I've been working with a customer that has a very mixed client environment, to help achieve a common user experience in MOSS across all the various browsers in their environment (mostly IE 5-8, FireFox and Safari).  One of the ways we can move towards accomplishing this is to disable client integration, but regretfully this disables many of the features that make MOSS a great collaboration platform.

The list below is a work in progress, I'm looking to identify fixes or addon offerings (such as Telerik's RadControls for MOSS http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-ajax/sharepoint.aspx) that can provide the desired functionality in a cross-browser environment.  There's also a codeplex project specifically for FireFox support at http://wssfirefox.codeplex.com/ but this won't meet my requirement for a common experience across ALL browsers. 

I'd appreciate any comments/feedback.

With the current economic climate, we're seeing an uptake in merger and aquisition activity across our customers.  One of the first things organizations want to do in these scenarios is often to rebrand the new aquisition to their own name, including email.  Although its not trivial to accomplish a full email consolidation, there are steps we can take to rapidly update the external email addresses of an organization and provide basic interoperability.  In most cases this can be done even without WAN connectivity.  The example below discusses Exchange to Exchange, but this same concept will work with most email systems. 

 Here are the steps: 

1.       Identify and address any email address collisions

a.       Consideration: how the new-hire process can be modified at each location to ensure no future collisions are created

2.       Identify and address any email policy differences to ensure consistent user experience, including but not limited to:

a.       Message size limits

b.      Anti-spam/content filtering rules

c.       Virus filtering experience (quarantine policies, notification format)

3.       Establish SMTP connectors within each Exchange environment

4.       Import account information from child companies to parent and establish forwarders

a.       Consideration: how you will keep this in sync moving forward if account information changes

5.       Configure child companies as non-authoritative for @parent.com

a.       See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823158 for details. 

6.       Update child companies to have primary SMTP addresses @parent.com via recipient policy or a script 

a.       Keep any existing SMTP addresses (at least for the short term) for work continuity and applications/subscriptions

7.       Import account information across the organization (as a contact) to each child company to ensure everyone has the full GAL 

This will give you email interoperability.  Once you have WAN connectivity between each site, you can take an additional step -

To enable Free/Busy synchronization – this would allow calendaring between Exchange organizations and show free/busy information.  Use the IORepl tool, available at:

http://microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E7A951D7-1559-4F8F-B400-488B0C52430E

This tool would also be used to consolidate/replicate public folders from the child organizations to the parent environment prior to collapsing those Exchange organizations.

Another Security Tip of the Month article was just published.  I worked on this one with our resident HPC and Management expert.  Richard gets credit for the HPC knowledge, and I put pen to paper.  (fingers to keyboard?).  You can find "Security Considerations in High Performance Computing" at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd339638.aspx.

You can also take a look at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc716276.aspx for the past Technet Security Tip of the Month articles.

We've noticed that most technical people in the technology industry are classified as either infrastructure specialists or developers.  The challenge with this thinking is the fact that most infrastructure projects require customization through extensibility, and most development projects require understanding of the underlying infrastructure. The blending of the two traditionally separate worlds has been accelerating. For example, to deliver a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 implementation (traditionally considered an infrastructure solution), one needs to be closely familiar with Windows Powershell, which is the management platform for Exchange. After a day with Powershell, it is trivial to recognize that general programming concepts, object oriented programming, and even .NET framework are necessary even when putting together system administration scripts for Exchange Server 2007. 

Similarly, delivering a pure development project is no longer simply development. Consider Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - in an enterprise deployment, the one will likely need to understand infrastructure components such as Active Directory, Network Load Balancing, Server Clustering, firewall ports, Kerberos, permissions, reverse proxies... The list goes on. 

Infradevs are a third group that blend the best of these two worlds, leveraging the power of best tool for the job, whether it is custom scripting with Windows Script and Powershell, or Visual Studio development of custom applications with the goal to increase efficiency of infrastructure deployment and reliability of infrastructure processes and operations.

A great example was a recent experience where our client was looking to accomplish a complex domain consolidation effort.  All conventional paths led them to a method using a large team of support engineers and a significant investment in third party tools.  Our Infradev solution for the client leveraged custom scripting and a revised process for the migration that decoupled unnecessary dependencies and yielded exceptional results.

We believe that the value in being an Infradev is removing some of the constraints that are found in out of the box solutions.  Any packaged product is developed with its largest constituents in mind, however those solutions can never account for the uniqueness found in every environment.  Thus, the skill set of an Infradev is the secret sauce that enables organizations to fully realize the value of their technology investments. 

Are you an Infradev?