Making Sense of the SharePoint World

Jul-312009

SharePoint on a Shoestring

MCBD09780_0000[1]When the Best is Too Much

You've heard the buzz about SharePoint. You've started doing your research. You're looking at best practices, configuration guides, and all sorts of good stuff. You're loving everything you read. You're head is swimming with facts and figures when suddenly you run across an article that makes your heart stop.

You might see an industry analyst group is reporting that it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and a phalanx of dedicated developers, administrators, and other IT pros to do an "average" complete SharePoint implementation. Suddenly your high hopes are dashed. There's no way you can get that into your budget. Heck, you might even be the only person in your company that knows what the initials "IT" stand for.

Does this mean that SharePoint is out of reach? Of course not!

What is "Good Enough"?

While it is certainly possible to take SharePoint to a huge extreme, you don't need to do that in order to gain many of the benefits of SharePoint. In fact, many people forget that there are actually free versions of SharePoint available. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express (MSSX) are both available as free downloads, and offer an amazing amount of functionality right off the bat.

Windows SharePoint Services gives you:

  • Team collaboration
  • Document Sharing
  • Discussion Boards
  • Custom List Management
  • Calendars and meeting management
  • Contact lists
  • Simple Project management
  • Basic user profiles and customization
  • Blogs
  • Wikis
  • Integration with Microsoft Office (e.g. Outlook and calendars)
  • Announcements
  • Email integration
  • Site Search
  • Customization and data integration with SharePoint Designer (now also free)
  • A huge array of existing add ins (Fab 40 application templates, Community Kit, etc...)
  • A great platform for development

Search Server Express gives you all of that, plus extended Enterprise-class search capability:

  • SharePoint sites
  • File shares
  • non-SharePoint web sites
  • Exchange public folders
  • Notes/domino databases

All of this is available with a simple installation on a Windows server. Heck, you don't even need to purchase a full SQL Server if you don't want to (though I do strongly recommend it). You can use the included Windows Integrated Database (with WSS) or SQL Express (with MSSX).

What About Hardware?

As I said before, it is quite possible to do a complete SharePoint installation on a single box. Naturally, you probably won't want to load it up on a netbook-class machine if you are going to base your business on it. But beyond that, almost any decent server can handle a small user base. This website, for example, is SharePoint (MSSX) based, and runs on a single processor, dual-core, server, with 3GB RAM.

In most cases, unless you have hundreds or thousands of concurrent users, the main reason you split functions onto separate boxes is resilience, not performance. You are trying to avoid a single point of failure, or perhaps bottlenecks where a peak in one process' activity may block access to other functions. Yet even there, the free versions of SharePoint have your back.

All versions of SharePoint support multiple web front-ends (WFE) connected to a back-end SQL Server database. MSSX also supports having the WFEs separated from the Application server. However, MSSX only supports a single application server, which must hold both the Index crawler and Query roles. (Note, if you do decide to go the farm route, you need to use a full SQL Server back-end.)

The Not-Quite-Best Practices

Naturally, keeping a SharePoint environment's costs to a minimum means you are also going to end up compromising on what most in the industry consider "best" practices. Not splitting functions out onto multiple servers, as described above, is just one of the compromises. Some of the others involve the setup process itself.

For example, if you are not going to purchase a full version of SQL Server, you need to understand the limits of the free editions of SQL Server that are included with the free editions of SharePoint. SQL Express (included with MSSX, but usable with WSS) has a 4GB per database hard-cap.

The other free SQL is the Windows Integrated Database, which is included with WSS. This is the only free version of SQL Server that doesn't limit your site's content growth. However, the only way to get WSS to use this is to perform a "basic" installation. In fact, even if you have another edition of SQL installed, a basic installation will configure WSS to use the WID. (Note: Basic installation with MSSX or any other version of SharePoint besides WSS will install SQL Express instead.)

There are limits of a basic install, though. One is that you CANNOT later add more servers to create a farm. You would need to essentially build a new SharePoint environment and migrate your content into it. The other is that the basic install doesn't give you any control over the accounts used to create the services that run SharePoint behind the scenes.

Yet many businesses have lived without that level of resilience for years with other systems. A single file server or mail server is not uncommon. So, if that is satisfactory in your environment, a single server SharePoint installation is no worse - go for it! Just be careful, as with your other systems, to ensure you have good and tested backups. (Reality check - Yes, I know. You don't have good, tested, backups for your other systems either... The point is, SharePoint doesn't change the rules. You just need to follow whatever rules are appropriate to your environment.)

In Conclusion

In this article, I've talked about how you really can implement SharePoint without a huge outlay in time or money. When you compare the "out of box" effort to get a powerful and functioning SharePoint environment up and running, I think you will find it is at least competitive with the "alternative" offerings you might have seen. In fact, you may even be surprised to find that the default functionality often far surpasses them. As with any system, though, the more you put into it "up front" the more value you and your users will get out of it in the end.


Published: Jul-31-09 | 4 Comments | 0 Links to this post
Tagged as: Administration, General, Search Server, SharePoint, WSS

Jul-192009

Office 2010 - A Quick Look

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This article is the first in what I hope will be a series about Office 2010 and SharePoint integration. In it, I'll talk about the current state of Office 2010, and some brief first impressions. I plan to focus later articles on each application, and how it integrates with SharePoint.

One Foot in the Future, One in the Present

Last week I (and just about everyone else in the known universe) posted that the Office 2010 Technical Preview had been released to a select group of people, and that SharePoint 2010 was going into technical preview to an even more limited audience. I'm pleased to say that not only I am one of those who has access to the Office 2010 client software preview, Microsoft has lifted the gag order on these client pieces as well. Unfortunately, SharePoint 2010 is still pretty much under wraps (see the Sneak Peek site for the stuff that Microsoft has elected to make available).

That doesn't mean there is nothing to say about Office 2010 and SharePoint. In fact, there is one scenario that is likely to be common for quite some time, even after the public release of SharePoint 2010. That is, accessing "old" SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 sites with the new Office 2010 client pieces.

Note: Depending upon your enterprise, you may also encounter the reverse scenario - attempting to access a server running SharePoint 2010 with Office 2007 (or earlier) client tools. (Obviously, we won't be able to talk about that until the SharePoint 2010 pieces are available.)

Are We There Yet?

One important point to remember is, Office 2010 is still undergoing heavy development. The build included in the preview (4006.1110) is not even considered "beta". That means that even the features Office will support at release are not necessarily ready for prime time now, or features that are in the build may not make it into final production. Because of this, I'm not usually going to be too critical when I find that something doesn't work quite the way I might expect. On the other hand, when something looks pretty cut-and-dried, I'll make sure to point it out, and discuss some of the ramifications.

Getting Started

The Office 2010 preview consists of several independent elements:

  • Office 2010 Professional, which contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Outlook, and OneNote.
  • Business Contact Manager for Outlook
  • SharePoint Designer 2010
  • SharePoint Workspace 2010 (formerly known as Groove)
  • InfoPath 2010
  • Microsoft Visio 2010

Each of these is available in 32 and 64 bit editions. There are also assorted pieces of documentation.

Setup is pretty much the same as most Microsoft applications over the last few years, so I won't dwell on that. You can install it side-by-side with older versions of Office, or upgrade your existing applications, except for Outlook 2010 and SharePoint Workspace. These must always upgrade/replace any existing version of Outlook or Groove, respectively. One other caution here - if you open an application of a version different from the most recent one, a partial setup will occur, which resets certain defaults (e.g. file associations) to reflect the newly opened version. This can take several minutes, and is a bit of a pain if you open the wrong version by accident. (This has always been the case with multiple versions of Office on the same system, and isn't a 2010 specific complaint.)

At First Glance

Once you have Office 2010 installed, and open an application, it looks pretty familiar. Below, you can see Word, with the by now quite familiar tabbed ribbon (aka Fluent) user interface. One change you may notice is that the big round "jewel", which summoned Office 2007's equivalent of the File menu, has been replaced with a tab.

image

Unlike the jewel, however, and also unlike the file menu, this tab reveals one of the first "new" elements of the Office 2010 products - the "Back Stage." As with the jewel menu before it, this includes the typical file-related elements, such as Open and Save, as well as access to utility functions. But, it also now provides a much richer application management experience.

image

You might also have noticed the blue background and tab color. This also is new, and provides a way to recognize the different Office 2010 applications. As you can see in the carousel image below, each application has been assigned a different color for its Back Stage.

 image

A Flexible Ribbon

One of the biggest complaints about the ribbon in Office 2007 has been its "static" nature. Even if you didn't like the order of tabs, or the groups Microsoft supplied by default, you were pretty much stuck. In the Office 2010 clients, that isn't the case. In fact, you pretty much have free reign to rearrange the defaults, or create virtually any custom ribbon you desire.

image

A Note About SharePoint Designer 2010

I mentioned earlier that when I encountered something that looked pretty cut and dried, I would point it out, and discuss the ramifications. One of these areas revolves around a product near and dear to my heart, SharePoint Designer. Unfortunately, even though SharePoint Designer 2010 is included in the preview, I won't be able to give you much detail about it until SharePoint 2010 itself becomes more publicly available. Unlike FrontPage and SharePoint Designer 2007, SharePoint Designer 2010 is so tightly linked to SharePoint 2010 that you cannot even open a non-SP-2010 site. If you try, you get the following dialog (which is very similar to the one Expression Web gives when you try to open any SharePoint site):

image

Even though the date on SharePoint is wrong (it says 2009 rather than 2010), you get the idea. What's more, SPD 2010 won't even open an individual page from the file system unless you already have a SP 2010 site open.

So, what does this mean? Essentially, if you want to customize WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 sites, you still need to keep a copy of SharePoint Designer 2007 around. In addition, SPD 2007 is a great tool for editing non-SharePoint web sites (including legacy FrontPage based sites) which it appears will not be the case for SPD 2010.

Summary

In this article I talked about the Office 2010 preview release. We looked at the components, as well as some of the User Experience changes - particularly the color-coded Back Stage feature. I also talked briefly about SharePoint Designer 2010 and the fact that SharePoint Designer 2007 will be needed as long as SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3 are around. All of this, and we have just barely scratched Office 2010's shiny-new surface.


Published: Jul-19-09 | 1 Comment | 0 Links to this post
Tagged as: General, Office, SharePoint, SharePoint Designer, Office 2010

Jul-132009

Taking the Stage - Office and SharePoint 2010

In conjunction with the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), Microsoft has started showing off a bit more of the next versions of Office and SharePoint. Still no bits for most of us* to play with, but there are some preview videos talking about the changes. Click the link below to check out the Sneak Peek site, and stay tuned!

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx

* Note: There is an invitation-only preview program. Tech-Ed 2009 attendees got invitations for the Office client pieces. I'm not sure at this time about SharePoint Server.

Published: Jul-13-09 | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post
Tagged as: Conferences, SharePoint, Office, General, 2010

Jul-82009

Share the Power

A Tale of Two "Points"

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… No, wait – that's the wrong tale!

It was the best of Points, it was the worst of Points…

Today I'm going to talk about PowerPoint, and how the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Slide Library takes it to the next level.
(Note: I originally wrote and published this article on my original blog site when MOSS was first released. It is just as relevant now, so I've decided to repost it here to be seen with fresh eyes.)

PowerPoint presentations are the lifeblood of many a corporate meeting; however, getting a consistent message across has been difficult due to the fact that a PowerPoint deck is one big file. Sometimes, it is one really big file. If you have certain key business information and you want to ensure everyone presenting "gets it right", your choices have generally been limited to providing a "standards" deck, containing all of your company's boilerplate, and making everyone pull out the slides they need; or going through the tedious process of saving each slide or small block of slides individually, then having your users merge each file them into their working presentation.

That can be very difficult, not only because you might have many such standard slides, but it means that the user needs to try to copy and paste them from the base presentation into their working copy, or merge many separate files. Finding just the right slide can be a task as well. Wouldn't it be great if you could just have each slide in its own file, and easily pick and choose which ones you wanted in your presentation? Well, with PowerPoint 2007 and MOSS, you can!

The slide library feature of MOSS allows you to create a repository of standard company slides, that is true, but because it is based on SharePoint, you can do so much more! Your library can include custom fields so you can make it easy to find just the slides you are looking for (e.g. sales figures, company policies, key executive bios), either by search, or by filter. You can separate slides for internal use only from those suitable for public consumption.

Creating a Slide Library

Creating a slide library in MOSS 2007 is just as easy as creating any other type of list or library - just go to the Create page, and select Slide Library:

You will then be asked the normal questions, like what you want to call it, if you want it on the quick launch, etc...

Accessing your library

Once you've created your slide library, you will want to populate it.

Open a presentation that has some slides you wish to re-use. Then, from the Office menu, select Publish, and click Publish slides.

Use the Browse button to select your site and library (and optionally folder), as normal. Now you can pick and choose which slides you want to save in the library, optionally renaming them and giving them new descriptions at the same time!

Now, what about getting the slides into a new presentation? Easy as can be! Open your slide library, tick the boxes beside the slides you want, and click the "Send to Presentation" link. You will be asked if you want to create a new presentation, or insert the slides into an existing one.

You can have the slides retain their original formatting, or assume the format of the target presentation. You can even have PowerPoint tell you if the source slides have changed since you inserted them into the presentation!

Conclusion

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 are both great products on their own, and even greater together. The MOSS slide library brings this integration to the next level. With a final apology to Charles Dickens:

It is a far, far better thing that they do, than they have ever done; it is a far, far better combination they bring than we have ever known…


Published: Jul-08-09 | 2 Comments | 0 Links to this post
Tagged as: Classic, Office, Lists and Libraries, SharePoint