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iPad Takes the Enterprise by Storm!

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Joel Oleson

I recently sat in on Barry Jinks Office 365 Saturday session and viewed the Webinar on "Secure File Sharing with SharePoint: An Alternative to Dropbox." At first I was simply exited to see a new file sync tool for SharePoint. I’ve been getting beat up at work over the complexity of using SharePoint to sync a folder. My users haven’t exactly been happy with our encouragement to move from file shares. Many have taken up Dropbox, and security has been up in arms. We haven’t had a very strong argument to get them to move from Dropbox. We tell them to use SharePoint, but they complain about the poor user experience on iPad and mobile devices, both of which have a better story with Dropbox.

In this session, Barry introduces first the numbers on this iPad/tablet invasion. The numbers he shared were incredible. Gartner’s anticipated numbers for various OS’s just show what this surge is going to look like.

Incredible! In the session I overheard many explaining that out of nowhere it seems that the iPad has been legitimized as an alternative to the laptop, and is a popular favorite with executives. One attendee shared that his company had purchased 20,000 iPads.

Microsoft hasn’t ignored Apple’s revolution in the enterprise space. They’ve slowly been testing the waters, first with Microsoft Tag reader, and next with a full blown OneNote app for iPad released free to the app store. Now you can get iPad formatted SharePoint BI reports on PerformancePoint. Seems to me that Microsoft does know that various company execs want to see their reports on their iPads, in fact they have already responded in a small way.

"Cumulative Update 2011-12 (CU 2011-12) for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 enables organizations to view certain kinds of reports and scorecards on Apple iPad devices that use the iOS 5 Safari browser. This article describes what business intelligence content users can view on iPad, how to configure reports and scorecards to be displayed correctly, and how to navigate business intelligence content on iPad." Read more on TechNet…

Here are quick list of what’s now supported in SharePoint 2010 SP1 with the December CU.

Business Intelligence Center
Dashboards with filters and links
Excel Services Reports
Scorecards
KPIs
Analytic Charts (my favorite, if you’ve seen my presentations!)
Web Page Reports

Quick SharePoint and iPad tip: "Apple iPad does not use right-click functionality or the ability to double-click a SharePoint folder to open it. However, this does not mean that context menus are unavailable. To open a SharePoint folder or a shortcut menu or a hyperlink in Safari on iPad, tap and hold a position for approximately 1-2 seconds. A menu opens from which you can select the option that you want."

In fact, Barry went on share that iPad use at work is not so rare at all. In fact professionals who use their iPad at work is 67% (IDC iPad for Business Survey 2012.) In our in house session poll, 50% of those who had iPads in our SharePoint crowd had used their iPads for work. I admit I’ve definitely used mine to sync my work email, and frequently use it to answer after hours email. I’ve also definitely used it for connecting to our Intranet for doing people search, and casually browsing corporate news and accessing social networks. I also admit I haven’t used it much for accessing SharePoint outside of the casual browsing, mostly because of the user experience through the browser in working with documents. Not the best experience as you can imagine.

Yes, iPad is making waves and forcing IT departments to wake up. In fact a recent survey by IDC, a poll to a number of professionals asked "Has the iPad has partly, completely or not at all replaced X device?" In the case of laptops, the number goes as high as 16% replacing a laptop with as many as 54% saying it partly replaced it. (IDC iPad for Business Survey 2012)

IT has definitely been taken off guard. Only 14 say they official support the tablets in their organization, with 9% saying it’s widely in use but not supported. 49% of organizations have limited use or are under evalution. (Ernst & Young 2011 Global Information Security Survey)

Part of the wake up call is… how to manage this? These edge devices that seem like an information leak waiting to happen are frequently being used by executives and those with the best of access to corporate data. I know I understand that passwords and policies force users to come up with simple passwords. In fact, my 2 your old knows my password on my phone and iPad. The password requirement that is enforced by exchange down to my iPhone and iPad are pretty strong if my 2 year old can do it without making too many mistakes. How do we manage this? People today are already using dropbox to get data onto their phones and devices. Dropbox is a consumer solution with no real enforcement solution for enterprises. I’m sure you heard about the dropbox fiasco where there was a 4 hour window with the environment just left open. In fact when you investigate corporate solutions you find it’s quite expensive and it doesn’t necessarily solve your biggest concerns. Here are three: Employee "owns" the data, vulnerable in an e-discovery, can’t apply disposition.

How can we get both ease of use, flexibility, and security and management?

In comes MDM – Mobile Device management. A new, but sorely needed software based solution for IT. It’s all about controlling and protecting data, settings and configuration. There are various mobile deployment management software for getting your arms around things. You need the ability to centrally manage and restrict the settings. You need that ability to remotely wipe when someone walks off with a device. You need the ability to manage the security, and manage how content is cached, and shared externally. The challenge is finding the apps you want to support, and ensuring all the right hooks are there.

There’s Colligo Administrator for enterprises to centrally deploy, manage and report data across the various Colligo applications.

I’m evaluating Colligo Briefcase over the next couple of weeks. I’m already jazzed up about seeing a solution that provides both security management and ease of use. I don’t want to fill you full of just the marketing info. I want to get you the real word on this. So watch here the for a product review. There is actually a briefcase lite that’s free from the iPad app store. Simply providing a feedback score to the free app and a follow up email to Colligo enters you into a free iPad offering.

Here’s some good references on Colligo’s comprehensive solutions for the individual and enterprise around iPad.

Get more information on Colligo Briefcase Enterprise from Colligo’s site, including a request to evaluate it in your organization.

Are SharePoint Web Analytics Good Enough?

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Joel Oleson

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I’m a geek when it comes to analytics. On my own SharePoint blog I currently use google analytics. Sad. Sorry to say… I’d use a Bing equivalent if there were one. The SharePoint analytics are great around very specific areas, but are lacking in others, but do have logging where you can build your own reports. Is it worth it? I say… on your own blog it’s no big deal to go with a free one, but if you’re serious there are now a rich ecosystem of third party web analytic solutions.

The best writeup on out of the box analytics is from Ryan Duguid from the SharePoint Marketing team. He does a good job selling it. In my mind it’s lacking for serious analytics, and you wouldn’t get an argument from Microsoft. They realize that. They as well would tell you there’s a rich ecosystem here. Good enough? Not for most. Not even enough for what I want on my blog. J

Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010: Insights into Reports and Metrics

Here are the top of mind things I’d say you need a third party web analytics solution for:

Mapping out your users where they are coming from (Locations, Regions, Countries, Languages, ISPs, Domains)
Farm wide analytics (without development) – I personally want to know the real counts, not just on the portal, but across all web apps, so I can see how my authenticated users, visits and sessions are increasing over time. I’m also interested in much more detailed statistics around session length and I ultimately want bits and bytes. How much content is being transferred? When focusing exclusively on webs and site collections, I’m missing out on being able to get all up numbers. I’m also really missing out on trends with how my enterprise is changing over time.
Authenticated Users count – I really like being able to determine who exactly is using it, who are these top users and then drilling in on what they are doing in their sessions. Often it is a crawler, and then I want to ignore them, or find out if it’s all web services or what are they doing. The more I can dig in on sessions the better I can understand what are these long running sessions.
Devices and OS – Mobile Device type. You want to know how many IOS iPad vs. iPhone vs. Windows Phone 7. You won’t get this out of the box. You’ll also find that Chrome isn’t well represented and if it the browser didn’t exist at the time SharePoint 2010 shipped, it may not be listed. I’m noticing the unknown is getting larger and larger in the browser.
Fulfilment – if you want to see what path your users are following through the site, you’ll find it lacking.
Top documents, sites, pages – while you may get top sites in a site collection or top destinations on a portal you’ll definitely find the product lacking.
How is the product being used? – You’ll very likely end up writing your own reports on gathering how many databases you have, how many site collections, how many unique owners, and on and on about details about file types used, and site template types used
Enterprise rollups – you may want to pull all the logs or all the data together to see how search is being used and what people are doing with it.

What SharePoint Analytics does ok…

I’m not saying SharePoint does everything you’ll need, but I think you will find that these reports are useful. I prefer to get weekly excel reports of what queries are happening, and how my best bets are being handled. I do get frustrated with the large number of user searches that clog up my best bet recommendations. I’d like to say don’t recommend person.aspx ever… simply turn it off and stop recommending it for any searches. I can put the a list of executives and so on in by hand, but .

Search Keywords Usage (Note there are differences between SharePoint Keywords and FAST keywords)
Best Bet Usage Reports (FAST has separate reports, with more functionality)
Top Queries
Failed Queries
Health logging and reporting – there is a lot of in the box health analytics that is not going to be found in external third parties. This also is not something in the IIS logs, so it should be seen as separate.

Essentially there are 3 categories you’ll find and beyond these areas is where you’ll find the edges. There is some custom reporting, but it often involves more work that it’s worth for what you might get off the shelf as canned reports else where. You need to decide how much it’s worth both in collecting and building vs. buying something off the shelf.

Traffic reports: These reports provide metrics such as:
- How much traffic your site gets (Number of Page Views);
- Who visits your sites (Top Visitors);
- How visitors arrive at your site (Top Referrers);
- Daily Unique Visitors, Top Destinations, Top Browsers, etc;
Search reports: These reports give you insight into what users are searching for, for example:
- How many times users searched (Number of Queries);
- What were the most used search terms (Top Queries);
- What queries have high failure rates (Failed Queries);
- Best Bet Usage, Search keywords, etc;
Inventory reports: These reports display key metrics regarding the inventory of your sites:
- What is the total disk drive space user (Storage Usage);
- How many sites exist (Number of Sites);
- Top Site Product Versions, Top Site Languages, etc;

No matter what solution you choose, you’ll likely still use some of the reports that are in the box. One of the biggest limitations in the SharePoint Usage Analytics is your ability to build reports that can easily be shared with polished looks. There’s a lot of online pagination. I can’t see all authenticated users on a single report as an example. I can’t even get that report in excel. If you want repots in Word, PDF, and nicely polished reports with great charts and graphs you’ll definitely be looking for more than what you find in the box.

If you’re looking beyond SharePoint Web Analytics, which isn’t really a stretch, there are some things to consider in your third party choices.

Do you need real time metrics?
Do you want the analytics happening in place or on separate infrastructure?
Are you more comfortable adding a javascript bot (snippet of code) in the masterpage?
Do you need SharePoint specific analytics or are you simply interested in web analytics that you’d get from generic log analyzers?
How well do you need to understand your audience?
Is commerce and path and decisions important in your metrics? There is a big difference in your purchase here.
Are you interested in a vendor with SharePoint expertise?
Is this tool designed for Intranets or Internet sites?
Will it support your SharePoint Upgrade? Is the company already thinking about v next?
Are the reports just in the browser or do you have various formats for those who will want to see them on a regular basis in email, PDFs, word, excel for munging, etc…

In your pursuits at looking at looking at third party solutions you’ll find different types of solutions. Some will analyze your IIS logs, those I’d consider the basic type of analytics solutions. The more engaging ones have “bots” that will be able to give you more real time results. With SharePoint you’re likely going to want to know what’s going on with your data, so there may be solutions that even get more integrated than a simple bot. Not all solutions are created equal.

Vendor Solution

Check out Intlock’s CardioLog 2010 – SharePoint vendor Web Analytics and Usage Reporting Solution. They sponsored this blog. They didn’t tell me what to write, just dug into my thoughts on it. I do plan to do a product review on Intlock’s solution, so we can find out just what type of reports, problems they are solving, and so on. Anxious to hear your feedback and experiences in this world of analytics. You get an idea of what the SharePoint Analytics have vs. Intlock and other solutions by looking at their comparison report.

Silverlight and SharePoint 2010 – Beating a Dead Horse

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Joel Oleson

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Had a great tweetjam today #SPJAM and one of the questions struck a chord with me. It’s around what is the value of the SharePoint community and will it continue to be relevant. You can see the amazing stream captured at http://harmon.ie/blog/02-13-2012

Yesterday I posted a book review SharePoint 2010 Development with Silverlight and immediately after tweeting the post, a conversation started with a small group of SharePoint MVPs and Community influencers. You’ll recognize them from their twitter handles.

The nature of twitter makes the conversation sound a bit more terse and dense, but the value is you get the message across in a lot less space. It starts with my tweet on the book Silverlight and SharePoint 2010 book review, and then goes from there. This blog is to open up a discussion on SharePoint and Silverlight with SharePoint 2010 and beyond. Our friend Mr. SharePoint Sheriff himself Bil Simser speaks very plainly about his attitudes about Silverlight. The world has changed a lot in the last year, and I think this thread is important for NOT to beat a dead horse, but rather making sure we are all on the same page around Silverlight and SharePoint development. Most SharePoint People don’t think Silverlight is that dead horse. They may not be following what’s happening with Windows 8. I think we’re far from being on the same page, but I don’t see too many people pushing Silverlight beyond the book at this point. I am anxious to see both sides represented and expect that with this open thread we will get a lively dialog. I’m going to highlight the important parts for the ADHD in all of us…

Joeloleson: Book Review: SharePoint 2010 Development with Silverlight – It’s the SharePoint APIs on Steroids
http://bit.ly/z7oqF7

Bsimser: I wouldn’t be investing too much in Silverlight on SharePoint. HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript has a better life expectancy

JoelOleson: I’ll follow your lead. I am skeptical, but there are definitely some important investments in client APIs that are very important

Note: When I first got the book in the mail, I was wondering about the odd timing. I had attended a recent session that @mosslover Becky had done on HTML 5 vs. Silverlight where she said it was quite relevant in your toolbox for working with SharePoint 2010. I also followed the conversations out and around PDC where the discussion around the lifetime.

It’s important to understand the history of Silverlight. We are on version 5 and I see Silverlight as Microsoft’s answer to Flash. It provided a development platform for the web that was cross browser compatible. The challenge has been the device explosion which in my mind is what has been killing Flash and has been challenging the strategy of using Silverlight. Silverlight is amazing in it’s own right, but all you have to do is listen to Microsoft DPE on leveraging HTML 5 in Windows 8 space to see Silverlight’s days are numbered. Part of the Silverlight history is in SharePoint. SharePoint 2010 shipped with Silverlight components both in the site template picker and in the org charts. Those org charts have been in MANY a demo of SharePoint 2010. Silverlight was very sexy in 2010. Now with HTML 5 and much of what has been accomplished with Javascript, ultimately JQuery and cross browser, cross device client scripting. It’s amazing the brevity that you can get out of most JQuery today. Incredible.

JoelOleson: I’m a big fan of HTML5 and Javascript/JQuery with Client side OM. I also live in reality where Silverlight right for some today

Bsimser: I live in the real world where every time someone writes a Silverlight component for SharePoint a kitten dies. HTML5 is today.

Bsimser: I wouldn’t be investing too much in Silverlight on SharePoint. HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript has a better life expectency.

JoelOleson: LOL. Love the candid thread. I do see the value in the SL book is the APIs. It’s a client API book.

Bsimser: Client APIs for sure but SL + SP is a dogs breakfast. HTML5 and JavaScript + Client side OM is more likely a workable solution

Bsimser: Someone writing a Silverlight web part means legacy code we have to rewrite later. No thanks. Not worth it.

JoelOleson: Glad to see you can be open and honest here. I know some that speak out both sides of their mouth on Silvertounge I mean light.

JoelOleson:I am impressed with what’s possible with Javascript. Floors me over and over. I’m a big query fan.

BSimser: The SharePoint Sheriff has spoken. So let it be written, so let it be done

JoelOleson: The SharePoint Sheriff has spoken. So let it be written, so let it be done 😉 > Bulls eye! Sheriff straight shooter

JoelOleson: I say push JQuery till it hurts. Wish more developers could leverage web services and REST with SharePoint

None of this should come across as new. The Silverlight guys went crazy about 8 months ago. Here’s a thread after the announcements around Windows 8, note the date of June 2011 from eclipsoft from the Silverlight forums

This thread is a must read… yeah and there are 192 responses Re: Windows 8 apps going html5, wtf

Jun 02, 2011 01:56 AM | LINK

Potentially TERRIBLE news. It almost puts me in a state of shock. My biggest fears coming into Windows 8 was that, as a mostly WPF+.NET developer, was that they would shift everything to Silverlight and leave the FULL platform (can you write a VisualStudio in Silverlight? of course not, not designed for that) in the dust. To my utter shock, they did something much, much, much worse.

I say ‘potentially’ because, it is possible WPF and Silverlight will be able to be everywhere and do everything that the Html5+JavaScarry "platform" (replacing XAML + C#…. can you believe your eyes? I can’t) can do in full integration into the slick riding OS. There is reason to hope that is the case.

< 4:49 pm: Where is Silverlight in all this?

There’s still a place for Silverlight, says Sinofsky. "The browser that we showed runs Silverlight and it will still run on the desktop." />

But Microsoft reps reading this, I admonish you to make things clear in the fullest sense of the term ASAP. It’s hard to not enter panic mode, when our investments in .NET look to be seriously demoted. Even worse, demoted in place of what is clearly the most hated programming language (not even object oriented! … boy are we taking steps back). So please get on the message boards ASAP, because when Mr. Sinofsky said, ‘There’s a PLACE still for Silverlight,’ (let’s throw WPF and .NET fully into that), we would really like to know if that place is an isolated corner, or a fully, absolutely integrated "place." It will be shock and awe if the answer is no."

I know there were more than a few people taken off guard with the Windows 8 announcements and plans to support HTML 5 in a big way.

Bsimser: It’s more trouble than it’s worth IMHO to write SL code today just to be sexy. Be real today with JavaScript.

Bsimser: @joeloleson Of course if you’re still on SP2007 (as many are) this isn’t an option but then I wouldn’t be doing SL + SP 2007 either.

What’s new is our considerations for how we build apps. We start drawing a line in the sand with the improvements in HTML 5? Yes!

Bsimser: @joeloleson There’s tons possible with JavaScript but do be wary of the slippery slope too. Not everything should be client side.

Bsimser: @stacyDraper @joeloleson Writing Silverlight + SP today is like writing in .NET 2.0. It’s legacy and long term pain to replace it later.

JoelOleson: @bsimser Glad to see you can be open and honest here. I know some that speak out both sides of their mouth on Silvertounge I mean light.

I was very interested in seeing the other side of this debate, so I pulled in @mosslover.

mosslover: @joeloleson @stacydraper @mrackley @bsimser SharePoint 2010 sucks less with Silverlight…If I were less exhausted I could add more.

Mosslover: @stacyDraper @mrackley @bsimser @joeloleson That is actually what I told people in my talk to just use jQuery…Ok I need a nap really.

Bsimser: @joeloleson @stacyDraper @MossLover @mrackley When MSFT isn’t coming out on the future of it you don’t need a boot to head to get off now.

Bsimser: @MossLover @stacyDraper @mrackley @joeloleson Silverlight on SharePoint. Beat the rush, avoid the rewrites! Learn JavaScript and C#

Bsimser: @praveenbattula @joeloleson @stacydraper @mrackley @MossLover Don’t hate Silverlight, use it everday (WP7) but SP + SL is death warmed over.

JoelOleson: bsimser Is it possible that anyone who could defend the future of Silverlight can’t talk about it? @stacyDraper @MossLover @mrackley

JoelOleson: @bsimser @stacydraper @mrackley @MossLover In my org, I’m not pushing SL. I do encourage Javascript/JQuery with the right developers.

Sympmarc was late to the game, but added in his $.02

@joeloleson @stacyDraper @bsimser Looks like an interesting discussion about SL/jQuery today. Sorry I missed it.

@bsimser @joeloleson @stacyDraper So, what "won"? SilverLight, jQuery, HTML5, or "it depends"? Hoping the latter.

@sympmarc @joeloleson @stacyDraper The answer is always, it depends. You should know that by now.

The thread ended with this nice wrapup…

Path2sharepoint: @sympmarc So, what "won"? SilverLight, jQuery, HTML5, or "it depends"? => the finish line is in 2013 @bsimser @joeloleson @stacyDraper

In my additional research, I find that Bil isn’t so off base, and I also find that there are PLENTY of articles on the imminent death of Silverlight

Mary Jo Foley mentioned in a post Will there be a Silverlight 6:

Several of my customer and partner contacts have told me they have heard from their own Microsoft sources over the past couple of weeks that Silverlight 5 is the last version of Silverlight that Microsoft will release. They said they are unsure whether there will be any service packs for it, and they are also not clear on how long Silverlight 5 will be supported by Microsoft.

Yes, this part is hearsay, but Wow.

Conclusion: Client Side development has never been more important, and the Silverlight book has great references to leveraging web services and client OM, REST and more. I do think it’s time to caution developers not to make major investments in Silverlight.

Here’s some additional light reading:

Let me know on twitter @joeloleson if you post a blog response. I want to include it here… I did try to include

Come Hear the STP Antarctica Crew at SPTechCon San Francisco – Feb 26

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Joel Oleson

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David Rubinstein at BZMedia has made room for us to tell our crazy adventures and stories. I’ll be making a surprise visit to the conference and join in the festivities over the weekend. Our time slot is Sunday night at 5:30pm. Come by to get behind the scenes stories and join in with the conversation. Learn more about SPTechCon San Francisco, there are still discounts available.

I’m also currently planning on making a quick stop at SPTechcon Boston July 22^nd. This will likely to be my only U.S. show outside of SharePoint Conference in November and local/regional SharePoint Community events. Otherwise chase me down in Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria in March or Russia and Central Asia in the summer or Slovenia next winter.

Sharing The Point Antarctica

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Joel Oleson

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I’ve been dreaming about visiting Antarctica for a number of years. At first it was thoughts of completing a visit to each of the 7 continents, then it was wow I’ve spoken on all of the peopled continents. How can I speak at a conference in Antarctica? Well, as one of the founders of the concept of Sharing the Point the mission of the non profit organization is to reach the ends of the earth, and find those communities and individuals who feel alone and disconnected with the community. Michael Noel, and I did some serious research on how we could not only visit Antarctica, but reach out to the researchers and those on the bases that might benefit from some community outreach. We determined that even if we couldn’t get a venue, or wifi, we’d record our sessions and talk to the penguins. No matter what… This was going to happen.

In our research, our best bet of keeping the trip costs to a minimum while having the best exposure was to visit King George Island. The majority of the bases are there. I’d say with the Villa Las Estrellas, Chilean base, Russian Base, Chinese base and Uruguayan base there must be 200-300 people at peak if not more…. Just on King George island. The Villa Las Estrellas (Star Village) and Chinese base are the two largest bases in Antarctica, so staying on the Russian base which is right next to the Star Village was really ideal. The tour program itself would get us over to the Chinese base.

So, with the help of our awesome sponsors who listened and ultimately gave us a chance on realizing our dreams. Mega Special kudos to AvePoint (of the famous DocAve SharePoint 2010 suite of solutions) and FPWeb (SharePoint & Cloud Hosting with flexibility) for helping make these dreams a reality. To me this really shows the commitment and dedication of these special vendors. FPWeb joined us for the first STP (Sharing The Point) tour across Asia where we’d speak in China, Philippines, and Vietnam. Less than a year later, I’ve seen these communities grow, and relationships that were built based on these visits have made those communities kick start in a huge way. This tour was definitely special, and required even more commitment from our sponsors. It’s been great having AvePoint on board. Dan Holme their Chief SharePoint Evangelist joined us on this tour. Mark Miller, of FPWeb also joined us for the tour. He’s in a unique position of both understanding what our goals for reaching out to the outer lying community, but also with looking for strategic markets. Each of the cities was a first for each of us in that we had not spoken to these communities. They are a long way from home, but also haven’t had much of an opportunity to connect with the rest of the world. So it was really great to see this happen. I had met some of the key players in these southern South America commuties at an event in Costa Rica earlier this year, an event put on by Ricardo Munoz. He definitely has been very important in pulling off this tour. His contacts helped make this happen in a big way.

In preparation for Sharing the Point Antarctica I would bring my two flip cameras so I could capture sessions, Michael brought small bottles of vodka for the Russian researchers, Mark Miller brought NY winter caps, and each of us brought cameras, and other equipment. Ricardo our native Spanish speaker would help us reach out to the Chileans.

In reality we were able to connect one on one with a few of the Russians, find out what was going on in their world and share a little about SharePoint and how it could be useful for them. In my stay in Antarctica I saw at least 5 computers. Each of them was running Windows XP. I did see they did have wifi, wireless connectivity to the internet, and even a small data center or room for storing research data. The most fantastic story was of the Chinese, who have some kind of special satellite connection they’ve built with an 8GB/Sec pipe to the internet. Our guide proposed that it was the fastest dedicated internet connection on the planet. All of the research, video, webcams, and data collection was being piped through this. I wasn’t sure if this was some kind of secret research facility, (of course it was) but the story was nonetheless mind blowing. The Chinese, Koreans, and Chileans are in a bit of a competition lately to see who has the best facility and compete for largest square footage or largest base. The Chileans say they have the most square footage, but the Chinese buildings are definitely the biggest.

Chinese (Secret?) Internet Device 8GB/sec

In addition, we met with the commander of the Chilean base and a few of his cronies. We bought various T-shirts and patches and had a few small chats with them about what they were doing and gave them some background on what we do with SharePoint. As well, would you believe the Chilean Star Village has a post office, a bank, library, and school? Pretty amazing. During our tour, I went into the bank and sure enough I was able to exchange a US $100 for 200,000 Chilean pesos minus 18,000 in exchange fees. We also were able to send post cards from Antarctica.

While visiting the village, we met some Czech researchers who were hitching a ride on a Spanish military vessel. It was fascinating to hear how she as a micro biologist was studying how life would return as the ice melted and glaciers retreated. On this project alone there were all sorts of geologists, and geo physicists and more that would look at how life would appear to come from nothing. Fascinating. I shared a little with her about the power of SharePoint and how it could help in a project like this to not only store the data but in sharing it, collaborating on the various common and disparate data sources, and then allow them to compare notes. She was interested, but it’s funny how one thinks they have to be a geek to get the value out of it. I explained that all she really needed was a browser and an intuitive design. Across those of us at the event we did note that there were a few different companies that we knew that had projects going on in Antarctica, but much of the data storage and collaboration was happening off continent. The cloud is definitely in use in Antarctica as well. Storage definitely didn’t need to be on site.

The most incredible sessions were with the penguins. On our way to visit them, we all decided we’d spend a little time talking to the Linux crowd. Michael Noel covered infrastructure, Mark covered hosting, Ricardo talked about failures, Dan talked Governance, Paul talked dev, and my session was about Social Intranets, but with this Linux crowd I really focused on some of their pain points around the browser, and how it’s gotten some better with 2010.

The Elephant seals got shorter sessions. We had a little argument about service packs, that they won. In my defense I think we have something fairly solid with the December CU, and SP1 was pretty decent as well. Yes, as the seals suggest there has been some rocky times and not so elegant regressions, but it is still getting better.

We’ll get the videos uploaded and together so you can get one cohesive place for all of our SharePoint Saturday Antarctica sessions, and I’ll add a link here. Thanks for following. I am excited to announce that next year we are planning on Northern South America… Colombia, Venezuela, and Equador. We’ll be looking for global and local sponsors and local volunteers.