SharePoint Solutions Blog

Need Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint Training or Consulting? We have it!

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:08:00 PDT

Is your organization looking for training and/or consulting on SharePoint Online in Microsoft Office 365?

Well, your search is over!

Office 365 SharePoint is an increasingly popular way to incorporate the benefits and advantages of using SharePoint in your organization without having it installed on premises. It is hosted by Microsoft in “the cloud.”

Quality Office 365 SharePoint training is the key to using this hosted edition of SharePoint effectively, and SharePoint Solutions is your headquarters for practical hands-on Office 365 SharePoint training.

The content of each of the following courses applies to Office 365 SharePoint as well as on-premises SharePoint:

Introductory Level:

Intermediate Level:

These training classes are taught at our four training locations in the Eastern U.S. (Nashville, Chicago, Dallas, or Washington, DC), or may be attended Live Online.

Office 365 SharePoint Consulting

SharePoint Solutions also provides professional consulting services for organizations using Office 365 SharePoint. Many issues can be addressed through Web Consultation over the Internet using live meeting technology, saving you time and money. Find out more…

Whether it’s training or consulting that you need, when you think of Office 365 SharePoint, think of SharePoint Solutions.

Concessions of a SharePoint Skeptic (A Network Administrator’s SharePoint Awakening)

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 06:53:00 PDT

By RobertSchley

I’ll admit it at the outset. I was a SharePoint skeptic!

I worked as a Network Administrator for many years. I joined the Marines straight out of high school as a “small computer systems specialist" and worked for eight years setting up and maintaining many diverse systems, ranging from straight Cisco networking to Windows Enterprise support to WAN/LAN transmission mediums. I took for granted the amount of technology that I was being exposed to over my enlistments. Once I left the military, I realized I needed to choose a specific area of expertise rather than be on call for general IT support. So, for the next four years, I worked for four years as a Department of Defense contractor teaching Information Technology to Marines.

At the end of my contract, I moved to Nashville, TN. After going through months of SharePoint training and being mentored by some of the finest SharePoint instructors around, I’m now an Instructor myself with SharePoint Solutions, where I continue to utilize my training skills and vast IT background knowledge. Now that I have had comprehensive training and experience with Microsoft’s SharePoint software (though I'm always learning new things about it), I realize how little I knew about SharePoint as a system administrator.

Why? Well, that’s a bit of a story.

My first exposure to SharePoint was in the Marine Corps in the early 2000s. There wasn’t a huge to-do about it, so SharePoint quietly slipped into usage at the unit I was in. The IT people who set it up, and the IT people involved in sustaining it, were from different departments that didn’t always communicate with each other well.

Personally, I saw SharePoint as little more than “a web server joined with a shared drive.” So, although I saw SharePoint, over time, becoming integral to Marine Corps communication and information sharing, I dismissed it as unimportant, since our department, the “real” IT department, wasn’t responsible for it.

My last job, where SharePoint was used for collaboration and reporting, began to wake me up to the possibility that SharePoint might be much more than I realized – until forced and unnecessary server migrations broke the customizations which had made it so useful in that environment.

Now I work for a company that is focused on SharePoint, and I realize how my false preconceptions and skepticism “stunted my growth” relative to SharePoint. One of my assumptions from a behind-the-curtain, systems/network administration perspective was that it was such a simplistic system I didn’t need to follow it. There couldn’t possibly be any real power in a system that doesn’t need technical people to explain and maintain it. The fact that the IT Department did not run the SharePoint server when I was in the military was "proof" of that. It never occurred to me that there could be a very good reason that IT was not given that responsibility.

Similar to social networking, the power of SharePoint is the ability to hide "the man behind the curtain." The technology behind SharePoint is not actually that complex or anything too terribly new. In its most basic breakdown, SharePoint is literally a web front end that connects to an SQL database to store objects. The ambitious nature of this is not the technology (which I’ve always been focused on), but that it is "organizationally capable." In other words, it works, and that is the reason SharePoint is creeping in to most organizations. It’s likely that even Microsoft couldn’t have foreseen how popular and pervasive it would become.

So now, having overcome my former skepticism, here I am a former network administrator who has transitioned to training technology and now to teaching SharePoint. (I see myself as a teacher now rather than simply an instructor. Teachers offer their thoughts, comments, and impressions of progress, as well as methodology and facts.) In this case, teaching SharePoint is much more than explaining which button to push. It is the awareness of who needs the information; and the “who” is different for every single implementation.

Having gone through this transition, I now see the wisdom of taking SharePoint Information Management out of the hands of IT, because they are outside the flow of information. The IT Department is excellent at providing platforms to support work, but the raw effort of managing associations, information flow, and relevance to active operations (business) needs to be managed by the people actually doing the actions. I was a platform provider rather than a direct information manager.

Information Technology professionals still play a vital role in organizations. The deep knowledge and skills required to provide platforms will never go away. But Information Managers are taking an increasingly important role in business systems. While the ability to build an IT platform will always be vital, the ability to utilize those systems and optimize them for the organization is just as important.

Maybe this is just part of my own personal growth from having “skills for the sake of skills” to learning to craft those skills to be useful within an organization. I like to think that I am catching up to the revolution of empowering individuals within organizations to adapt the organizational methodology to be as efficient as possible. Organizations are becoming smarter through the improved communication and collaboration in SharePoint. As Stephen Hawking put it, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”

SPGA 2013: A Site Vending Machine

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:36:00 PDT

by Tony Bierman

Recently we announced the release of our newest software add-on:
Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2013 (SPGA 2013).

The beauty of SPGA 2013 is that it enables every site to be provisioned just the way you want it – every single time. It’s a site vending machine that generates on demand, uniformly and automatically.

Why is this so important?

In organizations where lots of new sites are created on an ongoing basis, the IT department can get overwhelmed with the load of creating and provisioning new sites – making sure that site after site:

has the right security settings
is plugged in correctly into the taxonomy and hierarchy of the organization
has a look and feel consistent with the organization’s branding
has all the appropriate features and functionality for the team requesting the site
complies with and enforces the governance standards set forth by the organization

In addition to the pressure of backlogged requests, the actual work of producing site after site in this way can be mind-numbingly tedious, and it carries the potential for significant human error.

SPGA 2013 empowers the IT department to create each type of site just once, and have it automatically replicated on demand at the user’s request.

With SPGA 2013, administrators create Site Request Profiles with all the appropriate functionality, standards, and limitations “baked” in. A “set-it-and-forget-it” solution. Users then select the appropriate Request Profile for the kind of site they need and fill out a short request form which sets into motion the automated process.

Workflows then activate, automating the approval, creation, and provisioning of the site, and the completed site is "dispensed."

And there you have it – SharePoint site vending machine!

We’re excited about SPGA 2013 and how it relieves IT stress, saves labor costs, boosts IT morale, and empowers users with the sites they need. We’ve even created a SPGA ROI Calculator tool so that people can determine for themselves how much money SPGA 2013 can save them. We think it gives both users and administrators a lot to be happy about.SharePoint Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant 2013

SharePoint User Migration Training

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 06:16:00 PDT

These 2-day courses will get you up to speed on the new version in a hurry!

As an information worker who works with SharePoint every day in your job, you feel very comfortable with SharePoint and know exactly how to do what you need to do.

But now your company is migrating to a newer version of SharePoint, and you’ve heard that it’s very different. There are even new features and capabilities you may be able to leverage to make your job easier.

But which course would be the best one for you to learn all about the changes and improvements? The answer to that question depends on which version of SharePoint you HAVE been using, and which version you WILL be using.

It's as easy as 1,2,3.

2007 = SharePoint 2007 (WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007)
2010 = SharePoint 2010 (SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010)
2013 = SharePoint 2013 (SharePoint Foundation 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, or Office 365)

1 = Course: Exploring SharePoint 2010 - New Features
2 = Course: Exploring SharePoint 2013 - New Features: Preparing Users for Upgrade and Migration
3 = Courses: 1, and then 2

These courses are taught at our four training locations and Live Online.

Now when your organization is ready with the new version of SharePoint, you’ll be ready to use it confidently and effectively.

The Microsoft Self-Service BI Toolset: A Quick and Efficient Way to Mine Business Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:09:00 PDT

Business Intelligence can help you turn mountains of data into manageable, meaningful information, which can give your business decision-makers the insights they need to make better-informed decisions.

Having the right BI right tool is the key to making this process quick and efficient.

Without the right tools, it can take months for highly specialized IT professionals to gather, assimilate and share Business Intelligence data. With the right tools, that process can be done in mere days by business professionals.

Microsoft has made a way for business professionals to “help yourself” to the data, aggregate it, and format it in a meaningful way, without a lengthy and complicated “data warehouse” project.

The secret? Microsoft’s Self-Service BI Toolset.

Our new webinar “What is Microsoft’s Self-Service BI Toolset?” gives an overview of the evolution of Business Intelligence and a description of Microsoft’s BI Tools:

PowerPivot
Power View
SQL Report Builder and
SharePoint

The webinar takes place March 21 at 11 a.m. EDT and is hosted by Jeff Cate, president of SharePoint Solutions and author/instructor of the course Business Intelligence Training – the Microsoft Self-Service BI Toolset.

If you want to learn more about how this set of powerful, user-friendly tools can empower you to quickly and efficiently mine important data your organization’s decision makers need – leading to better-informed business decisions – click here to register for the FREE webinar.

You also may want to check out Jeff’s next BI class, which takes place April 2-4, 2013. The class is being taught Live Online through our new Live Online Remote Attendance option.

Getting Something Extra

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:03:00 PST

by Randy Moody

I walked into an ice cream store in Georgia while on a road trip. It was a hot, dusty summer afternoon, and I was feeling parched and ready for something cool and refreshing.

I ordered a single-dip waffle cone. The lady turned around, took a normal size ice cream scoop, and began to cram ice cream into my cone until there was an orb about the size of a softball there. When she brought it to me, I said, “I’m sorry, but I just wanted a single-dip cone.” She responded, “That IS our single-dip cone.” WOW!

Then I tried the ice cream, and it was absolutely unbelievable. “We make it right here in the store,” she told me. They made an enthusiastic customer out of me in just one visit!

I would have been happy with just a “normal” single-dip cone with “normal” quality ice cream. But what I got was something extra – more ice cream and far more delicious than I expected.

Something extra! Don’t you love it when that happens?

When our students attend our SharePoint Solutions trainingclasses, they tell us they feel like they’re getting something extra from us:

· “Ricky gave us a lot of added information that might not normally be covered in this type of class.”

· “Thank you. I got much more out of your training course than I expected. I will definitely recommend your company to others.”

· “I expected to learn the ‘course content’ listed on the website, but throughout the course, I gained ‘above & beyond’ knowledge that is invaluable.”

· “This was a great course! All of my specific needs were met within the first day. The second and third days were just icing on the cake!”

Ready to have YOUR expectations exceeded? Our instructors are ready and waiting to exceed them!

Browse our course catalog for that course that offers the skills you’re looking for. And don’t be surprised if you get more than you expected.

New Video Tutorial Takes You Through the Basics of SharePoint 2010 – and It’s Free!

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:35:00 PST

How would you like a guided tour of the basic features and functionality of SharePoint 2010? SharePoint training course author and instructor T.L. Ferrell walks you through a functional introduction to SharePoint 2010 in our new video tutorial, “Introduction to SharePoint 2010.” The video is a part of our Free Video Training Library, and is available to anyone who would like to view it.

Refreshingly simple, clear and easy to understand, T.L.’s presentation is appropriate for SharePoint beginners, managers, users who are currently using SharePoint 2003 or 2007, or those who are not yet using SharePoint at all in their organization and who simply want to assess SharePoint’s capabilities.

Beginning with navigating the SharePoint 2010 interface, this free SharePoint tutorial covers the foundational concepts of SharePoint technologies and explains and demonstrates the fundamental capabilities and features of SharePoint 2010. These include sites, subsites, lists, views, libraries, alerts, security/permissions, search, web parts, and customizing SharePoint’s look-and-feel.

Lively and informative, this rich one-hour tutorial gives you a taste of the power of SharePoint’s collaboration features, showing you step-by-step how to use it.

T.L. has packed a truckload of information into this highly practical video, and we trust that you will find it enjoyable and helpful. And just think: if we can pack this much useful information into a one-hour video, imagine all that our 2- or 4-day Introduction to SharePoint class could provide!

A Whole New Way to Learn SharePoint 2010

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:05:00 PST

We are very excited to introduce a new training alternative for those needing SharePoint 2010 training. And it’s so affordable, you could have your WHOLE ORGANIZATION trained on SharePoint, right at their desks.

I’m talking about our new Self-Paced Online SharePoint Training. We’ve taken our most basic course, Introduction to SharePoint 2010 – Using SharePoint Foundation 2010, and made it available in an online eLearning format that you can go through at your own pace.

The Self-Paced Online option is a lot like auditing a college course: you will see SharePoint’s features explained and demonstrated by a skilled instructor in a recorded presentation, but you will not have the printed course manual, the hands-on lab experience, or the assistance of a live instructor. Our goal is that at the end of the course, you will have a practical understanding of the basic features of SharePoint 2010.

Affordably priced at just $399, our new self-paced online course is available for a limited time at an introductory price of just:

$199!

Please show this to your bosses, your training coordinator, your co-workers – and anyone else you know who needs to get an understanding of the basics of SharePoint. Getting everybody up to speed on SharePoint 2010 will streamline communication and improve your office’s efficiency. And at this price, it’s a no-brainer!

Want to know more? Go to our Self-Paced Online SharePoint Training page and view the explanatory video there. You can also access the FAQ page here.

But that’s not all. Should you subsequently choose to take the full classroom-based course, you may use your Certificate of Completion for this class to receive $199 off the purchase price of one of our live 2-day Introduction to SharePoint Foundation classes or 4-day Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010 classes! The classroom-based courses give you the additional benefits of a comprehensive course manual, the scripted step-by-step hands-on lab exercises, and the live instructor.

The Self-Paced Online Training class has been created in a SCORM-compliant format, so it can be imported into most LMS systems. If you are interested in finding out more about licensing the class for your company, please contact us.

So spread the word! This new affordable training option might be the perfect fit for your co-workers.

Microsoft Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI) Explained (and taught!)

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:15:00 PST

by Jeff Cate

Last fall, my employees came to me and complained that they could not get the answers to their business questions from our data. We have TONS of data. We are a small company, but are highly automated and have data in ERP, CRM, Marketing Automation, Google Analytics, various Cloud services, Excel spreadsheets, etc.

Of course, all of our business systems have some degree of built-in tools for reporting and data analysis. But, even so, there are still problems such as:

Only certain people have access to the reporting interface of certain business systems. Even though we are OK with everyone having access to most of the data contained in each of the systems, we couldn't always give everyone access to the reporting tool for each system.
The user interfaces and functionality of the different reporting tools are vastly different. Let's say you want to run a report on CRM data using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The tool that you use is vastly different than running a report on web traffic data using Google Analytics.
It is virtually impossible to combine and correlate data from multiple data sources. Take the Dynamics CRM\Google Analytics example. Neither product gives a means for importing data from the other to do analysis on the combined data to try to identify some correlations.
We don't have dedicated IT "BI Pros" on staff, so custom-developed SSRS reports or data warehouses or SSAS cubes are out of the question.

This internal business problem led me to spend a great deal of time in October and November researching and learning about what has become known as the "Microsoft Self-Service BI platform":

SharePoint 2010 Enterprise (or 2013)
PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint
SQL Reporting Services Power View
SQL Reporting Services Report Builder 3.0

It took a good bit of initial technical work to get our SharePoint Intranet farm configured to support the Self-Service BI approach. I did that work myself and may write another blog post in the future on that experience.

Once I had the platform up and running, I put together an internal training class to teach my employees how to use the platform. I brought seven of them into our training center and spent four days training them on the tools, how we would govern self-service BI (very important topic - might do a future blog post on it too), and then worked on creating some initial reports and data analysis to get some practice.

(Small self-promotion: I have also created a public training class on the subject and will be teaching it every month this year Live Online and at our physical training facilities in Nashville, Dallas, Chicago and Washington, DC. Go here to get more details. Hope I get to see you in class!)

I am happy to report that this project has been successful! We are up and running on the Microsoft Self-Service BI platform, and our business professionals are quickly overcoming the problems that they had with analyzing their data before the Self-Service BI adoption.

I have started to record a series of YouTube videos on Microsoft Self-Service BI. The first one answers the question: "What is the Microsoft Self-Service BI Toolset?" You can watch it below, or go here. It's 11 minutes.

Live Online SharePoint Training – A New Class Attendance Option

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 05:00:00 PST

by Randy Moody

Need SharePoint training, but can’t travel? No problem!

Each week we hear from students across the country who would like to attend one of our SharePoint training classes, and have money in the training budget, but are not able to travel.

Maybe that’s your situation too. If it is, then I have some great news!

SharePoint Solutions is now offering a Live Online Remote Attendance option for our classroom-based classes.

Through our new Live Online Remote Attendance option, you’ll join a live class in Nashville, Chicago, Dallas, or Washington, DC, except you’ll be sitting at your own desk connecting across the Internet.

You’ll see the instructor live, hear the lectures and watch the demos, and then connect to your own personal virtual SharePoint environment, just like the classroom attendees, to do your hands-on lab exercises using the very same course manual that they’re using.

The classroom experience is essentially the same, but without the hassle and expense of travel.

We’ll provide a printed course manual, a USB headset, and instructions on connecting to the class and the lab environment.

You’ll be responsible to have your computer ready for training according to our instructions, and to have a place to work where you won’t be interrupted or distracted.

Eventually, the online option will be available for all of our SharePoint training classes. But, to begin with, we’ll be offering this option on selected classes beginning in March.

You can see which classes are being offered online by going to thispage. Classes with a location of “Live Online” rather than the name of a city are available for remote online attendance. You simply register online like you would for any of our classes.

Interested? Clickhere to learn more.

New SharePoint 2010 Training Course: Designing SharePoint Document Management and Records Management Systems in SharePoint 2010

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 18:44:00 PST

by Randy Moody

For many companies, SharePoint Document Management really amounts to little more than eliminating file shares and storing documents in SharePoint document libraries. But that is only the beginning of what SharePoint 2010 is capable of when it comes to managing your organization’s documents and records.
SharePoint 2010 allows you to actually design and create Document Management systems.
When you create systems for managing documents in SharePoint—instead of just storing documents in SharePoint—you leverage the power to:

· Simplify document creation, organization, and discovery for end users

· Control and improve document distribution

· Improve regulatory compliance

· Decrease costs and increase efficiency

· Take SharePoint to the next level in your organization!

In our new 4-day Intermediate-Level SharePoint training course, DesigningSharePoint Document Management and Records Management Systems in SharePoint2010, students learn to leverage Enterprise Content Management (ECM) features in SharePoint Server 2010 to begin developing systems for managing documents in their organization. They learn to:

· Understand the concepts, features, and technologies that are available for creating document management systems in SharePoint 2010

· Create Content Models to understand the roles of documents in the organization and serve as a roadmap for building systems in SharePoint 2010

· Build simple document management systems that use single location sites, libraries, metadata, and document sets

· Build centralized document management systems that utilize automatic routing, workflows and customized search pages

· And finally, integrate Records Management for full regulatory compliance with their governing authorities’ requirements.

Student learning will be facilitated through a combination of instructor presentations and hands-on lab exercises. A sample company will be used in the labs to teach students how to integrate these concepts and SharePoint 2010 features to design and build systems for managing document processes.

Classesare now enrolling for our new course for our Nashville, TN location in March, and our Chicago, IL location in April, 2013.

Learnmore about the course.

Not Like Everybody Else

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 13:06:00 PST

by Randy Moody

I’m not like everybody else.

Take restaurants for example. When I go into a restaurant, I want to sit at a table, not in a booth. Recent studies show that everybody except me wants a booth. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that you can’t push booths together to make one REALLY BIG booth (“Eisenstein, party of 16.”), tables might disappear from restaurants altogether!

And then the glass of water. When did a wedge of lemon hanging on the lip of the glass become mandatory? I like water-flavored water, not lemon-flavored water. I ask for “ice water, no lemon, please,” and if they bring it to me with lemon, I want a fresh glass, not just the same one with the lemon removed.

And I don’t use a straw. And I usually don’t like the sandwich just the way it is. “Sure, I can make that without honey mustard and with extra mushrooms, sir. We can have that ready for you Tuesday. And that’ll be two dollars extra.”

I’m not like everybody else.

But here’s the thing:
You’re not like everybody else either!

I have a songwriter friend (remember, I live in Nashville) who puts it this way:
“Everybody’s different from the way we all are.
It’s not that we’re all weird, it’s just there’s no such thing as par.”

We’re all unique, with different personalities, different preferences, and different quirks.
At SharePoint Solutions, we get that. And that changes our approach to classroom instruction in three significant ways:

Not everybody learns the same way. So our classes are crafted to accommodate the diverse learning styles of our students. We want to make sure you get it.
Not everybody learns at the same pace. So we make sure each student is able to keep up.
Not everybody is interested in learning the same things. Students come with a variety of expectations, so we try to meet as many as are reasonable without getting sidetracked.

Our personal interest in your particular learning needs and learning style are a significant part of what makes our SharePoint training so effective.

Because you’re NOT like everybody else.

Microsoft’s Hosted Solutions Bring Big Company IT to Small Business

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:07:00 PST

by Robert Schley

At the SharePoint Conference 2012, I was blown away by the ideas that Microsoft is putting out. In the past I've seen them as wanting to slowly creep into controlling every aspect of what IT folks want to do. It could just be that I'm in a different place now and not as directly involved with IT platform work. I think that may only be part of it, though. I am farther outside of the server farm than I have ever been, but I see the IT infrastructure more from a business perspective now. It's not, "Wow, that's awesome. I want it." I now see IT as, "What can it do for me and is it worth the money I put into it?"

I know that not every IT professional sees their work as an opportunity for more toys. I do know that, just as in every field, there are more technical points that are really only appreciated by the professionals of that field. In the case of SharePoint’s new direction, there are a lot of finer points being addressed. The biggest take-away that I got was that Microsoft wants to push a more business-oriented experience. They want to get away from the IT folks wasting time trying to upgrade to the next version. In their minds, the idea of versions is becoming obsolete, and they want to push minor releases every 90 days. What this holds in store for major revisions, I'm not really sure.

With this attempt to remove upgrading and the IT focus from their products, they are opening up a new market for their company. With Microsoft’s hosted solutions of Office 365 and SharePoint Online, the company is bringing big company IT to small business.

At this point, I'm on board. I'm not just sipping the Kool-Aid, I want to guzzle it. Beyond the point that Microsoft now gets to feel the pain of using their own product on a massive scale (one of the speakers at SPC declared that 13k+ servers are being used across their worldwide data centers!), I think they are seriously looking to change the direction of their product. It's a requirement in this day and age. Good enough computing, a term for computing power going way over the average users’ requirements, has replaced the need to have the next best thing. Coupled with the economic downturn and the need to get information anywhere, companies are pointing toward a reduction in IT costs by increasing their return on investment for any Information Technology.

As part of my desire to buy into Microsoft's plan, I am going to convert to their new scheme for everything I do. I have interest in creating webpages for some professional friends that need help. In addition, my crusade will be to find the line of benefit for small business having O365 and determine when having a dedicated IT section is a better choice. Lastly, my boss doesn't believe my evangelism, so this is partially to show him the benefits as well.

I will consider this a case study and record my journey, along with what I want to accomplish and how it gets accomplished.

The first thing I want to do is sign up for an Office 365 account, so I Google "Office 365 signup." The top sponsored link and the top returned match are both Microsoft's page for the service. I choose the top returned link as we all know that the top sponsored links are usually scams and not what we are looking for. I'm going to choose to look at the Pricing and Plans to see what I might want to sign up for. This page shows some pricing points that don't exactly tell me what I want; I'm looking to turn over e-mail, business files, and to start a SharePoint Online site.

The lowest account of "hosted e-mail" is out the window as I want more than that. I think the P1 "small business" will work, but let's dig a little deeper; besides, it has a free trial. I fire up the plan advisor to verify my choice. It confirms my choice as far as email and my level of tech support. I choose no tech support because I don't want to work very hard on this, and leveraging my tech skills defeats the purpose of evaluating this for general small businesses. The plan advisor didn't ask me about SharePoint, though, so I'm skeptical. Let's give it a try. It's a free trial so we don't lose anything, right?

I hit the button for free trial. I expect the heavens to open up and shower free money on me for the smart move I have just made. No such luck. =) I get a trial signup page beginning with country of origin. This has a nice little explanation of using this choice to configure what data center I will be assigned as well as currency used for billing. The second choice, "Organization Language,” surprises and pleases me: My choices are English and Española, but this is still a huge step to even have an option.

I fill in the rest of my personal information and enter my current email address for administrative purposes. And I have to finish up with a domain name of “something”.onmicrosoft.com. Hmm... my mind spins with attempts to be clever. My first attempts of "ComputerGuy" and "Apostle" fail, so I fall back to a default of robertschley.onmicrosoft.com. I choose a username and set a password; acceptable security 8-16 chars and no limit on special characters. Some CAPTCHA, a spot to accept Microsoft marketing emails, and "I accept" button sets me up. Surely, heaven opening and accolades at this point, right?

Nope, a quick note for account resets and recovery using a phone number I choose; I’m not sure how I feel about Microsoft not pulling my phone number from the previous form. I decide that it makes sense to have a separate number from my listed profile number and view my new domain. The interface seems pretty easy to look at and fairly logical from a System Administrator Standpoint. I'll have to get another opinion from a non-tech perspective or try to find my user glasses to give a better overview. The signup process seems very easy with a few pleasant surprises as far as unexpected customizations. So far the experience is not exactly trumpets from heaven, but I would say it is as easy as checking my email in the morning.

I'm going to play with it a bit and get back to you on my findings.

Being Picky Has Hurt a Lot of Companies When It Comes to SharePoint – Do you have any examples to share?

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:23:00 PST

by Jeff Cate

I think one of the reasons a lot of companies have had so much difficulty with SharePoint deployments and adoption over the past ten years is simply their “pickiness.” I know this is true because I have seen it over and over again with my own eyes in my role as a consultant and trainer.

The kind of pickiness I am talking about is related to changing the software just because they would like for it to be a certain way or look a certain way. To many people in enterprise environments this doesn’t seem wrong. “We are big, we are important, we are complicated, and we have the development resources. So, why shouldn’t we get it the way we want it?”

What they aren’t thinking about is:

· the additional costs that these changes cause during design and development

· the opportunity costs related to the delay of getting the benefits from SharePoint until these changes can be properly made and tested

· the opportunity costs related to the other, more important things their development resources could be working on which would benefit the company

· (the biggest one of all, in my opinion) the hard costs or opportunity costs that result when three years down the road the company either A) can’t upgrade to the new version of SharePoint at all because they modified their existing version so much, or B) have to spend big again to handle a very difficult migration to the new version because they modified the existing version so much.

There is no doubt in my mind that as much as 50% of the organizations that implemented MOSS 2007 are still in this situation today. MOSS 2007 was a marketing and sales bonanza for Microsoft. The penetration of the product in the market was huge in the 2007–2009 timeframe. But a big number of the adopters during that timeframe came out of an era where customizing enterprise software was what every large organization did. It was unthinkable to try to use enterprise software like SharePoint out-of-the-box. The prevailing thought was that “our requirements are just not that simple.”

I wish I had a nickel for every time I have had someone at a large enterprise tell me “our requirements are not that simple.” Nine out of ten times what is really going on is that their organization is so screwed up and complicated and the resistance to change is so great that they just start modifying the software to keep the peace in the company.

I can give you an example of this scenario (this one is from SharePoint 2010 – I couldn’t quickly find a MOSS 2007 environment to get one from, but in general, this kind of thing is even worse in MOSS 2007), and you can use my example to judge whether I would think of you as unnecessarily picky when it comes to SharePoint.

Example: Assume you have a site and have granted some users read-only permissions to the site. You’ve enabled the publishing features on the site and discovered that your read-only users still see the Site Actions menu and the View All Site Content menu option:

This is simply how the software works out of the box. There is really no harm in it – if you ask me. Yes, the read-only user can click on the View All Site Content option and see the list of all objects in the site that they have read access to. What problem does that cause? I don’t see any. Does the presence of the site actions menu and this option cause any clutter or confusion for those read-only users? Maybe some people would say so, but what a minor issue to be concerned about in the grand scheme of trying to have a successful business!

Would this example be a deal breaker for you or your company? Would you just “have to have this fixed” before you could roll out this site to users? If so, I would probably think of you as unnecessarily picky. If you were one of my employees, I would wonder if you are very good at seeing the big picture. (Incidentally, here is one solution for “fixing” it. And, if you implemented this solution it would just be one more thing you would have to take into account at upgrade time.)

As a society in the U.S., I think we have evolved into a very picky population of consumers. Consumer product companies have fueled this fire with their marketing in their never-ending attempt to win the consumer and get a leg up on their competitors. I think this mentality has spilled over into the workplace and is costing companies a lot of money – especially when it comes to their use of packaged software. Why not just learn how to adapt to the software as it is instead of modifying it because you don’t like something about the way it comes out of the box?

Do you think I am nuts? Do you have any good examples of companies that were too picky about SharePoint and it cost them down the road? If so, I’d love it if you would share them in the comments section.

It’s All About You

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:30:00 PST

by Randy Moody

Living in Nashville, Tennessee, is cool in a lot of ways. It’s hard to walk five steps in this city without bumping into somebody who is in the music business.

One night I unwittingly attended the CD Pre-Release Party of a country “used-to-be-a-star” who has a “comeback CD” ready for release in a couple of months. It was advertised by the venue on its website as a “free show” and I thought, “Sure. Why not?” I like some of the guy’s music and thought it was pretty cool that he was singing for free.

Well, he wasn’t singing for free. He was talking about how great the CD was and how cool it was that he was going to be releasing all these great tunes, most of which he wrote, which were being played at about 90 decibels through the PA system. And how his “new contemporary” sound was going to take the Country Music world by storm. It was a “let’s celebrate how cool I am” show.

So what I got for “free” was (from the user side) the equivalent of buying a twelve dollar dinner and listening to his songs on my iPod turned up REALLY LOUD, and hearing him elaborate on what a great singer and writer he is. I could have had THAT free show at home, and not paid for a $12 meal!

Pretentiousness is always repellant. And it is an absolutely universal fact that pretentious people don’t know they are pretentious. They see themselves as “relevant,” “important,” and “impactful.” And they strive diligently to make you see them that way.

I’ve been to training classes with instructors like that. Have you?

You won’t get that with our instructors at SharePoint Solutions. They’re not out to impress you. They’re out to help you become a skilled SharePoint user. It’s not about them, it’s about you.

Here’s what the students themselves are saying:

“Ricky was very knowledgeable and personable as well. I felt comfortable in class almost immediately. Ricky is the real deal.”
“Although I am sure you have many qualified and talented instructors, I would request Tracey and Robert again. They were both very knowledgeable in what they were teaching, very approachable, and both had a great sense of humor.”
“Jeff was phenomenal. Everyone loved him and he greatly helped us. It was great and very much worth the money invested.”

Students consistently find each of our instructors friendly, down-to-earth, approachable, and genuinely helpful. The kind of person who is easy to learn from.

When you learn from SharePoint Solutions instructors, you’re learning from the best.

(But THEY won’t tell you that.)

What Will Be The Impact On Enterprise Cloud Computing (and SharePoint) If Salesforce.com Eventually Goes Belly Up?

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 05:46:00 PST

by Jeff Cate

Are you thinking this headline is just written to be sensational? I can assure you that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I am generally not a believer that Cloud Computing is always going to be in the best business interest of enterprises, even though many vendors and the media are full-steam ahead with the idea. If you missed it, you can read why I think this in a recent two-part article I wrote for this blog.

This past week Salesforce.com, the pioneer and largest enterprise-focused Cloud Computing company in the world, announced its latest quarterly earnings. Once again, they reported a loss when using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Also once again, they reported a profit using non-GAAP reporting and very much emphasized the non-GAAP results in their report to stockholders and the market.

There are many market watchers who would liken Salesforce.com’s current business practices to a pyramid scheme. It is fairly easy to see why. They have a regular practice of paying employees a huge amount of their compensation with stock instead of cash. By doing it this way, they can do two things: A) they can increase their cash on hand dramatically (which looks good to the stock market), and B) they can report profits using non-GAAP because they don’t consider the stock issued to employees as operating expense (a major no-no in the GAAP world of financial accounting).

Why would they want to do it this way? Simple – they need their stock price to stay high so that they can afford to pay their employees in stock, rather than cash. If they had to pay their employees in cash, they would be insolvent. So, they need new investors in the stock market to pay their employees for them by purchasing the recently issued stock from the employees. Then, the employees can put the investors’ cash in their pockets.

Doesn’t this sound a lot like a pyramid scheme? The people who are really supporting the house of cards are the last people in – in this case the latest investors who are purchasing the stock issued to employees as compensation.

Switching gears – what has this got to do with SharePoint? Well, last week I was in Las Vegas the entire week at Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2012. From the opening keynote, the entire conference was carefully orchestrated to emphasize SharePoint in the Cloud. The Cloud version of SharePoint was demonstrated first by a Microsoft employee in every single session that I attended. It was completely clear that this was by design. Microsoft wants its enterprise customers to switch to SharePoint in the cloud as soon as possible. There is no doubt in my mind about it anymore.

What I do have doubts about is whether the Cloud is really a profitable business model for vendors such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft at the price that they are currently charging customers. I think the data that Salesforce.com is reporting raises a lot of doubt about this.

Many in the CRM market feel that Salesforce.com’s pricing is very high already. Unfortunately, as is clear from their GAAP financial reports, that pricing does not generate a profit for them.

Will enterprise customers get lured into the Cloud at prices that really don’t generate a profit for the service provider? If that happens in the short-term, what will the long-term look like? Will the service providers raise prices dramatically so that they can start making a profit? If the higher prices no longer make economic sense for customers will they be able to migrate out of the Cloud and back on-premises, or will the service provider “own them” so much that it is not possible to move somewhere else?

If Salesforce.com were to go belly up, I think we would quickly see some major re-thinking about the role the Cloud will play in the future of enterprise computing.

Note: Here are some links to different discussions on the web about what is going on with Salesforce.com’s financial model:

http://beta.fool.com/boriskabinov/2012/08/13/will-salesforce-ever-make-profit/8950/

http://finance.yahoo.com/mbview/threadview/?&bn=12e59a33-dea1-3f06-b0f4-6edfe13d6ea2&tid=1321565751000-ff52e87b-ca2b-3c4b-8881-aa3e43f4b27d

http://seekingalpha.com/article/304166-salesforce-com-s-non-gaap-lemonade-stand

http://seekingalpha.com/article/826301-benioff-s-bombastic-boasting-can-t-hide-salesforce-s-expenses-bomb

The reader comments section of the last article I link to is very lengthy and gives a lot of viewpoints on what is going on at Salesforce. One commenter does a particularly good job at boiling it all down in very simple terms. Here is what he said:

“I'll try to explain it simply what Salesforce.com is doing.

To complement salaries of employees, they give them stock options instead of cash.

Then they say: because we did not pay our employees 100% in cash, we saved ourselves the cash, so we will not count stock-based compensations as costs and we will add the saved cash to our cashflow, as if we will never have to pay it. Moreover, we will treat the saved cash as profits and thus add them to our non-gaap earnings.

You see, because the stock based compensation is rising and counted as non-gaap profit, they were able to "beat" on non-gaap earnings. In reality, in Gaap accounting, the stock based compensation should be counted as a real expense, this is mandatory by the SEC. That's why you see increasing GAAP losses.

It's a Ponzi scheme that works as long as the stock price goes up, because if it goes down, employees will not accept stock based compensation as salary.

An added expense to the shareholder is the dilution that these increasing stock based compenstaions are causing. Every quarter, the share count is rising. So the shareholder is fooled in a double manner. By dilution and representing costs as profits.

Once investors realize it's a Ponzi scheme that can't keep carrying itself, the crash will be swift and hard. The only problem is that I cannot predict how much longer the investor can be fooled, in other words when he wakes up.”

Reflections on the Microsoft SharePoint 2012 Conference

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 11:17:00 PST

by TL Ferrell

The 2012 Microsoft SharePoint Conference was held in Las Vegas the week of November 12. It was an enlightening, interesting, and at times exciting experience. Conferences such as this are usually two parts education, one part networking, one part dog-and-pony show, and one part pep rally; this gathering was no exception. It was a somewhat surreal experience to be one of 10,000 SharePoint evangelists, enthusiasts, and worker bees for four days of seminars and assorted activities. Witnessing the well-oiled machine of the Mandalay Bay catering team as they funneled us into a cavernous facility with endless repetitive buffet lines for meals was worth the trip all by itself. Throughout the conference, the social networkers among us (including me) checked in on Foursquare and Facebook and posted Tweets with the hashtag #spc12. During the keynote presentation, so many of us Tweeted that #spc12 was the number one trending hashtag. I also earned a Swarm badge on Foursquare.

1-The SharePoint Faithful

The conference officially kicked off with a keynote presentation, led by Microsoft’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Jared Spataro. (You can watch the presentation online at http://www.mssharepointconference.com). Comedic sketch attempts aside, this presentation to launch SharePoint 2013 set the tone for the whole conference: It’s a brand new SharePoint. All the familiar elements are there, all the tools and features you are used to, but SharePoint 2013 is a sleek, updated platform with more punch than ever before. With 2013, Microsoft has done what it always does; taken a look at what’s happening in the digital world and synthesized pieces, absorbing the new realities of how people work and interact with digital devices. As is also typical, they’ve built on these realities and added their own twist.

The result is an interface that will look oddly familiar to about one billion people; anyone who dabbles in social networking for either work or personal use will be impressed with the vast improvements in the way these paradigms are incorporated into the collaborative focus of SharePoint. There are significant changes in some of the underlying technology and implementation options. There are also improvements in ease of use, performance, power, feature sets, and extensibility. As usual, there are also shortcomings; improvements or enhancements that would seem to be obvious which aren’t there, or features that still fall short of what might be desired. There are changes that are puzzling in some ways. There are rumblings of more changes to come that may not sit well with the community. With any new release there will also be glitches as all the bugs get worked out as the software is released into the wild. So, there’s a lot of change; whether good or bad in each case may depend on one’s perspective.

2- I never understood what this breakout room was for

There were around 300 breakout sessions, covering many aspects of SharePoint 2013 and related products and technologies such as Office, Project, Project Server, Visio, Yammer, and others. Whether your role is as a business user, a developer, an administrator, or jack-of-all-trades, there were sessions to match your needs. There were overviews and deep dives, technical nerd-outs and philosophical discussions. At any given break-out slot it could be hard to pick which session would be the best choice. Luckily, video of each session is available to attendees for a few months, so I’m going through and watching the sessions I wanted to attend but couldn’t. It’s a lot to take in, and of course we are doing our own research, exploration, and experimentation. In the coming weeks and months you’ll be hearing more from us about this next wave of SharePoint. In fact, we have already scheduled the first round of classes for those who will be upgrading to SharePoint 2013 from previous versions: Exploring SharePoint 2013 - New Features: Preparing Users for Upgrade and Migration.

I’m not going to detail the many changes and new features here, but I will hit a few of the major potential game-changers.

The Cloud, The Cloud, The Cloud. The Cloud. Have I Mentioned The Cloud?

Cloud computing is all the rage, albeit controversial. Just as Microsoft seems to have bet the OS farm on the radical changes seen in Windows 8, they have placed a large bet on the cloud being the wave of the future. SharePoint, along with Office, Outlook, and other tools, can now be deployed via Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud platform. If one takes the presentations at this year’s conference at face value, Microsoft simply assumes that everyone will be moving to Office 365 as a matter of course. The differences in Office / SharePoint as implemented in Office 365 vs implementation onsite are minor; we were assured over and over that the code base is identical. (The primary difference seems to be in application integration; it is slightly better in Office 365 since O365 is a truly unified system.)

Some in the community agree that the cloud is a no-brainer, others believe it’s a non-starter, and many, many others are unsure. The benefits can be considerable, but the potential drawbacks are certainly worth considering. During the conference, Office 365 actually experienced a brief outage. It’s one thing for an organization to experience downtime with systems under their complete control; it’s quite another for it to happen when the systems are under someone else’s roof. My crystal ball is out for repairs, so I have no prediction for the outcome. I will say I’ve seen this thick-client vs thin-client pendulum swing back and forth a few times in my career. Stay tuned.
For further discussions of cloud computing, see the recent blog posts by our President, Jeff Cate:

· Does Dumping On-Premises Software Make Good Business Sense? - Part 2

· Does Dumping On-Premises Software Make Good Business Sense? - Part 1

SharePoint Social Is More … Social

The importance of social networking in today’s world is hard to deny. It’s true that I know many people – including a majority of our students – who don’t Twitter, who don’t LinkedIn, and who barely Facebook. Still, social computing is a modern fact of life, and many people (especially the under-30 crowd) see social applications as an integral part of their on-line life. Many people are much more likely to text, tweet, status-update, check-in, etc., than they are to make a phone call or send an email. Such communications are briefer, faster, can be more connected to other communications and data, and have the potential to be simultaneously broadcast to a wider audience and targeted to self-selected recipients.

The MySites feature in previous versions of SharePoint was an attempt to incorporate social computing into SharePoint, but it always seemed to be a step behind current trends when a particular version was released. In addition, it didn’t really integrate with the other sites the user might have access to – it was more like an annex than a lobby. Many organizations did not even implement MySites, choosing not to activate the feature at all. In other organizations, MySites might have been activated but has never really been used. It looked and functioned like an adjunct to the primary functionality and purpose of SharePoint. It had clear business purposes, but it could be difficult to convince users and decision-makers how it might fit into – never mind improve – their current work habits. The terms “social networking” and “social computing” are partly to blame, I feel. Decision makers believe or fear that social = frivolous rather than understanding that it just means collaborative in this context. Unfortunately, the terms seem to be here to stay.

Enter SharePoint 2013. The case for social computing in SharePoint – and in the enterprise – has never been clearer. In addition to the personal workspace, profile information, and document sharing capabilities that have always been part of MySites, the 2013 edition – rebranded as SkyDrive Pro -- incorporates more collaborative, tracking/notification, and personal work management tools than ever. Microsoft has picked up the flow of how sites like Facebook and Twitter work and how users interact with them. They’ve folded tagging, mentioning, following, and more into the new Newsfeed and other elements. In addition, it’s possible to have “conversations” on individual sites. Imagine a site centered around a particular project, and there on the site is a newsfeed where the project team, stakeholders, management, etc., can participate in an open conversation about the project. It’s right there on the home page, less structured than a discussion board, and deeply familiar to the vast majority of current computer users. Think of how that would drastically reduce the number of emails that float around, and the increased documentation and information sharing that would take place. Finally, there’s an increased focus on providing aggregation of everything you are doing and tracking throughout the SharePoint system in order to provide “one-stop shopping” for all of your work. For organizations that already use MySites in a significant way, 2013 should be welcomed with open arms. For organizations that don’t use MySites, or who have it but don’t know what to do with it, a fresh look and thoughtful implementation of SkyDrive Pro could be well worth it.

Yammer On

A twist to the integrated SharePoint social components is Microsoft’s recent purchase of the messaging system Yammer. Yammer was definitely a shiny new toy at the conference that Microsoft was eager to showcase. It is estimated that over 80% of the Fortune 500 user Yammer in the enterprise. Being a new purchase, though, Yammer is not yet integrated with other Microsoft products. They promise that it will be incorporated in the future, but right now it is redundant with other social features already in SharePoint.

You CAN Take It With You

SharePoint 2013 is multiple-device-centric. Not only are the mobile device interfaces improved, but the assumption is that any given user may be using SharePoint over a wide variety of devices – not only a desktop plus a laptop, but perhaps a smartphone or a tablet. While Internet Explorer will still (and probably always) provide the optimum experience, the attempt to be OS/browser/device agnostic is even more earnest. Finally, the biggest change – depending on how a given organization implements all the features – is that there’s a shift to thinking about focusing the experience on the user rather than the machine. The idea is that it doesn’t matter what device you are on, you can always get to “your stuff” in a seamless way, without depending on bookmarks/shortcuts which are device-centric.

Number Crunching – Even Crunchier

Business Intelligence tools have long been a part of SharePoint, but with each version they become more and more robust. SharePoint 2013 is no exception. To me some of the most exciting enhancements are actually part of Excel 2013. These include features like FlashFill data pattern recognition, Slicers to provide customized data filtering options, and more. Combine this with enhancements to Excel Services and you have a much more robust feature set for displaying and manipulating data in spreadsheet form. Access Services has also gotten a makeover, and Microsoft seems to have a refreshed interest in Access in general. A new tool called PowerView provides new capabilities for interactive data modeling. Enhancements in Visio Services, PowerPivot, and PerformancePoint round out the package. There are disappointments, but BI in SharePoint is definitely beefier and more tasty.

Apps Are the New Black

Anyone with a smart phone or a tablet device is familiar with the concept of apps – applications. These are usually small programs with a focused purpose. They may be a stripped-down version of a web site, or they may be a stand-alone program of some type. Microsoft has embraced the app model and married it to SharePoint. Not only can developers create open-source apps to sell (or provide as freeware) in Microsoft’s app store to add or enhance SharePoint functionality, but the data features in SharePoint – what we currently call lists and libraries – are now apps.

Find What You’re Looking For

Search is an essential tool for information storage and sharing in computing. The SharePoint search tools have been good in the past, but the 2013 version is, as expected, even better. The big news is that FASTSearch, which was a separately-purchased add-on for SharePoint 2010, is the core search technology for SharePoint 2013. In addition, the way Search crawls, indexes, queries, and displays content has been redesigned. Users can view a preview of a document before opening it, and can even interact with it to a limited degree. Results are often grouped or prioritized based on search frequency, ratings, and context. The new Search is a rich area for improving usability of SharePoint sites, and I look forward to exploring it further.

Bonus: Project Server

Project Server and SharePoint have been closely aligned since SharePoint’s beginning. With each new release, the two platforms become more integrated. There are those who even believe that eventually Project Server will become a fully integrated part of SharePoint, becoming in essence Project Services to parallel Access Services, etc. In this edition, Project Server is also an optional component of Office 365 as well as being available for onsite implementation. One of the most exciting features that I saw was that not only can you publish a Project Professional plan to a SharePoint task list (without Project Server), but that that plan can then later be converted to a published plan in Project Server. In this way, the project manager and directors/executives can still leverage all of the resource and portfolio management tools in Project Server, while team members and stakeholders can view (and in some cases, even interact) with the plan in the SharePoint site. This opens up a whole new workflow paradigm, especially for those teams or organizations who have been reluctant to use Project Server, yet use SharePoint for the nuts and bolts of project documentation and collaboration.

Note: Task lists themselves have had an amazing makeover, and I can’t be more excited about the prospect of teaching this new functionality. I don’t have the space to go into everything here, but in the context of project management I do want to point out one innovation. A soon-to-be-released App was previewed at a session I attended. This app will allow users to view and manage a Task list in a graphical “tile wall,” typical of agile project management. Again, this could be a huge improvement in functionality for organizations that feel their project management style has not been a good fit for Project / SharePoint.

Does Dumping On-Premises Software Make Good Business Sense? - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:30:00 PST

by Jeff Cate

In my previous post, I listed some of the unique benefits of the Cloud that I particularly like. Now, here is my short list of unique benefits that on-premises software offers over Cloud software:

· On-premises offers easier and faster application integration development. Since we moved CRM back on-premises with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, it has been much easier, much faster and less costly to integrate different software applications in our company. When we were in the Cloud with CRM, integrating SFDC with our on-premises ecommerce system was difficult and time consuming (and, SFDC did not offer ecommerce functionality). When we wanted to integrate our Cloud-based training class registration application (Regonline) with SFDC, that too was difficult and time consuming. There were several Cloud-based integration software providers available that promised to make integration easier, but their solutions were incredibly pricey, so we had to develop all of our integrations on our own. It turned out to be more difficult to do in the Cloud than on-premises.

· On-premises offers a shorter timeline for making programming customizations to meet user needs. You might be thinking that I am crazy saying this given the long history of waiting forever for internal IT departments to customize applications. And, maybe I am crazy on this one, but I am basing it primarily on something a customer told me a while back. This customer was fairly large (45,000 users) and in multiple countries. Their C-levels bought into the Cloud about five years ago and purchased Microsoft BPOS Dedicated for the entire company. So, they moved all email, SharePoint collaboration and IM into the Cloud using Microsoft’s products and data center. My client said overall performance had been good and that the solution had been reliable. But, she also said the end users hated the fact that it took Microsoft such a long time to approve and deploy seemingly small customizations. She said the reason was that there was a tremendous amount of overhead and bureaucracy involved in obtaining Microsoft’s approval to publish customizations to their Cloud environment. She said that it could easily take eight weeks to document, review and approve a plan to make a small customization. Before moving to the Cloud, this type of customization could get approved within a week and developed, tested and deployed within two to three weeks.

· By nature, some software applications are valuable revenue-producing assets of the company that are critical for the company to protect and can best be protected using the on-premises model. Now I have my business decision-maker and accountant hat on. If I look at certain mission-critical software applications from this standpoint, it is clear that they represent tangible, revenue-producing (or revenue-sustaining) assets to the business. By accounting definition, business revenue is generated from business assets. So, in order to generate\sustain revenue a business has to own at least one asset, and usually a lot more than one.

For instance, if you are a manufacturer of televisions, the asset category of “Plant and Equipment” is one of the asset categories that provides you with the ability to manufacture TVs and ultimately sell them for money. Without “Plant and Equipment,” you can’t generate any revenue.

Likewise, if you are a service business or an Internet retailing company, a mission-critical software application can also be a major asset category that provides you with the ability to produce revenue. For instance, Amazon.com’s website is quite clearly a software application that is an asset which allows them to produce revenue (and a lot of it in their case). Therefore, their website software application is just as much of a revenue-producing asset to them as a TV manufacturing plant is to Sony.

If I am a business leader or accountant at an Amazon.com type of company, how much would I care about the physical location, safeguarding and upkeep of a software application that is such a valuable revenue-producing business asset? A lot, I think! Would I want it to reside at and be maintained by a third-party Cloud provider? Probably not, if I had a choice! I would want to exercise as much protection and care over that asset as I possibly can, and it seems obvious that the best way to do that is to keep it on-premises if I have the financial and human resources available and the choice to host it on-premises. The bottom line is that the business asset value of this type of software application trumps the benefits that running it in the Cloud offers.

· In the event of a prospective company sale, on-premises software applications are more likely to be valued accurately. When it comes time to sell a business or to merge with another business, a team of accountants and lawyers from the acquiring company will undertake a “Due Diligence” project. The Due Diligence project is a fine-grained examination of the target company’s assets and books to make sure that the prospective buyer has a very clear picture of what he or she is buying and its true value.

What is the impact going to be to the Due Diligence process and the follow-on price negotiation process if revenue-producing software applications and data are sitting in a third-party’s data center on the other side of the country and managed by non-employees? My feeling is that this could hurt the negotiating position of the company that is being sold because it will be a lot more difficult for the accountants and lawyers to recognize an accurate value of the software application as a business asset since it isn’t hosted on-premises.

Wrapping it up

So, to those of you who are business decision makers and IT leaders out there, I say be careful before you jump on the bandwagon to dump your on-premises software applications in favor of the Cloud. I think the Cloud has a lot of really nice benefits and a big role to play, but I don’t believe that it is the de facto best business decision for every application.

My advice is to be careful to not be unduly swayed by all of the industry hype surrounding the Cloud. I guess in the end, the vendors could force all computing applications into the Cloud by not giving us a choice, but I really hope wiser business minds and the free market will come into play before that happens and demand the choice to use on-premises software or the Cloud on an application-by-application basis, depending on what is best for each individual business.

What's New in SharePoint 2013

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 14:54:00 PST

With the release of SharePoint 2013, everyone is curious. And many are wondering, “What’s new?”

Our newest course will answer that question and give you hands-on experience with the most significant new features.

Our new 2-day “Exploring SharePoint 2013 - NewFeatures: Preparing Users for Upgrade and Migration” will help prepare SharePoint 2010 users for the new interface, capabilities, and functionality coming in SharePoint 2013.

You’ll get a first look at features like:

SharePoint 2013 Apps
Enhancements to the SharePoint social networking features
Vastly improved Search
Publishing and Web Content Management enhancements
Access 2013 Web Apps
SharePoint Designer 2013
New enhancements to workflow design, tracking, monitoring, and managing
And a whole lot more…

Which new features will YOU be using on a daily basis?
Which ones will change the way you work?
Come and find out!

This intermediate-level course is aimed at experienced SharePoint 2010 users who want to become familiar with the new features of SharePoint 2013. It is NOT a course for SharePoint beginners.

Our new SharePoint 2013 course will debut in Nashville January 29-30, 2013. The cost of the 2-day class will be $1195.

New Course: Business Intelligence for SharePoint 2010

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:15:00 PST

SharePoint Solutions is excited to announce the launch of a new 3-day course on Business Intelligence for SharePoint 2010:

“Business Intelligence Training – the Microsoft Self-Service BI Toolset”
Leveraging PowerPivot, Power View and Report Builder to Build No-Code BI Applications and Reports for SharePoint 2010

Better business intelligence leads to more intelligent business decisions. Intuition-driven decision making is no match for data-driven decision making. Facts trump feelings. But getting the data into a format which is readily accessible and easily consumed has always been the issue.

Microsoft’s Self-Service BI Toolset is giving business professionals the tools they need to develop no-code BI applications and reports to aggregate and display data in SharePoint 2010.

This 3-day course will give you the hands-on training to use these tools effectively. You will learn to develop BI and reporting types of business applications, including dashboards, using no-code, power user-oriented tools.

This is an intermediate- to advanced-level course. It is aimed at business professionals who are experienced SharePoint 2010 power users, and is NOT for beginners. Prospective students should feel very comfortable working with medium to complex Excel workbooks with formulas, multiple data sources, Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts, and should have at least 6 months experience working in SharePoint 2010 on a regular basis.

The new course debuts January 22-24, 2013, in Nashville, TN. Registration for that class is now open, and the cost of the new 3-day BI course is $1895. A second class, in Chicago February 19-21, 2013, is also open for registration.

Your Opinion Matters

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 13:58:00 PST

by Randy Moody

At some point in the last couple of decades, your opinion about pretty much anything became REALLY IMPORTANT!

Television networks decide which shows get to continue based on ratings.
Politicians navigate and adjust the focus of their campaigns based on public opinion polls.
EBay sellers live or die by customer feedback.
And products, services, restaurants, hotels, and businesses of all kinds often sink or swim based on customer reviews.

One shift in the marketplace as a result of all this is:

Companies had better be REALLY GOOD at what they do if they’re going to stay in business, because there are LOTS of other choices!

If I’m considering making a significant purchase, I take the time for “due diligence” and check out customer reviews. I’ll bet you do too. What are other people who purchased this product or used this service saying about it?

What about SharePoint Solutions training classes?

Are there any reviews available on the Internet about those?

Why yes, there are.

Microsoft has a special website devoted to Microsoft Partner companies and their products and services. It is called Microsoft Pinpoint. For each company, there is a place to post reviews.

I would encourage you to see what our students are saying about our classes.
You can read the reviews here.

Ultimately, we are in business to help you and your organization make the most effective use of SharePoint. That’s our goal, and our single focus.

So once you’ve seen what others are saying, come and see for yourself.

Configuring Alternate Access Mappings and IIS Host Headers in Extranet Collaboration Manager (ExCM) 2010

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 06:12:00 PDT

by Matthew McBride

“Allow myself to introduce…myself.” – Austin Powers

I think of the above quote every time I run across this error supporting Extranet Collaboration Manager 2010:

(click on images to enlarge)

“Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” What does that even mean? Could there be a less intuitive error message? Actually, don’t answer that….

This is one of the most common ExCM 2010 support tickets I see on a weekly basis. In almost all cases it is caused by an incorrect Alternate Access Mapping for a zone and/or errors in the IIS Host Headers.

In the SharePoint 2007 world, you were forced to extend an existing Web Application in order to use Forms Based Authentication (FBA). The original one was configured to use Windows Authentication and the extended one used FBA. However, in SharePoint 2010 and the introduction of Claims Based Authentication, this is no longer the case. So almost all installations of ExCM 2010 will look like this in Central Administration:

Notice that I only have one “default” zone that can use both Windows and FBA.

If you came from the 2007 world, or if you are just creating a new Web Application for test purposes, you probably just entered something very simple for a host header like this:

http://myserver

In my case I used:

http://demo

There’s nothing wrong with this approach until you decide to open your Web Application to the outside world and create an Extranet. The intuitive approach to solving this would be to just add a new Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) such as this:

Seems straightforward enough until you actually try to access the URL:

Argh!

So what’s the problem and how do we fix it? The first thing to understand is that each “Public URL for Zone” that appears under AAM MUST correspond to an existing zone for your Web Application. In the case above, since no “Extranet” zone exists, SharePoint does not know where to direct requests for the “extranet.demo.com” URL.

To work around this, we can do a few things. The simple solution is to select “Edit Public URLs” and configure the AAM to look like this:

Now if I try the URL again, I get my expected result:

But what if my environment required users or applications to still be able to access the “http://demo” URL? How can we configure that correctly? By adding an “Internal URL” like this:

Notice the “Default” zone highlight above. This is another place I’ve seen administrators get tripped up because the intuitive selection might be something like “Intranet”:

But we must remember that we still only have the single “Default” zone for our Web Application. After making the changes, our AAM screen now looks like this:

Observe the “Public URL for Zone” column. They are identical for both entries. However, the “Internal URL” values are different. Any internal request using either Internal URL in that column will be sent to the Public URL. So, entering either of the URLs below will send us to our site:

http://demo

http://extranet.demo.com

OK…so now we’re getting somewhere. However, there is one last piece to consider in a real world scenario if we are going to open our site to the outside world…implementing SSL.

For the purposes of this post, I just created a self-signed certificate in IIS and then added a new binding to my site in IIS Manager:

Seems straightforward enough, right? So let’s try to access our newly secure site:

What the Smurf? Again, the error message is mostly useless because we know:

a) That we have a Web Application using the “extranet.demo.com” URL

b) That we typed the URL correctly

c) That we just successfully applied an SSL Certificate in IIS

However, the last part offers a subtle clue:

“…the system administrator may need to add a new request URL mapping to the intended application.”

Aha! It looks like we still need to tweak our AAMs one more time. In the case of adding SSL, SharePoint still doesn’t know what IIS does…that the “https://” and the “http://” URLs both point to the same place. So we need to use the AAMs to help it along. To achieve this, we need to do two things:

- Change the Public URL
- Add another Internal URL

First, I will change the Public URL to reflect the secure URL and then add the unsecure URL as an additional Internal URL:

Now, our AAM page looks like this:

So we have three different Internal URLs all pointing to the newly secured site. Entering any of them will basically do a SSL-redirect to the site:

Woohoo!

Hopefully, this will help you understand the mysterious “object reference” error should you run across it in the future. The two most important things to keep in mind are:

- Any Public URL entered in the AAM settings MUST correspond to an existing zone for your Web Application

- SharePoint doesn’t always know what IIS knows, so AAM settings must be used to “teach” it

Good luck!

Enhancing Site Collection Navigation with Color

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 05:00:00 PDT

by TL Ferrell

SharePoint provides many tools for providing navigation throughout a site collection. Typically, the Top Link Bar near the top of each content page provides links to subsites, and this can be set to persist down through the hierarchy. (This bar is referred to as Global Navigation in SharePoint Standard and Enterprise.) The Quick Launch Bar on the left (called Current Navigation in Standard and Enterprise) typically provides links to lists, libraries, and other content within the subsite.

A Tree View is also available in addition or instead of the Quick Launch Bar. Finally, links may be placed manually on the Top Link Bar or Quick Launch Bar, or may be placed anywhere on a page via a Links list.

In addition, SharePoint provides navigational aids through the Browse menu and the breadcrumb navigation path found on every page.

These tools can help you understand where you are in a hierarchy. However, the Top Link Bar on a subsite might not inherit from the parent site, and in that case the breadcrumb and Browse menu won’t provide a complete drill-down trail. In addition, in large site collections it can be easy to get lost in the hierarchy when you start clicking around.

One technique that can help users stay oriented is to use site colors as visual cues. While we teach look and feel customization in our courses Introduction to SharePoint 2010 – Using SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Introduction to SharePoint 2010 - Using SharePoint Server 2010, this post will show how these features can be used not just for their own sake or general branding purposes, but to enhance the user experience.

In SharePoint Foundation, you are limited to the built-in themes for color (and font) schemes; SharePoint Standard and Enterprise allow customization of themes on an element-by-element basis. Of course, in any of these editions, custom themes or CSS code can be developed to accomplish even greater customizations.

In the site collection example, there is one top-level site and six subsites; many of the subsites have additional subsites, some for several levels. The goal is to make each branch of the hierarchy visually distinct, to help users understand when they are in the HR branch versus the Marketing branch, for example. Users rarely start at the top level and drill down. So, this technique may be especially helpful when users follow a link posted somewhere or sent to them in email, or even when using a bookmark they’ve made.

The first two examples below use only the built-in browser-based tools to apply strongly contrasting schemes.

The first option, available to all editions of SharePoint, is to simply choose a different Theme for each branch. The top-level site of this site collection retains the Default theme. The Administration branch also retains that theme.

Here’s an example of what the other branches might look like after applying different built-in themes.

The problem, though, with using the different out-of-the-box themes is that the site collection gets a higgledy-piggeldy look, with no unifying look and feel. In addition, the site collection may have more branches than can comfortably be differentiated by themes, given that some themes may not be suitable for a number of reasons. Also, themes include font choices, and it may not be desirable to have different fonts in various areas of the site collection. Environments which have SharePoint Foundation only may need to turn to custom solutions in those cases. Environments with SharePoint Standard or Enterprise have another option.

By applying one of the built-in themes throughout the site collection, and then tweaking the dominant colors for each branch, it is easy to create unique, but unified looks for the entire site collection. Once a color palette has been chosen (or borrowed from one of the many color scheme sites on the Internet), it’s a simple matter to change the individual color elements that make up a theme to create a custom theme. To make the examples below, I started with the SharePoint Default theme. (For step-by-step directions for this process, stay tuned for a future blog post in the SharePoint Solutions Help Community Blog.)

(Note that these color schemes are not meant to be examples of excellent web design, but just to illustrate the point of visually differentiating branches of the site collection.)

Many of these subsites have subsites themselves, and the custom scheme for that subsite is inherited throughout the hierarchy. So, the color scheme for the entire site collection looks something like this:

On corporate web sites, the color schemes might already be mandated and set up for the entire site collection (or site collections), but even then there may be room for variation that can help users. In the case of a site which adheres to corporate branding standards, such customization would be simple to tweak to provide the types of variations that would provide visual cues. For example, if the dominant corporate color is dark green with accent colors of gold and black, different combinations of those three colors, including shades and tints based on those colors, could be used as dominant and accent colors.

Another option is to simply change the site icon in the upper left corner. Again, there may be corporate standards regarding the logo, but usually certain variations can be allowed or developed. In our example, a simple two-color line drawing is an accepted variant of the logo. Using the same color schemes described above, alternate versions of the logo can be created and used to replace the default SharePoint icon at the top of each page while retaining a single theme throughout the site collection.

Configuring Global Registration Fields in Extranet Collaboration Manager (ExCM) 2010

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 08:13:00 PDT

by Matthew McBride

Registration is one of the core concepts in Extranet Collaboration Manager 2010. It represents the main advantage of ExCM over other SharePoint Extranet Management tools. There are two types of Registration -- Anonymous and Invitation. The most common, by far, are the Invitation Registrations. You send an e-mail to a potential new user, the click on the Registration link provided and then are taken to the custom Registration Page on your site. Here is an example:

(click on images to enlarge)

This page can be completely customized to capture the data you want from your users. In the example above, we are capturing the following (field type in parentheses):

· First Name (Text)

· Last Name (Text)

· Company Name (Text)

· Job Title (Text)

· Phone Number (Text)

· Zip Code (Text)

· Captcha (Captcha)

· Site Policy (Policy)

In addition to the field types above, you can also implement the following field types:

· Description – Provides a way to enter lines of text for descriptive or informational purposes

· Choice – Presents selections as either a drop down, radio button, or checkbox

There are two ways you can edit the fields that appear on the Registration Page: by Site Collection via the User Interface (UI) and globally via the web.config file. In most cases, you will want to capture certain fields on every site (First Name, Last Name, Company Name, etc.), so it makes sense to configure those globally and add the more specialized fields (Captcha and Policy) via the UI. However, what if you were running ExCM on hundreds of sites? It would be very time consuming to go into each site and configure the additional fields. In that case, you would want to choose the common fields for ALL your sites and configure them globally. In this blog, we will look at how to configure all the field types globally via the web.config file.

First, let’s take a look at the area in the web.config file for the content site where the global Registration fields are declared. Here is the provided tag example from our help site:

This example includes First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Job Title, and Phone Number by default, and all are both of the type “text” marked as “required” with the following elements:

fieldType="Text"

isRequired="true"

The “name” of the field (how it will appear on the Registration Page) is declared in this way:

add fieldName="First Name"

Now, let’s take a look at how to add the additional field types here in the web.config file so that they are available globally. First, here are examples of the remaining three types:

Description

Captcha

where imageStyle="Basic\GreenDiagonals\PurplePlaid"

Choice

<add fieldName="State" fieldType="Choice" isRequired="true" displayType="DropDown" options="AL,AK,AS,AZ,AR,CA,CO,CT,DE,DC,FM,FL,GA,GU,HI,ID,IL,IN,IA,KS,KY,LA,ME,MH,MD,MA,MI,MN,MS,MO,MT,NE,NV,NH,NJ,NM,NY,NC,ND,MP,OH,OK,OR,PW,PA,PR,RI,SC,SD,TN,TX,UT,VT,VI,VA,WA,WV,WI,WY" />

Policy

The Policy field is a little more complex because it typically contains HTML content, which is invalid in an XML attribute. As a result you, we will need to add the policy message content to a resource file (.RESX) and place it in the App_GlobalResources directory of the IIS site.

We have provided a zipped collection of files for use with Global Policy Fields that can be downloaded from here:

In it, you will find the following files:

Note that I have also used “ACME” in the sample config files to remain consistent with the blog post. In your case, you will basically want to replace all instances of “ACME” with your company name.

The first is the resource file itself. This is where we will enter the HTML changes we want to make for the Policy Field. The next is a sample anonymous master page that I will use for this blog. In my environment, I have Anonymous Access turned off on both my Web App and IIS for this site, so I will need to reference this anonymous master page to allow the users to see the Policy Field.

The third is a text file that simply contains the HTML portion of the resource file to make editing easier. Decoded, it looks like this:

The “policy_web_config” file is the Policy Field tag that will need to be added to the content site web.config file for the Registration Field as mentioned earlier:

Finally, “PrivacyStatement.aspx” and “ServiceAgreement.aspx” are sample files we can edit to suit our needs. For the purpose of this blog, we will only configure the Service Agreement. The configuration of the global Privacy Statement would follow the exact same steps.

The first thing we need to do is create a folder in the 14 hive to store our custom Policy. By default we would create it here:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS

In this case, I will create a folder named “ACME”:

Once it’s created, we need to copy the following files from the zip file into our new directory:

Now we need to edit the “ServiceAgreement.aspx” file to reflect our customizations. I have highlighted the areas I changed below:

The first change I made was to reference the “anonymous.master” master page due to my environment configuration. Next, I gave the header the name “ACME Service Agreement,” and did the same for the PageTitle and PageTitleInTitleArea tags. Finally, I put a very brief custom agreement in the “descriptiontext” tag.

Next, let’s make the necessary edits to the included resource file. The area we are looking for is at the bottom of the file:

The full text as it appears there is as follows:

<value>I accept</value>

</data>

<value>Clicking <STRONG>I accept</STRONG> means that you agree to the <A href="javascript:ShowPopupDialog('/_layouts/ACME/ServiceAgreement.aspx')">service agreement</A> and <A href="javascript:ShowPopupDialog('/_layouts/ACME/PrivacyStatement.aspx')">privacy statement</A>. </value>

</data>

Notice I have simply changed the path from “/SPSolutions/ExCM” to reflect our newly created folder “/ACME.” Once the changes have been saved, we just need to copy the resource file to the “App_GlobalResources” directory under our content site:

The final step is to add the Policy Registration Field in our web.config file using the “policy_web_config” example from the zip file. This will make it globally available to all Site Collections in our Web App:

In addition, I will also go ahead and add the rest of the global field types we mentioned at the beginning of this post:

Now we’re ready to take a look at the update Registration Page with our Global Fields:

And here is how our customized Service Agreement now appears:

As mentioned earlier, you can follow the same steps to also customize the Privacy Agreement.

Prove You're Not a Robot

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:52:00 PDT

By Randy Moody

Okay. So I went to my favorite URL shortener site to trade in a long Internet address for a short one. And they did it to me again!

Before they would surrender my short URL, they stipulated that I must first enter a string of characters to prove that I am a human being and not a robot.

First of all, is this really a problem? Have I been missing something in the news?

Are Internet robots now randomly shortening URLs willy-nilly with malicious intent all over the Internet?

Is it causing people difficulty to the point that hard-ball defensive tactics must now be employed?

INTERNATIONAL GANG OF INTERNET ROBOTS APPREHENDED –
THOUGHT RESPONSIBLE FOR THOUSANDS OF SHORT URLs!
Anti-terrorist ties suspected. Congressional investigation pending…

What, exactly, would be the downside to lots of shorter URLs?
Our fingertip typing callouses might begin to soften?
Broken finger nails might grow back?

Second, my URL shortener site always presents me with a string of characters that no human being could possibly identify – to prove that I am human. Is anybody else seeing the irony here?
(By the way, these ARE real unaltered screen shots.)

That shorter URL could simplify things a lot for me and our customers.
But first, I have to overcome the obstacle of deciphering something I don’t understand.

SharePoint is like that.

If you know how to use it effectively, it can streamline your work and make your productivity soar! But if you “can’t figure it out,” SharePoint becomes an obstacle to productivity – a hindrance instead of a help.

Nobody is ever going to come along to help me decipher that string of characters. I’m just going to have to keep pushing that “Different Text” button until they show me one that looks like real letters. And with every click I’m losing daylight.

But WE can certainly help you with SharePoint. We’ve been demystifying this very complex but very powerful product for office professionals for nine years. We can have you proficient and confident in just 2 to 4 days. And we promise to always treat you like a human being.