Many people consider SharePoint to be something that is only used within an organization. The fact is that it provides a very good platform for utilizing outside the organization as well. It provides a ‘standard’ platform on which developers can create some amazing sites. One of the best of these I believe is Ferrari.com.
Microsoft has now made a case study about Ferrari.com available which you find available at:
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000004987
On there you’ll also find a nice video about the reasons and results of the web site. I do however find it frustrating that Microsoft only makes this video available via Silverlight. The problem is you need to download and install Silverlight v3 to view the video. This typically requires a browser restart which isn’t smart in my books because it takes people away from the web site. It would be much better to also offer something on YouTube in standard AVI format. Here’s something similar from YouTube about the web site but it doesn’t talk about the fact it is built on SharePoint technology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lME2WIee-6s
I believe you should be making it easier for people to share your propaganda rather than requiring them to install additional browser components. How many ‘ordinary’ people out there are going to have SilverLight v3 already installed? Not many I reckon.
The point that I really do want to illustrate here is that many businesses are not only utilizing the functionality that SharePoint provides but also the platform it can provide to be easily extended and enhanced. There is plenty to recommend SharePoint already but when you see what people like Ferrari and those below are achieving you just gotta say WOW!
As I have always said, SharePoint is merely a tool – what you do with it is up to you.
Other examples of Internet facing SharePoint sites include:
Guide promotion
After some discussion with SMB Books we have agreed to make some special offers on my Windows SharePoint Operations Guide.
-> You can now purchase the product via a 3 instalment payment option. This means that it is only $99.99 over three consecutive months. This means that you’ll get access to the full Guide from your first payment and continue to do so for a whole 12 months upon making the remaining payments. Hopefully, this will make it a little easier for those who have been considering the guide but need to also keep an eye on their cashflow.
-> If you buy the Guide and any other product on the SMB Books site you’ll also receive a $20 discount off your total purchase price. There are plenty of other great reference books available on SMB Books covering all facets of technology and business. Unfortunately this offer can’t be used with any other offers (like the part payment mentioned above) and is a special offer unique to the Guide. When you make a purchase use the code CRANE09 at the checkout to take advantage of this offer.
-> When you buy the Guide you’ll also receive a free copy of my “Overcoming email frustrations for OUtlook” in PDF format. This is book that shows you 10 ways to overcome the most common frustrations people face when dealing with email.
The Windows SharePoint Operations Guide is now almost 1,500 pages in length and 4GB of information on the subscribers DVD and growing every month. Why spend time hunting around the Internet for information about Windows SharePoint? It is all here in one regularly updated location. From installing to maintaining and customizing the Guide contains it all and more so visit www.wssops.com or email me (director@ciaops.com) for more information.
Don’t forget all the other free documents I also have available on http://www.slideshare.com/directorcia about SharePoint and other topics.
The word
A while back I wrote a post about Windows SharePoint Services licensing. In there I said that I was still waiting on confirmation about Windows SharePoint running on Windows Foundation Server. Well now I have a definitive answer:
“there are no restrictions, we want a customer running Foundation to be able to use all products, simply not for customers with more than 15 users.”
Yeah! This makes things much clearer. So you can install Windows SharePoint on Windows Foundation Server but you must abide by the product’s normal licensing, which includes the limit of 15 user access.
Given the competitive pricing of Windows Foundation Server, this makes it a very good option to install as a second server in small networks to allow a stand alone installation of Windows SharePoint Server. Sure you don’t HAVE to use a second server but it certainly provides more flexibility and reliability for your installation in my opinion.
Change
One of messages that has come from the recent Microsoft Partner Conference is that the world is changing for Microsoft and resellers (as if you didn’t know!). The article “Microsoft rubs Web 2.0 noses in SharePoint cash pile” shows how Microsoft believes the world is changing and how its resellers should also.
“Microsoft’s business applications chief Stephen Elop on Monday told Microsoft’s overwhelmingly desktop-and-server-oriented partner army that nine out of 10 of their customers want to transition a portion of their IT to the cloud.”
Which I believe is true, though perhaps not to that extent now but it many eventually reach that level. Interestingly,
“Elop didn’t reveal the source of the data behind his claim, but the message was blunt.
“My business is changing. Your business must change as well,” Elop told Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.”
So the message appears clear from Microsoft that traditional server and desktop hardware is going to be a declining source of opportunity for all. You would also have to agree that the message is very similar from Google who have perhaps been at this cloud computing thing longer than Microsoft.
To ignore two of the largest players in the market saying that online is the place to be would surely be folly for anyone providing technology solutions. Personally, I agree with this premise in principal but I believe it still must be tempered by some ‘non-sales’ reality here but the end result is that change is certainly upon us. Nothing could perhaps illustrate that better than a recent example of my own.
I was called in by a prospect who were interested in Windows SharePoint v3 as means to improve their collaboration and productivity. They had just recently purchased a new server running SBS 2003 (their existing IT people seemed uncomfortable with the move to SBS 2008 which, as an aside, I have noticed to be quite common), so they already have their infrastructure in place. Now, how do they go about implementing Windows SharePoint v3?
Option 1 – On the existing infrastructure
They need to install Windows SharePoint v3 on their SBS 2003 server which requires a bit of customizing since it is SBS. They’d probably also find that the SBS box is already pretty well loaded (being SBS 2003 it has a 4GB RAM limit) so maybe installing SharePoint v3 on SBS is not a good idea. Maybe then they could purchase an additional server, which means more hardware and Windows Server licenses even before the installation commences.
You can see how hard this is becoming can’t you.
Option 2 – Hosted
While at their offices I set up a 30 day free trial of hosted SharePoint with a single login. They can immediately start using the product to get a feel. They have remote access, don’t have to worry about additional servers, software etc. After 30 days they can simply convert that trial into a per monthly cost with an unlimited amount of users.
How easy was that?
Sure there are issues around both services and advantages and disadvantages but look at it from the customer’s perspective. Which involves less pain? If they like SharePoint and want to start using it in their business which is going to give them a result faster? The winner is Option 2 – Hosted.
This online concept also applies to other applications like email and even desktop applications such as word processors and spreadsheets. In the end I think we have finally crossed the threshold where technology is simply part of our day, like electricity or the car. It has become so ingrained in our society that the less we have to think about it the better. Clearly, things will not change overnight but they are changing and those who fail to make the transition will get left behind. If the business model and focus of players like Microsoft is changing then resellers need to start making similar adjustments. Now is the time to start making those adjustments in your own time rather than having little option or opportunity down the track.
Like it or not, change is here.
SharePoint Guide – August
So what’s coming in the August update of the Windows SharePoint Operations Guide? Firstly, there is information about how to index Outlook MSG files in SharePoint (which is not enabled by default). Next, there is information about a free web part that allows users to quickly post comments up to a SharePoint page and finally there are some troubleshooting tips around import data using Excel, which can be problematic at times.
The Guide is now rapidly approaching 1,500 pages of information and is expected to easily break that barrier when SharePoint 2010 beta is released in the near future. These and future updates will be available to subscribers so they can take their SharePoint installation beyond the default and really make them shine.
For more information about the Guide please visit www.wssops.com.
Necessary modifications
I have always been an avid ‘petrol head’ and none more so when I purchased my first car. I used to spend just about every weekend pulling it to pieces to either add something new or try and improve it. Some of the most notable failures were when I created a dead short to the battery through a wire that ran underneath the carpet, which resulted in plenty of smoke, some fire and a scorched carpet. Another over sight was the inability to locate a critical part of the engine that had been removed during tuning and adjustment that went undiscovered for 6 hours! The small item turned up exactly where I had put it – in the bay between the wipers and the engine, but until that discovery the car wouldn’t start.
My avid ‘customization’ efforts usually commenced on Friday evening and sometimes weren’t finished by the following Monday morning. In many cases this meant driving the car around ‘superleggera’ style (i.e. lightweight). That was basically a car without anything except a drivers seat on the inside – i.e no other seats, carpet, roof covering, glove box and so on. Another common problem was that after I managed to reassemble the car I always had some parts left over. Plenty of times I asked myself whether the car not having these particular parts was going to make it better or worse? The answer was usually worse but took a few days to uncover why.
Being a keen electronics buff I also delved into improving the cars instruments. For example, I installed an alarm system that was so ‘good’ that it managed to flatten the battery in less than 15 minutes if it was activated (which happened quite often, thanks to a faulty trip switch). I also managed to blow up a home made graphic equalizer I have built and fill the car with dense smoke during a rainy day, luckily I made it to the side of the road before hitting anything. In the end the car probably had as much cabling running through it as a jumbo jet.
So I think that you get the picture of the lengths that I went to ‘improving’ the car, all with varying degrees of success. It was great fun (except when I needed to get somewhere and couldn’t get the car started) and I learned a lot. Probably the biggest lesson I learnt is that although mucking about with the car was fun, it really didn’t make the car that much better and consumed a lot of time. Since then, if I have purchased a car I try and ensure that it has everything I wanted and didn’t tinker much.
What’s the point of this story? Well, I’ve been thinking about how much work you need to do to bring Windows SharePoint up to the level it should be at and I kinda see it like days when I was fiddling with my first car.
Out of the box Windows SharePoint does a lot of really great things and is a huge benefit to most businesses but making some further simple modifications can it dramatically improve its functionality.
What sort of stuff doesn’t SharePoint do or have configured by default? Here’s a short list:
– No PDF search
If you upload Adobe documents then they will not be indexed and not available via the inbuilt search utility. You can still check them in and out but having the ability to search within documents is a huge time saver that really needs to be enabled.
– No PDF icon
If you do upload an Adobe document to SharePoint you find that it doesn’t display a little PDF icon next to the file type. As you can see from my Supportweb site it is possible to have the PDF icon displayed.
– No Office 2007 document indexing
You’ll get .doc, .xls and so on out of the box with Windows SharePoint but you won’t get the ability to index .docx, .xlsx, etc. That may not have been a issue a while back but with everyone moving more and more to Office 2007 native format you really need to index these formats.
– No OneNote document indexing
Of the greatest abilities of OneNote is to capture and index documents that are printed to it. So you can print a web page to OneNote and it will not only capture the information but also index it. This indexing ability also gets extended to SharePoint if correctly configured. Problem is you don’t this ability by default.
– No .MSG email document indexing
When SharePoint works with email it normally does so in .EML format, which is natively for Outlook Express. You can save email messages in native Outlook .MSG format but again, guess what? They won’t be indexed by default.
– No file share indexing
It continues to amaze me that people have no strategy for indexing the information they have saved on their internal servers. They create it, save it and forget it. From there it appears doomed to be lost in the bowels of network file shares. I bet most people don’t realize that you can enable Windows SharePoint to index all documents in all network file shares, but again not by default.
– No public folder indexing
Just like network file shares SharePoint can index Exchange Public folders, just not by default. If you have a lot of information invested in Public Folders just image the return you could achieve by unlocking it by full text indexing.
– No web site index
Again, if you have internal or external web sites that you business uses regularly you can use Windows SharePoint to index and retrieve the content. All you gotta do is configure it.
– Limited templates
Windows SharePoint comes with a number of default site templates but Microsoft makes at least 40 more available for free. These templates can save a whole lot of customization time given you can start with a site that pretty well already configured. Only problem is, you have to install and configures these after you get Windows SharePoint running.
– Wrong regional settings
As with most Windows products the regional settings for SharePoint are typically wrong. Why can’t they work out these settings from the machine they were installed on? I don’t know, but they don’t so you generally always need to go in and configure the correct regional settings for your site. Is that easy? Clearly not because most people never seem to do it.
– Usage analysis not enabled
Another hidden gem inside Windows SharePoint is its ability to display usage analysis. This will show you popular pages, locations and referring locations. Why wouldn’t you want to understand how your users are working with the site? Unless you enable this feature, which isn’t enabled by default, you’ll only be guessing.
All of the issues that I’ve mentioned here can (and should) be configured for Windows SharePoint. Even on Companyweb on SBS 2008 they are not enabled so imagine how much better your implementations of SharePoint would be if you did all this? If you wanna stand out from the crowd with SharePoint, here’s a very simply way.
If you enjoy playing around with Windows SharePoint and learning about all this ‘non-standard’ stuff (like I did with my car) then there are plenty places on the Internet that will show you how. Unfortunately, there really isn’t a single location which you can go to, so be prepared to spend a lot of time doing research. I certainly hope that if you see Windows SharePoint as a commercial opportunity then you’ll appreciate the advantage of having all that information in a single location. That is the reason I created my Windows SharePoint Operations Guide, exactly for this reason.
Rather than wasting hours of research and testing, for the cost of a few hours of labour, you getting all this information plus more. Even better its gets enhanced, updated and improved every month. It’s like every car from my second one, I worked out what I wanted and paid for it rather than wasting my time doing the modifications myself. Why? Because it is a better return on my investment.
I have even been thinking of creating a condensed version of my guide with a list of recommendations and configurations for how to optimize Windows SharePoint out of the box. However, I don’t want to duplicate what I’m already doing unless there is some demand. So if you’d like to perhaps see a shortened Guide covering items like configuring the above items please let me know via director@ciaops.com.
In the end I’d urge you to consider taking SharePoint from its default configuration to something that really utilizes all the capabilities the technology has to offer.
Public folder guidance
I was at a SharePoint seminar today and the age old issue of SharePoint vs Exchange Public folders was raised. The most common myth is that Exchange Public Folder are going away in favour of SharePoint, and the following blog post from the Exchange team confirms that:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/03/31/448537.aspx
and in there it says:
“For this reason, Microsoft will continue to support Public Folders in the next major release of Exchange Server, after Exchange 2007. This means Public Folders will have full support for 10 years from release of the next major release of Exchange Server.”
The post then goes on to discuss the strength of both SharePoint and Public folders, which is well worth a read.
If you think Public Folder in Exchange are going then think again! It should be a matter of using the best tool for the job and with SharePoint and Exchange Public folders you have the choice.
SharePoint Guide – July release
I’ve just finished uploading the July release of the Windows SharePoint Operations Guide for subscribers. In this month’s update you’ll find:
– A free SharePoint log viewer that makes troubleshooting SharePoint easier.
– How to configure cross site lookups.
– How to customize Team Discussions to suit any need
– plus more
All subscribers will also receive the source file to my recently uploaded Getting started with Companyweb document so they can customize it to suit their own business. I plan to make more of these documents available over the coming months so if you have any suggestions of what you would like to see please don’t hesitate to contact me.
If you are interested in becoming a subscriber go to www.wssops.com or contact me directly (director@ciaops.com).
CIAOPS 