Backstage Pass

Well folks, Spring is officially here!

What’s that you say? You’ve been enjoying the new season for the past month and a half? Okay, truth is… I have too! I spent all winter making meals in the Crock Pot (yes, I still consider this cooking), but the crazy nice weather has got me grilling anything and everything I can think of. Have you ever tried peaches on the grill, drizzled with honey? If not, please stop what you’re doing and go make some now… I promise you won’t regret it!

Alright, I may have gotten a little off track with the peach thing. But really… spring is all about baseball games, evening walks, and soaking up every minute of daylight you possibly can. Another thing it’s good for? Traveling the globe, talking about SharePoint. So without further ado, here’s what the Fpweb.net SharePoint Hosting ‘Road Crew’ will be up to in April:

Innovative-e, Inc. and Fpweb.net are proud to host a free SharePoint webinar series – “Temptations That Lead to the 5 Deadly Sins of SharePoint in the Enterprise.”

Join us for the next webinar in the series, “5 Risky SharePoint Temptations for IT Leaders” on Thursday, March 29, 2012, at 2:00pm ET. Co-hosts Dux Raymond Sy, managing partner of Innovative-e, and Mark Miller, Director of Global Strategy and Senior Storyteller at Fpweb.net, will discuss SharePoint risk management and take an in-depth look into the “temptations” or mistakes that IT leaders make when it comes to implementing and managing SharePoint enterprise-wise.

The “SharePoint Temptations” series is an extension of the original “5 Deadly Sins of SharePoint in the Enterprise” webinar. Innovative-e’s monthly webinar series began in January and Fpweb.net is proud to be joining this month as a co-host. The series will continue through June 2012.

Please register FREE to attend this featured SharePoint webinar.

You will be sent a link to obtain your unique attendance URL the day before or morning of the event.

Want to win cool prizes? Tell us your favorite Fpweb.net blog post!

Do you read Fpweb.net’s blog? Has a particular post been especially beneficial to you? Taught you something new? Made you laugh? What post did you give a second look?

The contest is simple, tweet us your favorite blog post! The grand prize: A seat at the table! Specifically, a seat at Innovative-e’s upcoming SharePoint training session “How to Build a Project Management Information System (PMIS) with SharePoint 2010” on March 9th, 2012 (this Friday!) from 11am-3pm ET.

This free ticket to Innovative-e’s online training session is a $249 value (covers attendance, artifacts and resources, and a recording of the presentation) but one random tweeter will enjoy the full course for free! The winner can attend or choose to send a friend! Plus, Additional prizes will be sent randomly to other contestants (coffee mugs, sunglasses, flash drives, etc).

It’s easy to enter the contest, and easy to win!:

1. Acknowledge @fpweb in your tweet
2. Link to your favorite Fpweb.net blog post
3. Add the hash tag #bestfpwebblog

Ex. My favorite @fpweb blog is When Cloud Computing Meets SharePoint http://blog.fpweb.net/cloud-computing-sharepoint-in-the-cloud/ #bestfpwebblog

A winner will be chosen randomly from all contestants on Thursday at 2pm CT. Winners will be announced on Twitter; make sure you’re following @fpweb so we can Direct Message you if you win!

The session is available to everyone, even if you don’t win (enter the discount code ‘Fpweb’ to receive an exclusive 20% off!)  Learn more and register here!

A Word with Chris Riley, Product Marketing Manager and Evangelist for CloudShare

Here at Fpweb.net, we aim to be your trusted SharePoint advisor. To live up to that name, we develop strong relationships with companies that offer quality third party tools for Microsoft SharePoint. Fpweb.net does the legwork so that when our customers are ready to build out their environment, we know what direction to point them in. We’ll even setup the meeting.

We want to take the time to focus on some of the people and services of some such companies and how Fpweb.net’s Hosted SharePoint can integrate with their products and services. From time to time we identify and evaluate new offerings from these companies and do our best to show customers how to best utilize them.

Recently, I had the opportunity to break e-bread with Chris Riley from CloudShare. CloudShare is in the business of moving enterprises to the Cloud. It earns its name by making the transition to the cloud easy, offering the benefits of performance and accessibility among others. Chris shares Fpweb.net’s enthusiasm for the future of cloud computing, and he’s ready to tell you all about it:

This is the fourth in a series of articles documenting the Sharing the Point South America 2012 Tour, sponsored by Fpweb.net and AvePoint.

“Your plane has crashed down. We have had to cancel the flight.”

These were the words we heard when reaching the checkout counter at the airport, before leaving from Montevideo, Uruguay for our flight to Santiago, Chile. It seems there was something lost in translation. Fortunately, “Your plane has crashed down” only means “There is a mechanical failure and the plane has been taken off the schedule.”

While it was a relief to get that worked out, the dilemma was now how are we going to get to Santiago? Option one: Rent a van and drive 12 to 14 hours through the mountains at night. Not a great choice, but available as a last resort. Option two: Find a private plane and charter the flight. Not viable at all on our budget. Option three: Stand at the counter, holding up the entire line at the airport until the attendant found us seats on the next available flight.

At first, that didn’t look like it was going to work, but we were persistent and with the blessing of a group of nuns standing in line right behind us, we were able to book a late night flight, arriving in Santiago about 1:00am.

This is the third in our series of articles documenting the Sharing the Point South America 2012 Tour.

It was an early wake up call to get to the ferry for the trip to Montevideo, Uruguay. We had all agreed to a short night the night before because we were going to have to catch the 7:30am ferry, with a mandatory 6:30am check in.

That’s not how things roll, though, in the Oleson/Noel family tour. They still hadn’t actually seen a real Argentinian tango club. Joel, Paul, Ricardo and Michael went on the hunt and found a place where locals go to tango in the evening. Only hitch? It seems like tango is only for the over-60 crowd nowadays. Even with those restrictions, the guys had fun talking to the clientele and learning a couple steps.

(This is the second in a series of articles documenting the Sharing the Point South America 2012 Tour sponsored by Fpweb.net and AvePoint. In case you missed it, please check out the Sharing The Point 2012 South America & Antarctica Travelogue, Part 1)

By coincidence, four of us routed our travel through Washington DC and ended up on the same flight down to Buenos Aires. This was a long haul, but relatively easy because of the 10:00pm departure, allowing us to get some sleep before we arrived.

The first shock of the trip was having to pay $140.00 as an entrance fee into Argentina. The pass is valid for 10 years, but it still felt like getting hit with a “tourist tax”. Dan Holme had flown in a couple days earlier and warned us to negotiate a taxi fee before we accepted a ride. We were able to get that done through the taxi info center at the airport and headed into downtown Buenos Aires.

It has been a week since my return from the Sharing the Point Tour of South America and Antarctica, and yet the aura surrounding the event has not dissipated.

In fact, it gets stronger each time I view the pictures or talk with people about the trip. Even this morning while walking the kids to school, neighbors were surrounding us, asking questions and listening in awe as I described some of the scenarios of the journey through South America and Antarctica. My six year old’s first grade class is studying foods of the world, so I’ve even been invited to give a presentation at PS 41 in New York City, showing our food pictures from the trip.

I was able to visit six locations near the “end of the world”, as they call it in Ushuaia, speaking with people about their use of SharePoint, what their projects look like and what their plans are for the future. Along the way there were food adventures, unexpected changes in travel plans and hospitality that made us feel welcome wherever we went.

This is the first in a series of articles reliving moments from our tour, explaining why we do what we do and talking about future plans for Sharing the Point.

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.