Tag: SharePoint

Something I forgot to say

At my recent Sharepoint presentation at SMBNation I failed to mention a really great quote I found from management guru Peter Drucker –

 

“We have to extend the range of human beings through tools they have to work with rather than through a sudden quantum jump in human ability.”

 

I think that this really encapsulates what we need to be doing with technology. Most businesses I have come across simply EXPECT their employees to be able to use the tools they are given. The reality is in fact that most people only use a tiny percentage of the full potential of an application simply because they do not know that all the features of the product. It seems to me that most businesses simply expect their employees to be ‘experts’ in things like Windows, Word and Excel. The reality is quite the opposite from what I have seen.

 

The issue is that most businesses have the tools but they fail to utilize them in an effective and efficient manner. Note how I said effective and efficient. Why? Simply because it is not much use being efficient if you aren’t firstly effective. You need to ensure that the task you are attempting is worthwhile and provides value. What’s the point of being efficient in something that has no value?

 

For all the benefits that technology has provided us it has also lulled us into some very poor habits. We continue to store vast amounts of unnecessary information simply because we can. When we run out of space we get more space rather than examining the necessity of what we have already saved and how to store that more efficiently. However, I think the single greatest fallacy of technology that people reinforce everyday is poor time management (or low productivity).

 

In simple terms they allow technology to dictate their routine and their responses. ‘Bing’ – Oh great a new email, I’ll interrupt what I’m doing to see what it says. How is that being productive? It is simply being Pavolv’s dog! Another great time waster people fall into is that when they want to procrastinate they’ll go to their email and scroll up and down for a while till they find an email they’ll reply to or delete. I know of many, many more examples like this and it is not the fault of technology per se, it is just that technology makes being unproductive so much easier and the vast majority of people continue to fall into this trap everyday, simply because they haven’t be shown how to be anything else.

 

I totally agree with Drucker’s statement but I would add that any use of the tools needs to be done effectively and then efficiently, but in essence people are not suddenly going to become smarter or more efficient by themselves are they now?

Now that the conference is over

I am free to tell everyone who attended my SharePoint session at SMBNation that I have developed a product called the Windows SharePoint Operations Guide that helps you install, configure and maintain Windows SharePoint on a variety of platforms. If you want more information see:

 

http://www.wssops.com

 

The guide is an annual subscription for which you get over 800 pages of information specifically focused on Windows Sharepoint as well a DVD that includes installation files, training and marketing material to help you or your customers get up to speed with SharePoint quickly.

 

The guide is available from me or via SMBBooks. Since it is a subscription I update the documentation every month and for the price it is an easy way to get a swag of information on Sharepoint that normally would take hours to find, test and implement.

If you missed my chat with Karl Palachuk

You can download the audio of the conference call by clicking:

 

Download Now – MP3 format (9.5MB – 1 hour duration)

 

I enjoyed doing the call and hope that anyone listening got a better understanding about using and selling Sharepoint in their business as well a better understanding of what my Windows Sharepoint Operations Guide has to offer.

 

As Karl mentioned in the call I’ll soon be in Seattle at SMB Nation doing a presentation on “Improving your business with Sharepoint”. So if you’re going to be at SMB Nation come up and say hi, I’d love chatting about Sharepoint, SBS or business in general. If you can’t make it SMB Nation then I’ll see what I can do about posting up the presentation for you to download.

 

In the meantime, enjoy the recorded conference call and let me know if you have any comments.

SMB Conference call

Got some time to kill Thursday morning the 25th of September (Sydney, Australia time)? Well, between 7 and 8 am Sydney time I’ll be chatting with Karl Palachuk from SMB Books about Sharepoint. To register go here:

 

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/895127356

 

and don’t forget to convert the times to your local timezone (in Sydney it’ll be 7 am on Thursday September 25 2008, while in the US it will be Wednesday, September 24, 2008 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM PDT).

 

The topic will be Windows SharePoint. We’ll focus on the strategic side of customizing and selling SharePoint. We’ll also talk more generically about developing a business around customizing existing products.

 

I hope that you’ll be able to join us.

I think this is way cool

What I really love about SharePoint is that it is so extensible. You can not only add SharePoint web parts but you can also include stuff like embedded YouTube videos, Google Calendar and other standard HMTL. In that vein, have a look at what I’ve been able to do with the following page:

 

Supportweb embedded SBS videos

 

When you click on a link (only two at the moment) a window should display over the current SharePoint page and one of my YouTube videos will start playing inside a box. To return to the SharePoint page simply click the Close button or just click outside the video box.

 

What I like about this solution is that it is simple to deploy and allows streaming video (or any other web content to be displayed) over the top of an existing Sharepoint page. That way I don’t have to host the videos on my Sharepoint site and I don’t have to use my bandwidth to display them, I let ‘someone’ else do all the heavy lifting. I think that is way cool.

 

I’ll be working to incorporate all the videos I have done up here shortly and completely link it  from the main page. In the meantime drop me a note and let me know what you think, I’d love to get your feedback.

 

Subscribers to my Windows Sharepoint Operations Guide will get full details of how they can implement this in their own Sharepoint sites very soon. Don’t you wish you were a subscriber?

SharePoint search – revisited

In a recent post I was wondering about the reason for Microsoft saying there were limitations in SharePoint search if you installed SharePoint v3 after upgrading your SharePoint v2 instances to full SQL.

 

After referring the issue to our local SBS-MVP (Wayne Small), who referred it onto the SBS Dev team and after they tested it, it appears that, as I suspected, there really isn’t an issue.

 

“We ran through this scenario here in our test lab and had no issues with search. It worked fine. We will update the white paper once our writers complete the SBS2008 doc work.”

 

I am very grateful to Wayne for forwarding my request and to the SBS Dev team for responding so quickly as I feel it will clear up a lot of confusion in the whitepaper:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc671966.aspx – Installing Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on a Server Running Windows Small Business Server 2003.

 

So, in summary, Sharepoint v2 and v3 search does work on the same box even if you have upgraded your instance to full SQL.

New video posted

I have just uploaded a new video that details the process of relocating SharePoint databases in SBS 2008 using the inbuilt wizards.

SharePoint search

So I’ve been doing some more work on my Windows SharePoint Services Operations Guide (WSSOPS – plug, plug, plug…) and have come up against something that doesn’t seem right.

 

Now, according to :

 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc671966.aspx – Installing Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on a Server Running Windows Small Business Server 2003

 

there is section called Limitations. Under there it says:

 

“If you moved the Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 databases from WMSDE to the Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database software or to Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Search does not function after you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.”

 

Now I’ve been testing the migration from Sharepoint Services 2.0 with the database instances upgraded to SQL 2000 Server across to SBS 2003 (and SBS 2008) and this seems to work without issue (as long as you disable Full-Text Indexing first). So now what happens if I install Sharepoint 3.0 on the original SBS 2003 server that contains Sharepoint 2.0 that has had its databases upgraded to from WMSDE to SQL Server 2000?

 

I completed the “standard” side-by-side installation as recommended by Microsoft. I then ran a search in Sharepoint v 2.0 (a.k.a Companyweb) and as you see it still works.

 

image_2_vb9XaQ

 

So now I do a search in Sharepoint v 3.0 also installed on the same SBS 2003 box and guess what?

 

image_4_Ffbk0g

 

That search also works! So, it appears to me that the statement

 

“Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Search does not function after you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.”

 

isn’t correct because both search services (Sharepoint 2.0 and 3.0) appear to function on my test SBS 2003 server even after installing Sharepoint 3.0.

 

In an attempt to understand where this “limitation” has come from I have asked my local resident SBS-MVP (Wayne Small of sbsfaq.com) if he can (or find someone who can) explain what I seem to be missing here. If anyone else out there knows why this “limitation” has been highlighted in the Microsoft documentation I’d appreciate you letting me know as I really can’t see it as being a limitation, but then I am probably missing something obvious (as I have done many times before). I would be disappointed if people read this and decided not to install Sharepoint 3.0 on SBS 2003 because they had upgraded their instances and were afraid Sharepoint search wouldn’t function as I have read a few comments on the web to this extent.

 

Help me understand – I need to know!