It is well past time, in my opinion, for a SharePoint conference that is focused strictly on business-oriented solutions. The speakers and sessions have been selected by a committee of users, and have been curated by The Eventful Group, who has many years of solid conference experience.

As much as I love my SharePoint infrastructure and development friends, I think that the surface area for business solutions on SharePoint is very large and should be recognized as a significant and valuable contribution to SharePoint customer implementations.

I’ll be watching the keynotes and sessions to see how many SharePoint business “Roles” are introduced or discussed. I’m not enough of an expert to enumerate the roles that I think should exist for SharePoint business solutions, because I have a feeling that there are many more than I can describe right now. Excluding all developer, IT Pro, and infrastructure roles, I could probably describe 3 or 4 business user roles that need to exist for a “best practices” SharePoint implementation. However, I fear that there really should be 8 or more roles identified and explained. Perhaps, after SHARE 2012, I will be able to put more description behind these roles.

I notice that the folks at Bamboo have proposed a sample schedule for attending SHARE 2012. Niice!

I’m going to make an effort to be sure to see the keynotes from Dux, Michael Sampson, and Gideon Bibliowicz.

There are so many incredible speakers, however, it would be hard to list all of the sessions that I would like to attend.

I’d just like to add that the Pingar booth/kiosk in the exhibitors area will be a great place to talk about business user roles in SharePoint, as well as how business users can benefit from rich information about documents. Yes, the magic that Pingar provides to SharePoint.

I hope to see you there!

Links
Share 2012 Conference US
Share 2012 Conference US Speakers
SharePoint Reviews
Michael Sampson Currents
Bamboo and Share 2012 Conference

SQL Server 2012 now requires processor core-based licensing for SQL Server 2012 enterprise edition, and core-based licensing is one of two types of licensing available for SQL Server 2012 standard edition.

For about 6-7 years now, ever since Oracle started charging for processor core, Microsoft enjoyed an easier licensing conversation because they licensed per processor, and not per core. I used to sell Microsoft technology, and had to answer licensing questions often about how their products were licensed, and was glad that Microsoft was only charging per processor, and not per core. It felt, at the time, that Microsoft wasn’t trying to penalize people for using the latest and greatest CPUs (which then were arriving with 2 cores, or 4 – of course, now, there are many more cores).

How times change. Apparently, Microsoft isn’t concerned about competitive licensing scenarios with Oracle any longer. I think that is probably a good thing for Microsoft. It probably also means that Microsoft’s internal models probably identify that they have been leaving money from customers on the table, and that moving to a per-core license will be able to extract a little bit more from customers than the per-server licensing model. All’s fair in product licensing?

Redmond.mag quotes Wes Miller, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, as saying that a single Enterprise core for SQL Server 2012 will have a list price of $6,874 per core. These are only sold in two-core packs. A server can be partially licensed or fully licensed. A fully licensed server requires a minimum purchase of 4 cores. Of course, volume licensing customers and customers with an Enterprise Agreement and Software Assurance will have significant discounts off of the list price.

I do like the flexibility of the licensing model to allow customers to move licensed cores from on-premise to hosted cloud providers and back again.

I was pleased to see the analysis on thelowercasew.com:

The actual cost for EE is roughly the same as if you licensed 2 sockets of SQL 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition as long as it had 4 cores per CPU. The cost goes up as soon as you start using 6 core processors and above. The prevalence of 4 core processors means this likely won’t change much for many organizations.

Compared to SQL 2008 R2 Datacenter, however, there is a large cost difference. Datacenter costs $54,990 per processor or over $100,000 to license a 2 CPU system. You can now essentially get the benefits of Datacenter Edition (unlimited virtualization rights, etc.) for half the cost you would pay in SQL 2008 R2.

Even with this new licensing model there are still huge cost savings to be had by licensing all cores of a server and virtualizing your SQL 2012 workloads. It’s hard to argue with unlimited virtualization rights especially for those lightly loaded SQL workloads.

I wonder if this model will also fall through on the upcoming next version of SharePoint Server licensing that will be out sometime this year or early next year. My guess is that this will also apply to the next version of SharePoint Server. (I have no insider knowledge of this, this is just a guess.)

Links:
Directions on Microsoft report

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 licensing page

Redmond.Mag: SQL Server 2012 to Bring Some Price Hikes

thelowercasew.com: New SQL 2012 Licensing and its Impact on Virtualization

Reblogged from Just Alyssa:

I miss PR. I was good at it. Hell, there was a time when both Fast Company and PR News declared me one of the best. Not because I liked working a billion hours a week, which is what it would have taken to rise to the top of my profession, but because I have some weird instinctual ability to know how people want a story told to them.

Read more… 2,337 more words

This is too important of a list of PR principles to not make a note of. I'm placing a copy on my blog so I'll have it when I need it. I'm sure that I'll need it someday. Just because I've lived a perfect life so far (Ha! Ha!) doesn't mean a crisis isn't around the corner. Thanks, @ericatoelle, for the hat tip to this article.

It started me thinking, though, about my journey with SharePoint Directions.  – or in a bigger sense, with our journey in life.

Wondering

To wonder is to envision, to question your direction, to question your efforts, your capabilities and your talents. To wonder is also to read, to study, to pray, to ask, to listen, to watch, to reason, to make plans. We must wonder before we can grow. Are we too busy to find time to wonder? Do we make the time to wonder regularly? Do you wonder how good you can be? Wonder regularly and wonder often. It’s good for you.

Wandering

Wandering is the activity component to Wondering. Where To Wonder is to work from your chair, To Wander is management by walking around. Wandering is experimentation. Wandering is experiential. To wander is to try out your ideas, to practice that speech, to give that interview, to spend that extra hour with the client. To wander is to move into different circles and to expand into unknown areas that might be new and strange – until one wanders into them.
To wander is to act on your ideas, and to put your plan into practice.

I started asking myself if the time that I was spending on different tasks was time spent wondering or time spent wandering. It became easier and easier to make that judgment about what I was spending my time on.  I did find, interestingly enough, that I was spending too much time wondering, and not enough time wandering.  I don’t really know why it surprised me, or why I was a little saddened to realize that I hadn’t been wandering as much as I could have been.

I was struck by the simplicity of the concept between wondering and wandering.  I was struck by how much time one could spend wondering, without reaching conclusions.  It is only when wondering is followed by wandering that great achievements are made. And it is only when wandering is preceeded by wondering that people achieve at close to their capacity.

So, I will be trying to wander a bit more often. I will still be wondering – there is too much to learn.  I wonder if this bit of inspiration is only for me, or if it also applies to others.  I think that it might apply to others, but in this case, it only applies to me.

All because of one little letter.  Are you Wondering? Or Are you Wandering?

I think that you are seeing right now why my blog is still being published under the http://owen-allen.com domain, and not under www.SharePointDirections.com.  One of these days I’ll get around to putting the SharePoint Directions blog on-line, and that will be a work-only blog.  But for now, you get work mixed in with personal reflections…

I’m participating in a SharePoint in the Cloud roundtable event (#FocusRT21) later this week (Thursday, July 21, 11AM PT), that should be very informative.  There are some great experts on the roundtable, which will be available for the public to call into.  I do hope that you can join us.

SharePoint is having an impact in every direction where it stretches its legs.  Moving into the cloud is no different.  SharePoint has supported external applications for a few years now, with extensive Web service support.  With SharePoint 2010, SharePoint exposed native object models for .Net, JavaScript, and Silverlight, all designed to encourage more sophisticated remote clients for SharePoint – so that information and process stored in SharePoint could be leveraged in a distributed architecture.

SharePoint 2010 also introduced a service application infrastructure that enabled service applications to be subscribed to by different SharePoint farms, enabling different farms to stay in synch by accessing centralized resources.  This can be useful in a cloud environment – think of SharePoint farms at different plant facilities that are all leveraging a centralized product catalog, or business services.  SharePoint can be a client, in this way, as well as a server.  All that we have to do is to think about designing SharePoint applications from a broader perspective.

Office 365 is another example of SharePoint in the Cloud.  In this regard, Microsoft is offering SharePoint as a Service.  This is a little bit different than we have traditionally thought of SharePoint farms.  Office 365 will bring the collaboration and information sharing attributes of SharePoint to the world, but it won’t bring the application platform characteristics to the environment.  This will force SharePoint application developers to move to alternative ways of delivering their functionality.  It will be interesting to see if Microsoft decides that they do want to offer platform capabilities on Office 365 or if they will be satisfied simply adding functionality to their “SharePoint as a Service” offering.

Richard Harbridge (@rharbridge) has collected a good group of experts for the roundtable. I hope that you can join us on Thursday!

Link to the Roundtable event page

Nomadic Software provides middleware to being information and data to mobile devices.  The also create mobile applications, but they’re real magic is in the connections to line of business systems.

We spoke for just a few minutes, and it seems to me that he is approaching the confusion and the dynamic nature of the mobile device market from a good position.

NetConnect sells a product called Team Portal, which is a hosted version of SharePoint that is dedicated per customer. One element that I really liked about Team Portal is that NetConnect has integrated an application marketplace within the SharePoint instances that they provide to customers.  From this application marketplace, customers can rapidly install project management apps, workflow apps, crm apps, etc.  Team Portal also has an iPhone client and a desktop client to make accessing and browsing SharePoint sites even more convenient in specific scenarios.

I am not a customer yet, but I will probably need to give this a try.  It’s exciting to see that they are including solutions on top of SharePoint in this way.

And, the partner list that they already have is impressive.  Brightwork, NewsGator, Nintex, 21apps, Equilibrium, Office Talk, and ELearningForce.  Good stuff.

I know that they are looking for additional solutions to add to their marketplace, and so if you are a software company (ISV) that is interested, please reach out to Lars.

It’s the best time of the year again. (If it seems to you that each year has about 5 or 6 ‘best’ times of the year, then, congratulations! – you must be a regular to the blog.)

This time, is the MSFT Wordwide Partner Conference 2011 (WPC). (www.digitalwpc.com | #WPC11)

It’s the time of the year when Microsoft partners of every stripe get together to celebrate the end of twelve months since the previous WPC, and to start anew.  They meet together to make all sorts of business deals, to recruit the best people from each other’s organization, and to get an eye and an ear on what their competition is doing to make the big bucks.

Microsoft sets the direction by sharing the marketing direction that they will take for the next twelve months, and this helps the partners understand where Microsoft will be laying down the marketing air cover for the partners.

I expcet that in the SharePoint world, we’ll hear a lot about Office 365, and then some strength around enterprise success stories in large on-premise SharePoint installations.

I hope that there is some new discussion about the strength of the solutions that are being built around SharePoint and that are carrying SharePoint into new green fields around and within and in-between enterprise customers. I’m a firm believer that SharePoint still has a lot of growth remaining in it.

Back to the topic of the blog post, though.  One of the best off-the-floor activities of the week is the partner SharePint!  A SharePint is a meetup that is arranged at a recreational establishment, and a date and time are published.  There usually isn’t a main title sponsor, but from time to time different partners will stand up and supply a prixe or a t-shirt and buy a round of drinks.

Together with the SharePoint product marketing team, I’ve helped arrange the last two WPC SharePint events, and we got our heads together to make it three.

I tweeted an early location last week, but we’ve had to change the location. The SharePint will NOT be held at the YardHouse, but instead will beheld at the Weiland Brewery Underground.

Here are the details:

Weiland Brewery Underground

At the corner of S Flower and 5th Street
underground of the City National Bank Building
Tuesday, July 12 — 5:00-8:00PM

Please stop by and join us.  Some partners will have prizes to raffle off, and this is the best place to meet your SharePoint peeps and friends and other contacts in a casual way.

I look forward to seeing you there!

One of our development teams was in Argentina, another development team was in Redmond, WA, and Ooyala has headquarters in Mountain View, CA.  We needed a development and testing environment that would enable all three groups to work together and to share an environment in preparation for the show.

For a couple of months, we had been using a development environment that was provided by CloudShare.com.  And everything had been working well.  We would bring up the CloudShare environment when we needed to, and share access to it from city to city.

One of the useful features that CloudShare provides is the ability to recreate a SharePoint environment from one a list of starting environments that they provide.  When one of our development teams release a new build, we can recreate a new environment on CloudShare and test the installation and configuration, etc.  It was working very well.

If you haven’t tried out CloudShare yet, you can find them at www.cloudshare.com.  Look for the “SharePoint in the Cloud” selection right on the front page.  That page will describe the SharePoint environments that they offer and how you can utilize them.

As we got closer to the NABSHOW, however, something wasn’t quite right.  I was worried about little things, like the URL used for the demo.  We also wanted to share the demonstration version with other potential partners and customers, so we wanted to create a demo URL (i.e. NABDEMO.OOYALA.COM) and have the dev/test environment support that.  I couldn’t find the right way to make that happen for the CloudShare environment that wasn’t located within our data center, but a quick call to CloudShare answered the question.  (They have since cleaned up how the features are displayed so that this particular feature is easier to find.)

The problem that I was running into is one of the features of CloudShare that allows their service to be affordable.  When a CloudShare environment times out due to a period of inactivity, the environment is automatically suspended, and the assigned IP addresses and physical hardware can be re-utilized for other users and to meet additional demand.  Sound very cloud-centric, right?  Well, yes, actually.  However, when the environment would be re-activated the next time someone needed it, the server machines in the environment might be assigned a different collection of IP addresses.  This meant that I might have to keep updating the DNS entries for the URL that I wanted to use for the demo.  Difficult and inconvenient.

But then I learned about a great little feature called “Always-On”.  This costs more per month, but enables your environment to stay up all the time, maintaining the same assigned IP addresses.  A quick call to CloudShare operations, and we had the solution, we had a constant IP
address for the DNS settings, and we were starting to demo using an easy to communicate and an easy to use URL.  I’ve learned, over the years, to never underestimate the importance of having an easy to communicate URL when working with salespeople…

So, long story short, we unveiled the product at the NABSHOW in April – the demo environment was flawless, and we are still using CloudShare as our development environment as we enter into a full Beta stage with the product here in June.

If you’d like to learn more about CloudShare, please learn more at http://www.cloudshare.com.

If you’d like to learn how to bring the video capabilities of Ooyala into your SharePoint environment, please send email to Andrea@ooyala.com.

If you’d like to take me to a Seattle Mariners game this summer (Yes, I’m back on the bandwagon!), please send me email – owen@sharepointdirections.com.