SharePoint and Information Management Policies

Did you know you can create policies within SharePoint that will dictate how long a document will reside in a library before it’s automatically disposed of? Did you know you can enable barcodes on documents for physical asset recording? Did you know you can achieve all of this without writing a single piece code? Information Management Policies within SharePoint is a key and usually under utilised SharePoint feature that will assist any organisation with the lifecycle management of document libraries, plus a whole lot more. These policies can be created at the document library level and...

Stream media from your SharePoint Site with Windows 2008 Media Services

Posted by George Khalil in SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, Windows on May 22nd, 2009 | 0 Comments

Wouldn’t it be great if you could deliver digital media content including Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) from your SharePoint site without buffering issues and poor viewing experience. We must admit that SharePoint itself isn’t great in handling and storing digital media in particular large Video files and we can blame SQL for that! Even though you can host WMV’s in document libraries just like any other file, features such as fast streaming capabilities effectively eliminating buffering time, and reducing the likelihood of playback interruptions due to network...

Exchange 2010 Beta, So what’s new? – Part 3/3

Posted by George Khalil in Exchange, Exchange 2010 on May 18th, 2009 | 0 Comments

We have arrived at the final article of this series on Exchange 2010 Beta, with this post focusing on the new features and technology enhancements. Today is all about the reasons why we are all going to migrate to this latest product offering when released to the public, right? Okay, so let’s begin with everyone’s favourite, Outlook Web Access (OWA) and focus on some of it’s new features. OWA has come along way since the days I first used it as an end user in Exchange 5.5. From the outset you will notice that Exchange 2010 OWA adopts the Windows Live theme, see below screenshots, and by...

Exchange 2010 Beta, Configuration – Part 2/3

Posted by George Khalil in Exchange, Exchange 2010 on May 13th, 2009 | 0 Comments

In our previous post we successfully completed our first Exchange 2010 Install, and after looking back the most difficult part was ensuring all the prerequisites were met for a new Exchange environment . In today’s post we will continue with our installation with a focus on basic configuration to get mail flowing for internal and external clients, configuring our Anti-Spam agents on the Hub Transport Server (remember we are not utilising the Edge Role in our dev environment) and testing all of this using the brand spanking new Outlook Web Access (OWA). Just a reminder, the next and last article...

Bring a web application closer to the desktop via Prism

Posted by George Khalil in Firefox, Windows on May 11th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Although not necessarily a blog topic of choice I couldn’t resist myself to not introduce Mozilla’s Firefox latest extension for “Prism”. This little add-on allows you to convert a website to a desktop application in a matter of a couple of clicks. The web applications that immediately came to mind included Google Apps, Facebook and YouTube. So I went ahead, downloaded the add-on from here and installed it on my Firefox browser (currently running Firefox 3.5b4 on my MAC OS X). From here it’s pretty straight forward, you browse to the site you want to convert as a desktop...

Exchange 2010 Beta, First Look – Part 1/3

Posted by George Khalil in Exchange, Exchange 2010 on May 8th, 2009 | 0 Comments

I have been blogging a lot about SharePoint lately and thought I’d post a 3 part series about my other favourite topic of interest, Exchange. Exchange is one of those technologies that once you spend the time designing, beta testing, dev testing and finally implementing in your production environment, there’s not too much development later in its lifecycle, so when Exchange 2010 was released as a public beta I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it and set it up in my dev environment. I implemented my first Exchange server back in the days of 5.5 and progressively kept up to date...