Friday Five – January 14, 2011

I also blog at work (internally) and resolved to post more frequently this year.  I figured the best way to keep that up was to institute a regular weekly feature which I’m calling the Friday Five – five technology-related articles I found interesting in the past week.  I work with web, collaboration, and ECM (Enterprise Content Management) systems, most frequently Microsoft SharePoint, so some articles I pick are geared toward that, but others are general technology, consumer electronics, or industry-related.  I thought I would share those here as well.  So here you go – the inaugural edition of the Friday Five:

Microsoft estimates that you the customer will spend a total of $6.2 Billion on services related to SharePoint in 2011… According to Goldman Sachs data more than 50 countries have a GDP (Gross Domestic Product) less than what the world spends on SharePoint.

SharePoint is many things, but cheap it isn’t.  Interesting comparison.

#2 – How To Perform Nearly Any Task From Your Browser’s Address Bar –

By integrating all of your favorite services into your browser’s address bar, you don’t have to spend nearly as much time navigating their webapps. No matter what you want to do—whether it’s add a task to your to-do list, add an event to your calendar, send a quick email, or even get driving directions—all you have to do is hit Ctrl+L and type in a few choice words.

I admit it – I hate the mouse. I am eagerly looking forward to multitouch monitors, but in the meantime some well-constructed keyboard commands are always welcome.

#3 – Show/Hide [SharePoint] Lookup fields with jQuery –

I will show you how to show and hide form fields dependent on the value of a drop-down list field, with a special look at what to do with Lookup fields. I am often given requirements for SharePoint forms that have functionality that isn’t possible with the out-of-the-box controls, this is one such example.

I haven’t had the chance to try this, but our team has had a lot of success in manipulating SharePoint through jQuery.

#4 – Could this be the year we get to ditch the cable box? –

Unlike the attempts we’ve seen in the past, at CES this year there were a number of ways TV manufactures and cable companies figured out to bring HD to the TV without a set-top box. The commonality between the methods was that the provider will create and control the user experience on the TV. This means that no matter what type of TV you buy, the user interface will look the same.

Perhaps some of the most interesting news to come out of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year is how far along the mainstream cable providers are in being able to uncouple their programming from their physical network.  This would allow, for example, Time Warner to sell their cable TV package over a Comcast-provided broadband connection. Or bundle it with a TV purchase. Or offer their service as an app on your mobile device. We might finally be seeing some real competition in this space, and competition breeds better products for consumers.

#5 – HTML Video Codec Support in Chrome –

…we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

With the recent rollout of an internal video management solution we’ve been keeping a closer eye on video technology in our department. Just as soon as you think you have a handle on where the road is leading you, something changes. It was widely assumed that H.264 would be the standard codec for HTML5 native video, but this announcement from Google might change that direction quickly.

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That’s all for this week.  Hopefully everyone found at least one article that piqued their interest.  Stay tuned for next week…