Trying Out Microsoft Servers With Virtual Hard Disks

I’ve posted before about various evaluation downloads available from Microsoft as Virtual Hard Disks – very useful if you want to try out a product without the need for doing a full evaluation install on one of your own servers.   There is now a single page on the Microsoft TechNet site which lists all of the VHDs available for download.   Take a look at Run IT on a Virtual Hard Disk to see what’s available.  Current offerings include Office SharePoint Server and Professional, Search Server Express 2008, Exchange 2007, ISA Server 2006 and lots more.

One point to bear in mind – Microsoft VHDs are normally configured with US settings and for a US keyboard.  So the @ character (often used in the login password) may not be where you expect if you have a non-US keyboard.

 

Technorati tags: Evaluation, Microsoft, VHD

Improving the SharePoint Calendar

When you show new users the SharePoint calendar options, they start off impressed but soon start asking awkward questions, for example:

Question: Can I roll up entries from several sub-sites into a single view?  Answer: No, not using out of the box functionality.  If you hunt around, you can find some helpful posts which might get you part way there, for example the screencasts available on EndUser SharePoint, or this example using SharePoint Designer.  The problem with both of these is that they don’t let you roll up the calendars into a new calendar view – what you get is a consolidated list of calendar items.

Question: Can I colour-code different calendar items, depending on the category, like I can in Outlook?  Answer: Again, not with out of the box functionality. There is a free colour (color) calendar solution available from Planet Wilson though and it has plenty of fans.  

Question: OK, can I put my calendar into a web part on the site home page, and filter it by category, like I can do with other lists?  Answer: Once again, not with out of the box functionality.  It would be nice if you could filter a calendar web part using a connection from another list placed on the page, but unfortunately you can’t.

So the best solution I’ve found so far is a combination of commercial web parts from Bamboo Solutions.  A combination of their Calendar Plus and List Roll Up web parts will address the shortcomings I’ve listed above.  And the Bamboo Team Blog has a good article on how to filter the Calendar Plus Web Part.

Also, I’ve just noticed that Bamboo have a new Team Calendar Web Part which lets you hook up to both Exchange and SharePoint calendars, and show both at the same time apparently.  More details on this Bamboo blog post.

Technorati tags: SharePoint, Calendar, rollup

Case Study – How Defra Use SharePoint and Records Management

Microsoft have just posted a new case study on how the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (defra) are using SharePoint Server 2007, and in particular Records Management.  You can read or download it from here.

A couple of quick highlights:

Chris Edwards, e-Records Management Team at Defra, says: “The records management capabilities in the new system out of the box are highly flexible. We quickly realised that with some customisations, they could meet our record management needs, and deliver us a fit-for-purpose collaboration infrastructure.”

Through Defra’s customisations of Office SharePoint Server 2007, developers added several new features:

• The system automatically populates metadata fields with information about the user who is creating a document, which in future is going to become a record.
• Documents are given a high, medium, or low importance by the author—documents with a medium or high importance are automatically harvested into the records repository after six months.
• Office SharePoint Server 2007 captures documents as records, as well as a whole site if it is less than 10 megabytes—what is considered a record has to be defined by each customer.
• Users can create, view, and add information in a workspace shared by all relevant team members through a browser interface.
• The technology creates virtual team working environments where they can produce, capture, and work on shared documents.

The Records Management capabilities in SharePoint 2007 are very powerful, but need very careful planning.  Defining document content types and appropriate metadata are key to most SharePoint implementations, but even more vital if you plan to use Records Management at some point.  The general recommendation is to plan for a Records Management implementation as a separate web application, with its own content database.  If you want a more details walk-through of what’s involved, there is a good one in a book I’ve previously recommended – Essential SharePoint 2007 – Delivering High Impact Collaboration.

Technorati tags: SharePoint, Records Management, Case Study

SharePoint 2007 Licensing Scenarios

I picked this up from El Blanco’s blog – a very useful post from Lady Licensing on common MOSS 2007 licensing scenarios.  This is well worth bookmarking if you are planning licensing requirements for a new implementation – or if you haven’t converted the evaluation licence key yet!

Technorati tags: SharePoint, licensing

Storing Your Data in the Clouds

Cloud Computing is attracting lots of interest, particularly with the growth in applications that run online, so you can use them anywhere you can connect from.   Many, like Google Docs, and Office Live Workspace, are personal rather than business applications, but there are also well established business solutions that run in this space, such Salesforce.com.  Even BBC News has an article about Cloud Computing.

Lots of activity from Microsoft in this area as well, offering various hosted options for hosted Exchange, SharePoint and CRM.  And if you take a look at the session list for the Microsoft Professional Developers’ Conference coming up in October, you will see that many of the topics relate to Cloud Services, Data Services etc, so expect lots more announcements in the coming months.

I saw an article in Computerworld discussing Microsoft’s use of container-based systems in their data centres (or data centers if you prefer) and I was interested to see exactly how this worked and what the containers looked like.  I found some good information on the Rackable Systems web site.  They have the Ice Cube Modular Data Center, as you can see here:

Their stats say that these give up to 2,800 independent servers per container, and up to 22,400 processing cores.  They also say the cooling technology they use can give up to an 80% reduction in cooling costs compared to traditional data centres.  It’s worth taking a look at their site, where they have a picture gallery showing how the servers are configured inside a container.

But when speaking to clients, I get the feeling that the majority of them are still uncomfortable about trusting their organisation’s data assets to a hosted service.  I wonder what the uptake rate will be?

Technorati tags: Cloud computing, data centre, data center