Ginneblog

We got the word on Friday, April 16, that Microsoft SharePoint 2010 was released to Manufacturing.  Check out what the SharePoint Team Blog has to say about it.

You can sign up here to watch the Office 2010 + SharePoint 2010 Virtual Launch event coming on May 12.
 
Here in San Francisco, the DesignMind team is very excited about this release. Our clients will now be able to leverage many of the new features. Our team will be able to do more custom development, with less effort, than MOSS 2007 required.
 
We’ve also been waiting impatiently because we will soon be re-launching  the designmind.com site, using SharePoint 2010 as the platform.  I’ll let you know how that goes, as our own launch date approaches.
 
In the meantime, congratulations to the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 team for some really great work! 

Here’s Huey Lewis at the SharePoint Conference 2009.

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Captain Kirk - a cloud pioneer

By default, when you upload a document or any other large file to SharePoint, it gets stored as a Binary Large OBject   (BLOB) in the content database in SQL Server.  As revisions are made, each version of that file also gets stored (not just the differences).  The amount of BLOB data grows significantly faster than associated metadata, causing SharePoint to consume large amounts of expensive SQL Storage space.   Burzin talked about externalizing BLOB storage, as well as options for storing infrequently used BLOBs in the Cloud.  These approaches can help ease the backup and storage cost problems content-heavy SharePoint sites encounter. 

Burzin’s SharePoint Storage Best Practices talk also covered Configuration, Maintenance, and Performance Tuning.  He explained some of the unusual stresses SharePoint puts on SQL Server, and offered suggestions on how to avoid degraded performance.  If you’re planning a significant SharePoint implementation, you’ll want to take a close look at his specific recommendations regarding recommended I/O Capacities, Database configuration and sizing, processors and memory. 

Given the headaches SharePoint BLOBs cause in many organizations, it makes sense that StorSimple has a complete solution to externalize them. Their storage-on-demand appliance provides tiered storage for SharePoint with the option to secure and store infrequently updated BLOBs to the cloud to achieve substantial cost savings.  According to Ursheet Parikh, StorSimple’s Founder and CEO, Burzin’s extensive SQL Server and SharePoint experience make him a key member of the StorSimple team. 

I’ll write about StorSimple’s product in an upcoming post, and will follow that with a case study once DesignMind has had a chance to implement StoreSimple’s Cloud Storage Solution for one of our clients.  For data storage, Space is the Final Frontier.

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A prospective DesignMind client in San Francisco is making modest use of SharePoint 2003, and is considering a move to MOSS 2007.  The reasoning is good. They can do an incremental rollout, and gain immediate value from SharePoint’s ability to index documents, including PDFs.

In preparation for the meeting, I had to refresh my memory in two very important areas.  First, I needed a Comparison of the features of SharePoint 2003 with those of MOSS 2007. 

The second major question to answer was which features are included in each version of SharePoint?  

Here’s another useful site Comparing WSS and MOSS. 

The last gem I uncovered was an excellent PowerPoint file covering the Functionality in MOSS 2007 and Office 2007.  This is a great resource for those thinking about leveraging the integration Microsoft has delivered in these two major toolsets.  It will help us make the right recommendations to our clients when it comes to purchasing Standard vs. Enterprise Client Access Licenses. 

No doubt there’s a ton of information to sift through on MOSS.  Next I’ll look forward to reviewing the comparisons between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010.  I must say I’m pleased that Microsoft is making our lives easier by by shifting back to the name SharePoint rather than MOSS…read my June 3rd Ginneblog post for more on the rollout of SharePoint 2010.

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Montreal, Quebec

I wish I were attending the SharePoint Summit conference in Montreal this week. We use it at DesignMind. It really enhances our collaboration and content management processes. It’s no wonder that Forbes Magazine calls SharePoint the “Ultimate Business Timesaver”.

According to InfoWorld, MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 is the fastest growing product in Microsoft’s history and has “as many uses as a Swiss Army knife”. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, ECM (enterprise content management), business process management, and business intelligence.

Ford Motor uses SharePoint for its dealer portal, and the Marines have deployed collaborative applications to aid their efforts in Iraq. In Scotland, the entire K-12 education community is connected via SharePoint.

The great thing about SharePoint is that it offers a single environment for all your information and collaboration tasks and it’s easy to learn, use, and personalize. It has a single platform and well-integrated set of technologies to manage and lower user support requirements. Can you tell I’m a big fan?

I’m also a fan of Formula One racing, so the following bit of news made me particularly happy. If you like fast cars check out the new Ferrari.com site which was built with MOSS 2007.

Ferrari F430

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