supports browsing, navigating, and searching for processes and their respective metadata (Title, Overview, Scenarios, Desktop Procedures, User Guides, etc.). The most valuable piece of the puzzle is the ability to link Visio shapes to an external data connection and of course be able to display this mash-up of information in the browser. Tagging SharePoint list/library/reusable content against the Visio shapes, in this case processes or process steps, provides the global operations team the ability to manage processes in a central location while also wrapping a content publishing process around the metadata. End users are presented with a dynamic user interface with hierarchical browse, diagram interaction, and filter/search capabilities. A challenging aspect of the project is driving a well defined content metadata structure. The more well defined the business process needs are the easier it will be to design the supporting metadata structure, both input and edit functionality.

I will share some of the more interesting technical components and code snipets for reference as the project progresses.

Two links that have been very helpful working with the new Visio Services API are Visio Services Microsoft blog and Visio Product Team MSDN blog.

I’m interested in hearing about your experiences with the new and exciting Visio Services API. How are you stretching it’s capabilities to deliver value to customers?

Tags: Process Library, SharePoint Service Apps, Visio, Visio API, Visio Services
Posted in Visio Services | No Comments »

bluLink is now blogging

May 2nd, 2010 -- by bluLink Team

Welcome to the bluLink Solutions blog. We are excited to begin blogging about the technologies we use and the experiences we have with them. To follow our blog, simply click on the RSS feed icon to the right. To follow individual blog posts click on the RSS link at the bottom of each individual post. We encourage our readers to leave comments as this is an educational forum and collaboration is key for all of us to learn and grow.

SharePoint, including the Microsoft business productivity suite will be the core focus of this blog, however from time to time we may post non-technical pieces related to the business landscape in general. Your feedback is appreciated, your suggestions welcomed. If there’s a specific topic you enjoy reading about here on our blog let us know. If you think there is value in a new topic, please speak up.

bluLink Solutions and team look forward to blogging and interacting with all of our readers.

Kind regards,

bluLink Solutions

Posted in Announcements | No Comments »