SharePoint, Exchange and Office 14 becomes 2010
Microsoft has announced the official names of the next release of 3 major products, Exchange, SharePoint and Office. Initially labelled version 14 for all 3 I can sense “the better together” marketing theme that Microsoft have used in the past when it came to releasing the same 3 products in 2007. I will discuss some of the highlights below for each product. Exchange 2010 now available in beta can actually be downloaded from the Microsoft TechNet Site. Some of the features noted include enhancements to the “anywhere experience” providing enhanced universal inbox...
Read MoreVirtualising your SharePoint Environment
To virtualise or not to virtualise? I thought I would provide you with some insight into my SharePoint infrastructure setup and hopefully place some minds at ease when it comes to virtualisation and SharePoint. First and foremost, all of my servers are running in a virtual environment and have been for quite some time. Virtualisation is handled by VMware Infrastructure v3.5 across 3 beefy ESX Hosts running dual Quad Core Xeon processors with 32GB RAM each connected to a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network with 15K Disks. The ESX hosts are also housing other virtual machines outside of the...
Read MoreSQL 2008 Service Pack 1 released .. Did it break my SharePoint Farm?
Microsoft has recently released Service Pack 1 for SQL 2008 which you can download from here. Being the brave person that I am, I decided to update my SQL instance housing my SharePoint databases as soon as I could. Even though it doesn’t contain any new features but mainly bug fixes and a rollup of cumulative updates 1-3, I have a habit of being up to date! So, today was the day! After successfully updating my VMware ESX hosts to update 4, I decided I would continue with the theme of “updating” and upgrade one of my SQL 2008 boxes which is dedicated to housing my SharePoint...
Read MoreSharePoint, My Site and Tracking Colleagues
Social Networking meets SharePoint! My Site is SharePoint’s answer to Web 2.0 social networking public sites like Facebook and LinkedIn specifically tailored for the corporate workplace. For any organisation especially those located across disparate locations it provides the ability to create synergy between those offices and users within offices. Today’s focus is on colleagues and the colleague tracker web part. Colleagues are those users that are part of your Workgroup plus those users you add manually that are not directly part of your Workgroup. Your Workgroup is automatically...
Read MorePeople Picker, SharePoint and Forest Trusts
Everything in my SharePoint Farm was working well until ….. I decided to install the recent February 2009 Uber packages from Microsoft, don’t ask me why but I have a habit of trying to keep up to date, even though Microsoft explicitly states when you download the hefty packages that you should only install them if you are experiencing one of the issues listed in the KB article and should wait till the next service pack. Have you ever sat down and read one of these Cumulative Update KB’s, they go on for pages and how am I suppose to know if I am actually a recipient of one of the...
Read MoreSharePoint Workflows and InfoPath Form Services
One of the biggest selling points of SharePoint is the ability to extend and automate day to day business processes. This is usually one of my key points of emphasis when demonstrating SharePoint’s capabilities to key stakeholders of the business. What I am specifically referring to here is the ability to take an everyday business process, analysing the steps, people and processes involved and automating that through electronic workflows. Workflows within SharePoint automate otherwise manual and usually repetitive business processes, providing you with the ability to add some smarts to...
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