Fpweb.net SharePoint Blog

At the end of December, Jose Antonio Morales (Chief Innovation Officer at NYCP) posed an interesting question to our industry in an EndUserSharePoint.com blog post titled, “Is the SharePoint Community an incubator of entrepreneurship?”. The survey he collected seems to indicate that, yes, the SharePoint community is teeming with pioneers and product launches. Of those responding to the survey, a whopping 42% classified themselves as business owners or managers. The second largest survey group- 20% of participants- designated they are actively using SharePoint as a platform to drive innovation.

Simultaneously, Microsoft is actively promoting entrepreneurship. Through its BizSpark initiative, Microsoft hopes to develop and foster a thriving ecosystem of small companies developing software applications for platforms like Office, SharePoint, SQL Server and Azure. And due to the rapid adoption and growth of SharePoint, a number of companies have popped up focusing specifically on the SharePoint platform.

But who are these SharePoint innovators? What kind of new products are they launching? Which new SharePoint tools have been introduced by entrepreneurs? In this post, we’ll take a closer look at a few of these newly minted SharePoint startups.

(Meet Don Conrad, affectionately known as Don SQL in the office. This introduction into the SQL arena paves the way for further SQL content from Don.)

Hello, I’m Don Conrad. I’m the Database/Systems Architect for Fpweb.net, a dedicated SharePoint hosting company. Hosting SharePoint sites for customers around the globe is our only business. As a leader in our industry, we host thousands of sites– everything from small Foundation environments to some SharePoint Server Enterprise multi-server farms that demand literally terabytes of disk space.

Hosting for SharePoint, a Microsoft product, also requires SQL Server, another Microsoft product. The underlying architecture for SharePoint fundamentally relies upon- and resides within- SQL Server databases. Curious, that.

I take care of those database servers and have about 20 years of experience doing so. My main job is to help plan, configure, install and administer SQL Server database servers and databases for our various SharePoint hosting customers.

I recently read a very interesting blog post from Ricardo Wilkins on his SharePoint Cowbell blog. He describes his recent SharePoint development experience using the Developer Preview edition of Microsoft Visual Studio 11 in Deploying a Visual Web Part to your Remote-Hosted Fpweb.net SharePoint Site using Visual Studio 11 (Dev Preview).

The new and (actually) improved features for SharePoint development in VS 11 are quite impressive. Ricardo explains “the ability to deploy visual web parts as sandboxed solutions”, and automatically deploy those solutions to remote hosted SharePoint sites.

It’s no secret that document collaboration is essential in today’s business world.

Frequently, the expertise and roles of multiple people are required to complete a single business document; sometimes an editing process has to occur before a document can be approved for publishing.

Unfortunately, too many companies still rely on the network share as the center for document collaboration. Companies create a ‘share’, assign security, and let people create folders and save documents on an as-needed basis. Emails fly from one person to another saying “Your turn” or “Please review this” or “I’m done.”  But the network share methodology is never efficient. Plus, managing documents and collaborating with team members in this manner presents several serious problems:

The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 is the product of a Post-9/11 world, a new legislation created to change U.S. policy regarding gathering intelligence for the purpose of preventing further attacks. Deemed a knee-jerk reaction by many and intrusive by others, the unadulterated power and confusion surrounding the Patriot Act have now directly impeded much of U.S. data centers’ cloud services.

Many cloud services companies are feeling the sting of potential clients that are avoiding U.S. governed providers subject to the Patriot Act. This paranoia springs from the risk of their data being swept up in the Act’s net if invoked, and as a result, some firms are avoiding U.S. cloud providers altogether. It is important to note that although it is used as a counter-marketing tool for U.S. data services, such as web hosting companies, similar counter-terrorism laws exist in places like the UK and Canada as well.

The purpose of this article is to outline the basic principles of the Patriot Act, explain how it affects your business, examine how to represent the issue to your clientele and identify the European work in motion to shorten its reach. 

 In this post, Fpweb.net’s Director of SharePoint Engineering Chris Schwab shares his experiences at a recent SharePoint Saturday community event.

After a month and a half break in my travel schedule, I hit the road again. Over the first weekend in January, I packed up the Fpweb.net booth and headed out to spread the word about Hosted SharePoint to members of the SP user community in Virginia Beach, VA.

Virginia Beach… in mid-January… that alone means this event is destined to be great. Of course it did SNOW on us out there last year, but this one was different… much different. Temperatures in the 60s, sunshine, and a great venue at the Tidewater Community College made this one stand apart.

The first surprise was meeting up with Eric Harlan (@ericharlan) and Geoff Varosky (@gvaro) on the flight into Norfolk, VA. It was a short 35 min flight, but it was nice having some people to talk to on the way over. Later that night I headed over to the Speakers dinner at the Shifting Sands Club and found out what a fantastic lineup of speakers were brought in for this event.

It’s hard to believe that it’s 2012 already, but for all of you SharePoint users out there, this means one thing: It’s been over five years since SharePoint 2007 (MOSS/WSS) was released. My assumption is that all of you are aware that SharePoint 2010 is out there by now, and if not, well perhaps you have traveled to the wrong website.

Just like any “new and improved” Microsoft product that’s released, many end users are hesitant to upgrade right away. Simple math tells you that SharePoint 2010 has been used for over two years, and now that all the guinea pigs have ironed out the wrinkles, guess what? It’s time to upgrade!

So, what are you waiting for? Order the software, throw the CD in the drive and click Setup! Not so fast… SharePoint is not your average Microsoft software that allows you to click Next a couple times and you’re done. There is a whole lot of planning that needs to go in to upgrading from your 2007 version to 2010, and the Fpweb.net SharePoint experts are here to walk you through it.

The Cloud just got its driving license!

“The car in the cloud is more than just cool technology; it’s the harbinger of a fundamental shift in the way automakers will do business in the future. ” – William Clay “Bill” Ford Jr.

Need further proof “the cloud” is gaining momentum in the marketplace? Look no further than this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

This week, for the fourth year in a row, Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally takes the stage at CES in Las Vegas, NV. His keynote speech, however, will introduce a new buzzword to the automotive industry: the cloud!

Ford’s ingenuity has always helped set the pace of auto innovations, whether it’s saving gas or producing greener emissions, and now they’re the latest enterprise to embrace a future in the cloud.

The Ford Evos Concept car’s design is straight out of a sci-fi mag (if Ray Bradbury could have been this forward thinking!) The Evos Concept’s target audience is the busy, working professional. Someone who runs on as many cylinders as their car and can benefit from having all of their data and info (be it work or home related) cloud connected. Ford is presenting the ideal of not just relying on your phone to be connected to your work station, but for your car to play the in-between and manage the lot.

The medical industry is realizing the great potential to streamline and organize their business processes and data with SharePoint 2010. Many healthcare organizations require a HIPAA-compliant SharePoint solution to store and process electronic protected health information (ePHI).

The HIPAA Security Rule covers the standards and implementation specifications that are required to become compliant. The Security Rule only applies to ePHI where the Privacy Rule refers to PHI which may be electronic, oral, or paper form.

I’ve recently been researching what makes a HIPAA-compliant SharePoint 2010 environment.
NOTE: I’m not a compliance expert. I’m simply recording my thoughts in hopes of sparking conversation and receiving feedback on real world compliance projects involving SharePoint.   

Whether your cracking the champagne or applying to the gym – whatever your New Year resolutions call for – we’re happy to be ringing in the New Year with you!

Hope your 2012 hosts many blessings and adventures!

-All the best from the Fpweb.net team