Collaborating with external users in Office 365's SharePoint Online

If you're not sure what Office 365 is, take a quick look.

To be able to share a Office 365 SharePoint site with external users:
1. Go to portal.microsoftonline.com -> Admin -> Manage SharePoint -> Manage Site Collections -> Settings -> Manage External Users -> Allow -> Save
2. Go to the site collection that will host the site to be shared -> Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration -> Site collection features -> External user invitations -> Activate (if not already active)
3. Go to the site you want to share (this doesn't have to be the root site of the site collection, can be a subsite) -> Site Settings -> Share Site. You can type what e-mail addresses you want, they do not have to be Live IDs or be on the hotmail.com, live.com etc. domains. A message confirming that the invitation has been sent will show up. Access the invitation link in the e-mail and you'll be redirected to a login page giving the option to login with either a Live ID or a Microsoft Online Services ID. You can logon with any Windows Live ID that you might have, it doesn't need to have the same e-mail address that the invitation was sent to.

You can even give an external user contribute rights to a site, which I think is a very interesting feature for collaboration with customers / partners.

I'm watching this ability to collaborate with others  in Google Docs and Skydrive for a long time now, and I consider Microsoft's approach more balanced from the security vs. usability point of view than Google's, which enables editing without requiring a valid account.

Hope this helps.

MKV transcoding on the fly with Synology NAS

Have a Playstation 3 or DLNA enabled Sony TV and also happen to have some kind of networked storage / NAS in your home?
If so, you might have wondered when will there be an easy way to play MKV files on PS3 directly from the NAS. If it happens that your NAS is branded Synology, you're just in luck! The latest firmware release (3.2) supports on-the-fly transcoding of MKV stored on the NAS to Playstation 3 and DLNA enabled Sony TV's.

This means that the full workflow for having a movie ready to watch is:
1. find a torrent (~2 mins)
2. login to the NAS's web interface and submit the torrent to be downloaded (~1 min)
3. some time later, depending on your bandwidth and torrent # of seeds, you receive an e-mail that your movie is ready to be watched (0 mins)
4. turn on PS3, browse to the title, and play (~2 mins).

Steps 1-3 do not require you to be home, you can do it anywhere you have an internet connection, like at a traffic light, so that when you get home, the download is ready.

Except for the actual downloading time, which varies with your internet connection and which can be as low as 7 minutes for a 5GB title over a 100Mbps link, I think the ~5 minutes required to begin watching a movie are pretty close to the iTunes / Netflix experience, which are not available worldwide anyway.

The latest firmware can be found here: http://www.synology.com/dsm/index.php