Considerations in SharePoint Hosting
January 20, 2012
Finding an enterprise search solution that works for your organization is no longer just about securing the best solution, it now extends to securing the best hosting option as well. SharePoint is obviously the most widely implemented enterprise solution, but even after choosing a SharePoint installation, a decision must be made whether to host on-site or in the cloud. More and more customers are moving toward cloud hosting for reasons including security and access.
A blog entry, “SharePoint Cloud Hosting Explained,” emphasizes the need to secure an appropriate and smart cloud hosting solution:
When searching for Sharepoint Cloud hosting, companies should be sure that whatever hosting company they choose to work with, is willing to create a system that is tailored-made to their particular needs, if necessary. Some hosting companies will allow businesses to pay as they go or give them the option of purchasing a license. It will also be extremely important that all of a business’ data is stored on servers that are secure.
One third-party solution that has received accolades for its work in the cloud is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. While working as an alternative to SharePoint, or as a compliment to an existing SharePoint infrastructure, Mindbreeze is a smart enterprise solution that works seamlessly on the cloud. Read more on their “Search in the Cloud” page.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise and the Cloud fit together perfectly. The Cloud makes your business mobile; Mindbreeze finds its way in the Cloud. This intelligent search is available as a Cloud service. This means that, if you so desire, Fabasoft Mindbreeze can run without any installation whatsoever – we operate the search engine for you. All the data that you manage in the Cloud is made searchable by Fabasoft Mindbreeze. This makes Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise the center of excellence for your knowledge in the Cloud too.
If you desire to cut down on installation and maintenance time and cost, hosting your enterprise solution on the cloud is worth looking into. Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze and see if their solution and cloud hosting opportunities will work for your organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: More News on How to Migrate Your Content to SharePoint
January 19, 2012
Customization Best Practices for SharePoint Users
January 19, 2012
SharePoint customization has become a whole world, a whole community unto itself. The reason is simple, almost every feature of SharePoint is customizable. Furthermore, many specialists defend that SharePoint is only useful when it is fully customized. Out-of-the-box, SharePoint is simply a blank slate, an infrastructure.
Gale Pomper offers her insights on the topic in “SharePoint Customization Best Practices.” The piece is a white paper offered through Global Knowledge. While written before the SharePoint 2010 release, many of the principles still stand.
Pomper gives an overview of what can and cannot be customized in SharePoint:
It might be easier to define what cannot be customized because almost every aspect of the SharePoint implementation can be customized, including applications, look and feel, and web parts. Some of the more commonly implemented customizations are identified in the table below. But first, let’s discuss one element of SharePoint that cannot be customized – the SQL Server database.
Pomper goes on to offer her top ten suggestions for customization, as the case has already been made for the need for customization. However, the overarching question is why so much customization is needed in the first place. With SharePoint being such a highly used enterprise solution, shouldn’t developers have a good grasp on what is desired and strive to implement those changes?
This brings us to the discussion of third-party solutions. One we particularly like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Mindbreeze implements smart features out-of-the-box, saving administrators and end-users time and energy. One smart feature that we will highlight is the Fabasoft Mindbreeze query language.
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Query Language is a powerful query language by itself. Users can intersect document hits using an AND expression, join hits with an OR expression, restrict queries to metadata, and much more. Despite our powerful query language, sometimes you need to customize the query language to your own domain specific requirements. Because of this Fabasoft Mindbreeze provides an API extension point, which makes it possible to transform a given query. The possibilities are manifold: transformations can replace, extend or even remove parts of query expressions.
This is an example of a smart customization option. What SharePoint offers as customizable features are often features that should be included out-of-the-box. However, with a smart third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, customization is optimized for an enhanced user experience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: How SharePoint Fails as a Social Platform
January 18, 2012
SharePoint: Document Access Versus Storage
January 18, 2012
SharePoint is an information management tool, focused on organization and retrieval. However, the “storage” element of SharePoint is one often critiqued. Is SharePoint the best place to store documents, and if so, which ones? The SharePoint Pro blog takes on this question in, “Access All of Your Content Through SharePoint, Yes. Keep All of it There, No.”
The author states:
All content may be created equal, but it certainly doesn’t exist equally throughout its lifecycle. Some content is business critical, some is purely personal, some is connected to a series of workflows in a process and some is destined to get pushed directly into an archive, some files have a large footprint and some are measured in bytes. And in some cases content can share a number of these attributes all at once. My point is that we need to think about the content we’re putting into SharePoint, as in a number of cases above, it might not actually be the right place to store it.
While the author makes a good point about some documents being more pertinent to workflow than others, sorting documents based on their relevance is a time-killer. With a third-party solution, users do not have to worry about where items are stored in order for them to be accessed by SharePoint or by an accompanying third-party enterprise search. One solution that we like, Fabasoft Mindbreeze, pays particular attention to this topic in its “Winter 2012 Release Notice.”
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise 2012 Winter Release . . .enables all information that is connected to Mindbreeze to be displayed in Microsoft SharePoint . . . In this way not only information contained within Microsoft SharePoint, but also all other information that is available within the respective company, can be consolidated within one “platform.” Mindbreeze, therefore, delivers real additional value to Microsoft SharePoint in the form of an add-on. The Microsoft SharePoint search is replaced by Fabasoft Mindbreeze, with the added value of information pairing, which extends the search to the entire connected company knowledge – all on one page. So-called search-driven dashboards can also be created . . . All information of a page is displayed by Web Parts made available by Mindbreeze. A simple configuration is all that’s needed. The displayed content is always up-to-date and to the point. And after the initial configuration, this takes place automatically and maintenance-free.
With more intuitive and agile third party enterprise solutions being developed, less attention needs to be paid to sorting and organizing. Saving the end-user time equates to saving the organization time and money. Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze and see if its solution might be beneficial to your organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 18, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Is SharePoint the Best Web Content Management Platform?
January 17, 2012
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of SharePoint Hosting Options
January 17, 2012
A SharePoint installation is a grand undertaking, with two basic options: on-site installation or the cloud. Both options have pros and cons, and Gina Montgomery weighs them all in, “SharePoint Decisions: To Host or Not to Host?”
Montgomery sums up the issue:
Have you been scratching your head over the potential infrastructure investment that you’ll incur with your upcoming SharePoint Farm deployment? Are you feeling a sense of bewilderment over how you’ll have full control of your SharePoint environment if it’s not on premise? Or, perhaps you’ve been perplexed with how you’ll manage the around-the-clock IT support and overhead costs that come with the 24/7 monitoring and the recapitulation of OS upgrades and patches in your on premise environment. Well, the good news is that you’re not alone.
Montgomery does a good job of sizing up both options. While an on-site hosting for one organization might be best, another organization might choose to go with the cloud. She urges that each organization’s decision will be unique, based upon what suits their needs most effectively. However, we would like to throw out another option. There are third-party vendors that can meet an organization’s enterprise needs while also simplifying their hosting needs.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers different scalable options depending on an organization’s size and needs. Read more in, “Three Configurations for Dynamic Scalability and Deployment.”
In enterprise search, quality, usability and style are as important as relevancy of results and performance to engage your users right from the start. Let’s take a look at typical scale-out scenarios that become relevant when implementing enterprise environments with Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
The entry goes on to describe the customization options available via Fabasoft Mindbreeze depending upon the scale and scope of the client. Ranging from an installation that utilizes one single Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance, all the way up to a cloud installation, every organization will be able to have their storage needs met. The most useful part of this type of third-party installation is that Fabasoft will work with you to ensure that your bases are covered, while also planning for the future.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Make SQL Better than Ever for SharePoint
January 16, 2012
Quick Fixes for the Daily SharePoint Environment
January 16, 2012
Shortcomings in the SharePoint environment are plentiful, comprising a large portion of the enterprise internet chatter. We are always on the lookout for good tips and tools, hoping that it will improve the quality of life for many a user. CMS Wire devotes some attention to the topic in, “Lowering the Bar: 5 Information Management Quick Fixes to Improve Your SharePoint Environment.”
The author describes how he hopes his simple tips might improve the usability of SharePoint and limit wasted search time:
Let’s dive in to what I’ve found to be the most effective ways to improve a SharePoint environment through changing how end-users work with documents on a daily basis. These are not technically complex, but . . . they require a commitment from end-users to spend an additional 15-30 seconds during the document creation, upload or check-in process. And although we all know that users are notoriously reluctant to spend any extra time at all during these activities, if you frame these in terms of the time folks waste looking for documents they can’t find . . . you stand half a chance of getting folks on board for at least one of these — and doing even just one of these consistently will have a huge impact on the overall quality of your SharePoint environment.
He goes on to advise beginning document names with the file type, organizing top-level folders, and using comment fields for checking in documents, as well as a few others. Let’s bring some attention to the main idea proposed by the author. In order to avoid wasting time in SharePoint, the user must be trained to spend a bit of additional time on the front end. This is understandable, but it comes across as a workaround. We like solutions that are intuitive and timesaving all on their own. One we particularly like for this reason is Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Read more about their intuitive approach:
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise finds every scrap of information within a very short time, whether document, contract, note, e-mail or calendar entry, in intranet or internet, person- or text-related. The software solution finds all required information, regardless of source, for its users. Get a comprehensive overview of corporate knowledge in seconds without redundancy or loss of data.
More and more organizations are turning to third-party solutions for a better enterprise experience. Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze and see if it might meet your organization’s information storage and retrieval needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 16, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint Lags in Innovation, Development Cycle
January 13, 2012
In terms of web content management, SharePoint still lags behind despite its 2010 update. While there were notable improvements in many of the large areas of complaint: metadata management, multi-language, taxonomy, and basic web analytics to name a few, many shortcomings are still evident. Darren Guarnaccia tackles the issue for ZDNet in, “SharePoint 2010: a sheep in wolf’s clothing?”
While much of the piece is spent dissecting the major problem areas, here the author gives some grounding or basis for why SharePoint still falls behind:
Microsoft has gained some ground with this release, but it is still some way off the pace being set by the best-of-breed vendors in this market. If you believe the benefit of having a single integrated suite outweighs its various shortcomings, or if your requirements are relatively simple, then SharePoint may be a good fit. Something else to consider is the typical SharePoint development cycle of three years. While three-year product release cycles are normal for large enterprise content management projects, three years is a long time on the web. Entire new markets and trends can arise in the span of six months to a year.
Two concepts in the above statement are worth some attention. First, there is SharePoint’s position as a single integrated solution. It is worth pointing out that there are now outstanding third party solutions that work seamlessly with SharePoint, allowing the user to achieve the feel of a single solution while compensating for all of the shortcomings of SharePoint. We like the Fabasoft Mindbreeze solution and its SharePoint Connector.
Secondly, we agree that SharePoint’s long development cycle is one of its weak points. Again, referring to Fabasoft Mindbreeze, new products releases and updates are made quarterly for on-site installations and monthly for the cloud.
Continuous quality assurance and performance optimization ensure extremely short release cycles. We release a new Mindbreeze Cloud update every month.
Frequent updates (that are easy to install) ensure that usability and functionality remain high for all users. Perhaps SharePoint will start taking queues from some of its successful competitors and shorten its development cycle.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 13, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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