Tag: SharePoint

CIAOPS BPOS Portal now live

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You are looking at the homepage of the new CIAOPS BPOS Portal. The portal is a SharePoint site containing everything you’ll need to know about Microsoft Business Productivity Online (BPOS). In there you’ll find links to media stories on BPOS, documents from Telstra and Microsoft, a calendar of webcasts and other BPOS events, marketing material, tutorial videos, templates, links, software download and more all in one place.

 

The best thing about the portal is that subscribers can also contribute information and have it published to the site. This means that the volume of information on the site will continue to grow as the number of subscribers grows. Combined with the ability of everything on the site to be searchable it makes finding the information you need about BPOS simple. The portal is supported and maintained by the CIAOPS as well.

 

Here’s a screen shot of some of the existing knowledge based articles.

 

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So what’s the cost? For people who already subscribe to the Windows SharePoint Operations Guide (www.wssops.com) it is a free addition. For those who aren’t the portal only costs $10 per month.

 

So how do you subscribe? You make a payment via credit card or by contacting me (director@ciaops.com) to arrange other payment methods.

 

If you are interested in Microsoft BPOS and want a central location for information then go no further than the new CIAOPS BPOS portal, you may also learn how powerful SharePoint is a collaboration tool!

Australian SharePoint Conference – Day 2

The day started with a session on using Visio 2010 to create SharePoint workflows. Very interesting I must say and something that I’m going to have to spend some time investigating more. However, the highlight of the day was probably the next presentation from Neil Hadlee of Dark Blue Duck on the integration of scanning technologies and SharePoint. As Neil says, paper is still here to say but you can certainly make it easier to manage with some of the technology he demonstrated.

Finally it was time for my presentation and it was disappointing to see a low turn out. Admittedly, I didn’t really expect many people to attend given the session was based around small business and SharePoint Foundation server (not the full SharePoint Server). However, I certainly hope that those who attended got value from the session. I’ve posted the slides of the presentation up at:

http://www.slideshare.net/directorcia/running-sharepoint-on-small-business-server-pros-and-cons-100-level

where you can view and download them.

All in all I enjoyed the conference. I would have liked to have seen some stuff for SMB but I certainly understand why I didn’t. Hopefully as SharePoint and Office 2010 penetration increases and features like Office Web Apps and Office co-authoring increase there will be a bigger uptake at that end of the market. Hopefully there might be enough demand next year for me to offer a similar session. Fingers crossed.

Australian SharePoint Conference – Day 1

Well, I got myself along to the Hilton Hotel in the heart of Sydney to partake in the Australian SharePoint Conference. After the keynote the conference was divided into four tracks – Business, Tech 1, Tech 2 and Voice of the Customer. I attended at least one session from each but would have to highlight “Why you need to be more social” by Daniel McPherson.

It reinforced once again the importance of social networking and how many of these ideas have found their way into SharePoint 2010 Server (not SharePoint Foundation 2010 Server unfortunately). Daniel demonstrated a number of ways that you could modify SharePoint 2010 to include popular features from high profile networks such as www.foursquare.com. I am really disappointed that many of the inbuilt social features of SharePoint didn’t make it into SharePoint Foundation 2010 but I’m sure with a little thought something can be integrated.

So tomorrow I’m back again for the final Day on which I’m giving my Windows SharePoint and SBS presentation (just after lunch in Ballroom B if you are interested). I haven’t seen many SMB guys around but that is kinda of expected so I wonder how few people will turn up to a session on SMB? I will be very interested too see. I believe that much of the information I have to share has relevance across all SharePoint platforms, alas others may not see it that way.

I’ll post up the slide deck on http://www.slideshare.net/directorcia some time after the event so anyone can get access to it if they want. Stay tuned for another update tomorrow.

Office Web Apps video

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.

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

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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.

 

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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).

 

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When changes are saved to the document by others they show up marked in green like for you, so:

 

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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:

 

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you see:

 

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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.

 

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Select the option Site Collection quotas and locks from the SharePoint Site Management section in the top right.

 

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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.