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.
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.
Backup workshop roundup
Over the weekend we ran a Backup and Disaster Recovery workshop for SMB resellers. It was pleasing to see the event so well attended, with people even travelling from inter state to be present. I’d like to think that we did something a little different at this workshop by inviting a number of vendors to demonstrate the ability of their products to not only backup a standard SBS 2008 server but also to do a bare metal restore to different hardware without them actually touching the hardware (a volunteer was used to perform all the work). The consensus on day was that BackupAssist provided the best result in our tests but all vendors performed superbly and we thank them all for their efforts.
Another first for us was that the event was conducted over two days, stretching from our previous single day. Even then we could have probably gone another day but most attendees agreed that three days would be just too much. Apart from the content around backup and disaster recovery we also had a number of other technology presentations including those from:
Jeff Alexander on Microsoft Data Protection Manager,
Peter Vane from ITWest on selling Backup and Disaster Recovery to customers,
Kieran Cook from Trend Micro and
yours truly on SharePoint and Cloud Computing.
We where also luck enough to have both Susan Bradley and Kevin Royalty present remotely. Many attendees commented on how much they liked the mixed of presenters and topics over the two days so we take this opportunity to thank all those who did take the time to present over the workshop.
So what did people think? Well here’s a number of feedback comments from attendees:
“The SMBiT workshops are excellent. They offer real value for money with solid technical and business content. Almost as valuable is the time spent networking with other IT professionals. Well worth it.”
“For the busy IT consultant, these workshops offer a great way to learn a lot in a short space of time. Like TechEd but without the massive cost!”
“After the first day I can whole heartedly recommend attending the events that are run by the NSW group, the content is at the perfect level for the attendees in both technical and informational levels.”
“The SMBiT Workshop days are some of the best value for money seminars I have been to. They are real hands on rather than theory, powerpoint & overview. A lot of the additional value is undocumented such as networking with colleagues & other technical hints that come up during presentations.”
“Absolutely fantastic. You’d be crazy not to attend at least once! We picked up so many ideas from the two days, I’m looking forward to working out how to fit them into our business!”
Thank you Sydney SMBiT Professionals group for organising most stimulating and informative workshops. They were well run and had the level of information I was looking for. Each of the workshops were true to their names and the practical nature of them, was what I wanted to see and not the marketing hype of the vendors.
Well done and I am looking forward to more similar professional sessions. Great value for money and a good investment of my time.
You’ll also find some further feedback from Susan Bradley and Peter Vane that is very much appreciated.
A big thanks for the day must also go to Hilton Travis from QuarkIT who travelled down from Queensland to webcast and record the event (as well as provide his unique point of view on most topics) as well as Ryan Spillane and David Wales from Correct Solutions for the hardware and the pre work that went into getting it ready for the workshop. A heartfelt thanks.
We are now towards the next workshop on the 20th and 21st of August that will be around business development and cloud services. Make sure you reserve the days because after this one I’m pretty sure places are going to fill really fast!
SharePoint 2010 on SBS 2008 – Yes but why?
Susan Bradley posed a good question in a recent blog post as to why you would even consider putting SharePoint 2010 on SBS 2008. Even though it can be done as I have demonstrated recently, it isn’t a pretty process and may end up breaking a number of SBS integration components. So why would the average IT Professional even attempt it?
As Andy Parkes notes in the comments to Susan’s post the implementation of Office Web Apps is one reason. Office Web Apps requires SharePoint 2010 to operate so indeed if you wanted to run Office in a browser you’d need to have SharePoint 2010 installed.
I think the other main reason is to run Search Server Express. Previous I’d been battling away to get this operational on SBS 2008 without much luck but now I have also successfully installed in onto SBS 2008. Search Server Express provides enterprise level indexing of not only SharePoint sites but also file shares, public folders and web sites all through a familiar browser interface. I never really understood why Microsoft didn’t provide details on how to install it on SBS 2008 as I think it was a natural fit for SBS 2008.
Now given that it is POSSIBLE to install both SharePoint 2010 and Search Server Express on SBS 2008 the question still remains – for the average reseller – is it worthwhile? I’d have to say no. I believe it is a far better option to have a second server in the network (say a Windows Foundation Server) onto which goes both SharePoint 2010 and Search Server Express. It makes the setup easier, cleaner and provides better separation. The other question you have to ask is that if you did install SharePoint 2010 on SBS 2008 what happens when a service pack becomes available? Will it break that is there? Will there need to be a separate ‘SBS 2008’ service pack to accommodate this? Hmmmm….I think having on a second server in a ‘standard’ installation is much more robust.
The other issue I’ll raise about SharePoint 2010 on SBS 2008 is the fact that SharePoint 2010 typically runs on SQL Express 2008 (although installing to other SQL versions is supported). Given that most IT Professionals would prefer to install SharePoint 2010 on the SQL Express 2008 since it is free, they will face the inbuilt limitation of a 4GB database. So, if your existing Companyweb installation is greater than 4GB then you are probably going to have to install a full version of SQL before you install SharePoint 2010.
Again, as Susan says, I reckon you need to carefully consider that although you CAN install SharePoint 2010 on SBS 2008 whether you SHOULD in fact do it considering all the issues that it may unearth. However, if you REALLY want to at least you can, however I would still wait and see if any official guidance from Microsoft is forthcoming. I’ll certainly be putting more together about my process when I have attempted to resolve the integration issues.
SharePoint 2010 on SBS 2008 – Yes we can
Been neglecting the blog lately but I do have a good reason, honestly. I have been working hard behind the scenes trying to work out how to get SharePoint 2010 onto SBS 2008. I have documented my previous attempts with the beta and most recently with the RTM.
Not willing to accept that it couldn’t be done I went back to the drawing board and can now proudly announce that I have finally managed to get it working as the screen shot below shows.
Now I have to tell you that the process isn’t very clean or simple and honestly I really don’t why anyone would want to go through the pain but at least you can if you so desire.
I am still working on tidying some related issues around the process so I can provide a full set of documentation around how you can upgrade/migrate WSS v3.0 Companyweb on SBS 2008 to SharePoint Foundation 2010 Companyweb. This means retaining as much of the initial WSS v3.0 functionality as possible. So give me a little while to get all that down and document the process.
Stay tuned for the magic behind how it can be done if you REALLY want to!
CIAOPS 