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Arpan Shah's Blog

SharePoint Technology

SharePoint, E-Learning and SilverlightJanuary 5

Happy new year everyone!

I wanted to kick off the new year by highlighting a really innovative e-learning partner solution built using SharePoint and Silverlight technologies. E-Learning is something I'm hearing a lot more about lately and many customers have asked me how to approach E-Learning for their organizations. Point8020, a SharePoint partner, just released a compelling E-Learning solution: Beta 2 version of LearningPoint that you can download and try out for free.

LearningPoint is a solution that can be installed on top of WSS 3.0 or SharePoint Server 2007. It's easy to install and takes advantage of SharePoint for storage and the collaboration functionality and leverages Silverlight for the user experience. It's SCORM compliant and has all the bells and whistles of what you would expect in an E-Learning solution: you can add courses, assign courses, manage users & courses, look at course/user reports and even create courses! The creating courses piece is really innovative and what I found most differentiating. You can create something as simple as a few videos and images strung together or something more complex.

Another side benefit for folks out there is that Point8020 is willing to share its source code. So if you're a partner who needs to develop an E-Learning solution or you are interested in seeing how Point8020 built the Silverlight + SharePoint in

Making Social EasierDecember 18 2008

Call it Web 3.0 or social, but the Internet has been moving in a new direction for the last many years. It used to be search that really uncovered the billions of pieces of content. Now, it's people. Search engines continue to help us find exactly what we're looking for. Social helps us navigate, interact, explore the web & connect with people. It makes the Internet human.

A few years ago, blogging took off making it super easy for the average person to express their thoughts & opinions; companies like Technorati & Digg emerged that specialized in surfacing popular content by the masses. As high bandwidth became more and more ubiquitous, sharing digital content like photos and music became popular with flickr & Apple iTunes leading the way. Just a handful of years ago, YouTube opened up the world for digital content making it easy for people to upload video. Time made the new social/digital age official when they announced YOU as the person of the year in 2006. And most recently, Facebook really took social to the next level as it became the place for users to store photos, digital media,

My Recent SharePoint PodcastDecember 1 2008

Robert Foster, a SharePoint MVP, informally interviewed me a few weeks ago in Redmond.  Rob asked me very interesting questions ranging from SharePoint in the cloud to SharePoint "14".

You can listen to the podcast @ http://www.sharepointpodshow.com/archive/2008/11/24/sharepoint-in-the-cloud-sharepoint-and-azure-and-questions-on.aspx.

Links & Recent Announcements mentioned at TechEd DeveloperNovember 17 2008

I just got back from Europe where I participated in TechEd Developer and internal Microsoft meetings. I recapped a few recent announcements & resources in my session and wanted to share more broadly. (This list is not comprehensive by any means):

SharePoint Development
- http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/ (redirects from http://mssharepointdeveloper.com as well)

SPDisPose Check Tool
- http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/11/12/announcing-spdisposecheck-tool-for-sharepoint-developers.aspx

SharePoint MCA | Masters
- http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/11/10/introducing-the-microsoft-certified-maste

SharePoint and Office news at PDCOctober 30 2008

For those of you not at PDC, but interested in knowing what "new" news was announced publicly at PDC pertaining to Office & SharePoint:

Day 1
- Microsoft SharePoint Services as part of the Azure Services Platform. This is not the same as Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). Please refer to PDC 2008- Announcing Azure Services Platform and Microsoft SharePoint Services for more information.

Day 2
- There will be an Office “14” in the future; essentially, the codename was officially announced. No details on timing.
- The Office client team introduced and demonstrated Office Web Applications. Very compelling demos! It was also mentioned that this was part of Office "14". No details on licensing or packaging.

I'll blog more later!