So…What do the changes at Sun mean to the ECM market???

Sun made the announcement this afternoon after the markets closed that they are going to "cut up to 5,000 jobs in restructuring".

What will this mean to the ECM market??? Well after reading Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog article looking for clues, the only hting that jumped out at me was the following:

"we will build all products at Sun from Java, Solaris, StorageTek and from our newly unified SPARC and x64 SunFire platforms."

"three products that represent the future of such systems innovations. The recently unveiled Niagara servers, the StorageTek Titanium archive platform; and lastly, an upcoming extension to our NAS offerings, code named Thumper."

"announcing in late June – code name Thumper. Thumper is a SunFire server, running Solaris and its 128-bit ZFS file system, that packs 24 Terabytes of storage into a miniature package – allowing Solaris and Java applications to run directly on the storage device at breathtaking speed and price points."

Not sure but this last product sounds like a competitive offering to EMCs Centera storage solution.

If so then Sun may be trying to position these offerings into their larger enterprise clients for large global ECM solutions and the ASP providers who may be offering hosted ECM.

I will be watching to see if there are any more clues over the next few days.

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Office 2007 Beta 2 – So Far, Pretty Stable

Well I have been running Office 2007 Beta 2 on my laptop for the last week and so far I am very impressed with the stability. For the most part I have not experienced many crashes. I did come across two incompatibilities that I had address before I could use Outlook reliably. But in both cases, Office provided a link to a support web site that identified the offending issue based on the error report sent to support.

First, I should mention that I went ahead and did an upgrade to my existing Office 2003 (I did a full backup of my machine first ) installation rather than complete a new installation. All settings, email accounts, signatures, etc. were migrated perfectly.

The first incompatibility was a conflict with the Outlook add-on for an older version of Adobe Acrobat 6.0. The Microsoft support article suggested that Acrobat 7.0 would fix the problem. I was not interested in upgrading so I modified the current installation and disabled all Microsoft Office extensions for Acrobat.

The other incompatibility I came across was the Outlook add-ins for MindJet MindManager 6 which caused some stability issues. Once again I modified the current MindManager installation and disabled all Microsoft Office extensions. As an aside, MindManager is a great tool for brainstorming, quickly gathering documenting and requirements, and designing and documenting taxonomies.

Since removing the Office integration features for both MindManager 6 and Acrobat 6.0 Outlook 2007 Beta 2 has been very stable. One of the features I really like is the ability to view multiple calendars in "Overlay Mode" which merges the multiple calendars on top one another. This makes it very easy to find open blocks of time when coordinating a large number of people or resources.

The following link provides a list of MSDN resources for Office 2007.

I plan to get started on reviewing WSS v3 and SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 later this week.

In my next post I will talk about my top three most significant features/improvements to Office System 2007 that will make ECM easier… 

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Finally – Success Downloading Office 2007 Beta 2

The methods for downloading Office 2007 Beta were changed yesterday and I was able to finally download all the pieces. I am composing this post in Word 2007.

I have been using Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint for the last day and getting used to the new UIs. I will start creating a list of things I like and things that I don’t like. But overall I am enjoying the enhanced Clear Type presentation within the apps. Much easier to read.

More soon…

Downloading Microsoft Office Beta 2 – 3:54 PM Eastern

Well, I started downloading Beta 2 about 90 minutes ago and was able to successfully get Office Professional Plus and Office Forms Server.

After that  – no luck. All the other downloads I had schedules indicated an error. When I try and get back into t restart the download I can no longer get verfied.

 I guess Microsof tunderestimated the capacity needed one the word got out that Beta 2 was available.

I guess I will try tonight

Microsoft Office 2007 Beta Released

Finally! The public beta of Microsoft Office 2007 is available for download.

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