While some may think that the United States Government is pretty slow to react to technology trends, there is a recent site launch that indicates otherwise.  The U.S. Department of the Treasury site is Microsoft SharePoint 2010 hosted in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).  Check out http://Treasury.gov

Everyone loves lists.  Top 10, Top 5, 7 Habits, etc.  This is Seven Steps to PREPARE for SharePoint 2010.  There are a few lists regarding how to prepare for SharePoint 2010 out there, but all of the ones I’ve seen are for IT users.  It will include everything from SP2, Cumulative Updates, stsadm preupgradecheck, upgrading (or migrating) to 64 bit, and more. 

This list is for everyone thinking about SharePoint 2010.  SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint 2010 Standard, or SharePoint 2010 Enterprise.  Whether you are implementing SharePoint for the very first time, upgrading from SharePoint 2007 (or 2003), migrating from other ‘non-SharePoint’ systems, or adding yet another SharePoint farm to your organization, these seven steps are some of the most important tools for your SharePoint implementation.  What if you’ve already started your SharePoint project?  The good news is that it’s never too late to start doing it correctly.

1. Education.  For yourself, for your team, for your users – education is the most powerful tool available to you as a SharePoint user, architect, developer, or administrator.  Everyone learns at their own pace and learn in their own way.  Some people learn by doing.  Some people learn by watching.  Some people learn by reading.  Some people learn by being shown how to do it.  SharePoint has achieved the critical mass necessary to provide materials, classes, books, samples, websites, user groups, and can be learned in any of the above methods.  Microsoft provides fully configured Virtual Environments and trial versions of the product so that you can learn everything about the product before ever making monetary investments in the platform.  
    
2. Community.  Join the community.  Communities are based on collaboration.  SharePoint is all about community and always has been.  SharePoint is big.  No, really big.  SharePoint is global.  SharePoint is everywhere.  There is plenty of room for you to participate in the community.  The SharePoint community consists of local user groups, online user groups, dedicated blogs, dedicated websites, MSDN, TechNet, hundreds of books, literally hundreds of SharePoint conferences annually, and so much more. I’ve spoken at quite a few of these conferences, and my personal favorites are SharePoint Saturdays and SharePointConference.org.  Of course, I’m a little biased on the last one.
    
3. Governance.  If given the proper opportunity, SharePoint love will spread like wild fire throughout your organization and even beyond.  SharePoint is a powerful enabler that will free your IT staff from day to day configuration tasks and enable your business users to configure solutions that meet their needs immediately.  Great power demands great responsibility.  A SharePoint Governance plan should be put in place to include major facets of how SharePoint will be used both within and outside of your organization.  Your SharePoint Governance plan should be clearly articulated, clearly documented, and frequently revisited by your Governance team.  When will new environments be configured?  How will sites be managed?  Who will manage taxonomy?  When will Content Types be created?  When will items be archived?  IRM?  Records?  Search configuration?  Who will make up the governance committee?  How will governance be enforced?  Policy?  Workflow?  I recommend SharePoint Governor as a title because this role does not need to have an IT skill set.  This is vastly different from the SharePoint Administrator skill set and should be designated as such.
    
4. Integration.  SharePoint will integrate with your other systems.  That may be a bold statement, but I’ve yet to see any SharePoint configuration that was completely standalone.  SharePoint 2010 includes a variety of ways to connect to other systems, but the most powerful way may be the Business Connectivity Services (BCS).  The BCS components provide an extremely powerful tool set for CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations with external data (.NET, Web Services, SQL, etc.).  Give serious consideration and planning to system boundaries well in advance to simplify implementation decisions.
    
5. Hosting.  Determine where to host SharePoint.  For most organizations, this seems like a simple decision.  “We’ll just host it ourselves” is what I hear most often.  It is worth giving serious consideration to hosting SharePoint in the cloud.  There are wonderful fully managed hosting solutions available at a variety of price ranges.  These managed hosted solutions provide excellent service and support, ability to deploy custom solutions, integrate with your environment (whether AD domains or custom LOB systems).  The best of the managed hosting providers closely monitor services, apply updates, provide rapid deployment options, and take care of all maintenance as well.

   Microsoft BPOS is yet another option.  BPOS provides the option for SharePoint only, or you may opt to include a variety of other tools such as Exchange Online, Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online.  One of the options that suprises so many people that I work with is that you can opt to leverage your BPOS subscription for BOTH hosted AND on-premise licenses.  This means that you can host some of your environment in the cloud (using Microsoft) and host some of your environment in your own hosted environment.  You may opt to put you collaboration environments in the BPOS cloud while you keep your HR, contracting, and financial documents and tools on your in-house servers – all with the same licenses.
    

6. Configuration vs Customization.  Where are you going to draw the line?  This is a big decision that may include a heated debate.  Let’s define Configuration as manipulating SharePoint without using Visual Studio.  You can use the web interface and SharePoint Designer to manipulate the IA, content types, views, list structures, libraries, workflow, design, UI, data views, Business Connectivity Services, External Content Types, Themes, Security, and much more – without ever writing code.  Now let’s define Customization as using Visual Studio.  SharePoint provides extremely robust tools and utilities for completely customizing SharePoint to make it exactly what you need.  Custom authentication, custom workflow, custom web parts, custom solutions, custom UI, and much more.  If you can dream it, you can build it in SharePoint.  With such a flexible and powerful platform, what is the correct answer?  There isn’t one.  Some decisions are easy, but this one has a lot of options.  If SharePoint can’t be configured to meet an exact business objective and the business objective is inflexible, then Customization may be required.  The best advice that I can give is to refer to Item Number 1 above: Education.  Knowledge of SharePoint’s capabilities is the most powerful tool available to any SharePoint developer, user, admin, or architect.  I’ve seen custom code that was very elegantly implemented.  the only problem was that it was written to perform a function that SharePoint did out of the box.  The developer was given a requirement, and the developer knew how to write custom .NET code to elegantly achieve the requirement.  The only downside was that the developer didn’t have enough core SharePoint knowledge to know that SharePoint already had this functionality. 
    
7. Pilot.  SharePoint is a perfect platform for building, testing, and deploying using a pilot before formally releasing to your entire audience. There are two main types of pilots with software releases: functional software pilot or pilot users.  A functional pilot is a proof of concept – a ‘beta’ version of the software that could include the user interface, functionality, data storage, and user experience in order to test the scenario to ensure that the requirements can be achieved within the allocated time and budget using the selected approach.  This is also frequently referred to as a proof of concept.

   Pilot users are test group users that are tasked with using the application to give feedback quickly and accurately so that the solution can be tuned, updated, or fixed prior to releasing to the entire audience.  Pilot users could be using the full application or a proof of concept.  With an Intranet scenario, a pilot group could be a department or project team (other than IT) that will begin using the solution before it is deployed to other departments.  With social networks, committee sites, or member-based sites, the pilot group is a group of users to solidify the solution before deploying the template(s) and solution(s) to other site users. 

Conclusion.

SharePoint is big.  SharePoint has a big community with thousands of members.  SharePoint is a big platform that provides thousands of solutions.  SharePoint has a big ecosystem with thousands of MVPs, experts, consultants, vendors, hosting providers, and add-on providers.  Hopefully, these seven steps will provide a solid foundation that will help you implement SharePoint in the most effective, efficient, and correct way for your initiatives.

Today’s topic is Microsoft Exchange Online. I’ve been using the Exchange Online Beta for a good while now, and it is great! I love everything from the super simple web based interface to managing accounts and settings to the fact that it includes full spam filtering and virus scanning.

Exchange Online comes in two flavors (for now): Exchange Online Standard and Exchange Online Deskless. While the Exchange Online Deskless may be perfect for some folks, I am addicted to using Outlook 2007 so Exchange Online Standard is the absolute minimum for me.

So, what is so special about Exchange Online? First, I don’t have to manage Exchange Server. Most of the clients that I work with have IT departments. However, the folks that work in the IT department have much better things to do than to manage Exchange as a full time job. This is where Exchange Online fits a real sweet spot – allowing small to medium sized businesses focus on their business and not focus on running a data center and running an Exchange farm. From the easy to use web interface, an administrator can manage and provision mailboxes and distribution lists, manage domains, manage migration, and even manage mailbox sizes.

Migration? Yes, you can migrate mailbox content from either POP/IMAP mailboxes or from a premise based Exchange Server to Exchange Online.

So what else do you get with Exchange Online? You get excellent spam filtering and virus scanning provided by Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering and Microsoft Forefront. You get full integration with Outlook 2007, Windows Mobile Device access and ActiveSync (which will work on your cutesy little iPhones), and Outlook Web Access as well.

Exchange Online also allows you to use your own domain name. Furthermore, Exchange Online supports coexistence with your premise based Exchange Server.

Finally, Exchange Online has support for Exchange Web Services. These Exchange Web Services provide the Autodiscover Services (another win for the IT person), but also full web services for programmatic manipulation of Calendars, Availability, Contact Management, Messaging, Folder Management, Notifications, and Events. See the Exchange 2007 SP1 SDK for Exchange Web Services sample code.

I’ve recently been talking a lot about Microsoft SharePoint Online – part of the new Microsoft Online Services. As I’ve mentioned, you can sign up today for a beta version and get 5 fully functional seats and test it out for yourself. In fact, I’ve heard that there is transition support for folks on the beta so that come October they’ll be able to use everything they’ve done during the beta.

So, what exactly is SharePoint Online? It is MOSS! It is not WSS. It is MOSS Standard in the cloud. I’ll say it again, MOSS in the cloud. MOSS Standard hosted by Microsoft and supported by Microsoft.

While I don’t work for Microsoft, I’ve read and heard quite a bit about SharePoint Online. This is my current understanding (please provide feedback):

• Up to 100 Site Collection per account (aka per business)

• 250 MB of storage per seat (beta gets 5 seats, so approximately 1.25 GB of storage spread how you want across 100 Site Collections).

• 5 seats will be the minimum…

• Single Sign On support (for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, etc.). The Single Sign On support of Microsoft Online Services will require another download , currently in Beta at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=01f6c0e4-f897-442a-8462-425f8edddad9&DisplayLang=en

It is MOSS Standard, but it is currently limited (surprised?). What does SharePoint Online not include? Here is a list of items that I’ve noticed so far…

• No Anonymous access!

• No vanity URLs!

• No My Sites!

• No custom code!

• No email enabled lists!

• No Presence!

• No Site Directory!

• No Business Intelligence (no Excel services, no BDC, no Filter web parts, etc.)

• Limited Search capabilities. Search works great within your site, but…

  • No People Search

  • No Custom Content Sources

  • No cross site collection searches

  • No admin of search/index/etc.

• No Content Deployment

• Missing Site Templates from MOSS

• No Publishing Site Templates

• No Search Center Template

• No Records Repository Template (no records)  

Wow, that is a big list of things that are not included. But there is an even bigger list of what is included!

WSS Site templates are there, MOSS Publishing Features are there (just no site template), Search is there, SharePoint Designer support is there, branding support is there, Workflow is there, Data View Web Part is there… Surveys, Document Libraries, Page Layouts, Variations, Slide libraries, Forms libraries, Mobile support, and great Office integration is there!

As you can see, there are many of great things included, and there are more features on the way. I would hazard a guess, though, that there is enough included out of the gate that will make a majority of organizations happy.

Microsoft Online Services is the hosted service offering by Microsoft. You can label this as SaaS (Software as a Service), but Microsoft actually seems to prefer S+S (Software plus Services). However you slice it, Microsoft is offering their products in several distinct flavors.

First, you can get Microsoft’s server-based products on-premise. This means that you host it yourself (either in your building, your data center, or at a co-location facility). This is the ‘traditional’ model that most of use every day. The on-premise model represents nearly 100% of the solutions that I’ve architected over the past 15 years. There have been a few exceptions to this rule (such as multi-tenant applications), but even in these rare cases the overall architecture was on-premise based.

Second, you can get their server-based products hosted by third-party companies. For SharePoint and Exchange and nearly any other product, third-party companies have been providing a hosted, SaaS, ASP-type solutions for years. I’ve used a few of these products in the past for a variety of clients with some success.

Finally, you can get Microsoft server-based products hosted by Microsoft. This is the Microsoft Online Services offering. This is new. This is ‘in the cloud’. This will change how we work with Microsoft.

Microsoft Online Services are available in two varieties today: Standard and Dedicated. The Microsoft Online Services Standard offering is a multi-tenant architecture. This is the perfect environment for many small and medium organizations. The MOS Standard offering offers fast deployment and configuration with no limit to the number of users (seats). The Microsoft Online Services Dedicated offering is not just a clever name; it is a Dedicated environment. Dedicated hardware, dedicated architecture, for businesses needing more than 5,000 seats. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to focus on the Microsoft Online Services Standard offering.

Microsoft Online Services Standard is currently in Beta and expected to be formally launched in October 2008. The Standard offering includes Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Office SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting. Each of these services can be purchased independently for a small monthly fee per user (per seat). There are also a couple of options with the Microsoft Exchange Online and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Online.

Exchange Online is offered as Exchange Online Standard and Exchange Online Deskless Worker. Both versions of Exchange Online are protected by (surprise!) Microsoft ForeFront and anti-virus and anti-spam filters. Exchange Online Deskless worker includes email, calendar, address lists, and is available only through Outlook Web Access (OWA). Exchange Online Standard includes both desktop and mobile support, offers Outlook Web Access, but also includes full Microsoft Outlook 2007 integration (this does not include Outlook 2007 license).

Microsoft Office SharePoint Online is also available as both SharePoint Online Standard and as SharePoint Online Deskless Worker. The SharePoint Online Deskless Worker includes access to the online portal, team sites, and the search. However, the SharePoint Deskless Worker does not include collaboration. This is basically a ‘read-only’ view into the SharePoint Online environment. SharePoint Online Standard includes Portals, collaboration, search and customized team sites. I would like to point out that this is NOT Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) but this is indeed MOSS Standard (minus a few items). This means that you do get things such as the Publishing features and much more!

BPOS, or the Business Productivity Online Suite (rolls right off the tongue), is a ‘package’ of the four core offerings in today’s Online Services. A BPOS seat gets you Exchange Online Standard, SharePoint Online Standard, Office Communications Online, and Live Meeting Standard. The Deskless Worker Suite is both the Exchange Online Deskless Worker and the SharePoint Online Deskless Worker offered as one per seat cost.

So, what does all of this actually cost? The good news is that it is cheap and that there are no setup fees.

Exchange Online Deskless Worker Seat per month: $2.00
SharePoint Online Deskless Worker Seat per month: $2.00
Deskless Worker Suite per month: $3.00

Exchange Online Standard Seat per month: $10.00
SharePoint Online Standard Seat per month: $7.25
Office Communications Online Standard Seat per month: $2.50
Office Live Meeting Seat per month: $4.50

BPOS Seat per month: $15.00 (38% discount)