Newsletter Articles

With over 1,000,000 users around the world, we’re sure that hosted SharePoint is used far and wide for an enormous variety of reasons. Yet, sometimes we can’t help but wonder what features are used the most and what percent of businesses use it strictly for collaboration.

Well, curiosity has gotten the best of us. We would like to take a quick snapshot of what folks are doing with hosted SharePoint.

The learning landscape has undeniably changed in the past ten years. These days, students all over the world are constantly in touch with technology outside of school, so it’s proving wise to integrate technology into daily school lessons to maintain students’ interest and attention levels. With the recent development of more technological and interactive learning methods like Microsoft SharePoint 2010, traditional teaching elements are starting to show their age.

Getting to the SharePoint pages you visit the most can definitely steal some valuable time from your day. If you’re a member of several sites, SharePoint navigation can seem even more daunting. However, by creating a SharePoint quick list of links under My Links, you’ll be able to navigate faster to these important pages. Here’s how in just six easy steps.

As most of you out there know, one of the biggest features of micro-blogging service Twitter is the following feature. It brings news from your favorite brands, companies and people right onto your profile page, so you don’t have to spend minutes searching for updates.

However, the downside is that it’s hard not to feel a slight sting of rejection when someone decides to unfollow you or your company. While there’s no cure to make losing followers a little easier on you, there is a way to track who stops reading your tweets and possibly figure out why they jumped ship.

Your customers know right where to find you on the Web. Now, easily point them to your physical location with a Google Map located on a SharePoint Server page. Using the Content Editor Web Part, it’s easier to embed a map than you think!

It doesn’t matter whether your organization has 20 employees or 20,000; when you need certain bits of information, you crave split-second access. However, just like the Rolling Stones warned us, it seems that in the world of search, you can’t always get what you want. Yes, you’ll get what you need eventually but it will cost you valuable time.

For the last decade, search giant Goggle has clearly upped the ante on how easy it is to find what we’re looking for and how fast we expect this information to be in our hot, little hands (or in this case, pulled up on our computer screens, iPods or smartphones). There’s no denying it – our Google-influenced minds can make it seem like your IT team isn’t up to par in the search department. However, there is hope.

Woohoo! Just minutes ago, we received confirmation from Microsoft that Fpweb.net is a finalist for 2010 Microsoft Partner of the Year in the Hosting Solutions category – as part of Microsoft’s World Partner Conference (WPC) 2010! It’s a good thing we have some champagne left over from our launch of hosted SharePoint 2010 because we may need to reach for it very soon!

We’re anxiously counting down the days until this year’s Microsoft World Partner Conference to find out if we’ll need some prime shelf space for a coveted Microsoft Partner of the Year award. According to our official confirmation letter, we’ve been selected because our business “represents the commitment to deliver products and services for outstanding adoption and application of innovation build on Microsoft technologies that positively changes and impacts our mutual customers’ business”. When you read between the lines, what they’re basically getting at is that we rock at hosting SharePoint 2010 and no one knows it better than we do.

We would like to send an enormous thank you to Microsoft for this recognition. It’s a huge honor that our entry was picked from over 3,000 partner entries submitted this spring. The winner will be announced at WPC, which takes place July 11-15 in Washington, D.C. You can bet the Fpweb.net road crew will be crossing their fingers to take home a win at this conference.

A seismic shift is happening across the country. “Enterprise 2.0” is taking over – charged with the mission of revolutionizing the way team members interact within your organization.

The term “Enterprise 2.0” is becoming increasing popular in business development communities across the globe. According to technology news source ZDNet, “Enterprise 2.0”  refers to the use of social computing and other Web 2.0 technologies in corporate networks and intranets. Until recently, social computing has primarily been trend with growing influence outside the corporate firewalls. However, experts are saying that it has just as much if not more power to redefine and shape the future of your entire enterprise.

Whether you use them to host a blog, store files or keep track of meetings, sites and pages are an integral part of any hosted SharePoint 2010 environment. Your organization can use pages, sub-sites and top-level sites to divide a plethora of content into manageable pieces for different departments. This SharePoint tip of the month teaches you how to create sites and pages using pre-designed SharePoint 2010 templates.

In this edition of SharePoint Tidbits from the Trenches, we’ll say “so long” to the days where documents lived in a sluggish circular workflow of composition, printing and emailing, reviews, edits, editing approvals and publishing.  Recently, the Microsoft Office team has been narrowly focusing on making their products adhere to the cloud-based collaboration capabilities of the future.

In the case of document life-cycles for Word 2010, their solution incorporates an amazing new feature – the ability for multiple information workers to simultaneously edit and collaborate on a Word document.  This process is known as co-authoring and happens in real-time with the seamless integration of Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

I’ll give you a second to catch your breath.  That’s right, one document with multiple simultaneous authors and real-time editing and collaboration.  No check-out/check-in required (although it’s still available) and it comes with countless time-saving and productivity boosting implications for all kinds of business operations.

Sounds great, right?  Let’s go over the prerequisites and how it works.