For What I.T.’s Worth

Have you ever created a new SharePoint site using the Collaboration Portal template or the Report Center Template then navigated to the sample dashboard and received this ugly error?

Me too. Here’s how my team and I at Fpweb.net resolved the Excel Services Error:

Daily, we get customers who are learning the hard way that Microsoft’s Online Services BPOS (business productivity online service) does have significant limitations when it comes to SharePoint.

SharePoint Cloud Computing from Fpweb.net is coming soon.  We are targeting a launch at the SharePoint Conference on October 19 where we are a Gold sponsor. We will have some significant milestones along the way.  One such milestone will be announced on Friday, June 5, 2009 when we start offering fully functional Free Hosted MOSS Demo Servers.

The MOSS Demo servers will be available to test functionality, speed, custom code and web parts.  Just like test driving a new car, everyone wants to touch and feel it. We hear you! Feel free to scratch and sniff MOSS to see if hosted MOSS makes sense for you.  The Demo servers are free to qualified businesses – no credit card needed. Just fill out the free MOSS Demo server application to get started. WSS Demo servers will follow shortly thereafter.

I’ve been on the road speaking at SharePoint events quite a bit recently (See you at Microsoft Tech-Ed next week. Booth #552) and have had dozens of conversations with folks running SharePoint internally. I am amazed at how many people don’t know that we can host Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (Soon to be known simply as “SharePoint 2010”) for them. About half say they would have taken a serious look at hosted MOSS had they known it was possible before taking it on-premise. Yes, MOSS is a big bite as most of you already know. The vast balances of folks say they are getting by, but would consider a MOSS provider like Fpweb.net at their next upgrade cycle or hardware refresh.

Big things are coming in the world of SaaS!  Announced yesterday is a new partnership between Twisted Pair & Fpweb.net, making broad cross-organization communication affordable and easier than ever.  We are very proud to offer Interoperability as a Service - possible with a combination of WAVE Technology from Twisted Pair and the secure, scalable I.T. infrastructure of Fpweb.net.

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So… the official name is no longer Exchange 14.  It’s now Exchange 2010, and the Exchange 2010 Beta is released.  It will be the first release for the highly anticipated Office 2010 suite, probably end of 2009. The rest of the Office 14 Microsoft Office 2010 Suite (including SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010) won’t be released until…(drum roll please) 3rd quarter 2010.

Here’s a video from the Microsoft Exchange blog, posted last night.  The feature previews start at around 1:25.

This past week, I attended the Midwest SharePoint Conference.  There were about 300 people at the conference.  I heard great presentations from Quilogy, Nintex, and Microsoft.  I was probably most impressed with where Nintex has taken their work flow and reporting tools.  They have taken a UI based approach that makes work flows and reporting simple for users.

I also met Nintex co-founder, Brett Campbell.   Brett is an amazingly sharp guy that really understands his customers.  Brett and I were able to key some of our key folks together and push our partnership forward while at the conference.  So in the coming months, expect to see Fpweb.net offering services from Nintex.

Have you ever come across a “File Not Found” error when accessing some part of your WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 portal? So have I. There are some modifications that the farm administrator can make to the web application’s web.config file to show more information about the error.

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