Nov
13

Eeeek - another acronym ? DDPS and SAM…

By Gerry V

That’s all that technology professionals need, another acronym to learn… more importantly, even when we know the acronym, what is the concept behind it ? DDPS stands for Desktop Deployment Planning Services, yet another service offering from Microsoft that provides software versioning migration planning and SAM (that’s Software Asset Management) as a component of their Software Assurance.

The process is relatively simple - the enterprise identifies a Microsoft Certified Partner that is certified in DDPS to conduct the audit - usually taking 2-5 business days of auditing and consulting. The resulting deliverable identifies a standardization plan and upgrade path that is tied (ideally) to corporate culture and objectives. Yes, this is somewhat of a “fox watching the hen-house” scenario since the Partner conducting the audit is paid by Microsoft for their investment of hours. The consulting hours are not the real attraction to the partner/vendor, in their case, the real upside is the potential sales opportunity of both licenses and services required to actually complete the prescribed upgrade.

Ultimately, DDPS is a valuable free service for any enterprise committed to a desktop upgrade/migration as long as the clients take the time to understand the results and ask the proper questions after the fact.

Filed Under Excel, InfoPath, Microsoft Access, Office, Outlook, PowerPoint, SA Benefits, Visio, Word |

Oct
26

Moving / Copying InfoPath Rules

By Mike G

One difficulty of working with InfoPath is that if you have a button that has a rule with many actions and you would like to have some other button (or other control) execute those same actions, there is no way to simply copy the actions from one to the other. At least, not with the GUI…

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Filed Under InfoPath |