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11/17/2008

Microsoft Releases SharePoint As a Service

Microsoft made a big move into the SaaS space today with the GA release of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. The new products - which have been in beta since March - have already been deployed by over 7,000 organizations globally.

Though the two products can be purchased seperately (SharePoint Online is priced at $7.25 per user/month) they can also be purchased as part of the company's Online Services suite, which includes Office Live Meeting, Exchange Hosted Services, and Office Communications Online. This bundle will integrate with the much anticipated Office Online, due out next year.

So what does this mean for SharePointers? Well - when it comes to the bottom line - potentially some significant infrastructure and staffing cost savings. Microsoft calculates that its customers will save 10-50% by moving to their Online Services platform.

In terms of functionality, the code-base is the same as the on-premise applications, but Microsoft is expecting to rely heavily on partner vendors to deliver value-adds to the platforms. Everything from migration services to security and administration enhancements are expected to roll out from partners with expertise in the SharePoint space.

Microsoft is making their move, and no matter what the outcome, the SharePoint landscape will never be the same. Read more about the release here.

Posted at 4:39 PM by tucker hall | Category: SharePoint News; Events and Happenings | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

11/14/2008

Staring Up at the Cloud at SharePoint Connections

With all the buzz surrounding Microsoft's recent announcement of its cloud computing platform, Azure, it was not surprising that this week's keynote address at the SharePoint Connections conference in Las Vegas revolved around SharePoint's role in this cloud computing strategy.

Prior to sharing some of the details of SharePoint Online, Tom Rizzo, Director of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, ran through a "state-of-the-SharePoint-market" preso, outlining some of the key focus areas and product improvements over the past year. Microsoft's strategy for SharePoint is actually quite simple - world domination, as Rizzo put it facetiously. As part of this strategy, this year's solutions were largely focused on riding the 2008 wave, offering support for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. Rizzo also encouraged customers to start leveraging SharePoint as a web content management platform, including the use of Silverlight technology (cuz apparently not enough customers do so). He showed off several examples of internet-facing websites that were actually quite impressive, including easyJet, Volvo, and Conservation.org.

Personally, I was hoping we would get a hint of what's on the horizon for SharePoint in Office 14, but no luck. With respect to the cloud initiatives, much of what has been outlined for SharePoint Services fo Azure has been tagged as "coming soon", but the audience did get to see a brief demo of SharePoint Online, which is currently in beta. SharePoint Online, hosted through Microsoft's data centers will offer different packages, based on a subscription model. This allows organizations to leverage SharePoint's best-in-class collaboration solutions without having to invest heavily in their own IT resources. While there are some delegated administration capabilities that are provided to customers, much of the farm level administration tasks are off limits. There are additional limitations, including support for custom code or 3rd party web parts, as well as considerations in a multi tenant hosting model. That said, Microsoft boasts some big name early adopters, including Autodesk, Coca-Cola, Energizer, and Ingersoll Rand. One audience member wanted to know - how will content loss be addressed? The answer - use the SharePoint recycling bin, and there might be additional charges from the data center for recovering lost data. Hmmm...great question, not-so-great answer. It sounds like some infrastructure providers will soon be stepping up to provide these services to offer straight up support in the cloud - stay tuned!

Posted at 8:20 PM by Andrew Yeung | Category: SharePoint News | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

11/13/2008

Do you SUSPECT an EMERGENCY?

Hello fellow SharePoint admins! Have you ever opened Central Admin or a SharePoint site on your farm and been greeted with this?

"Cannot connect to the configuration database."

*Queue menacing trumpet* DUM! DUMM! DUMMMM!

I ran into this exact situation after my MOSS environment was brought down by a starved laptop battery.

Microsoft suggests a few things you can check to resolve this issue. I gave their suggestions a whirl but I was still out of luck.

It turns out that the cause of the problem was that my sharepoint_config database entered suspect mode when my environment went down and was not recoverable on SQL startup.

Thankfully, this post about restoring a database in suspect mode saved the day.

You can run the following query in SQL Server 2005 to switch the database in suspect mode to emergency mode, repair it, and set it back to online mode:

EXEC sp_resetstatus 'DBname'
ALTER DATABASE DBname SET EMERGENCY
DBCC checkdb('DBname')
ALTER DATABASE DBname SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE
DBCC CheckDB ('DBname', REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS)
ALTER DATABASE DBname SET MULTI_USER

Note that you should only run this restore method if you have backups of the database but can't overwrite the databases to restore or no other methods have worked.

After running the query above I was immediately able to access my sites. Thanks Mohamad!

Posted at 5:21 PM by Michael Wu | Category: SharePoint Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/22/2008

TechEd North America is Once Again a 1-Week Event

Tech Ed 2009 is taking place in sunny Los Angeles next year, and it's sure to be another great time.

But the big news is that - unlike last year - Tech Ed North America 2009 will be a single-week event! The big event is taking place May 11-15, 2009. No longer is Microsoft breaking up the Developers and IT Pros segments into two seperate weeks!

Registration opens December 10, 2008 for the big show in LA.

And to stay up-to-date on the very latest in Tech Ed news and announcements, subscibe to the 2009 TechEd Newsletter here.

Posted at 4:15 PM by tucker hall | Category: SharePoint News; Events and Happenings | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/16/2008

Don't Have an SLA for SharePoint? Better Draft One Up!

So we are about halfway through our AvePoint Fall Seminar Series, taking place across 12 different cities in North America. In a few of the seminars, I asked for a quick show of hands to see how many in the audience have service level agreements (SLA's) in place for their SharePoint deployments. While I did not expect it to be a large number, I was very surprised by how few actually raised their hands. In Redmond, only three people said they have drawn up SLA's for their IT serivces for SharePoint. In Mountain View, that number was even lower - only one person raised his hand. I'm pretty sure people aren't being shy. I think when it comes to SharePoint, that is the reality right now - scary, but true.

We all know that SharePoint is a "wonder tool", and harnessing the power of this platform is the ultimate goal of every organization that realizes the value that it can bring. However, without proper governance, management, and planning in place, adoption of SharePoint will likely spiral out of control. One of the key aspects of proper management of this platform should really be around formalizing the IT operational plan and services. In order to do this, a proper service level agreement should be established that distills the understanding of what to expect.

Some sample items you can include in your SLA:

Length of time and approvals necessary to create a site
Length of time for problem resolution through a helpdesk
System performance to expect
Site, storage quotas
Data, system availability and recovery time objective
Content recovery point objective

By establishing an SLA, you will form a binding contract that ensures IT's commitment in managing the systems and resources to drive adoption and return on investment in SharePoint. Hopefully the next time I pose the same question in front of a live audience, I'll see more hands raised from administrators eager to share their own success stories.

Posted at 4:40 PM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Administration; Backup and Recovery; Events and Happenings | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/1/2008

Reporting from Disneyland - Deploying SharePoint Roadshow

Another week, another trip down to SoCal. This time I was on my way to Anaheim, CA - home of Mickey and Minnie. Right next door to the Disney funhouse was the 2nd stop of the Fall 2008 Deploying SharePoint Roadshow. Even though I wasn’t able to hang with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, or Daisy, with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, I was happy to spend the whole day indoors at our vendor booth.

Deploying SharePoint is all about helping administrators understand the basics and best practices of effective management of a SharePoint environment. The speaker for the day was Michael Noel, SharePoint Server MVP, and he walked through a number of sessions ranging from building out your SharePoint infrastructure, to implementing a highly redundant SharePoint farm, to leveraging SharePoint as an enterprise content management solution. All in all, it was a great event with a lot of educational material really geared towards getting organizations to really start thinking about SharePoint from an infrastructure perspective. A good portion of the audience had either just started deploying SharePoint or is still sponging up all the information that they can to ensure that SharePoint is the right solution for them.

I think a lot of the content was spot on. It’s great to see so many organizations realize the power of SharePoint, but at the same time, they are planning ahead on how best to deploy and manage this sprawling environment. After all, as representatives from Microsoft themselves have said, “Just because you can install SharePoint in 20 minutes, it doesn’t mean you should”. There needs to be the proper operational planning in place, a well thought out information architecture, and it really needs to be treated as a real IT platform. Among others, these infrastructure needs would include a business continuity plan, setting up appropriate roles and policies, determining needs for a geographically dispersed environment, and migration or interoperability with other heterogeneous platforms.

The day ended with a giveaway for a Bose Sound Dock. I had the privilege of drawing the winning raffle, and it belonged to –wait for it – Andy Gordon from Suzuki! Congratulations Andy! And so ended an eventful day. It was great to network with other members of the SharePoint community, but ultimately, all good things come to an end, and I once again had the unfortunate experience of steering my way back to the airport in the midst of the infamous SoCal rush hour traffic. For those of you who missed it, the Deploying SharePoint roadshow will be making additional stops in other cities. You can find an event near you here.

Posted at 9:06 PM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Administration; Deployment Architecture; Events and Happenings; SharePoint News | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/19/2008

Just Beyond 90210 - Gartner Portals, Content, and Collaboration Summit 2008

Driving down to the Gartner Portals, Content, and Collaboration (PCC) Summit in LA this morning was rough. I have come to the realization that you should never stay more than 5 miles away from your destination in LA cuz it will take you forever to get there! The stop and go traffic did allow me to enjoy the scenery, especially when I drove past Beverly Hills, 90210. Funny, I don't recall there being this much traffic on the TV show! And I will admit that I did manage to tune in to the new "90210" show the past couple weeks, just like all of you other closet "90210" fans.

But enuff about Beverly Hills. Don't ask me why, but driving through LA and experiencing all of its sprawling glory reminded me a lot of SharePoint. There seems to be so much to do in LA, but it's just so difficult to get around and find exactly what you need - just like SharePoint. It's not surprising that much of the theme around this year's Gartner PCC Summit revolved around effective governance and management of enterprise portals.

I attended a session this morning entitled "Best Practices Balancing Governance and Empowerment with SharePoint", presented by Jeff Teper, Corporate VP at Microsoft. On one hand, you want to empower your end users to innovate and contribute, but on the other hand, you don't want to lose control, so the key is to really find that balance between the two extremes. SharePoint Governance, as Jeff described, encompasses four different areas:

Roles and responsiblities
Operational excellence
Information architecture
Application architecture and lifecycle

Around these main categories, Jeff went on to discuss various different considerations around operational excellence for effective SharePoint governance. These included provisioning policies, content lifecycle, SLA service tiers, geographic distribution, and HA and DR plans.

Overall, it was a very insightful session. It's been about 18 months since SharePoint 2007 made a splash, and no doubt a majority of the organizations have started adopting it, but very few have been able to effectively govern their sprawling environment. Among the few successes was Pfizer, who came up on stage and described how they had carefully executed against their governance plan, and have succesfully deployed SharePoint to over 63000 users across 122 departments and 11 divisions. Their environment consists of over 4 data centers, 6300 sites, and 143 custom solutions (even thos 97% of their needs are satisfied by out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities).

Interestingly enough, within their governance plan/checklist was the need for a granular backup and restore plan, for which they had chosen a third party solution in AvePoint's DocAve Software Platform. In his own words, Dave Biersach, Program Manager for Pfizer said they can now achieve granular restores in just minutes, when previously it had taken hours. It's great to hear that from a happy customer!

Posted at 1:44 AM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Administration; Backup and Recovery; Events and Happenings; SharePoint News | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/18/2008

SharePoint & Exchange Forum - Sweden

Following my previous post, fast forward some 30 hours in the air and I've landed in Sweden. Stockholm's Arlanda airport is a bit smaller compared to Melbourne, Hong Kong, and London Heathrow airports...where I've spent the last day and a half. But small doesn’t always mean bad when it comes to airports, because this means that the immigration and customs lines are a breeze to get through.

The conference itself is actually in the country, some 40 kilometres from the city of Stockholm. Our premier partner in Sweden, HumanData, headed by SharePoint MVP Goran Husman, have selected the nicest little country club to host their SharePoint Forum in. The Aronsborg country club sits on a vast landscape with its own golf course, mini-golf, marina, restaurant, lounge, and even a night club! Probably the most amazing aspect about the venue is the fact that they make their own chocolates, and they’re delicious! Also, the conference facilities are first rate, with 3 separate halls to carry out 3 separate tracks at once and a large ‘mingling’ area for the attendees to enjoy refreshments and interact with the exhibitors.

Even though the conference is only 2 days long, it’s jam packed with everything you’ll need to know and learn about MOSS 2007 and Exchange. Goran has managed to secure some of the best SharePoint minds in the world to come and offer their insights, including our buddies Steve Smith, Eric Shupps, and Todd O. Klindt to name a few. This year the conference is seeing its highest attendance rate ever, with close to 80 attendees, very respectable indeed for a local Swedish show held by a non-MSFT entity.

Overall the show was a success, during the day the attendees were packed into the conference halls for the majority of their time and released throughout the day to interact with the exhibitors over meals and snacks. At night the conference really came alive with live band and singing group performances, it offered both the attendees and the exhibitors to see each other in a setting outside of the normal business settings and talked business over a glass of drinks and billiards and of course ROCKBAND! As the live band performances are rocking away on one stage the other stage is filled with attendees lined up to take their moment in the spotlight with rockband.

Time flew by as we enjoyed 2 days of learning and rocking out at HumanData’s SharePoint Forum in Sweden, good times were had by all. Keep up the good work Goran and we’ll see you next year!

Posted at 9:47 AM by Tom | Category: Events and Happenings; SharePoint News | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/17/2008

TechEd Australia 2008 - Sydney

Day 0: We arrived at the Sydney international Airport to a chilly day. Remembering back to the last time I was out in Sydney in January, the sun was shining high and bright, and I was basking in 40 degree weather. This time around, winter is finishing up with its wrath and spring is just around the corner. While the cherry blossoms are in full bloom along the side of the highways, the weather is still a bit on the chilly side. We clenched our coats a bit tighter and head via taxi straight for the conference center. Work lies ahead...

The Sydney Conference and Exhibition Centre is located in the heart of Darling Harbor, with spectacular views across the harbor to the Sydney skyline, and surrounded by numerous restaurants, shopping and entertainment venues as well as the world famous Sydney Aquarium and Wildlife Centre. The building itself is not too shabby either, adorned with artwork and sculptures on the outside, centering the masterpiece sculpture that represented the Sydney 2000 Olympics. My, how the time flies, Beijing just closed its doors to the Olympics and before you know it the flame will be burning bright in London.

We enter the exhibition hall to be greeted by friendly staff that whisked us through registration and the vendor briefing in a flash, we were given directions to our booth and sent on our way. We discovered our booth on the exhibition floor and were immediately relieved. Contrary to previous years, the powers that be for TechEd Australia decided to collect all of the creative ahead of time and uniform it throughout the conference vs. letting exhibitors bring in and set up their own bespoke booths. Although this meant we saved a lot of trouble shipping our booths around, it also meant we had to trust the conference organizers not to screw up our creative. It would appear we left our creative in good hands, our booth was looking great with our recent ‘Best of TechEd: SharePoint’ award displayed prominently. We unpack and prop up the 2 banners we had brought with us to complete our booth transformation and headed back to the hotel to rest up for the week ahead.

Day 1: The conference opens today, but for exhibitors the work does not begin until 6pm when all of the attendees will be funneled into the exhibition floor for the first time during the welcome dinner reception. This means we had all morning and the better part of the afternoon to squeeze in a little sight-seeing in the beautiful city of Sydney. We left the hotel and made our way to the centre of all things touristy in Sydney, (i.e. the Sydney Opera House). The Opera House is even more beautiful in person than in photos, and across the quay on the other end is the beautiful Sydney bridge. We can’t help but to sit down in a harbor side café and enjoy a nice cup of coffee next to these 2 world-class landmarks that dominate the southern hemisphere. After the coffee we soon made our way to the wharf to hop on a short ferry to the island of Manly. There we enjoyed a nice bask in the sun as we watched surfers and swimmers tackle the cold waters while we chowed down on an age old English meal of fish ‘n chips. After lunch it’s back to work, we hop on the ferry back to Sydney and prepared ourselves for the welcome party reception.

Reception: It was awesome to finally meet the attendees, they all flooded in to the main exhibition hall with the lure of free food and - more importantly - free alcohol. The night was a great success, hundreds of attendees visited our booth, drawn in by what we offer for SharePoint. The consensus among the exhibitors certainly was that this year TechEd Australia was a huge improvement over last year’s and especially in the area of SharePoint. The MOSS boom all over the world seems to have finally caught up to Australia as every attendee we spoke with were either just deploying SharePoint or have come to TechEd to learn more about SharePoint. As the night died down with the alcohol running dry and attendees funneled out of the exhibition floor, we pack up our things, exhausted as we head out for some dinner and crash back at the hotel.

Day 2-4: The show continues to be a great success, we’ve seen many repeat visitors to our booth. Most have come back after reading our collateral to request a more in-depth explanation and technical walkthrough of our product to which we happily obliged. Others have come back after sitting through SharePoint sessions and asked questions that stretched the limitations of the Native SP tools and were told to come see us. Day 2 was the longest exhibition day of all, which started at 9am and ended at 9pm, but our exhaustion was for a good cause, we dispensed a lot of knowledge on SP today to the attendees and it gave quite a few smiles on their face as they left us. By the last day we’ve already had close to a thousand people passed through our booth and now we were faced with a new challenge of how we would be able to announce a winner for our raffle of a 22” inch HP LCD TV when a thousand people are slated to crowd in front of our booth after lunch. Again I must give kudos to the organizers of the event, they had foreseen this and invited us to use the stage on the main exhibition floor as the platform to announce the winner. The host/announcer for the event acted as our unbiased mediator and drew the winner’s name out of a bowl. Congratulations to Chris! An additional note, Chris turned out to be the luckiest guy from the conference as he proceeded to win an XBOX 360 after he took our LCD home.

Most of the exhibitors cleared out after lunch as all the giveaways were given away and although there were more sessions in the afternoon, there were unfortunately no more exhibition hours. We pack up our things and head out to a late lunch then off to the airport. I flew back to Melbourne with our AvePoint Australian team and will spend the weekend there before flying to Sweden on my way back to London. One of our best partners, HumanData, is hosting a SharePoint conference in Sweden and that’s where I’m headed after resting for a day in Melbourne. The flight ahead of me will be close to 30 hours door to door, the only consolation is knowing that somewhere else on the plane our buddy Steve Smith (SharePoint MVP) is sharing my misery. I’ll see you in Stockholm Steve!

Posted at 9:37 AM by Tom | Category: Events and Happenings; SharePoint News | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/15/2008

TechEd Japan, notes from Yokohama

Overall, I would say that this is one of the most well organized TechEd I have ever visited in my 5 consecutive years of exhibiting @ Microsoft TechEds around the world. An army of greeters and helpers line the Yokohama convention center corridors, the skywalk that connects to the magnificent Queen’s Square mall, and keeps everyone - exhibitors and attendees alike - punctual and in-line @ all times. Yes, they will tell you that you are 2 minutes late when you are indeed 2 minutes late. So future exhibitors, be on time or you will feel the wrath of convention organizers, in the most polite manner of course. =) Who are we kidding, this is Japan! Where everyone follows rules to the letter.

Another plus side, instead of giving attendees the same boring lunch buffet, everyone gets restaurant coupons. So you can go to the any one of the hundreds local restaurants for a yummy meal, whichever cuisine that strikes your fancy. Now that’s nice, especially when Japan is a heaven for food lovers! This small extra perk along is well worth the 11 hours daily booth duty. Standing on hard floors with NO chairs! Now that’s Japanese discipline for you. Try it four days running and you will need Dr. Scholl's… “Are you gelling?” I regretted that I wasn’t…

While there were only 16 exhibitors this year, TechEd Japan is a much busier (of course that’s better) show than TechEd SEA. AvePoint was Gold Sponsor here, with extra large booth 8x3 feet, not a 1/8 of a inch more allowed. Yeah, space is definitely a premium in this country. =) and in case you are wondering, yes, you will again feel the wrath of the show organizers if you use one extra inch of space, and again, in the most polite manner of course. People are so nice here you have to feel guilty to do anything outside of the rule book. =p

Our seminar on the 1^st official unveiling of DocAve v5 anywhere in the world in its full glory – with the new SharePoint Deployment Manager, Business Process Driven SharePoint platform backup, single timeline full fidelity SharePoint item-level restore, Notes to SharePoint Migrator, real-time item-level SharePoint Replicator, and the new sleek single pane web GUI, in full localized Japanese mode – was a blockbuster! Our AvePoint Japan crew did a fantastic job localizing all AvePoint collaterals, data sheets, website, user guides, GUI, press announcements, product presentations, into Japanese under a very tight schedule. My hats off to our team. They all work as much as me! And trust me, that’s a scary thing. Not something I would recommend to most people. =)

While shy, attendees that have SharePoint all stopped to find out more about AvePoint, our partnerships in Japan with Hitachi Systems and BBS, or just to gawk at the cool DocAve 5.0 GUI in full Japanese mode. Needless to say, I was very proud.

So over all, besides feeling totally inadequate speaking just two languages, TechEd Japan was an awesome experience! Very tiring from all that standing and trying to speak broken Japanese 4 days in a row, but our local Tokyo team really pitched in and helped made the whole event a great success. SharePoint is really just starting here, and businesses here are definitely very different than companies we are used to working with in the States/Europe/Down Under, but still, 90% of the fun is to adapt to the challenge. =)

Posted at 6:09 PM by Tianyi Jiang | Category: SharePoint News; Events and Happenings | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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