Alex Pearce's SharePoint Blog

Thanks for all those who attended my session on SharePoint Governance for Education.  Remember there is no right and wrong – it all depends on your school.

Here are of the links I used throughout the day

• Learning Gateway User Group
  • http://www.learninggateway.net
• SharePoint User Group UK
  • http://www.suguk.org
• SharePoint 2010 Sneak Preview
  • http://sharepoint.microsoft.com

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Over the next 12 months Microsoft have some major releases of their main applications.  Many of these build up the elements of the Microsoft Learning Gateway.

Over the coming month we’ll have a look at the different products that are currently available for beta and a look at what is yet to come.

Here is a list of things that are coming from both the client and service side

Client

• Windows 7
  • The new Microsoft operating system replacing Microsoft Vista.  I’ve played with both the Beta version and RC and they are great.  General release is on 22nd October but keep an eye open on the news for RTM and release to Volume Licensing. 
• Office 2010
  • The Technical Preview (beta 1) is currently out there for people who registered.  I don’t know if everyone got a copy but I’m liking the custom ribbon on all the apps.  I mainly use Outlook and I’m like the new features.
  • No date yet for release

Server

• SharePoint 2010
  • Being the main product in the Learning Gateway I am always looking for the latest news via twitter or on the newsgroup about SharePoint 2010.  You can see a sneak preview of SharePoint 2010 over at http://sharepoint.microsoft.com.  There are 3 videos at the moment, an overall view of SharePoint 2010, an IT Pro and an Dev video.
  • If you do use twitter, I search for SharePoint 2010 but Microsoft recently said the official hashtag for SharePoint 2010 is #SP2010.
  • Again no release date but if you want to know more information about SharePoint 2010 Microsoft say attend the Official Microsoft SharePoint Conference later in the year http://www.mssharepointconference.com/
• Exchange 2010
  • Exchange 2010 went to Public Beta a few months ago and you can download this from http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/try-it.aspx .  Not many people know that Exchange 2010 (codenamed Exchange 14) has been used by Microsoft for about 2 years now.  Live@edu has over 2 million accounts that run Exchange 2010 and a lot of other Microsoft mail services available online are also Exchange 2010.  This tell me that if Microsoft are prepared to use it externally to customers, the product is in a very good state in this first public beta
• TMG
  • Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) is the next version of ISA 2006.  ISA 2006 can’t be installed on Windows 2008 due to the changes in the security framework so Microsoft have replaced the product with TMG.  http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/edgesecurity/isaserver/en/us/tmg-mbe-faq.aspx
• Office Communications Server 2007 R2
  • Released in February 2009, Office Communications 2007 R2 increase the functionality of the original 2007 product with its phone system.  I recently had a Microsoft employee in my office who made a call with his OCS and used the internet to connect to Microsoft HQ before then making the call externally.
• Office Web Apps
  • The technology has been around for a while now with Google Apps but Microsoft made some major announcements at the World Partner Conference on the 13th July about Office Web Applications.  Have a look here http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-13Office2010WPCPR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases 
  • No release date yet

Over the coming weeks and months we’ll take a deeper look into each of these product and how they can be used from an education point of view and how they fit into the next version of the Microsoft Learning Gateway 

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Richard and I would just like to thank everyone who turned up to the first Learning Gateway Conference during the week.

The event was a massive success and I hope you found the day as useful as we hoped it would for you.  I want to thank all the speakers and all my friends who helped on the day.

We will keep you updated about the next one.  We have ideas but nothing is confirmed yet.

Watch this space.

Thanks again

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The Learning Gateway Conference is focused mainly for education but there are at least 10 reasons why you, as IT Pro’s should attend which would benefit your environment.

1. Simple really – find out about great innovative technologies being used in education
2. Session 1 – Maintaining your SharePoint
   Steve Smith will talk about best practices for your SharePoint environments, SQL, patching etc.  These are the best practices for education, health and any small or medium sized SharePoint farms
3. Session 2 – Unified Communications for the Learning Gateway
   Hear Nathan Winters talk about the Microsoft Unified Communications, Office Communications Server, Live Meeting, Group Chat and Exchange.  All these are used in small and medium sized businesses.  Again for any industry.
4. Session 3 – Sites and Structure
   Andrew Woodward will talk about different site templates you can use and how to structure your site properly with content databases.
5. Session 4 – Branding
   Whether you are a school or business you still need you site to be branded well.  Hear Penny talk about how to brand your site.
6. Session 5 – What else can you do with the Learning Gateway
   A session that looks at what else can be done with SharePoint.  Can you benefit from some of these features in your business?  Do they give you ideas for your environment?
7. Ask the exports!
8. Hear a great keynote speakers – Steve Beswick, Microsoft's Director of Education
9. Meeting with suppliers that work in both education and business
10. COME TO SHAREPINT!!!!  We’ll meet in The Bell bar at the Belfry afterwards.

All that for £150 – not to be missed

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With in the next 2 weeks Microsoft are hosting a online conference.

I’ve personally not attended a online conference yet but I guess we all have to start somewhere.

There’s a good agenda for the day which includes Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2 and OCS 2007 R2.  Viral who is someone I have got to know quite well at Microsoft is talking about SharePoint while Emma Healey is also talking about Virtualisation.

If you are available for the day or maybe it’s something to setup in the office so the whole team and listen and watch, register here. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/dd819085.aspx

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Thanks to everyone who attended the EduGeek Conference last week.

I had a great time standing up and presenting to you and hope to do it again soon.

I’ve uploaded my slides here on SlideShare and feel free to email me with any questions.

The link to the Learning Gateway Conference is http://www.learninggatewayconference.co.uk

A.

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Tomorrow I'm speaking at the Edugeek Conference in the UK.

I've put together a new presentation called `SharePoint Governance for Education' and hope this can be a great start to anyone who is looking at implementing SharePoint at their school. Maybe by listening to my presentation you will find that you have missed something in your environment and you can go back and implement something new which will drive your user adoption further.

I'll post my slides onto slideshare after the conference so you can view them if you can't attend the conference

Very much looking forward to the presentation and look forward to seeing many of you there.

A.

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Over the past few months I’ve been working on building a new user group. 

The Learning Gateway User Group is a new community site for education schools/organisations to blog about what they are doing, share their experiences in the class room and their technical knowledge with the Microsoft Learning Gateway.  Of course it’s not all Microsoft which is why its more known as the Learning Gateway as you can integrate a lot more than just Microsoft products like library systems and VLEs.

Take a visit to the site, register yourself as a user and get involved in the new community

http://www.learninggateway.net

If you are school, college, company or individual and wish to blog on this community site please let me know

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Just a quick post that there is a SharePoint User Group meeting tonight in Nottingham.

If you want to come sign up at the link below and hope to see you there at 6.30.

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/18475.aspx

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So last week I was at the first European SharePoint Best Practise Conference in London. I made a few notes while I was there so I thought it was defiantly worth a post for you all.

• Have the ratio of 5 Web Front Ends per 1 SQL Server
• If you have user who use SharePoint – page hopping for more than 20 minutes at a time – you need to look at Kerberos authentication
• 1 Domain Controller per 3 Web Front Ends – ensure they are in the same subnet mask as well
• No more than 10 Web Applications per Farm
• A good quota for uploading documents 50MB.
• User RAID 10 for SQL Server – but yes it is expensive
• Pre-grow your SQL data file to the maximum size you want it
• Content DB size limitation – 100GB
• 64bit – in case you hadn't heard – the next version of SharePoint is 64bit only
• If you are patching your server – disconnect your ContentDB as it will save time on the patching. Almost save 3/4 of the time
• defrag your ContentDBs
• Ensure your farm is on at least Infrastructure update
• No CNames

Of course this isn't all my notes – you would have to turn up to the next conference to get all those

I was delighted to see so many people turn up to Andrew Woodward and mine session on SharePoint in Education – I reckon we had just over 100 in the room during the lunch time session.  Thanks to everyone who turned up and hopefully we will have more time for questions next time

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