My two cents | Microsoft Office for iPad

On yesterday’s Microsoft Press event it was announced that Office is coming to the iPad. It was a rather small event and overall it was surprisingly quite short as well. That nothing else was shown at the event might be a dignify to the importance of this announcement. First Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella came on stage and said few words about the strategy Microsoft has for the future in cloud computing. Minutes later Julie White, the Office general manager, took on and showed the press the new Word, Excel and Powerpoint version for iOS devices.

None of Apples leaders showed up at the press event. However CEO Tim Cook was giving his virtual Congrats via Twitter to Satya Nadella and his team for the Office on iPad launch.

Welcome to the #iPad and @AppStore! @satyanadella and Office for iPad
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) 27. März 2014

In return Nadella answered the message from Cook with a Tweet of his own.

Thanks @tim_cook, excited to bring the magic of @Office to iPad customers #cloud4mobile
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) 27. März 2014

This is the true excitement behind the launch. With Cook at Apple and Nadella at Microsoft the two big players in the field are taking actions to harmonize their relationship. Could you imagine this event with Jobs and Balmer? Yep, you would only need to add popcorn to the equation.

Crossroads: Adding a Cisco Switch into your Hyper-V installation

This Blog is mainly about SharePoint, but from time to time there are other topics that might be of interest. That’s why I’ll start a new section called Crossroads were I’ll keep you posted about other news that will fit into the broader context of SharePoint.

Today I’ll start with the question: Did you know, that you can add a virtual Cisco Switch to your Hyper-V installation? Best part is, you might even use it free of charge.

Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms

As Microsoft has announced on their blog, Infopath will be discontinued after the version 2013. This means the next version of SharePoint will not support the Infopath Forms Services. However they are already investigating in an alternative. This will be necessary for several reasons.

Free ebook: Introducing Microsoft System Center 2012 R2

Microsoft System Center is one of the three pillars of Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision that will transform the traditional datacenter environment, help businesses unlock insights in data stored anywhere, enable the development of a wide range of modern business applications, and empower IT to support users who work anywhere while being able to manage any device in a secure and consistent way. The other two pillars of the Cloud OS are, of course, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Azure, and Microsoft Press has recently released free Introducing books on these platforms as well.

The free eBook is available for download from the following link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2013/12/16/free-ebook-introducing-microsoft-system-center-2012-r2.aspx

Microsoft IT-Camp on Hyper-V and Systemcenter

Friday the 13th has an attitude to some people, for me actually it was an interesting day. Attending the Microsoft IT-Camp in Walldorf, Germany there where a lot of interesting information about System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Hyper-V, SMB 3.0 and Azure Pack. So here are just a few impressions.

Removing a corrupted search service from SharePoint 2010

Removing the SharePoint 2010 Search Service can become quite a pain. Especially when the removal hasn’t work out the way it should have. So what do you do when the removal failed and your attempts to reinstall the search service are failing as well? I suffered from the same pains and therefor I’ll go thru the step I took to get my search service back online in this blog article.

The Retro Powershell - Looking good in 8-Bit | Part 1

I wrote a little script that, when placed in your PowerShell Profile, will print a message similar to the old boot message you got from your breadbox.

Like a lot of people out there I started my IT career with a Commodore 64. It is still today a class of its own and amazing to see what people are capable to do with this incredible machine. Not only was the Commodore64 the best selling home computer of all times, it still has a huge fan base today. So why not get back the good old feeling back into your PowerShell?

Help! My ULS Logs are empty. What shall I do?

A few weeks ago we added a new dedicated application server to an existing farm. Everything seemed fine so far until a coworker called and informed me that the ULS wasn’t writing information to the log files. In fact the files were created but in the end no content was written to them.

After a short investigation in the Windows Event Logs I find a lot of these entries: