Month: July 2011

Great book on SharePoint Foundation 2010

Mastering Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 by Callahan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you don’t know, there are two distinct version of SharePoint, Server and Foundation. SharePoint Foundation 2010 is available as a free download from Microsoft and is the base of the enterprise version known as SharePoint Server 2010. Thus, if you want to learn SharePoint, no matter what the version, you are going to need to learn about the features found in SharePoint Foundation 2010.

Too many SharePoint books I have read simply gloss over SharePoint Foundation 2010 and concentrate solely on SharePoint Server 2010. It is very refreshing to find a book totally dedicated to the base version of SharePoint that is available to anyone for free. Because SharePoint Foundation 2010 provides the building blocks for SharePoint Server 2010 I believe that everyone looking for information about the capabilities of SharePoint would greatly benefit from investing their time in reading this book.

The author has provided a very comprehensive guide for the SharePoint product, in many cases I believe the information provided in this book is far more comprehensive and relevant than other SharePoint books I have read. It takes through the whole process, from installing a single server, customizing, all the way through to configuring multi-server ‘farm’ environments. The book focuses more on the technical aspects of managing and maintaining SharePoint rather than designing solution or modifying the branding. However, there is very scant information about this available elsewhere and this book does a fantastic job of pulling it together in one place as a reference for the SharePoint administrator.

If you are looking to learn more about SharePoint or do indeed have the SharePoint Foundation 2010 product this book is probably the best for ‘cutting your teeth’ and getting up to speed with administrating the product. It provides a single source of information that is generally very hard to locate elsewhere. Best of all, it won’t confuse you when it comes to which version of SharePoint it is talking about as it squarely focused on SharePoint Foundation 2010, which remember is freely available but rarely mentioned (unfortunately).
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If you plan on purchasing this book, and you liked my review, appreciate it if you could do so through my Amazon store at:

http://astore.amazon.com/c00ef-20/detail/0470626380

helps me in a small way to buy more SharePoint books for review.

To understand Google read this

In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really like books that give you a history of a business. I especially like books that give you a history of technology businesses because they are usually so current. This is exactly the case with this book.

Many have heard about what makes Google tick but this book take your behind the scenes from day one and reveals what makes the place tick. It demonstrates how Google is really an extension of the personalities of Sergey and Larry. Reading the book helps you to better understand why Google does the things that it does and its whole approach to business. This is extremely beneficial given that fact that most people use a Google product every day.

The book is well written, easy to read and very entertaining as it takes you through the history of Google, dwelling on the major moments and products that have made it the colossus that it is today. It is very interesting to see how major products like Gmail grew from extreme small, almost hobby like projects into the features of mass culture they are today.

Most importantly of all it it gives you fantastic insight into the way Google thinks, how it make decisions and most importantly what it sees its mission in the world. As they say, knowing is understanding and with this book you’ll certainly be more knowledgeable about what makes Google tick.
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A numbers game

Much like how many “Friends” on Facebook you have or how many “people” are following you on Twitter Microsoft and Google are engaged in a numbers game to highlight the size and adoption of their online service.

 

A recent blog post from Microsoft claims:

 

“1 person is signing up to try Office 365 every 25 seconds”

 

Not bad in the few short weeks that it has been released eh? Any of these sort of figures has to be taken with a grain of salt but it certainly does point to the growing adoption of commercial cloud services by all sorts of businesses.

CIAOPS Office365 bootcamp


Following hard on the heels of my SharePoint bootcamp is the much requested Office365 bootcamp. You’ll find all the details and registration at:

http://www.ciaops.com/bootcamp

but it is running on Wednesday the 17th of August in Sydney at North Ryde RSL Club from 8.30am – 5.30pm. I’ll be covering all about Office365 and how to integrated into networks (especially SMB style networks).

What I am also considering is running the content also as an online webinar series over a few sessions. You could attend live or just view the recordings. I’d also make the recordings available to those attending the full day’s bootcamp.

If you are interested in an online bootcamp let me know how you’d like to see it run. Would 8 x 1 hour sessions be better than say 4 x 2 hour sessions? I’m all ears, so please contact me via (director@ciaops.com).

That’s why I use SharePoint

Just came across this site from Microsoft promoting the benefits of SharePoint:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/iusesharepoint/landing.aspx

and all I can say is well done Microsoft. You’ll find a number of short videos to chuckle at but they do get the message across about what the benefits of SharePoint to average users. All the videos are worth watching.

You’ll also find pointer to more helpful information such as tutorials and download about SharePoint.

Great site. Bravo Microsoft, bravo!

Installing SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 on SBS 2011

You’ve read the walkthrough, now see the video!

 

Office365 and SBS Essentials

Here’s a couple of good videos that gives you an overview of how Office365 will work with SBS Essentials.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVQz3KufpwQ

 

This first video shows you how you can manually set up the integration between SBS Essentials and Office365. At the moment, this is the option you’ll have to use until the Office Integration Module (OIM) for Office365 becomes available.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4O4LZ6UFEg

 

This video shows you the current (pre-release) Office Integration Module (OIM). It has some nice features and integrates nicely with SBS Essentials. Importantly, it doesn’t provide any AD synchronization, it simply allows you to easily administrator Office365 from the SBS Essentials console.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2-dVLwYraU

 

This video shows you how to integrate your custom domain with SBS Essentials. You will note that the Office365 servers need to become your DNS name servers. This means you’ll have to use Office365 to edit or add any records you have for your domain. The video shows the example of setting up the remote access URL on Office365.

 

If you are planning to install SBS Essentials and integrate it with Office365 then I’d suggest you take a few moments to have a look at each of these videos, after which you should have a much better idea of how it all integrated together.

SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 installation walk through

Here’s a walk through of the installation of SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Pack 1 on a stand alone server not connected to a domain with a default install of SharePoint Foundation 2010. I’ll look at doing something for SBS 2011 Standard soon.

 

The first thing you’ll need to do is download the Service Pack 1 file which can be found at:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26640

 

Right mouse click on the file and ‘Run as administrator’

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Next, accept the license terms at bottom.

 

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The Service Pack will now commence installation.

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You will receive a message indicating the process is complete. However, all that has happened that the binary files have been updated. You need to now apply the update to SharePoint Foundation 2010 manually. This is because now you must manually run PSCONFIG after installing SharePoint 2010 patches on ANY server that SharePoint Foundation 2010 is installed on.

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To check to see whether the Service Pack has been installed correctly, firstly run the SharePoint Central Administration. Select System Settings and then Manage servers in this farm.

 

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Note the Configuration database version. Unless it is 14.0.6029.1000 Service Pack 1 has not yet been applied to the SharePoint farm.

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To apply the downloaded update to the SharePoint farm run a command prompt as an administrator.

 

Change to directory c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\14\bin and execute the following command:

 

PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

 

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You should see the process complete 6 stages in total like shown above.

 

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If you now check the version of the configuration database in Central Administration as shown previously it should be 14.0.6029.1000.

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One of the additional features that Service Pack 1 provides is the ability to view the storage usage on a site. To see this go into your site and select Site Settings. You should now notice a new option under Site Collection Administration called Storage Metrics.

 

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As you can see from the above screen shot, this now gives you a break down of exactly where space is being used in your site.

 

If nothing else this is a great reason to install SharePoint Foundation service Pack 1.