Friday, March 24, 2006

SharePoint accessibility information

Looking for information on SharePoint accessibility compliance to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act? Check out these links:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_SP2003_ta/html/Office_SharePointAccessibility.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/section508.mspx

It's a mixed bag - the document doesn't mention any serious conflicts with the act, but for quite a lot of features, the common answer is - "yes, this can be implemented", which implies doing a lot of site definition modification work.

Update:
Here is some details on improvements to accessibility in SharePoint 2007:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/04/24/582506.aspx

Live Communication Server - I love it!

We have just implemented our internal Live Communication Server, and it has changed my World. Up to now, most people in the company have been using MSN Messenger, and that has worked well. But LCS just makes the whole thing so much nicer.

Our company is small enough to have everyone in everyone else's contact list. This is becoming my new phone directory. The user presence information (online, busy, in meeting) details link up to your Outlook calendar, so it's now easier to determine if someone is available.

I've been using the application sharing feature a lot - even with a colleague that sits opposite me. Maybe we are just lazy, but it's handy to just share Microsoft Word from my desktop and talk him through the document as I scroll through it. The voice chat quality is also great, because it's using our internal network rather than going out to the cloud.

As for SharePoint - now EVERYONES user presence details appears through-out the web pages. Previously, that only worked if your MSN Messenger e-mail log-in matched your corporate account.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

March Sydney User Group session

It's that time of month again, where the Sydney User Group get together. This month we have Brett Chase from CommVault talking about data management solutions for SharePoint. Come along if you are in town. Details available at http://sps.uniqueworld.net/sydney.