Mylearning.be

Spring is in the air… time for some blog cleaning. Today I installed version 2.5 of WordPress on this blog and on our family blog. This update contains a major rework of the admin area of the blog. You won’t see any spectacular changes, but I will

On our family blog, I upgraded the Coppermine fotoalbum to the latest version. No major changes there, just security updates and bugfixes. 

In the meantime, I added some plugins too: the All in one SEO pack and the WordPress database backup plugin. 

All should be working fine now. If you find a bug, let me know. 

In a meeting with Luk and Wim

Today, I noticed a SharePoint Search feature I did not  know yet: I was looking for the meaning of an abbreviation using the SharePoint Search center, and at the bottom of the first page of my search results a link showed up: What people are saying. After clicking the link, it showed me a perfect definition, and links to the documents were it was found. Cool!

This is what I can find in the Microsoft documentation: the Definition Extraction feature finds definitions for candidate terms and identifies acronyms and their expansions by examining the grammatical structure of sentences that have been indexed (for example, NASA, radar, modem, and so on). It is only available for English.

This means that during the crawling, the MOSS indexer is checking content for sentences like “X is ….”, and recognises them as a definition. It does not seem to be very configurable, but you can turn it off in the settings of the Search Core Results web part. Just uncheck Display Discovered Definition.

Recently, my company laptop was upgraded to Communicator 2007.

Two things I did not like about this:

• the “old” communicator 2005 had the possibility to do screen sharing. In OCS2007, it’s not there anymore. Of course, you can upgrade your conversation to live meeting, but we do not have that yet.
• after installation, my presence icons in Outlook 2007 did not work anymore.  And this made me realise how convenient these things are, and how quickly you get used to them: you start a new message, type in your recipient, you notice that he is in the office,… you close the message and go see him!
  Fortunately, I got them back to work by installing a microsoft update.

I have been testing the new Office Live Workspace, of course I wanted to check how this tool can be positioned in relation to Windows SharePoint Services or even MOSS.

A quick feature overview:

• sites and subsites: you can create different workspaces, based on a template (class workspace, household workspace, job search workspace).
• new documents can be created directly from a workspace, but the list is limited to Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
• built-in lists: tasks, contacts, events.
  
• custom lists: you can create your own list, but the available columns are fairly limited:
  
• interface: is very cool and easy to use. Unfortunately, Safari for Mac is not supported. You can uses Firefox 2 though.
• Office integration: you can install an add-in that adds the option to save or open files directly from Office. It did not work on Vista immediately, I had to install an additional update to get it to work.  
  Some of the lists can be exported to Excel, and calendars and contacts can be synced with Outlook. For the calendar, I encountered some issues with time zones and/or daylight savings, but that seems normal as the service has not been “localized” yet.
  
• Storage: you get 500 MB of storage. Not very much, but the purpose is not to distribute your divx movies .
• Alerts: there is a nice Activity pane that shows you recent changes to the list; you can specify if you want to receive activity mails, but you don’t have all the options you have in SharePoint for configuring the mail frequency.
• Sharing: you can share a workspace with up to 100 people; two security levels: viewer and editor. That’s it.

Check out the Frequently Asked Questions for the service. Or watch the demo.

It seems like a small version of Windows SharePoint Services Team sites. The interface is much slicker and easier to use, integration with Office is very good. A great service for occasional collaboration. There is even an option to collaborate in real time on documents (with SharedView ) but I haven’t tried that one yet.