Rework

I’ve found another book that I think business people should add to their list of reading. It’s called Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.

What I like about this book is that it challenges convention business thinking with common sense. The books is simple to read and broken up into small bite sections so it is easily read between appointments for busy business owners. Like many good business books this should make you stop and question the conventional wisdom about running a business. Sometimes the best way is not the same way that everyone else is doing it.

I am also a big fan of Jason’s business over at 37signals.com and would suggest that you check out what they have to help improve you team’s productivity.

I also found this video of Jason speaking about how going to the office is nothing but a distraction and couldn’t agree with him more. Scroll down the page to list item 1.

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/07/top-10-tips-for-surviving-office-life/#more-364200

As Jason says in the video, if you want a reason why you are spending so much time ‘working’ and not ‘living’ look at the interruptions that happen throughout your day. These all prevent you actually get working done, meaning you have to do it later. Many office cultures simply perpetuate the ‘culture of constant interruption’ or to put it another way, the ‘culture of nobody getting work done’. More of the interview with Jason is here – http://bigthink.com/jasonfried.

Don’t believe me? Have a look at the video and ask yourself whether your work environment functions like this. If it does then it is up to you to make the change if you want to be more productive at the office and actually have a life afterwards!

Microsoft InTune

If you weren’t aware then there is yet another cloud solution coming that I believe will make a major impact on the SMB space. It is called Microsoft InTune and will offer PC Management and security from the cloud.

It basically allows the installation of client software that connects the PC to the cloud allowing you to perform a number of tasks. Firstly you can monitor and examine the PC, you can also control the updates on the machine, you can also implement security and anti-malware and finally you can also use it for remote support. More information about the product can be found here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/magazine/ff742836.aspx

and the actual product site is here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsintune/default.aspx

The product is also in beta so I though I’d hurry along and sign up to have a look but unfortunately, it seems to be limited beta of which Australia currently isn’t part.

Damm! I’m sure that it will make it’s way ‘down under’ soon and I’m keen to give it a whirl as I feel there is real call for such a product especially deploy via something like Microsoft BPOS (which is the plan).

There are already plenty of other tools out there that do the same or more but I think there is certainly a call for something simple and standard, a bit like Microsoft Security Essentials. It won’t be everything to everyone but I certainly think it will appear to a large segment of the market.

I think this certainly adds value to a potential BPOS offering and will allow IT Professionals to offer a greater range of services at a lower cost. Combine this with the planned implementation of Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, Office Web Apps and improved Office Communications Server I think you’d really have to be mad to not at least be checking out what these offer and how they can be integrated into your business.

This is simply more evidence (for better or worse) that Microsoft is moving to the cloud in a big way. I also think they are approaching it in a smart way with things like the new SBS Aurora which is a hybrid solution. However, this means resellers are going to have to learn to become ‘cloud and proud’ as I say.

I was wrong

When I said two years ago that I thought SBS 2008 was going to be the last version of SBS (here’s the post). Interestingly, it has taken until now for the future of SBS to be revealed and it seems to be a bit of an each way bet.

Firstly there will be a version called SBS 7 that will be the traditional in house SBS with servers, Exchange, SQL and so on. However, there will be a hybrid version called Aurora that will be based on Windows Home Server and have services hosted in the cloud. You can read about these products here:

http://www.winsupersite.com/server/sbs7_preview.asp

and here

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2010/07/12/announcing-previews-of-our-simple-and-affordable-servers-for-small-businesses.aspx

Interestingly the Aurora product allows up to 25 users while SBS 7 allows up to the traditional 75.

My observations?

1. If the average SBS install is 15 users then Aurora is going to be the product that is most popular.

2. With most businesses divesting themselves of infrastructure (especially small businesses) Aurora gets the nod again.

3. If you are a reseller and you haven’t started learning about Microsoft online services a.k.a. BPOS well here is what Steve Ballmer recently told partners at the Microsoft world wide partner conference:

“If you don’t want to move to the cloud, then we’re not your company.”

4. SharePoint Foundation 2010 is included with SBS 7 and via the cloud so it is probably going to be an even more utilized feature of SBS going forward. If you don’t know SharePoint, Office Web Apps, Office co-authoring then you are going to struggle to provide value above and beyond just installing common services like email.

Reading Paul Thurott’s review (above) I have to agree with the following:

“solutions like Aurora make more sense, I think, for a much bigger percentage of the customer base”

So, good news that SBS will live on in at least two forms. I will be very interested to see how Aurora performs against 7 given the push to the cloud, now even more so by Microsoft.

SharePoint site migrated

As you can see from the above screen shot I have managed to migrate my public facing SharePoint site (http://supportweb.ciaops.net.au) into SharePoint 2010. I tried this a number of ways (in place migration, database swing, etc) all with abject failure. The most likely reason was a number of additional features and templates that I’ve added over time.

This time I used stsadm –o backup to save a complete copy of the site and then used ststadm –o restore to recover the site to a new clean SharePoint v3 installation. From there I did a database swing migration across to SharePoint 2010 which finally resulted in success.

That migration also migrated the blog that you are now viewing but as the screen shot above shows I don’t think it is as nice as what I have in SharePoint v3. So at this stage I think I’ll leave the existing site as it is until I can ‘tart’ SharePoint 2010 up a little. However, what this experience has shown me is that the quickest way to do a migration (and strip away the incompatibilities) seems to be to use stsadm to do a back and restore of the site to a new clean SharePoint v3 installation and from there to do a database swing migration.

Perhaps what it has also taught me is that the less modifications you make to SharePoint the easier it is to migrate, but that is pretty much the same with any other application then isn’t it?

KB983444 killed my SharePoint server

After learning the hard way a few years ago that Microsoft updates sometimes do bad things to nice servers I have always been extremely careful in how I update my internal SharePoint server. Now the box is nothing special, simply a stand alone server running nothing but SharePoint v3. The major difference is that it is a virtual machine running on Microsoft Hyper-V.

The advantage that a virtual machine gives me when doing updates is that I can shut it down, take a snap shot, power it back up and install the updates. If they go bad (which they did in this case) I can simply roll back to that snap shot quickly and easily. This ability allowed me to isolate KB983444 as the cause of the my issues (although I thought it was the Dot Net updates initially).

A further advantage of the virtual machine is I can take a copy of the machine and run it up elsewhere and test the exact system without interfering with the production system. When I locate the problem on the copied system I can apply it to the production system. Simple as.

The small amount of servers that I do maintain for testing purposes are all virtualized and having been that way for a few years now I’d never consider anything else. If you are an IT Pro and you haven’t looked at virtualization, especially Microsoft Hyper V for Microsoft server then I’d recommend you do if for nothing else than testing purposes. I can’t tell you the number of major update dramas I have been able to avoid by having the luxury of rolling back to a previous snap shot.

SharePoint Foundation on SBS 2008 – the video

I have just made available to all Windows SharePoint Operation Guide subscribers 3 videos that cover the whole process of getting SharePoint Foundation 2010 running on SBS 2008. These videos cover how to install the prerequisites, SharePoint Foundation 2010 on SBS 2008 as well as migration of existing Companyweb data.

I will be updating the Guide documentation to cover all the information in these video but I wanted to make sure that subscribers had access to this as soon as possible. Going forward I am planning on doing more video tutorials for subscribers as I think they arte generally an easier way to convey information quicker.

Now all my subscribers know

That’s right, the July update of the Windows SharePoint Operations Guide has been released to subscribers and it contains the complete instructions on installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 on SBS 2008. It takes you through the whole process as well as the integration with the existing SBS 2008 console.

In very near future I’ll also be covering in the Guide how to do a complete migration of any existing Companyweb site onto SharePoint Foundation 2010 on SBS 2008. I’ll also release these details via this blog but over a longer period of time as my first priority is to the people that subscribe to my Guide (thanks to all those). So if you really want to know how to do it step by step then I’d suggest you get my Guide (it’s cheap for the amount of time it will save you and you get for 12 months!).

Another upgrade to this month is the migration of the Guide to its own SharePoint site. Much like my new BPOS Portal the new Guide site will provide a much better platform to deliver content for subscribers.

As you can see from the above screen shot the Guide covers a number of different versions of SharePoint including WSS v3, Foundation 2010, MOSS and even BPOS. Many of these are still a work in progress but the important things is that additional information is being added to these regularly. I used to update the Guide monthly but this new SharePoint site should allow me to do it far more regularly.

Now not only do subscribers now have a step by step process for getting SharePoint Foundation running on their SBS 2008 machines, they have a new site full of SharePoint content that is being updated daily and of course that have full access to the new CIAOPS BPOS Portal as that is a free inclusion for all Guide subscribers.

As AMEX says, the benefits of membership.