Public beta of 'SharePoint 2010' was announced yesterday....You can preregister for the Beta here

The short named (without 'Office') avatar has entire Features Wheel redefined. WSS is now 'SharePoint Foundation 2010'

for detailed info visit Sharepoint 2010 site (and for the lazy ones here is an overview and if you are not much of a reader watch some videos here.. no excuses)

Not a new news but But if you still do not have x64 hardware you are not yet ready for it.

Microsoft Announced on 27th Jan, that later sometime this year Microsoft will no longer continue developing the standalone version PerformancePoint Server and has moved the software's scorecard, dashboard and analysis features into SharePoint Server.

Argument is BI is more of a feature than a product and fulfills "BI to the masses" mission of Microsoft.

PerformancePoint was priced at $20,000 per server, plus $195 for each CAL. Microsoft's SharePoint partners are very happy that their chosen product, which is already enjoying massive adoption, has been given even more functionality.

more

Microsoft patterns and practices team, last week released - "SharePoint Guidance - November 2008" helps architects and developers build SharePoint intranet applications. A reference implementation (RI) demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development and lifecycle management challenges.

This guidance discusses the following:

- Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring and packaging.
- Design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter.
- Implementation examples demonstrated in the RI and in the QuickStarts.
- How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
- Set up of development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
- Managing the application life cycle including upgrade.
- Team-based intranet application development.

download it from here

Microsoft Interactive Media Manager or IMM

- A Solution framework for MOSS to enable rich media workflows.

I’ve compiled a Glossary for common abbreviations you will come across while working in IMM. Before we begin let’s have a look at it.

IMM Glossary

Version History

IMMv1 (June 2007) -> IMMv1.5 (Apr 2008) -> IMMv2.0(Sep 2008)

Parts/Tools

-          RCE or Rough Cut Editor (Silverlight based)

-          WebParts

o   Media Library

o   Media Viewer (Silverlight based)

o   Annotation

    §   Ink Control 

o   Import

o   Media Cart

-          Ontology Editor

-          Forms Editor      

-          BDC  Connectors

-          Enterprise Search

-          IMM SDK 

§   Microsoft.Imm.Sdk (Rdf, Dam, SharePoint)

§  Microsoft.Imm.Core

§  Microsoft.Imm.Videos(Video, Audio, Image, Tape, Virtual Folders, Catalogs, Seasons, Series, Proxies, Thumbnails)

-          IMM Workflow Activities

-          IMM RDF Repository

Services

-          Media Services (Video Thumbnailing and Image Transformation, XAML etc.)

-          DAM Service

-          Integration Services

-          Encoder Service

-          Semantic Store Service

-          Semantic Metadata Service

Authoring Tasks

-          Research a topic

-          Write storyboard

Production Tasks

-          Shooting

-          Ingest

o   Partners

§  Aspera

·         Aspera Connect (for Vista)

·         Aspera Enterprise Server

§  File Catalyst

-          Transcode

Digital Content Creation

-          Microsoft Expression Media/Encoder

-          Partners

o   Adobe Premiere

o   Apple FCP

o   Avid - Media Composer

o   Any Stream – Agility

o   Rhozet – Carbon Coder

o   Telestream – Flip Factory

o   Agnostic Media

Digital Content Management

-          IMM

-          Digital Asset Management

o   Partners

§  Equilibrium – Media Rich

§  North Plain Systems

§  Verizon Media Platform

-          Digital Media Storage

o   Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003/NAS

o   Partners

§  HP

§  Sanbolic

§  Quantum - StarNext

-          Broadcast Management

o   Partners

§  Omnibus

Digital Content Distribution

-          Distribution

o   Microsoft MediaRoom

o   DRM

-          Web Video Delivery

o   Microsoft Silverlight

o   Windows Media server

o   Windows Media Content delivery Solutions

Archival

RDF

1.       Subject(Resource)

2.       Predicate(Property)

3.       Object (property value)

wmv(1) -> ‘is named’ (2) ->  ‘sample1’ (3)

SPARQL(RDF Query) -> DAM WebService -> RDF Store

OWL

-          OWL Ontologies

o   Dublin Core

o   SMPTE

o   IPTC

o   EXIF

o   XMP

o   MXF

-          Tool      

o   Owl.exe

more

Everything works great while you are using out-of-box features of MOSS. The moment things go complex and you need to customize - a familiar error pops up: 'Unexpected Error Occurred'

This error message is good for security reasons but bad for debugging.

Here is what you can do (as long as you are debugging)
- Change the configuration\SharePoint\SafeMode\@CallStack attribute to "true."
- Change the configuration\system.web\compilation\@debug attribute to "true"
- Change the configuration\system.web\customErrors\@mode attribute to "Off." 
- Attach your debugger to the SharePoint w3wp.exe process; it will stop at your breakpoints!

more tips

Checkout MOSS Faceted(Category) based search

see http://www.codeplex.com/FacetedSearch