Author: Robert Everatt
//After some research around the SharePoint 2003 issue, I have come to believe that the problem with the RTE error is not the browser but the operating system. I know this might sound strange as it should not affect the operation of SharePoint on the browser. If this is the case, I have seen a number of fixes for this on the internet, they mostly involve a hack. I will test this theory more when I get to work tomorrow (I have been researching from home today)
I was wrong
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//Michael and I have been presented with a challenge involving SharePoint 2003, to attempt to resolve a very strange compatibility issue. A content editor is used to input text and images into a SharePoint site, it uses a Rich Text editor to format the text, for some reason the Rich Text Editor (RTE) will work perfectly fine using Internet Explorer 7, however it will not work in any newer versions of Internet Explorer or any other web browser. This is a very odd Error as it is assumed that Microsoft would try keep it compatible with future updates.
Along with the Microsoft SharePoint research, over the next few weeks we will be looking into this issue and will attempt to resolve it.
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//“UK authorities are currently investigating Microsoft’s claims that its 99.9 percent cloud uptime is in fact true, after a series of outages left Office 365 users without email or communications.
The Advertising Standards Agency is investigating a complaint over “marketing communication on Microsoft’s website” specifically in regards to the uptime claims the company makes in its advertising material.” – ZDNET (http://lncn.eu/wxy6)
After only a few months of going live, Microsoft have already failed at meeting their 99.9% up-time guarantee, personally this comes as no surprise considering that BPOS was notorious for it’s downtime. Microsoft have already paid out refunds to all the companies that were affected by the outages, so they are keeping their promises concerning down time refunds but will Microsoft improve their actual up time or remove the advertisement?
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//Let me start by just saying that Michael and I have been working together for about 4 months now, however our desks are half a room apart and yet we have still managed to work well together, I believe that this is because of Lync. Microsoft Lync is included in all Microsoft Office 365 packages and allows users to IM each other, however, it is so much more than that. Michael and I use it to work together all day every day, constantly discussing our findings, sharing program control, sending monitor views and links to each other, we don’t need to get up and go to each others computer each and every time we find something new, Lync saves us a lot of time and effort.
I believe that Microsoft Lync will be an extremely useful too for the university in the future allowing staff and students to communicate with one another making communication within the University much more fluid.
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//Last week Windows 8 developer preview was released into the world, users were able to install Windows 8 as their new operating system or install it as a virtual machine. One of the biggest new features of Windows 8 was the Windows phone 7 style front page view, the applications and widget ’tiles’ are made mainly from HTML5 and java which is a new direction for Microsoft, but what does this mean for SharePoint?
So far there has been no word from Microsoft as to what Windows 8 might do for SharePoint, but there have been some theories thrown around the internet as to what the new OS could do for SharePoint. One blogger (http://lncn.eu/eghw)thinks that it could greatly improve the SharePoint experiance. “Making Windows 8 widgets from SharePoint lists will be ideal to show important information to the user: Sales forecasts, New team members, Team workloads, New documents published, Internal news and many more.” This could make SharePoint administration much easier to keep up with on large networks, this wouldn’t just benefit administrators but all users, having lists be updated in tiles, allowing them to read announcements and access new documents directly from the Windows 8 front page, this would greatly improve SharePoint’s userbility in my opinion.
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