Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

From what I can see Microsoft will release Exchange 2007 before Christmas this year - good news as the new version is very revolutionary. Currently I'm researching Exchange 2007 for my personal knowledge and also in order to start advising customers. Despite requiring new 64 bit hardware I can see some major benefits to the new version of Exchange. Rather than prattle on my blog here are a few links for reading and research that I've found useful:

• Paul Thurrot's Review of Exchange 2007 Beta 2
• Wikipedia History of Exchange including information on the current version

Wellingtonian Ian Morrish (and an old friend of mine from Advantage Group days) has been posting loads of information on WSS v3 and Sharepoint 2007 on his updated www.wssdemo.com website. Follow the link for tons of new sharepoint information.

Also congrats to Ian on his move to consulting services :)

I've got a customer who is having problems with a sharepoint installation where there are more than 4000 documents in a doc lib. In general this is not an issue for sharepoint but it seems to cause issues with their backup software. So I did a bit of research and found some interesting guidance on stopping performance issues with sharepoint doc libs. Resources and reading:

• Michael Ekegren Blog post on what happans when you put in 1 Million items into a sharepoint.
• Microsoft Resources - Setting up sharepoint as a collaborative filestore (good metrics on doc lib performance guidelines)
• Post on Mart's Tam Tam sharepoint Blog (Some similar quotes from the MS resource, but a few other notes)
• Microsoft General Sharepoint FAQ for background information

ASP.NET Ajax (Codenamed: Atlas) beta 2 has been released. New version, tons of changes and a new official name. Found the download and information here

For those of you non-ms people out there ATLAS (or ASP.NET AJAX for the new official name) is Microsoft's implementation of Ajax.

If Office 2007, Vista 2007 (with Windows Media Centre) wasn't enough - .NET 3.0 has also RTM'd. You can download .NET 3.0 directly from this link. A busy few weeks for Microsoft!!!

Windows Media Centre was always a specific version of Windows XP that end-users could not get. It was only open to OEMs who built and sold machines. That all changes with Windows Vista, now there is versions of vista that come with Windows Media Centre built in.

Windows Media Centre comes in the the home premium and ultimate versions of Vista.

More MS info at this link.

Probably old news to most, but Windows Vista and Office RTM versions are released on MSDN. More at this link