6 most considerable subjects of Gitex 2008

1. Egypt IT Industry Boost up

Some times ago one of my firends point that Egypt will expand its IT market and in Gitex 2008 you could see strong attempt of Egyptian IT Companies with diffrent solutions from software solutions to telecommunication solutions.

2. Unified Communication

It’s not much time past that unified communication borned. It seems it’s a favorite subject of middle east countries. Round table video conferencing, Microsoft Unified Communication, VoIP solutions and related hardwares still goes strong in the region.

3. Software As Service

With the comming of next generation of providing services to customers and according to concepts like Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 there are companies now moving from selling software to providing software as service. ERP applications are most softwares as service.

4. Microsoft Dynamics

Absence of Microsoft did not cuase absence of MS Solutions in the region where partners had the responsibility of introducing new solutions like Microsoft Dynamics. It seems Microsoft is moving to government body of mid east countries by Dynamics series and this is a way companies like Oracle have more experience.

5. Mobile Computing

By investigation of companies in telecommunication field and need of mobile computing for anywhere access to corporate information, there’s a huge market in this field. Mobile TV and Mobile Gaming had growth in mobile entertainement.

6. ITIL

Nowadays ITIL best practices are essential to IT departments of organizations. After releasing ITIL v3.0 you can see more companies providing ITIL services from training to compatible softwares to manage IT firms.

I think these 6 subject are most considerable things for IT industry in mid east region. These are personal thoughts and not any official publication or report.

acn Top 50 companies of Middle east

And finally acn an IT management magazine for mid east published top 50 companies of mid east. Top 10 are as follow

1. HP

2. CISCO

3. Oracle

4. MTC

5. IBM

6. Microsoft

7. EMC

8. Etisalat

9. Intel

10. SAP

to see the rest click here.

Comming up on Gitex 2008

Gitex 2008 will begin from tomorrow 19 October and will continue till 23. As like as every year Microsoft presents products but it seems this year focus is on Dynamics series.

Big news of this year is first attend of Google in Gitex after openning Google office in UAE early this year. ”We are very excited to be participating at our first GITEX conference this year,” said Husni Khuffash, Country Business Development Manager, UAE, Google. “Our participation showcases our efforts to continue engaging with our business partners and customers in the Middle East.”

I will be in Dubai from 20 to 23 to visit Gitex. I wish I could know Sharepoint companies in Middle East region. If there’s any sharepoint guy want to meet drop me a line.

Announcing New Daylight Saving Time Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

A good news for sharepoint users in following countries:

• Iraq
• Argentina
• Chile
• Iran
• Morocco
• Pakistan
• Venezuela

The update solves yearly DTS time change.

The post orginally published in Sharepoint Team Blog. Update is available for x86 and x64.

Go for Silverlight 2.0

And here it is. Microsoft released Silverlight 2.0. Microsoft is going to work with soyatec to bring silverlight development to Eclipse which means availability of silverlight development rools for Mac and even Linux.

Get Silverlight 2.0 RC0 here.

Sharepoint Exteranet Resource Center

Of course efficient externate access for Sharepoint is complex job. Extranet Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies provides valuable guides and toolkit for planning and implementing Moss 2007 and wss 3.0 exteranet access. 

Covered topics are:

• Designing Farm Topology
• Plan Authentication and Security
• Plan Alternate Access Mappings
• Plan Required bandwidth
• …

SharePoint Pod Show

I was surfing sharepoint blogs and found Sharepoint Pod show hosted by  Rob Foster, Nick Swan and Brett Lonsdale. Podcast subjects are interesting specially on Taxonomy and governance.

Long time no blogging and Meeting With Reza

Ok, It was a long time I was far from blogging. Not actully far from blogging, I updated my Persian Blog and had some posts about Taxonomy and Sharepoint, Sharepoint In Beijing Olympics and Knowledge Management Concepts and Sharepoint.

2 Days ago I had chance to meet a nice guy – Reza Alirezaei- A sharepoint MVP and Canada Sharepoint User Group Evangelist. He had good points on sharepoint.  I wanted to thank him for his support.

During these times I had many projects most for public Internet sites on sharepoint and also looking for a solution for integrating Autocad documents and sharepoint. Wow many things to do. Will be back soon.

Microsoft Sharepoint Administrative Toolkit

It was amazing. The frst sharepoint administrative toolkit released last week. The announcement was published in sharepoint team blog.

Calculated Fields: substitute a date value with a text

In this post i want to show how you can use calculated fields to retrieve number of days between two dates and change result value with texts like: “Today”, “Tomorrow” and “Yesterday”.

1- Create a custom list and set a name for it. In this case I’ve named it “Date Show” .

2- Create a Date Field. In this post it’s named “Date”.

3- Create a Calculated field and enter following formula(I’ve named it “Result”) :

=IF(DAYS360([Date],[Created])=-1,”Tomorrow”,

IF(DAYS360([Date],[Created])=1,

“Yesterday”,IF(DAYS360([Date],[Created])=0,”Today”,

CONCATENATE(TEXT(DAYS360([Date],[Created]),”0″),” Days”))))

4- Now you can enter “New Item” to get results.

date.jpg

Analyzing Formula

Now we are going to take a deep look inside of this long formula to know what it realy does.

There are four function in this formula: IF, DAYS360, CONCATENATE, TEXT

IF formula checks weather a conditions is met.In this scenario I used nested IF functions to check three state of results. Days360 returns number of days between two dates. This function calculate number of days between date field I created in list and “Created” field in custom list. If value equals “0″ Result will replace with “Today”. If it equals “-1″ it will replace with “Yesterday” and if value equals “1″ it will replace with “Tomorrow”.

CONCATENATE function joins two or more texts together and TEXT function transforms a numeric value to text. So the result of last Days360 function will turn to a text and then will join with ” Days” phrase.

You can change phrase with whatever you want.

Sharepoint Internet Access

One of the most common scenarios for using sharepoint in organizations is accessing sites from internet for remote users.

To do this there are some simple steps which administrators should care about. Most organizations use firewalls to secure LANs. Steps described here are combination of tasks on firewalls and sharepoint central administration.

1- First of all you have to configure firewall to allow incoming traffic on ports 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS on your server.

2- Open Central Administration and click application management section. Then click Create or Extend Web Application.

3- In new opened page click Extend an Existing web application.

4- Select desired web application that you want to extend for access from Internet.

5- Be sure create a new web site has been selected. Type an appropriate description for new IIS web site. It can be something like Internet Access. Type port 80 and enter your domain name or valid IP address in Host Header. Set file path for IIS web site.

After doing these changes URL field value will automatically change to the value you typed in Host Header field.

For final step select Internet from Zone combo box and then click OK.

After passing these steps you decide to use form authentication or remain on windows integrated authentication.

For users outside organization it could be a good idea to use form authentication with ASPNET Membership provider which gives you the ability to seperates Active Directory users from users coming outside organization. (I’ve placed link to form authentication in previous posts.)

You can also enable anonymous access and give users ability to login. Reza Alirezaei has a complete instruction on this.