I’m not trying to be rude – but simply asking the question – “What will be different now that I’ve been to this conference?”.  My accomplishements were as follows:

• Fantastic strategic meetings with Microsoft on how our company interfaces with them in the future.  The result of these meetings will have long reaching “product decisions” at Rackspace.
• I met some great people who have the potential to be “Great Rackers” (that’s what we call Rackspace employees).  So I had some great interviews that will ultimately enable us to build out an even better team to serve our customers.  You probably already realized that I work for Rackspace Hosting.  What you may not have realized is that our core product is “Customer Service” – which is enabled via our Hosting business.
• We met several pre-customers who see the value in what Rackspace can bring to their company.  I love helping people.
• I reconnected with some good friends and made some new ones.  This is what “moves the needle” for me.  At then end of the day (or even farther off from that) it’s the people and the relationships we build along the way.  SharePoint will someday fade away (shocker)… but I’ll still be friends with Shane, Nicola, Laura, Heather, Eric, John, Randy, Katy, Scott, Matthew, Ted, Andrew, Chris, Larry, Jeneen, Susan, Rob, Fitz, Rick, Marcy, Erica, Per, and many more.

So – Take what you’ve learned and the relationships you made/deepened… and make a difference!

Screenshot of this blog viewed through WPTouch

This brings up the question that if I am supposed to be a SharePoint professional, why don’t I use it to blog?

Great question.

My answer goes back to one of the main reasons why SharePoint is so successful in the enterprise.  When a new app enters an enterprise it not only has to meet the primary functional requirements justifying it’s existence – but it has to fit into the larger enterprise framework of things like Security, Integration, and Compliance.

When I was an Enterprise Architect in my previous role I was constantly challenged to review SharePoint against it’s competitors.  I was almost always able to find “single play” provides who had superior features to SharePoint in that one feature. I was never able to find one competitor who could compete with the breadth of what SharePoint can do out of the box.

When an enterprise considers a new application – it has to consider how that app will fit into the enterprise framework – not just the key features.  When an enterprise brings SharePoint in – they can solve that problem once for the entire feature-set of SharePoint.  Now there are other benefits to having “everything in one package” – and that lends to SharePoints global dominance.

For the purposes of this blog – I needed a blog.  That’s all.  I needed it to be easy.  I get distracted enough and don’t need any additional roadblocks to getting a post posted

So for me – Worldpress won. Add to that the ease of adding WPTouch for mobile users – and you have another win.

So I will continue to post about how awesome SharePoint is and how to make it better using the WordPress platform.

Have a beautiful day-

Before we continue – let me give you my definition of Governance. 

Governance is the who, what, where, why, and when of SharePoint.

Taxonomy is in large part the “what and where” in governance.

In our earlier SharePoint environments when SharePoint’s capabilities were much more limited, our decisions about Governance were much easier.  You see SharePoint did less than it does today and consequently there was less data and less business processes in there.  We also had a lot less options when it came options of where to placed our processing and data.

Quick aside: have you noticed that I am using the term “hosting” less and using the phrase “processing and data” more frequently?  This isn’t an accident.  Given the options available to us today we have the very real capability to break everything apart. Consider the following:

Data

There are newer and newer types of storage devices available to us in a variety of price points which provide varying degrees of availability, redundancy, and management.  There is traditional “direct attached” storage drives that can be plugged directly into SQL to hold the data in your content databases.  Netapp, EMC, and others provide block-level storage for your SQL data as well.

Using Remote Blob Storage (RBS) in SQL or by using products from AvePoint or Metalogix SharePoint BLOBS (Binary Large Objects) can now be stored outside of the traditional SQL database.  With these options you could use:

• File Shares in your datacenter
• Cloud-based storage from companies like Rackspace, Microsoft, Amazon, and a few others.

Processing

IT data-center managers have all the usual suspects of servers that can be used to host SharePoint as well as the maturing market around blade-servers as well as virtualize servers running on shared processing resources.

In addition to the physical and virtual devices that exist to the data-center manager are a myriad of devices hosted (or managed) by 3rd party companies.  These include:

• Virtualized server instances running on shared processing devices.  This is what exists when we typically think of “Public Cloud Server Hosting”.  Arguably the two front-runners in this space are Amazon and Rackspace.  Benefits of this type of hosting are lead by the economics – it is very cost effective.   A downside is that the company generally doesn’t have much control of where their processing takes place and they can be impacted by other companies who’s processing may spike.
• Virtualized server instances running on dedicated processing devices.  In this case the individual company is the “sole tenant” on the underlying server.  The company also has sole control of the exact topology who what server instances run on what devices.  At Rackspace we call this a “Private Cloud”.  So the benefit of this increased level of control is offset by the increase in expense for this type of cloud hosting.
• Dedicated Physical Servers.  This is the traditional server hosting model that most are familiar with when thinking of “Server Hosting”.  In this instance you have total control of the device and the software that runs on it.
• Hybrid Hosting.  Quite simply – hybrid hosting is a collection of any of the processing hosting models.

So which form of data or processing hosting is correct?  If you have any experience with SharePoint then you know that most SharePoint questions are answered with “It Depends”.  What does the hosting decision depend on? Well in this case it depends on your SharePoint…             wait for it…..

Governance!

Now everyone drink!

In the next post I’ll start to connect these concepts with some wire-frames to help you visualize what I’m talking about here.

I have moved my WordPress blog over a Mosso account in order to give it a test drive.  I’ll post some thoughts about it compared to my last “shared hosting” provider.

But then, that’s me.

Jeff