Web Content Management System (CMS) Smackdown

August 16, 2010 Community
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I wanted to give you advance warning that we’ll be having our annual Web CMS Smackdown at SBTUG on Wednesday 29 September. Yes, September – roughly 6 weeks away.
This was one of our most popular events at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group last year. If you’re already sold on the event and don’t [...]

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Microsoft – Privacy versus Profits

August 4, 2010 General Tech
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Good leaders make tough decisions. They may not always be the right decisions, and usually not everyone likes those decisions, but they have to be made.
Ed Bott’s post – Good Microsoft versus Bad Microsoft – highlighted this interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal. It’s about how Microsoft decided to kill off some of the [...]

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Things I Like

August 4, 2010 Personal
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No particular reason for this post except to mention a few things I’m liking at the moment – feel free to move along now…

Let’s Golf 2 – I’m not really a golfer, but this iPhone game has me hooked.
Glenmorangie – taking a big risk and trying something different from my usual Macallan 12 yo, [...]

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All About Microsoft promoting Google Apps

August 3, 2010 SEM
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Google certainly knows how to get it’s advertising in the right place.
Take this piece on the ‘All About Microsoft’ blog (one of my favourite blogs by the way – Mary-Jo is a bit of personal hero of mine). It’s a post about Microsoft’s recent white paper (PDF) on improved efficiency in their datacenters. It’s a [...]

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Microsoft Street Slide

July 29, 2010 Bing
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I love the stuff Microsoft is doing with it’s mapping technology lately. This latest one from Microsoft Research is particularly impressive.
It’s called Microsoft Street Slide (not to be confused with Microsoft Streetside) and takes the whole photo stitching paradigm another step forward. It’s best explained in the following video, but in a nutshell it allows [...]

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Andrew Coates has his head in the clouds ;)

July 28, 2010 Azure
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Loved this little animated feature from Andrew Coates on the benefits of using the platform – if someone’s done the heavy lifting for you, then why not use it. Don’t worry about putting your own kids down the well .
Available on Ch9 here. Andrew’s original Standing on the Shoulders of Giants piece here.
[...]

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Introduction to Search Engine Marketing

July 28, 2010 SEM
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Just realised I hadn’t posted this presentation I gave at the NSW.NET event last month. I was lucky enough to be presenting after Mark Vozzo who gave an excellent introduction to SEO, so my session on SEM flowed on nicely.
In the SEM presentation (embedded below) I went through the following main points:

How SEO and SEM [...]

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Bing with Mark Vozzo at SBTUG

June 28, 2010 Bing
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It’s going to be interesting to see what the Bing team have been up to lately – this Wed at SBTUG Mark Vozzo is going to be covering all the new stuff in Bing. He’ll be on after the pizza break (remember we have Gary Hayes talking about Augmented Reality in the first session).
One of my [...]

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Augmented Reality with Gary Hayes at SBTUG

June 25, 2010 Featured
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I wonder if you’ve spent much time considering what the benefits of Augmented Reality are for your business?
Personally I think Augmented Reality is soon going to be as significant as Location has become today. A few years ago people thought tracking your mobile phone location was only useful for freight companies. Now we know [...]

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Using Excel 2010 Sparklines to Analyse Google Analytics

June 20, 2010 Featured
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Seriously, how would businesses survive if it weren’t for Excel?
Excel is perfect for analysing analytics data in a variety of ways (eg using Pivot tables and Conditional formatting) and it keeps getting better.
I’m loving Office 2010 and Excel 2010 in particular – it’s just beautiful to use. In this post I want [...]

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SEO and SEM at NSW.NET

June 18, 2010 Featured
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I’m excited to be presenting with Mark Vozzo (<- SEO guru) at this month’s NSW.NET meeting. It’s on this coming Thursday morning, June 24. You can register here.
The event is in two parts. Mark will be covering Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for 30 minutes, and then after breakfast I’ll cover Search Engine [...]

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Australian SharePoint Conference Review

June 17, 2010 Featured
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I was fortunate to attend the Australian SharePoint Conference this week (June 16 & 17). This was a surprisingly good conference –  comfortable venue, well organized, top notch speakers, great networking and most importantly a very useful look in detail into SharePoint 2010. 

Complaints & Reality
There’s always a few things to complain about at a [...]

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True Blood and Urgency

June 14, 2010 Personal
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Michele and I have decided to have a week off.
Which, as you will know if you are a business owner, means you intend to relax but really just end up doing pockets of work in between snatches of non-work: TV watching, book reading and other activities that you think constitute ‘getting away from [...]

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Office 2010 & Windows Intune at SWUG this Wed

June 7, 2010 Community
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I’m looking forward to the Sydney Windows User Group (SWUG) this Wed (only 2 days to go!).
Nick Rayner (newly blogging again) has lined up another rip-snorter (<- the first definition) and managed to get both Alistair Speirs and Jeff Alexander presenting on the same night (many people travel miles to hear just one of these [...]

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Bing Webmaster Blog

June 2, 2010 Bing
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It’s good to see the Bing Webmaster Center Blog picking up. I’ve been following Rick DeJarnette’s posts more closely lately – he’s putting out some good stuff. I thought it worth highlighting a few examples:

SEO for Silverlight
SEO Site Review tips – Part 1
SEO Site Review tips – Part 2
Chasing the Long Tail with Keyword [...]

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Content is King by Bill Gates

May 31, 2010 General
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I’ve had a frustrating time trying to find the original ‘Content is King’ article written by Bill Gates back in 1996. There’s a few sites that have a copy of the essay, but nothing on the Microsoft site (it has been removed from the Bill Gates Published Writing page). Wayback Machine seems to be the [...]

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WordPress and SEO

May 7, 2010 SEO
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How time flies
I’ve been meaning to post these for months now – they’re sessions on SEO and WordPress I’ve presented at various User Group meetings this year.
First off, here’s the notes from my IIS SEO toolkit presentation at SWUG back in February. The slides are pretty simple, so I recommend reading my complete [...]

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Saasu, Xero, Freshbooks, MYOB and more at SBTUG (UPDATED)

May 6, 2010 SBTUG
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UPDATED: See notes below.
I need your help please.
This month at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) we’re covering online accounting, bookkeeping, time tracking and invoicing systems for freelancers and small businesses. But I need some guidance from you:
First, which products should we cover? I’m thinking products like Saasu, Xero, Freshbooks and Zoho. [...]

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Australian SharePoint Conference

April 27, 2010 Microsoft
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As far as well-priced technical conferences go, I think the Australian SharePoint Conference is pretty impressive. It’s $650 + GST for two days, with three tracks, held at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney. The speaker line-up ‘aint shabby either.
[Note: There’s also a few extras for attendees but I wouldn’t get too excited about [...]

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Lack of SharePoint professionals? Or lack of Simplicity…

April 15, 2010 Featured
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Back in January Oscar Trimboli started a great discussion on whether there was a lack of SharePoint developers in Australia. It’s a good post, and there’s a ton of value in reading the comments –  you’ll hear the thoughts of some of Australia’s best SharePoint minds.
As is the case with any technology on [...]

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