Microsoft Sharepoint Designer 2007 is now Free !

As word tends to spread in new ways, Facebook is today’s source of information. Well actually that’s not quite true. My friend and fellow I.T. worker Tobias Zimmergren of www.zimmergren.net posted a note today about Microsoft Sharepoint Designer 2007 becoming a free product.

This is pretty good news for those who use Sharepoint and want to be able to more easily customise what they do. This seems to be the latest in Microsoft’s bid to extend their commercial reign and I think it’s a good move.

We’re living in times where software is becoming more and more about the community. Monetisation is happening in new ways that don’t necessarily require software to be expensive and often that software is even free.

More information on Microsoft Sharepoint Designer 2007 – Microsoft.com

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/FX100487631033.aspx?ofcresset=1

Utilisation – It’s wheel’y important

There’s a saying that people have, “Don’t re-invent the wheel”, and as much as this article isn’t about wheels, I think it’s a useful phrase.

Usually in the technology world when we talk about utilisation, or more specifically in the software engineering world, we’re usually talking about some form of code re-use. Re-using code in a project is almost a no-brainer but there’s another side to utilisation that’s not so often talked about. This is the type of utilisation I simply call “using what’s out there”.

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It’s finally here

As many of you have been asking, and as I’ve been promising for the past couple of years, finally I’ve made time to put up a new website and am committed to post new information hopefully on a daily basis.

For the past year or so I’ve been mainly working with financial companies in London helping with white label branding of their products and developing in-house tools to make the work of their designers and developers easy. At City Index I was solely responsible for the development of their white label re-branding tool which had to be easy to use for their graphic designers. This tool included photoshop style color pickers, easy to use text editors, image upload functionality and a built in market label editing tool.

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