Social-Point

Cloud Server Showdown

JeffDeVerter — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:43:26 +0000

If you are interested in Cloud-Based servers – then the article reference here is for you:

Old McDonald Had a SharePoint Farm E-I-E…IO – Part 2

The article was written by Todd Carter (MCM, MCT, and all-round good guy).

A quick bit of clarification. When I refer to a “Cloud Server” – I am refering to a:

Dedicated Virtual Machine (It’s yours and yours alone)
The machine is running on a shared Hypervisor (physical machine)

A lot of people think of a “cloud server” as a server which is “not running in their data-center” – regardless if their server is dedicated to them or shared.

The hosting providers tested in this article were:

Microsoft Azure
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Rackspace Cloud Servers

SharePoint at Rackspace

JeffDeVerter — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 22:01:00 +0000

Just as no two finger-prints aren’t the same – no two SharePoint hosting options are the same.

To help clarify the options - I’ll be delivering a WEBinar on Friday where I’ll be showing the differences between Rackspace, o365, and …well .. everything else. Just to be clear – I work for Rackspace so I’ll have lots-o-information about them. Click HERE to sign-up.

This Webinar is part of a “week of webinars” sponsored by Rackspace. Here is a page where you can learn more about them and sign-up for those that interest you.

Hope to “see” you Friday.

Microsoft Changes CAL Pricing Scheme

JeffDeVerter — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 21:14:59 +0000

Mary Jo Foley posted an article for ZDNet Concerning a change to Microsoft CAL (or Client Access Licensing) for the following products:

Bing Maps Server CAL
Core CAL Suite
Enterprise CAL Suite
Exchange Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
Lync Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
Project Server CAL
SharePoint Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
System Center 2012 Client Management Suite
System Center Configuration Manager
System Center Endpoint Protection
Visual Studio TFS CAL
Windows Multipoint Server CAL
Windows Server CAL
Windows Server RDS, RMS, Terminal Services CAL

The core message is that Microsoft is raising the price of User CAL’s by 15% and allowing you to access your company’s Microsoft Servers by an unlimited number of devices. This is different from the Device CAL which would allow for an unlimited number of users connect to your Microsoft Servers from a specific number of licensed devices.

This change is effective December 1, 2012 (or when your pre-negotiated EA expires).

In the past – these prices have been roughly the same. A blog posted from December by UK reseller Softcat gives greater details.

Moral of the story – licensing for SharePoint is changing again.

Microsoft Datacenters

JeffDeVerter — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 13:55:55 +0000

So my brain has been wrapped up in thinking about how SharePoint is evolving as a product and evolving as core strategy at Microsoft. I’m not 100% ready to share my thoughts with you yet – but what I will say is that in a lot of ways, SharePoint is the “plumbing” that enables their overall strategy. That became increasingly clear today when I read this article about some of the innovation Microsoft is investing in concerning generating power for data-centers from reclaimed methane gas from sewage treatment facilities.

Microsoft’s involvement in running/managing data-center facilities is here for the long-haul. SharePoint as the plumbing that enables Microsoft’s “Office” strategy. The next thought to explore is why does Microsoft have this office strategy. But that’s a topic for another day. For now: just as we can’t do without the plumbing in our house – SharePoint as the destination and enabler of the Microsoft Office strategy is here to stay. I am very curious to see what form it takes in the future.

It’s Yammer Time!

JeffDeVerter — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:17:58 +0000

aka: The social layer

On June 25th of 2012 Microsoft announced it’s intent to purchase the social media company, Yammer.

For several month, the SharePoint community wondered what the impact of this purchase would mean for both Microsoft and more specifically, SharePoint. Last week at the SharePoint 2012 conference we learned what some of that road map looked like. Here are the big nuggets:

Yammer will only be available online – no on-premises solution
Yammer is “included” when you bring your SharePoint to o365
Microsoft is dramatically lowering the cost of Yammer – from $15 to $3 per month.
Yammer is investing heavily on integrating Yammer into SharePoint

Other points of interest:

Microsoft gets the needs for social now. There was a comment in the keynote the way an Enterprise will enable productivity is to build a “social layer” within (and outside) their businesses.
Microsoft spend $50B in large part to show that it gets the importance of social

Where do these points lead us? I’m not 100% on that – I don’t think many people outside of the inner product circle at Microsoft are. But I will give you an analogy that I think makes the most sense to me right now:

Yammer is to the Enterprise what Active Directory is to the Organization.

SPC2013 – It’s all about Innovation

JeffDeVerter — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:00:08 +0000

SharePoint 2013: How is our world changing?

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the messages we recieved last week from Microsoft from the keynote all the way down to the last sessions. I would characterize the message of the week by showing a picture from Jeff Teper’s Keynote address.

The key word they obviously want us to see is “INNOVATION”. It is my opinion that’s the goal of Microsoft SharePoint 2013 – especially the version they are making available through Office365. I believe it is Microsoft’s goal to remove as many barriers as possible away from business users who want to (and need to) work together. People who are successfully working together can get work done. If Microsoft is successful in removing the barriers of productivity – then they stand at the threshold as the creators of technology that could unleash productivity, creativity and ultimately – Innovation.

Now this is an interesting problem to solve – because in many ways they created the problem (at last the most common tool that enables the problem) – Microsoft Exchange. I would venture to state that there is more corporate intelligence and work bound to our in-box and calendars than anywhere else in our company’s vast IT resources. Microsoft isn’t just throwing another tool at a problem here – it really does appear as though there was some very deep thought around productivity, work-streams, tasks, and all of the most common business activities that happen every day in our jobs. Consider that in a SharePoint/Office 2013 and Microsoft Device reality that:

I can author a document (or task, or issue, or site…) at my PC and easily engage others to help with it’s creation

I can consume and/or edit that information from the device of my chosing

I can easily invite others into the approval process

I can easily share that information with others

I can tag the content with a folksonomy that fits my business

Others can elect to join the effort

Others can follow document’s progress

Others can easily discover the content through searches or simply because they pay attention to the content I create

IT can create policies that govern the lifecycle of the content I create and tag

We can author content in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote even without the desktop application loaded on our device of choice

To me – it seems as Microsoft stands at the threshold of our business with a set of tools, technology, and devices that will help us not think about any of those items (though in some cases – they are quite sexy). At a minimum, we will be much more successful in getting our job completed and in the best case: our cumulative innovation will help us transform our business and organizations to greater levels of success.

So this begins a series (hopeful a long-running one) where I will point out where their strategy is succeeding and where it isn’t. Please feel free to share your experiences.

SharePoint in the Cloud: SharePointConnections

JeffDeVerter — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:40:24 +0000

I will be presenting at SharePointConnections in Las Vegas next week in a session called “Demystifying SharePoint in the Cloud”. My session is Wednesday 3/28 at 2:30.

In this session I’ll be helping to put some definition around:

What is “the Cloud”
What it means to have “SharePoint in the Cloud”
When it’s appropriate to put data in the Cloud

I’ll also be presenting a “decision matrix” that helps to provide some context around when it’s appropriate to used cloud-based technologies.

Hope to see you there!

Today is a Great Day

JeffDeVerter — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:57:52 +0000

Today (which is a great day) you may have read the press release from Rackspace, an article in the Wall Street Journal, or saw a twitter from a friend – but today Rackspace announced that we have purchased SharePoint911. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am about this announcement!

Nearly 4 years ago I launched Rackspace’s SharePoint Hosting service, which is built on Rackspace’s Fanatical Support ™. This was such a successful product for us that we began looking for ways to not only be the best SharePoint Hosting company – but the best SharePoint company. That has quest lead us to SharePoint911 and the team that Shane Young has gathered. You see when Rackspace looks for an acquisition – we never look to capture market–share but acquire talent; and that’s what we’ve done here. These guys & girls rock!

I am pleased to welcome the SharePoint911 team to Rackspace and to our journey. The collective horsepower of our teams standing atop the worlds largest (and greatest) hosting company is awesome! But more than that – I am thrilled to be on this journey with people I’m happy to call friends. Each individual voluntarily made the decision to join the team. To each of you new “Rackers”, I’m humbled that you’ve come to Rackspace – Welcome!

To the test of the world – how can we serve you! (In our datacenter…. or yours… but more on that later.)

Here are a few links to what some of the team has posted about the event:

SharePoint in the Cloud

JeffDeVerter — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:21:17 +0000

This is a quick post to let you know about a new resource, it’s called “SharePoint in the Cloud“. Over at Rackspace we have created a Linkedin Group to have a discussion around all things “SharePoint in the Cloud“.

While this is a new group, I’d encourage you to go over and subscribe – we’ve got some very interesting things planned for the group and the discussions we’d like to have. But first…it takes group members – so if you find this topic interesting – go sign-up and we can get the conversation started!

Content Delivery Networks and SharePoint

JeffDeVerter — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:31:22 +0000

Content Delivery Networks and SharePoint

In the previous post I covered why someone would need to deal with global SharePoint and the 4 different options that exist to help SharePoint work over long distances. As a reminder, they are:

Shorten the distance by using a more efficient network (CDN)
Shorten the distance by staging SharePoint servers closer to the users
Shorten the distance for some of the content by putting some of the larger content closer to the users
Increase the efficiency of delivering the content from SharePoint by combing the many packets into a few packets – and compressing as much as possible

In this post I’d like talk about Content Delivery Networks. The goal of a CDN is to either

Shorten the distance between the servers and the users by utilizing a more efficient network
Stage content from your sites in regional points of presence (POP) in the CDN

Now different CDN providers have their own “secret sauce” that they can add to the picture to help with performance with either all traffic or with some solution specific traffic. Some CDN providers (like Akamai) will even create guarantees on the quality, speed, reliability, and availability of the delivery of your content. the challenge with some providers is that they have issues when delivering content that requires NTLM authentication (aka SharePoint). This doesn’t mean that it can’t work with SharePoint – they just can’t work with SharePoint in certain use cases. For instance – a CDN with NTLM issues would be fine for a public facing web-site but would fail when trying to us it to accelerate your Intranet. There is a way to work around this – but requires that your site be configured with Forms Based Authentication (or with basic authentication). Now this creates some usability “challenges”. You will need to decide if those will impact you.

As CDN providers deliver traffic – they are are also caching some of this content in POPs along the way. The result is that on the second request for the same content – the distance to deliver it is dramatically shortened.

So by a combination of a more efficient network and caching content along the way – CDN’s have the ability to speed web sites (and SharePoint sites) up for users who are far from the source servers. This speed does come at a technical cost depending on any authentication requires as well as a financial cost.

Here are few CDN providers that come to mind:

A Gartner Analyst I’ve met with while she was being brief by Rackspace is Lydia Leong. Here is a post where she talks about research she is doing in this space. If you’d like to get an analysts perspective on the key players, I’d recommend her.

Lastly – it is possible for you to manually handle the staging of content in a CDN while leaving the delivery of the SharePoint experience alone. Take the scenario where your site has a lot of very large graphic or media files that need to be delivered to your users around the globe. When you publish these items to SharePoint – first stage them in a CDN (like Rackspace CloudFiles) and publish the URL for those assets to SharePoint – and not the assets themselves. This helps with the end user experience. This technique doesn’t work with content that is collaborative in nature – that content has to remain in SharePoint for SharePoint to manage the experience. But for the static content that doesn’t change frequently – it is a good solution.

In the next post I’ll start to deal with staging SharePoint servers closer to your users.