I’ve just uploaded a quick video that give you a brief overview of Office Web Apps running on SharePoint 2010.
Brief introduction to Microsoft Office Web Apps – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XA7bqdTxGo
The video demonstrates how a Word document can be viewed and edited in a browser as well as opened in the full version of Word. Short and simply but at least you get the idea.
I’ll have a few more videos about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 stuff coming soon, so stay tuned.
Backup or be devastated
Here’s a copy of an article I wrote that appears in an e-zine from MyMate (on page 13) which can be found at:
http://www.wanttobebigger.com/MyMate-e-zine-June-2010.html
In the world of technology your last line of defence is the humble back
up, yet many businesses, especially small ones, remain extremely
caviller about this critical function of a business.
Nearly every business these days depends on IT. So what happens
when IT isn’t available? You have probably experienced a mild disaster
such as the internet being unavailable or a hard disk failing. The
question is, how long did that issue interrupt your business and how
much money did it cost you?
Now imagine a much bigger disaster, say your office being burnt down
or flooded. How long would it take you to get up and running again?
Most small businesses have never invested the time to consider their
disaster recovery planning – and they should – because without it there
is good chance they’ll go out of business after even a minor problem.
Let’s examine one simple aspect of disaster planning, backups. Most
businesses would probably say that they do backups, the problem is that
is only half of the solution. When was the last time that you actually
tested that your backups worked? You certainly don’t want to find out
that your backups don’t work after a disaster. So it is important that you
regularly test that you can restore from your backups. You should also
plan on doing a complete restore of all your data somewhere every 6-12
months to make sure you can get it all back.
Next consider how you would cope in a real disaster like a fire. What
plans do you have in place to keep your business operational? How long
will it take you to get up and going? How are you going to cope having to
get new IT resources like workstations, servers and printers? It really is
much better to plan for these eventualities ahead of time rather than
trying to have to manage them on top of everything else in the event of a
disaster.
Hopefully you will never have to implement your IT disaster plan but it is
important that you not only have one but that you practice its
implementation. This means that at least once a year you should
simulate an IT disaster and see how well your plan works and what may
need adjusting.
Too many businesses see their IT as simply an overhead. They fail to
realise that it is one of the most vulnerable parts of your business –
without which, you may be unable to operate.
If you value your data then you should value your backup and disaster
recovery plan, as they are going to save you. It is no good trying to
develop these in the middle of a disaster. They need to be planned,
implemented and tested beforehand, because as they say failing
to plan only means you’re planning to fail.
SharePoint popularity increasing
I see and read all the time about how SharePoint uptake is increasing but I want to share with you a personal metric I have found that indicates exactly this.
For quite a while I’ve been posting videos on YouTube firstly under the Saturn Alliance banner and then under CIAOPS. The most popular for years has been:
Getting Started with Virtual PC – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSBbpPDWFUE
which covers the basics of getting a Virtual machine running using Microsoft Virtual PC. This week was I went through my metrics I noted that this video has now risen to highest number of views:
Linking SharePoint 2007 with Outlook 2007 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9CnBNVnBjk
To me this certainly indicates, in some small way perhaps, that SharePoint is indeed gaining in popularity. Further reinforcing this view came when I attended the partner launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in Sydney this week. Much of the productivity benefits of Office 2010 need to be experienced with SharePoint 2010 as the back end. It was heartening to finally see Microsoft putting SharePoint on the same plain as other Office 2010 and recommending that partners go out and start implementing it. I couldn’t agree more.
New portals from CIAOPS
Now that the June update for my Windows SharePoint Operations Guide has been released (including the first instalment of how to get SharePoint Foundation 2010 running on SBS 2008) I can now turn my attention to getting two new portals ready for release on July 1.
Part of the Windows SharePoint Operations Guide has always been a DVD that contained not only guides covering Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and Windows Foundation Server 2010 (WSF) but was also filled with training material, white papers, videos and more. The major problem has been that as this information grows the DVD ISO became larger and larger making it longer to upload as well as download for subscribers. Also, even though I include a searchable index of the Guide documents, it doesn’t include all the other material on the DVD.
To overcome both of these issues and provide even greater resources for Guide subscribers I am moving all the content to a hosted SharePoint site. This means that both subscribers and I can add information to the site and have it all readily indexed and available. Much easier.
Also on July 1, I plan to make available via subscription a Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) portal. In here will be information in and around BPOS including how to get signed up as a partner, marketing and sales material, a technical knowledge base and an extensive list of BPOS links.
Again the idea is that subscribers can also contribute information and knowledge to the portal in order for it grow in value. I have a few people testing it now but I plan to make it available for $120 ex GST (basically $10 per month) for subscribers.
Having both of these as SharePoint sites also has another benefit for subscribers, it gives you real world experience with SharePoint. Firstly, subscribers can improve their knowledge of SharePoint by using the portals, secondly they can understand how SharePoint can be used as a knowledge store and finally it means I will be able to update both sites on a regular basis rather than only monthly. Using the power of SharePoint attributes, such as email alerts, subscribers will be able to know exactly when new or updated information becomes available.
In the longer run I plan to start using shared OneNote files to provide even greater flexibility with the information I make available. This is part of the ongoing iterations being made to try and improve the information the CIAOPS makes available.
As always if you want more information or have some suggestions of what should be included don’t hesitate to contact me (director@ciaops.com) as I’d love to hear. Oh yes, all existing Guide subscribers will automatically get access to my new BPOS portal for the duration of their subscription. Another great reason to sign up to the Guide.
Co-authoring documents with SharePoint 2010
One of the major reasons for implementing SharePoint 2010 is that, combined with Office 2010, you can do something called co-authoring. This means that two (or more) people can be working on the same file TOGETHER! Thus, no more locked files and waiting for the other person to save and make it available.
As you can see in the above screen shot here I am co-authoring a Word document saved on a SharePoint 2010 Foundation server. When two people access the same file and place it in edit mode you’ll see a little people icon in the lower left of the screen indicating multiple access. If you click on that icon you’ll see a list of people currently co-authoring the document.
If you also combine Office Communications Server you can chat or even speak with this person directly. Imagine how much better that would be than emailing a document back and forth. Also imagine how well this will work across the Internet using something like Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) when this features becomes available soon.
You’ll also note that document shows the edits the other person is making live. In the above screen shot you are looking at user Robert Crane and can see that the administrator user is making changes to a paragraph. These are almost real time (depending on your connection speed to SharePoint 2010).
When changes are saved to the document by others they show up marked in green like for you, so:
As you save the document your changes are also committed to the document and you receive any saved updates by other users. No more attachments necessary, as the file lives on SharePoint.
There are plenty of features and abilities with this co-authoring of Office 2010 and SharePoint. Best of all it is available across the whole Office 2010 application range. I can tell you that in OneNote 2010 this is absolutely brilliant, making a great product even better. It actually turns out that this co-authoring concept came from what previous versions of OneNote could do with SharePoint. As I have said before, OneNote is really THE killer app for SharePoint and now it is available in every version of Office 2010 so how can you afford to ignore it?
If you haven’t given co-authoring, or OneNote for that matter, a try then I suggest you do.
When SharePoint gets locked
Ok, so today you go in first thing to use SharePoint and you don’t see all the items on the menu bar even when you are correctly logged in to the site. Instead of seeing:
you see:
So you can’t do things like uploading files, checking and checking out, weird eh?
Had exactly the same issue a while back and it turns out that the whole SharePoint site was locked or more simply, put into read only mode. How did that happen? Well, each night an stsadm –o backup task was scheduled to backup the SharePoint site to a data file. Problem was that the backup terminated unexpectedly, which meant that it hadn’t reset the site to read / write after initially make it read only for the backup process. Ah ha, all makes sense now.
More importantly, how do you fix the issue? You go into the SharePoint Central Administration on the SharePoint server and select the Application Management tab.
Select the option Site Collection quotas and locks from the SharePoint Site Management section in the top right.
Make sure you have the right site collection at the top and set the site to Not locked if set to Read-only (as is the case here).
Now when you go back to the SharePoint site and refresh the page everything should be working as normal.
Took me a little while to work what was going when I came across for the very first time but now you can fix it in a manner of seconds and look like a SharePoint whiz.
Revisiting balance
http://supportweb.ciaops.net.au/blog/archive/2007/07/16/the-one-thing.aspx
http://supportweb.ciaops.net.au/blog/archive/2007/07/16/its-all-about-control.aspx
and
However most people don’t achieve balance without effort. If you try and stand on one leg and tie your shoe lace you are certainly going to have to do some work to prevent yourself from falling over. Everyday, in fact, your ability to walk upright requires a constant balancing act yet you do it so often that you don’t even realize you are doing it. Also, because you do it so often your body has developed a way to ensure maximum balance with minimal effort. That didn’t happen overnight, it took years and years of practice yet many time we forget that. Shouldn’t you be able to achieve the same ease of result with everything else? Not without putting in effort you won’t.
The key to balance is control as I wrote in an earlier blog post and control requires effort and discipline (i.e. sweat). In many ways control comes back to being a mental discipline because your mind controls just about every function of your body. Interestingly, one could also content that those who can’t control themselves are destined to be controlled by others.
Like a true Zen puzzle, there are many small pieces which individually they appear very simple. However as you start to interlock them you begin to discover that they actually interact and influence each other. Understanding the pieces comes first, getting them to work together is the challenge and only then do you achieve balance. Yet that all comes to naught without control.
If balance is the goal, effort is the way.
Blog URL rectified
When I started this blog I simply used the native blogging in SharePoint v3. As I felt that was a bit bland I then used a Codeplex template to make it look a bit slicker. One of the big benefits was that the URL of blog posts became more ‘standard’. Thus instead of:
http://supportweb.ciaops.net.au/blog/Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=816
it became:
which as you can see has the date and topic of the post. Problem is that behind the covers the URL was still the top more complex one.
Now if you subscribed to the blog via Feedburner you could read the post but when you clicked on the post in your reader you received a login prompt. Typically, you’d go no further.
To my own detriment I have known about this issue for a while but never gotten around to getting it fixed. I was having a conversation with Hilton Travis about the issue recently and he quite rightly pointed out that even though the RSS feed does display in the reader correctly it only displays the first part of the blog post. Thus, if it is a long blog post and you want to read it and click on the item to get more you are confronted with a login and password. As Hilton quite rightly pointed out, this fact is limiting my readership and frustrating existing subscribers. D’oh, what an idiot I am! Good example of a failure of customer service there. Shame, shame, shame.
So long story short, I believe the issue should now be resolved so that if you click on a link from Feedburner that has a cryptic URL would should be taken to the correct post, without any password prompts and the URL should now read the updated friendly one.
If it doesn’t PLEASE let me know and I will fix this. Apologies to all who have suffered through my lack of attention on this matter and I hope your reading experience with this blog is now much better.
