July 25th, 2007 by robert wuhrman
If you read my post the other day entitled SharePoint VHD may be getting fixed you probably noted that the download page for the SharePoint VPC was taken down on Saturday. Looks like the download page is back up now with a publish date of 7/24/2007:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=67f93dcb-ada8-4db5-a47b-df17e14b2c74&DisplayLang=en
Haven't had a chance to try this set of files yet, but presuming the CRC issue that was in the previous set of files is corrected, happy virtualization to all….
-Rob Wuhrman
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July 21st, 2007 by robert wuhrman
As some may be aware, there has been a CRC error when trying to extract the 2nd file of the SharePoint VHD from the Microsoft site for at least the past week. Well as of this writing, clicking on the SharePoint link on the VHD landing page
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/try/vhd/default.mspx
yields the following error message.
The download you requested is unavailable. If you continue to see this message when trying to access this download, go to the "Search for a Download" area on the Download Center home page.
Let's cross our fingers that this is a good sign that the problem has been noticed, the current VHD removed, and that a proper set of uncorrupted files might be reposted later today or early this coming week. If you don't already know about these, they are a great way to get up and running with a demo environment. They do have a 30 day "time bomb" in them that will cause them to expire though. So, if you're looking for a long term more sustainable sandbox environment these might not be for you. They're great if you need to give a demo, do some quick experimentation, evaluate SharePoint for the boss, if you are the boss, and for the merely curious.
Robert Wuhrman
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July 13th, 2007 by robert wuhrman
Last Christmas, I received a lovely new SPOT watch from my wife for Christmas. It's an Abacus 2006, one of the more popular SPOT watches du jour. Here's the lowdown on Microsoft's SPOT if you've never heard of it (none of my fellow-techies at work had ever heard or seen of it)….
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SPOT At a Glance
SPOT: Smart Personal Objects Technology. It lets you receive personalized feeds of information directly into your wristwatch. You can get movie showtimes, weather, news, traffic reports, and yes for a small upgrade fee even your Outlook appointments delivered directly to your watch. You can find out more about the different channels offered in the MSN Direct program. To date, SPOT has been used primarily for Watches, but there is now a coffee maker on the market that also incorporates SPOT technology and Garmin now has a GPS unit that utilizes MSN's SPOT technology to feed Gas Prices and Weather reports into your driving experience.
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Hmmmm, too bad we don't have the ability to get this SPOT to do RSS feeds I say, because MOSS 2007 does RSS! Well low and behold, there's a howto from Phillip Baron written in Jan '06 discussing how to utilize SPOT Manager in order to take an RSS, and send it to your wrist watch via Live Messenger.
and guess what, it works! After downloading and installing SPOT Manager to my wristwatch (note that the download link at that URL doesn't work so you need to go here for the time being to get SPOTManager_Windows.exe) then doing some light configuring, I am able to receive SharePoint Task list feeds on my watch.
It takes about 5-8 minutes for changes to the SharePoint list to be picked up by SPOT Manager, sent out onto the MSN Direct Network via my Live Messenger, and arrive in my watch, but it's an awe-inspiring experience nonetheless!
My only beef so far is that I've not been able to get the RSS feeds in SharePoint to push out based on a view. SharePoint's RSS feeds seem to only want to push out based on the content of the entire list. Let's say I have a task list I want to be notified in my watch whenever a task is completed by someone. So I create a view in my task list that shows me all of the completed tasks. It'd be great if the RSS subscription were context aware with respect to the view being displayed when you subscribe to a given list. Perhaps in a future update, or if anyone knows how to get your list RSS to filter based on a view, please let me know.
For the moment, I look at the watch feed as more of a proof of concept towards integrating SharePoint 2007 data with my wristwatch though it is an exciting prospect nevertheless. Bill Gates answered a question last year that someone fielded about SPOT technology and SharePoint at the SharePoint 2006 conference that you can read here. I suppose if you really want to take it to the next level you can have those SharePoint list and document library changes sent to your coffee maker 
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robert wuhrman