http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer

If you spend any amount of time digging into SharePoint farm issues – this tool makes it so much easier to filter and find what you need.

Here is a screenshot of the app:

This video tells the story of how and why Rackspace pursues Support as their primary product. I hope it inspires you to “serve your customer” today.

The Rackspace Mission from Rackspace Hosting on Vimeo.

So here’s the deal – when you publish a file or directory using the Rackspace Cloud Files product, you get a really nasty URL that references that asset in their Content Delivery Network (CND).

So when I share “files.deverter.com” I’m given the following URL from Rackspace: c3270232.r32.cf0.rackcdn.com

That’s nasty.  But I now have the ability to create a CName (or “Canonical Name Record”) for that nasty URL.

Now when I share files with friends or colleagues, all I have to do is upload the file to my Cloud Files account and give them the URL:  files.deverter.com/filename

Much better…. thank you, Rackspace!

Now, if you are curious how this relates to SharePoint (Six Degrees of SharePoint)…. Easy!  If I was creating a blog post with a video file of an interview I did with a SharePoint person at TechEd 2011 (which I’ll do later this week)….

1. Upload the video called “SharePoint_Interview.avi” to the Cloud Files account I listed above.
2. Since, I have made that location a “public” location – it’s shared throughout the entire Akami network.
3. Now inside of SharePoint where I want to use the video – I simply reference the following URL as the source (that’s right, I do not place that file inside of SharePoint) http://files.deverter.com/SharePoint_Interview.avi

So when a user comes along to view the post, SharePoint serves the master page, css, and text content.  The video file is served from the Rackspace cloud via Akamai.

Disclaimer: I am an employee of Rackspace – but that fact doesn’t make this feature any less cool!

A quick recap of the previous post is that until recently – all storage had but one location: SQL Server.

But now we have various locations where data (and/or processing) could happen in “other” locations.  Well what we will be talking about over the next few posts are:

1. What are my processing location options?
2. What are the determining factors in choosing processing location(s)?
3. What are my data-storage location options?
4. What are the determining factors in choosing locations for my data storage location(s)?

So here is the scenario:

A company with about 8500 employees is moving to SharePoint 2010 for their Intranet, General Council, and Team Collaboration.  So before we get into the details how how we got here – I’d like to show you the “end state”:

As you can see – there was a lot to think about with our business users to come to this point.  In the next post I’ll walk you through the decision process for making the decisions required to come up with a model like this one.

1. Location
2. Location
3. Location

This actually holds true when thinking about the storage of your data in SharePoint. For years – actually the entire life of SharePoint – we haven’t really had the opportunity to engage in the conversation. There was only one location for content storage and that was in the content database stored within a SQL server. Now if you think about the typical content that went into SharePoint in those early years it was all the files from their file shares. So over the past 10 years we have been taking content from what was the cheapest storage location (files share) to the most expensive storage location (SQL Server). Smart move, Micro$oft.

Fortunately, we now have a choice – several choices, actually. Through RBS (Remote Blob Storage) and tools from companies like AvePoint, Metalogix (StoragePoint), and now Quest Software we can not only define multiple storage locations for SharePoint content – but set rules for when and where that content is stored.

Factors that Impact where your SharePoint content gets stored include:

• Business Record Retention Plan – I learned about Business Records when working for USAA in San Antonio. They are a pain in the neck. They are vital to your SharePoint solution being successful. More on them later.
• Cost of the storage
• Lifecycle of the data
• SharePoint budget – does the well have a bottom or are your resources infinite?
• Importance of the data – is the content a worksheet planning for the company picnic or an SEC filing document?
• How the data is used

So this post is a continuation of the post I started here. Over the next few days we will be looking at how we actually implement a plan for SharePoint data storage locations.

So what do you need to do all of this:

• Office 2010 running on a PC (sorry MacFanBoy – Office for MAC doesn’t have the feature to broadcast.
• SharePoint 2010 (Foundation or Server)
• Office WEB Apps installed and running correctly (is that too much to ask?)

When the Office WEB Apps are installed you get a brand new Site Collection template called “PowerPoint Broadcast Site”.  This site collection is never intended to hold any content but to be a “broadcast point” for your presentations and to maintain security of the attendees.

Open you PPTX in PowerPoint 2010 and select File > Save and Send > Broadcast Slide Show.

The next window that comes up will ask you to select or add a Broadcast server.  Add the URL to the Broadcast site collection you created on your server.  You will then be provided with a link to the Broadcast site which will include a custom GUID that will only be used once.

In the screenshot below you can see the presentation being shown on my desktop – while I am receiving the presentation via a FireFox browser:

To take things a step farther and really scramble you eggs – here is a picture of my “presenter” screen in the background with an iPad and an iPhone both receiving the presentation. 

This feature is going to make it so much easier for employees to work together or with their business partners and customers.

Enjoy!

The Long Tail refers to a curve (see image 1) that starts with a high peak and falls off.

If we were talking about book sales at Amazon and the curve would represent books sales from the most popular to the most esoteric. So the peak might indicate the Oprah Book of the Month and the end of the tail might indicate The History of Locksmiths in Sweden. On a daily basis, sales at the end of the tail pail in comparison to those that Oprah’s recommends. But, if you take the total sales of the long tail and add them up – they make Amazon more money than the Oprah books. That’s the power of the Long Tail. Now, let’s apply this to SharePoint.

SharePoint usually comes into a business for 1-2 specific business cases and these cases are enough to justify the expense of SharePoint. But the reality is that there are many more opportunities where SharePoint can make an impact on the business and if you would take all of these opportunities and add them up and enable your employees to create the required solutions – they more than justify SharePoint. The hard part is educating your employees how to identify business cases and how to apply SharePoint to them. We will go into this in greater detail in the next post.

Now the business cases I am referring to are generally smaller and seemingly inconsequential. They are things like:

• How one department receives work from other departments
• How a team manages their employee’s calendar
• How teams collaborate
• How information is found (yes, findability matters)
  

Now as opportunities like these are folded into SharePoint and the teams that use them willingly adopt them – teams work together better and more efficiently. But as more and more data is moved into a single repository – there are additional rewards that can be gleaned by the business… but more about that in a later post.

So that’s what we’re going to be reviewing through this series of posts – how to get the rewards from the Long Tail out of SharePoint.

In the next post: I will identify the magic formula for success with SharePoint.