Web Development

(Don Conrad, a.k.a. “Don SQL”, is Fpweb.net’s resident database wizard and expert in all things Microsoft SQL related. In this post he examines the next version of SQL Server. Missed an installment of The Next Byte? Check out Don’s complete Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server series.) 

The Next Byte – Special Edition

Microsoft is busy promoting its next version of SQL Server, the database that powers the SharePoint platform. The RTM (“Release to Manufacturing”) edition of SQL Server 2012 is already available for download, and Microsoft will publicly unveil this new database technology before the end of March. As a result, SQL Server database administrators – and DBAs-in-training – are occupied studying up on the differences between SQL Server 2008 and this new version. For this “Special Edition” post, I’ve taken a break in my on-going talks about SQL Server to cover the highlights of new features in SQL Server 2012.

Perhaps the most pressing questions for SQL Server DBAs are:

1) What are the major enhancements?
2) What editions are available?
3) Did the pricing change?

Many of the feature updates in this version are truly significant and really enhance the usefulness of SQL Server. They are less about storing more, faster. Instead, they are more about how can I use my data quicker and better. They also directly address the massive increase in information that has been ongoing for 10+ years and is now threatening to be unmanageably large. How can we store, and access in a meaningful manner, the incredible quantities of data we already have stored and continue storing the increasing magnitude of data that we will have accumulated in the next few years?

…THE NEXT BYTE

The Next Byte is our series of posts about the relationship between SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SharePoint, written by database administrator Don Conrad. Missed the last post? Please read “Microsoft SQL Server: The Database Behind SharePoint”.

Up for discussion:

• A high-level description of SQL Server
• What are the major components of SQL Server?
• What are the core functions of SQL Server?
• What do I have after installing SQL Server?

SQL Server is a database server product. It’s arguably one of the three most popular ones on the market (the other two being ORACLE, manufactured by the ORACLE corporation, and DB2 by IBM). All three provide very similar functions albeit on three different hardware platforms. SQL Server runs on Microsoft Windows servers, ORACLE primarily on Unix/Linux platforms and DB2 generally on IBM mainframes.

While all three perform mostly similar activities, Bill G. and I can probably agree that SQL Server is the premier product. After all, administering SQL Server has helped me pay most of my bills these past years!

The European Commission recently put together a new draft of their outdated Data Protection Laws. In our previous post in this series (EU Commission and Data Protection, Part 1 of 2), we outlined the key changes to the original 1995 directive. This final part of the series will focus on the U.S. response.

The EU Justice Commissioner, Viviane Reding, and the European Commission have announced their controversial new directives and left the world asking a fundamental question: How much control should each individual user have over their online identity?

The reforms make it clear that web sites, search engines and social networks are being held accountable for what they do with personal user data. And while EU is setting the pace, many major U.S. enterprises with European users are sucked into the mix.

(This blog is a follow-up to our previous post USA Patriot Act and Cloud Hosting: What You Need to Know. It focuses on the recent draft of data protection directives set forth by the European Commission in response to their outdated data privacy laws.)

Background

As discussed in a previous blog, the USA Patriot Act reaches far beyond its own borders. The Patriot Act makes any data kept by a U.S. company, both within or outside the U.S., susceptible to a possible U.S. Government seizure or unwarranted search. So, regardless of where it is stored, any data can be turned over to the government for inspection since the company storing the data is governed by U.S. law. As expected, this is a concern for European users who have data stored in a server that falls under U.S. law. This applies to most major cloud services like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook.

The blog finished by reminding readers that the European Commission would meet in January 2012 and clarify the Patriot Act’s reach within EU’s jurisdiction. A 15-year-old Data Protection Directive would be revised and every effort would be made to let EU data remain in EU jurisdiction with EU law taking precedence. This is the result of that meeting:

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.

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.

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.   

Sometimes you need support.

As always, we want to make sure you get it as soon as possible – and we also want to make sure that you know exactly how to create a support ticket so the ball can start rolling on your request.  The Engineers (some call them ‘IT Angels‘) at Fpweb.net have put together this step-by-step tutorial on how to create your ticket.

Logging into the Customer Portal

Navigate to the Customer Account Portal Login screen located here: http://support.fpweb.net and this will re-direct you to the secure login page.  Login with your username and password.

Here at Fpweb.net, we’re constantly setting up and configuring farms for our customers. We see all kinds of requests for very strange setups, so discovering things not quite “working as intended” is nothing new. However, when you run into a standard feature that gives you repeated headaches then you know something is up. The User Profile Synch is just such a feature, and I’m going to share with you all of our relevant plans in hopes that your battles can be won much faster than some of ours have been.

Before we go too far, let’s get one thing out in the air, don’t go blindly into this fight! Most of the major issues we have encountered are the result of an improper deployment. These deployments cannot be easily undone, often end up in a farm rebuild, and are very easy to do. So where do we start? Spencer Harbar has some of the best laid out User Profile blueprints I’ve seen. Please read his blog over 5 or 6 times (ok, at least once) before starting.