Am pretty humbled here having been accepted into the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Student Mentoring programme (ok its a long title). However, its all about giving back your expertise, knowledge and experience into those who will in future help shape SharePoint and associated products. To recap, the MVP Student Mentor Program pairs MVPs with students in the Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) Program to share their knowledge and experience as influential technical leaders in the community. The MSP Program is a worldwide educational program that sponsors students majoring in disciplines related to technology who then share their knowledge with the academic community. The MVP Student Mentor Program helps MVPs share their passion, expertise, and real-world experience with students who share their passion and are just starting out in the technology community.
Also when I’m paired up I’ll be adding more articles related to SharePoint experiences with students so watch this space!
More information here:
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/students/learning/microsoft-student-partners.aspx
The awesome news is that Office365 for Education is FREE!!!
This product ncludes Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online and Office Web Apps. The Office 365 Exchange Online component is basically the same as Live@edu’s Outlook Live, so transferring from one to the other should be fairly straightforward.
This makes things easier for Universities to provide access to their students and provides them with a major benefit in the provision of course material.
Go check out this article for more information:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2012/jun12/06-27Office365.aspx?mtag=soc_tw
I was a guest speaker on a general SharePoint Security Webcast today, which was great fun. On the agenda was security of SharePoint relating to mobile devices. Unfortunately, the session did not manage to get into that topic, and I was so keen to talk about it. To counter, I’ve provided an article written today which talks about how personal devices as part of Consumerization have impacted SharePoint, some features available to mobile users, what implications are there in terms of security and finally a look at what Support needs to address.
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If you are an Information Worker in SharePoint, and you would like proove your skills by marking on your Cirriculum Vitae as a Microsoft Office Specialist in SharePoint, then the best way is by doing the Microsoft Office Specialist suite of exams provided by Microsoft and run by Certiport. This is also true if you teach Microsoft Office at school, college or university, and would like your students to be made aware of this offering.
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Time for an ‘infrastructure musling’…
Consider that if you have an environment which is low on resources, you may find that through creating web applications in the SharePoint 2010 farm that further attempts to create a new web application through Central Administration could result in the following:
- The creation process results in a ‘Page cannot be displayed’ message.
- The web application is only provisioned on the Central Administration server.
The reasoning is that as more web applications are created the more work is required and therefore the time in which it takes to create a web application increases exponentially. Also, due to the additional work is IIS reset and further updates, the default timing required to complete is beyond the 90 seconds set by the Central Admin application pool. Hence, the provisioning time may not simply be high enough.
To resolve, try the following:
- Delete the web application that did not provision to the Web Front End.
- On the server hosting Central Admin, open IIS manager.
- In the tree view, expand the server name and click on Application Pools.
- Locate the SharePoint Central Administration v4 application pool. Right click on it and choose Advanced Settings.
- In the Process Model section, set the Shutdown Time Limit to a greater value. I set mine to 300.
- Restart IIS.
- Try creating the web application again – note that you must be patient! On my environment (and it’s a TEST one) I had to wait for 5 minutes to provision.
Final note.
You should also check the number of cores that are available to the Central Admin server. Remember that the recommended core level is 4. I noticed that during the creation the CPU usage hit and stayed at 100% (and that was at 2 cores). Upping to 4 seemed to correct the issue where I did not have to alter the Shutdown Time Limit; that said, am still investigating what causes the slowdown in creating Web Applications (but that’s for another musling)…
Hope this helps you out there!
Whilst I was at the London SharePoint Conference 2012 I was rapidly taking notes on the sessions I managed to get to. Whilst doing notes on the talk by Rob Foster titled ‘Facebook in your Comnpany – You can forget it!’ I thought ‘Hey I should definately share some key points’. Additionally, the cartoons were done by Chris Shipton and during Robs talk (and many others) – I took pics of them, and used snippets of them in my ‘key points’ presentation I’d like to share. (more…)
Hi, booked way back to go to the London SharePoint conference taking place next week – going to be exciting to meet up with friends and make plenty of new ones, and learn learn learn!
Was really hoping to speak at the conference, but alas, a little too late for my submission, nevertheless, it still its going to be great fun and will let you know how it all goes and the highlights!
More information about the conference is on this link:
www.internationalsharepointconference.com/
From a planning perspective, what are the very basic areas that one needs to think of when going down the route of creating a SharePoint solution, whether its a site, or farm, or even a workflow solution. I have attempted to answer this by building a presentation key covering planning, adoption, supporting, delivery from a high level.
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Located some great guides whose goal is to assist the reader through the process of planning a SharePoint Server 2010 infrastructure by addressing the following:
Step 1: Identify the Requirements
Step 2: Apply the IT Policies
Step 3: Define the High-Level Architecture
Step 4: Design the Web Server Infrastructure
Step 5: Design the Application Server Infrastructure
Step 6: Design the SQL Server® Infrastructure
Step 7: Identify the Optimization Opportunities
These guides are available for download. The first guide takes the architect through an easy-to-follow planning and design process to successfully create a SharePoint Server infrastructure that is appropriately placed, sized, and designed to deliver the desired business benefits, while also considering the performance, capacity, and fault tolerance of the system.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/B/C/5BC966BC-47D8-41DF-95F2-FA9A2D816258/SharePoint%20Server.zip
For more information go here: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/gg581794.aspx
This guide provides a clear comparison of SharePoint collaboration technologies across on-premises, standard hosting, and dedicated hosting scenarios. The guide can be used as a framework for evaluating the technical feasibility of Microsoft SharePoint Online and determining which SharePoint delivery model best suits the organization’s needs.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/B/C/5BC966BC-47D8-41DF-95F2-FA9A2D816258/SharePoint%20Online%20-%20Evaluating%20Software-plus-Services.zip
For more information go here: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/ee354215.aspx
Am building a presentation summarising these guides for a future blog coming soon!
Just back from holidays and back into the throes of things – checking my mails find one from a client stating they want to migrate some of their in-premise SharePoint to SharePoint online.
To give this more of a scenario, here goes. The client is using SharePoint in-premise with Microsoft Office tools. Being a research body they write lots of papers and publish these on their in-premise SharePoint. They now need to make some of the documents public and wish to maintain them on their Office365 site. They are ultra-keen on ensuring that the key features of Microsoft Office are available to their SharePoint online site. One of those is the Research option.
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