Growth in smartphone and mobile device use and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend in corporate IT is now having a backward effect on PCs....Read the rest of entry >>

SharePoint expert shares SharePoint trends from healthcare....Read the rest of entry >>

The long-awaited Facebook 2.5 update for Windows Phone is now available, providing a number of new features that bring this app up to speed with recent changes at the social networking service. Facebook for Windows Phone is one of a handful of “must have” apps for this platform and if you do use this service on the go, you’ll want to upgrade immediately....Read the rest of entry >>

A recent article on CIO.com asked the question “Can Google Apps Unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange?” Many similar articles are published to help advise CIOs and budding CIOs about the deep and serious choices they will have to make about technology. Take the wrong decision and your career is a bust, make the right choice and your reputation is secure and you become a CIO par excellence. Or so the theory goes. Given the topic, I had a certain interest in the article. There’s always a possibility that you can learn something from the experiences of others, even if this article focused on a small 500-user company (New England Biolabs) in a highly specialized area (molecular biology) that might not be a good prototype for other companies that are considering making a switch.The trial to figure out whether Google Apps could replace Office and Exchange was carried out  by 24 users over 60 days. Not many companies could dedicate nearly 5% of their total user population to testing new software, so this was somewhat out of the ordinary. All of the testers were Gmail users for personal email and the company operates heterogeneous platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux)....Read the rest of entry >>

Question: I’ve been working through some disaster recovery scenario testing and sometimes I see databases marked SUSPECT and sometimes RECOVERY_PENDING. Why are there two different database states when in earlier versions there was only SUSPECT? Answer: From SQL Server 2005 onwards (when the metadata subsystem inside SQL Server was extensively rewritten), the database management portion of the Storage Engine has surfaced a variety of new states in the sys.databases catalog view. The SUSPECT and RECOVERY_PENDING statuses are needed because they describe quite different states of the database. The RECOVERY_PENDING state means one of two things: either the database could not be opened to determine whether crash recovery needs to be performed, or crash recovery needs to be performed but was unable to start. The boot page (page 9 in file 1) contains a flag that indicates whether the database was cleanly shut down (i.e. with no uncommitted transactions) or not. If the boot page is inaccessible for some reason, the database cannot be started as SQL Server doesn’t know if crash recovery has to be performed to make the database transactionally (and potentially structurally) consistent. If the boot page indicates that crash recovery needs to be performed, but something is preventing crash recovery from beginning (e.g. a missing transaction log file, or a damaged log file header), then the database cannot be opened as there’s no other way to make the database transactionally consistent. The SUSPECT state means that recovery started but was unable to complete. Note that I didn’t say “crash recovery” – instead I just said “recovery”. This is because the act of making the database transactionally consistent could be performed while starting the database (i.e. crash recovery) or is a running transaction needs to be rolled back for some reason. In the first case, a failed crash recovery will mark the database SUSPECT. In the second case, if a transaction is rolled back and hi...Read the rest of entry >>

How to use Windows PowerShell to simply and effectively create an attractive SharePoint icon that's not out-of-the-box boring....Read the rest of entry >>

A recent tweet took me to a script repository for Office 365 maintained by Microsoft’s Thomas Ashworth. Now, despite the best efforts of Twinbox to integrate my Twitter feed into Outlook (a job it does quite nicely), I don’t always respond to tweets or even read their content. After all, there’s so much rubbish you can deal with during any one day. But discovering an exception to the normal dross is always wonderful and so it is when you discover something useful. When I visited it, the script repository offered just six scripts. Perhaps more will come over time. However, the point is that there’s some interesting stuff here that can be taken advantage of immediately, which I think is the hallmark of a truly useful repository. In this case, the PowerShell scripts deal with aspects of Office 365 tenant domain management. I think that most administrators who have to manage email in an Office 365 tenant domain limit their horizon to the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) and don’t attempt to navigate the depths of PowerShell for Exchange Online. ...Read the rest of entry >>

Microsoft today is touting a collection of “official” wallpaper images for Windows Phone that users can apply to their handset’s lock screen. As you might expect, the images are reminiscent of the wallpaper Microsoft has previously offered for desktop versions of Windows, but are designed for the screen resolution and portrait orientation used by Windows Phone....Read the rest of entry >>

This week, Microsoft introduced a social network of its own, the awkwardly named So.cl (and, yes, it’s pronounced as “social”). But rather than being a full-fledged competitor to Facebook or Twitter, Microsoft says So.cl is simply an experiment, and aimed mostly at students....Read the rest of entry >>

In a new post to the Visual Studio Blog, Microsoft has detailed more information about the Visual Studio 11 product editions and which platforms the new developer suite will support. The news comes on the heels of an announcement about coming major changes to the Visual Studio 11 user interface....Read the rest of entry >>