Central Desktop Webinar … Central Desktop is hosting a Webinar on April 23, comparing its solution with SharePoint. “Join us for a 60 minute free webinar, Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 from 10am to 11am Pacific, to learn why customers have chosen Central Desktop as their Sharepoint Alternative. See and hear how Central Desktop can be used in your organization as a low-cost SharePoint alternative; deployed 20 times faster at a tenth the cost.” Registration required. More

Exchange 2010 … Microsoft released the beta of Exchange 2010, with new features for IT administrators and end users. “With Exchange 2010 in place, Outlook Web Access now features a Conversation view, with a threaded mode for following e-mail conversations. ActiveSync lets companies control how different devices sync with user accounts. The Exchange Control Panel allows for the management of advanced tasks through a Web management interface, and users can utilize increased self-help options to perform tasks such as creating a distribution group within the Webmail client.” For administrators, there are new message rules options and federation capabilities. More
– see Ed Brill’s blog post and conversation thread.
– per discussion at Slashdot, the database engine is still Jet, not SQL Server.
– see ComputerWorld for comments on replication, wider browser support for Outlook Web Access, MailTips to guide behavior, back-end design improvements, and more. For Windows Server 2008 only.

SharePoint 2010 … Microsoft announced that the next edition of SharePoint will just be called “Microsoft SharePoint 2010”, and the “MOSS” phrase will go away. On WSS, “When you read through the announcement, you may be wondering what happened to Windows SharePoint Services. While we didn’t announcement anything new for WSS, and I want to assure you that we’re definitely working on a new v4 version of the product. It’s too early to drill into any of the details but WSS is getting a lot of new features and will be a great release. We’ll talk more about WSS at a later date.” More

Tips for Surviving Telecommuting … Michelle offers advice on surviving telecommuting: (1) respond quickly to messages, (2) attend team meetings in person, (3) go to the office whenever possible, (4) volunteer for projects that require you to be at the office, and (5) work in the office at least one day a week. My reaction: This advice seems to say “go to the office whenever you can”, rather than “here’s how to make working remotely work even better than being in the office.” More

Enterprise Social Networking Workshop … At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston in June, Burton Group analysts are presenting a workshop on getting started with enterprise social networking, based on recent research. “In the fall of 2008, Burton Group conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 65 business and IT personnel representing 21 organizations to gain greater insight on enterprise social networking. These unguided discussions captured a variety of real-life stories, emerging best practices and common barriers confronting social networking project teams. Indeed, analysis of the study data reveals a repeating pattern of 15 critical issues organizations will likely encounter as the move forward with their internal social networking initiatives.” More

McKinsey on Cloud Computing … McKinsey argues that cloud computing doesn’t make sense, based on financial projections that Ajay finds flawed. “My take on this is that cloud computing will have lower costs as economies of scale kick in, as they did for nearly all technologies. McKinsey partners must be having a hard time meeting their annual bonuses if they have not factored this basic assumption in their cost projections. Cloud computing just converts this to a mass infrastructure from the present scenario where you pay annual licenses for software that you use for less than 60% of capacity in a day, and hardware that you find obsolete in 3-4 years–which gives accountants a method to help you with depreciation and tax benefits. Renting a computer in the sky is simpler and don’t need any consultant to help advise what configuration you need.” More, see original article at NYTimes.

ENGINEERING.com Discounts … ENGINEERING.com announced discounted pricing for its hosted collaboration suite. “Effective April 16th, the Company will offer a 25% discount to list prices . These prices will be in effect until September 30 2009. Collaboration Suite is an economical online engineering process control system. Complete with online project/process management, document management, web-conferencing and supplier management, ENGINEERING.com Collaboration Suite helps companies manage their new product introductions and other engineering processes across distributed design and manufacturing teams.” More

TextFlow … Nordic River released TextFlow into beta; TextFlow is an online text collaboration service. “The most obvious selling point of TextFlow is the way that it merges multiple versions of the same document into a single version with suggested changes arranged side by side. Users can merge documents edited using TextFlow itself with ones written using Microsoft Word. When multiple versions of the same document are imported, TextFlow uses algorithms originally developed to compare DNA to identify the differences between each version of the text. The software classifies changes made to sentences and those made to entire paragraphs or sections of a document, and it can also track when a paragraph has been moved to a different section. TextFlow assigns a different color to text from each version of the document and organizes the changes on a single page. A user can select which version to keep by moving her mouse over a suggested change and clicking to accept or reject it.” More

Other Items
– Review of online collaboration tools, on ReadWriteWeb: online editors, synchronization services, sharing and collaboration spaces, and ad hoc simultaneous collaboration tools.
– The RIM Storm may not be perfect, but it’s only the first attempt by RIM.