zondag 9 mei 2010
zaterdag 8 mei 2010
10 SharePoint deployment challenges
SharePoint is one of the most flexible server applications available today. But because of its highly dynamic nature, a SharePoint deployment can quickly get out of hand. Here are some of the most common challenges in managing a SharePoint deployment.
1: Enabling Office integration
SharePoint 2007 is designed to interoperate with Office 2007 to a high degree. If you have users in your organization who are still using older versions of Office, you may find that those legacy versions become a barrier to productivity. So you may want to consider deploying the latest version of Office to all SharePoint users.
2: Preventing site sprawl
One of your primary goals must be to prevent site sprawl. You can use several techniques for this. One of the most effective is to limit the number of people who allowed to create SharePoint sites. Experience has shown that if you allow users to create new SharePoint sites on a whim, some users will create sites they don’t even need, just because they can or because they’re curious. It’s better if site creation is handled by a dedicated group of people within the IT department. I also recommend establishing clear guidelines as to who is allowed to request a new SharePoint site, and under what circumstances.
3: Site lifecycle management
Unlike typical Web sites, many SharePoint sites have a limited useful shelf life. For example, it’s common for users to create SharePoint sites that are dedicated to a specific project. When the project is complete, the site is no longer needed. So it’s important to have a procedure in place for determining which sites are still in use. When a user requests that a new site be created, you should document the name and contact information of the person making the request, as well as the URL of the resulting site. This allows you to contact site owners on a periodic basis to find out whether the site is still needed.
4: Locating documents
After deploying SharePoint, some organizations eventually begin replacing file servers with SharePoint document libraries. The idea behind this move is that SharePoint contains powerful indexing features that can make documents easier to locate than they would be if they were located on a file server. Although SharePoint has a decent search engine, document libraries can and do become overloaded. It can therefore be tough for users to find the information they need within a large document library.
One way to make it easier for users to locate SharePoint documents is to enforce the use of metadata. SharePoint contains options that allow you to define individual content types and to create custom metadata fields for each one. You can require users to enter relevant metadata for each document they create. This metadata goes a long way toward helping SharePoint return relevant search results.
5: Information overload
Providing good metadata for the documents stored in a document library improves the relevancy of search results, but it will get you only so far. Another thing you can do to improve search results is to implement a policy for document lifecycle management.
While some business documents may need to be retained indefinitely, other types probably have limited usefulness. For example, the odds are good that nobody in your organization cares about a marketing proposal from 10 years ago. By working with the managers in your company, you can find out which documents are really important and come up with a plan for automatically purging other documents after a specific length of time. Doing so reduces resource consumption and helps to de-clutter search results.
6: Governance
The subject of governance seems to come up more often in regard to SharePoint than just about any other application. There is a reason for this. Without proper governance policies, a SharePoint deployment can quickly spiral out of control and evolve into something that doesn’t even remotely resemble the organization’s original SharePoint vision.
The only way to prevent your SharePoint deployment from getting out of hand is to make some tough decisions up front about how the deployment should be used and who has permission to do what. In other words, you need to decide things such as who has the authority to create a site, what types of data are allowed to be stored within SharePoint libraries, and what types of customizations you want to allow.
7: Disk space management
Disk space management is something of an art form. Most network administrators are used to dealing with file servers that store data on dedicated volumes. SharePoint, on the other hand, stores its data within a SQL database. While you can use quota management to ensure that users don’t consume an excessive amount of disk space, it is important to realize that multiple lists or libraries can be linked to a common database. Therefore, you must design your quota structure to take into account possible growth of other lists or libraries that may exist.
8: Web part management
SharePoint sites are built around the use of Web parts. This approach make site creation easier, but it also means that any changes to Web parts result in changes to every site that uses them. You’ll want to take measures to prevent Web part customizations from being made in a haphazard manner. A modification that enhances a Web part’s functionality on one site may wreck havoc on other sites that are using that Web part.
9: Service level agreements
Many organizations discover that it doesn’t take long for a SharePoint deployment to grow from being something of a novelty to becoming a mission-critical application. As with other mission-critical applications, administrators are often pressured into accepting service level agreements for SharePoint deployments.
My recommendation has always been to use the quest for service level agreements as a bargaining chip. For example, you could explain to the managers in your company that for you to be able to deliver the level of service they are requiring, you need additional server hardware or other IT resources.
10: Disaster recovery planning
I have seen a few real-world situations in which administrators verified that their backup software supported SharePoint but never really looked at what was required to perform a restoration. Unless you’re going to be performing a total restoration, most backup applications require SharePoint data to be restored to a recovery farm.
A recovery farm is a separate, dedicated SharePoint farm. Although a recovery farm does not require the same hardware resources as your production SharePoint servers, it does have to be configured with the same features, templates, patches, and software versions as your production farm. That being the case, a recovery farm isn’t really something you can just throw together at the last minute when you have to perform a restoration. You will need to have it in place in advance.
Source: TechRepublic.com 10 SharePoint deployment challenges
dinsdag 23 juni 2009
SharePoint Social Computing
Social computing with SharePoint
Bring your people together
Social computing gives information workers new ways to create value together. Blogs, podcasts, and other social media help them capture and share knowledge, enhancing innovation and teamwork. Social networks make it easy to find expertise and stay connected to key contacts. People can self-organize to solve problems and meet customer needs. Microsoft® SharePoint® delivers the power of social computing in the context of a complete collaboration solution—right alongside the tools that people already use every day to get work done and move your organization forward.
This demo delivers the details on how social computing features in Microsoft® SharePoint® can help your organization become more agile, innovative, and connected. Beginning with a general introduction to the rise of Enterprise 2.0, it walks you through key social technologies, including social networking with My Sites, finding experts with People Search, and capturing and sharing knowledge with social media including blogs and podcasts. You will learn how SharePoint delivers social computing in context, working closely with the Microsoft Office system and other technology as part of a complete collaboration solution. And, you will see how SharePoint provides social technology without the need to buy, integrate, or manage additional software, delivering maximum value for your investment.
View the demo Social Computing in Action >>
Explore the enterprise social computing features of SharePoint
Enterprise 2.0 made easy
Microsoft® SharePoint® provides rich features for enterprise social computing, from social networking tools like My Sites to social content technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS and more. Because SharePoint and Microsoft Office are applications that people use every day, you can begin connecting, conversing, and innovating right away. Social computing is a natural extension of the total SharePoint collaboration solution—once you have SharePoint, you have the foundation of Enterprise 2.0, with nothing additional to buy, manage, or integrate into your IT infrastructure. Explore the social features of SharePoint and discover how easy it is to get the benefits of social computing in your organization.
woensdag 27 mei 2009
Microsoft to Rename Groove as SharePoint Workspace
woensdag 15 april 2009
The Next SharePoint .. It’s Official !!!
It's Official - A New Name and Delivery Date for the Next Version of SharePoint
SharePoint 2010
A New Unified Communications Family
The news comes as a sidebar to the public beta release of Exchange Server 2010, part of the new unified communications family. Exchange Server 2010 is the first of the new Office-related products to be available for public beta. The others that will follow include MS Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and MS Project 2010.
What's so special about this next wave — or version — of Office related products? Microsoft says they are the first to be built "from the ground up" to serve both the on premise and software as a service (Saas) crowd.
And the Timeline Is…
Exchange Server 2010 is expected to arrive in the second half of this year. That's the first of the new product versions to go public. All the others, including SharePoint 2010 should be available for technical preview sometime in the third quarter, with an expected public release in the first half of 2010 — hence the name.
Wonder What's Coming in Next Version of SharePoint?
woensdag 8 april 2009
Microsoft Releases SharePoint Designer 2007 for Free
Office SharePoint Designer 2007 provides the powerful tools you need to deliver compelling and attractive SharePoint sites and quickly build workflow-enabled applications and reporting tools on the SharePoint platform, all in an IT-managed environment.
Here’s the details on the letter they sent out advising of the change:
Dear Valued Customer:
One frequent comment from you to us here at Microsoft is that a significant part of the capabilities of SharePoint Designer are seen as just an extension of what SharePoint already does. In addition, we hear more and more that you want to be able to create increasingly dynamic web sites on SharePoint.
In response to this feedback, we are implementing a number of changes to promote and facilitate even more customization efforts on top of our platform:
- Starting on April 1, 2009, we are making SharePoint Designer 2007 available as a free download.
- Customers with SharePoint Designer 2007 Software Assurance (SA) current as of April 1, 2009 will receive upgrade rights to Expression Web for the lifetime of their SA agreement.
We believe that these changes will help you enable more users in your organization to create customizations that increase the value of your investments in SharePoint products and technologies now and in the future. We are making SharePoint Designer even better in its next version, which will ship simultaneously with our next release of SharePoint. While the current version of Expression Web does not directly support SharePoint, we are also making significant investments to ensure that future versions of Expression Web become an excellent choice for page customization of SharePoint sites.
You can expect our future investments in this area to be focused on ensuring that each relevant role within your organization has the right tools to work on SharePoint while allowing different roles to collaborate. To this end, Expression Web and the full Expression Suite will empower professional designers with page customization capabilities on SharePoint, while SharePoint users can continue to use SharePoint Designer. Our goal is to continue helping customers just like you use SharePoint to deliver custom portal solutions, extranets, intranets, internet-facing sites, collaboration solutions, social networking sites, and internal applications on top of the extensive capabilities of SharePoint.
This is an exciting time for SharePoint and we at Microsoft are confident that you will be impressed by our continued commitment to providing you with the right tools to support the investments you have made and continue to make with us. Your account team or your Microsoft partner are there to assist you and can provide you with any additional information, which is also available at http://www.microsoft.com/spd.
On behalf of Microsoft, thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
The SharePoint Team
Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1)
zaterdag 21 februari 2009
Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS)
The Business Productivity Online Suite is a set of Microsoft hosted messaging and collaboration solutions including Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Office Communications Online. These online services are designed to give your business streamlined communication with high availability, comprehensive security, and simplified IT management. When your company subscribes to one or more of the services, it connects to the rich interactivity of on-premises client and server applications with the flexibility and scalability of Web-based services. Because Microsoft hosts the services, it reduces your company’s need to maintain IT services on site. Many organizations today are moving to this "software-plus-services" model, because it decreases the need to manage hardware and software.
Exchange Online
Provide employees access to e-mail, calendar, and contacts from virtually anywhere, at anytime, on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices—while helping to protect against malware and spam. Exchange Online can be rapidly deployed, flexibly expanded, and is designed to be securely administered using a powerful yet simple remote Web-based console.
- Standard 1GB mailbox (additional storage available for purchase)
- E-mail, shared calendar, shared tasks, and contacts
- Spam filtering and antivirus capabilities via Exchange Hosted Filtering
- Outlook client connectivity, Outlook Anywhere, and Outlook Web Access
- Latest ActiveSync devices support
SharePoint Online
Share documents, contacts, calendars, and tasks through a single location. Based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, SharePoint Online delivers rich team collaboration capabilities that enable you to flexibly and efficiently collaborate with team members, find organizational resources, search your intranet site, and manage content and workflow.
- Portal, collaboration, content management, site search, and forms capabilities
- Single location to share documents, contacts, calendars, and tasks
- Offline access to documents on the service from Outlook
- Roll-up views of calendars and tasks across multiple lists and sites
- Blog site templates that support article posting, reader comments, and RSS feed generation
Office Live Meeting
Connect with colleagues and customers through real-time meetings, training sessions, and events using only a PC with an Internet connection. Hosted Web conferencing services from Microsoft Office Live Meeting provides your employees the power to collaborate wherever they are, set up project meetings, brainstorm ideas, and collaborate on whiteboards without the cost and hassle of travel!
- Web client support for remote attendee flexibility
- Interactive application/desktop sharing and whiteboard tools
- Active speaker video switching, multi-party video, and multi-party VoIP audio
- Rich media presentations, native video conferencing, high-fidelity recording, and Web cam capabilities
- Training and event management, with event and class registration and virtual breakout rooms
Office Communications Online
Enable users to find and rapidly connect with the right person from the applications they use most. Office Communications Online provides streamlined access to rich presence and IM capabilities that are centrally managed by IT and work seamlessly with a range of Microsoft Office system programs.
- Instant Messaging with text based chat, file transfer, 1:1, or 1:many communication
- Seamless presence awareness enabling users to check another users availability on the network
- Presence information shared across Microsoft Office applications, such as Outlook and SharePoint
- Support for multiple modes and devices—PC, Web browser, or mobile phones
Meer info: http://www.microsoft.com/online
Get Started with Business Productivity Online Standard Suite
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