January 2007 - Posts
Excel 2007 increases the grid from 65,536 rows and 256 columnns to over 1 million rows and 16,384 columns - whether this will create even worse monster spreadsheets is a different question - as well as memory, multithreading, XLL improvements.
Also good whitepaper on Improving Performance in Excel 2007.
SharePoint 2007 has a nice feature where they do a red squiggle validation for data entry controls, similar to spell checking in Word.
It's done by some clever div / span with contenteditable dhtml as uncovered by fooshen.
It's good to see that these SharePoint querystring tricks work on Microsoft Office Server 2007.
Add ?contents=1 to the url which will take you to the web part maintenance page when you need to close a misbehaving webpart on page.
Add ?ToolPaneView=2 which shows the Add Web Parts toolpane, handy if want to add say a content editor webpart to a item edit page.
Whether it is Google, eBay or MSN - they all need to scale to millions of users.
How eBay manages it's storage is an extreme problem,
"eBay's storage engineering team ('Eleven people', Strong said) utilizes 2 petabytes of raw digital space on a daily basis to run the site and store its data, yet has to add about 10 terabytes of new storage every week to cover new transactions"
TechNet paper talking about how MSN scales out SQL Server with data dependent routing to partition data across a federation of servers - this is becoming a bigger issue as sites use multi-tenant data architectures.
The consumer space sometimes leads the enterprise space, especially with free software - like instant messaging, voice over IP (VOIP), blogs, etc.
Good Microsoft paper on the use of blogs and wikis in business - how they can be relevant to workers sharing events that happened on their shift to collaboration for program management.
The real winners in enterprise intranets are ones that empower the end-user to self-service themselves - this is a space that SharePoint 2007 is going to grow and grow.
Also seems Podcasting is gaining the interest of analysts, so these corporate tips should come in handy.