Fpweb.net Blog

Sorry SharePoint fanatics…
This is a blog about sales and marketing, but please bear with me.

In the last week I have experienced one of the best and worst moments of our business.  As a metrics fanatic, we tend to track everything around here, or at least I do.  As the saying goes, “if you can measure it, you can improve it.”  I discovered that as of the last two months, our #1 metric for lead generation has been current clients! This is a mark of great success for our company and it is one that we deliberately focus on.

In a recent Forrester report, the research group really honed in on  two main points: the importance/success of MOSS 07 and how the release of hosted SharePoint 2010 will make an exponentially bigger impact on businesses everywhere. We at Fpweb.net couldn’t agree more on the triumphs of MOSS 07 and absolutely can’t wait to bring you SharePoint 2010 hosting.

The new QuickStart Business Suites, AppFoundation and AppServer, take business to the next level by satisfying department and industry vertical needs in a powerful hosted environment.

Saint Louis, MO (PRWEB) January 21, 2010 — SharePoint Hosting Pioneer™ Fpweb.net and CorasWorks have just announced the highly anticipated launch of the new QuickStart SharePoint Business Suites; proven SharePoint applications designed to operate flawlessly on all flavors of SharePoint hosted by Fpweb.net.

Congratulations are in order! Our partnership with CorasWorks has spawned a revolutionary, super solution for your departmental day-to-day demands. This little engine that could contains a suite of stable SharePoint apps which let you chug through your day like your favorite talking tank engine. We would call it Thomas, but we’d get sued.

We’ve been waiting for what seems like an eternity to finally unveil the masked maven known as SharePoint 2010 to the masses. We’ll have the beta up and running beginning in February and are anxiously awaiting the day you can proudly call hosted SharePoint 2010 your own.

As we all know, the new SharePoint 2010 is designed to be bigger and badder than ever with lightning fast search capabilities and new business connectivity services. Enhanced integration with Visual Studio 2010 lets you build sandbox solutions to test custom code without affecting your production environment. A glossy new version of SharePoint designer finally lets all non-developers build without writing code, while updated social media tools make work seem like Facebook™ behind a firewall. A new and improved user interface and an in-place content editing interface are just a few more of the new features you’ll immediately want to get your hands on.

Sick of the same old view? If the answer’s yes, our SharePoint tip of the month is right up your alley. Make the view work for you by filtering by a set of criteria, sorting in a particular order or hiding unnecessary columns. Below we’ll show you how to create, change and modify your view for a list or library.

“The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component”

The Fpweb.net SharePoint 2010 research team was having an issue with SharePoint Server 2010 search services. No matter what we would do, how we would install it, or how we got our pre-reqs, we would end up with the following error:

System Status Crawl status The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component. Verify that the administration component ‘8d5c3da9-d70c-41f3-88af-32a4d142aaf4′ in search application ‘Search Service Application’ is in a good state and try again.

Plenty of questions pop into your head when looking for the right SharePoint hosting provider. We’ve compiled a list of great need-to-know questions you should ask during your RFP or RFQ for hosted SharePoint services. If the company hesitates when answering any of these questions, your best bet is to keep on looking.

We recently had a Fpweb.net hosting customer inquire about uploading multiple files to SharePoint 2007 using a Mac (with drag and drop functionality). We all know that you can map a network drive to your SharePoint document library in Windows Explorer. It utilizes the WebDAV protocol to retrieve SharePoint data and to upload files into SharePoint.

The problem:
The default web interface for shared documents on macs doesn’t give me the option of multiple uploads or explorer view.

As many of you know, I’ve been working on building some hosted SharePoint 2010. I’m also trying to determine exactly what each service account needs rights/permissions to. I’ll have more on the specifics of the service accounts in an upcoming post, but the main service accounts I currently have are:

1. Install account
2. Farm account

The Install service account is what I use to run the SharePoint 2010 installation and configuration wizard.

The Farm service account is the account I use for app pools and database connectivity.

When you setup the configuration wizard this way, your configuration database is created by the farm account you specify, while the admin database is created with the install account. This doesn’t cause problems… until you try to connect a second SharePoint Server to the farm.