Ruth at RCM Technologies sent along an opening they have for a guru-level SharePoint business consultant in the Beverly Hills, California area. If you or someone you know if interested, give Ruth a call or send her an email (her contact info is at the bottom of this post):

RCM Technologies is a leading provider of comprehensive of Information Technology solutions for customers in the Financials Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Communications, Entertainment, and Pharmaceutical markets is looking for a Business Systems Consultant for a project in the Beverly Hills area. 

This is initially an 8 week project. There is a high likelihood of extension after the initial phase is completed.

This project is slated to start ASAP.

Job Description

Responsible for providing business solutions to enterprise-wide technology initiatives.  Candidate must be a self starter with excellent communication skills.  Background in web testing and training on web based systems.  Formal classroom experience is not mandatory. 

• Acts as a liaison between business/user and the technical developer 
• Plan and analyze business initiatives to be solved with business systems. 
• Provides technical expertise in identifying, evaluating, and developing effective procedures and systems requirements that meet business requirements. 
• Works with business user to provide assessment of developed system in respect to the user’s needs.  Also provide training and resolve issues and questions. \
• Participates in validating existing design features with specific system requirements and specifications. 
  Initiates systems testing. 
• Acts as internal consultant within technology and business groups by re-engineering technical processes for greater efficiencies with significant impact to the business.

Required Experience or Knowledge of the following technologies/functions

• Microsoft SharePoint 2003 - Candidates must be expert level in SharePoint
• .NET development
• SharePoint implementation/migration experience
• Please send your resume as a Word document. You may also reach me at the number below.

Thank you,
Ruth Lozano
RCM Technologies
Anaheim, CA
800-972-6269 x220
ruth.lozano(at)rcmt.com
www.rcmt.com

eWeek is reporting that eBay is in talks to buy Skype, a remarkably popular voice and text communication IM program.

Skype's popular and cool, but I have to say that industry references to Skype as a VoIP player are (IMHO) poorly thought out. Why? Because Skype uses no industry standards in their communication - they created their own proprietary protocols, which means they don't interoperate with other systems. What Skype needs to do in order to play the full VoIP field is add (note - I said "add" not change) SIP and other standards-based capabilities to their product for communication and connectivity. If they do that, they might just make some money and own a huge market. But they'll have to hurry if they haven't already started.

Also - why in the world would an auction company buy a IM and Internet calling company? Is eBay really that lost? Their share price after the rumor broke seems to show it may be a bad idea. Or maybe I'm missing something here, but on its face it seems a bit ridiculous.

Gateway's announced a widescreen format Tablet PC - cool design, and it has dedicated ATI graphics, which should be nice in the Vista world of Aero Glass. PC Magazine has a review here:

"The CX200 is a workhorse: It's loaded with the fastest Pentium M (770) processor currently available, 1GB of RAM, and the ATI Mobility Radeon X600 graphics chipset. Unfortunately, the system couldn't run our SYSmark 2004 SE and MobileMark 2005 benchmark tests because of the tests' limitations, but other systems with this type of configuration perform very well on day-to-day computing tasks. Both the Doom 3 and Splinter Cell games ran smoothly. The 3DMark 2005 scores were very respectable at 996 (1,024-by-768), something rarely seen on a tablet..."

MSN Search has opened up the ability to search for/in RSS using the "feed:" operator. Cool stuff.

That probably explains the previous MSNBot behavior. Ah, it does, according to the MSN Search Blog over at MSDN.

I've been researching some specific technology needs, and figured I'd post here and see if anyone working in the collaboration/groupware/SharePoint world has any ideas. I've got my own research, and am speaking to a few others I know, but the community is bound to have some good input.

What I need is a Yahoo-Groups-like system, but it needs to be private and deployed on the LAN (for security purposes). Threaded discussions, with an email interface to contribute and receive updates. In a perfect world, it would build into SharePoint (we use it as an intranet platform), or at least lend itself to being displayed there. And while I am aware of future software possibilities, I can't wait for v.next in this case.

Indexed, searchable content, with opt-in and opt-out lists that can be moderated if needed, are also important.

Any ideas? Please - let me know!

Things I have considered:

• Groove - http://www.groove.net - and Groove Mobile Workspace for SharePoint, which looks like a possibility
• KAOrg - http://www.kaorg.com/ - which is interesting, but it's not very grown-up

The three brightest objects in the night sky - Venus, Jupiter and the Crescent Moon - all together at once...

(click for larger image)