Monthly Archives: July 2008

SharePoint is on fire across the country and across the globe. More and more organizations, especially in the Federal government and defense sector, are adopting or digging deeper into SharePoint implementations.

SharePoint has now made the vital jump to Microsoft Office interoperability and has been doing it for enough versions to have survived the "will it continue to be supported?" waiting period that many companies use as a measure of whether something is safe to adopt.

If you are not well versed in what SharePoint offers, it is worth your time to pay some attention, as it might well be in your future. The big draw is that SharePoint takes a big chunk of unstructured data off the file servers and puts it into structured SQL Server storage. A lot of really useful extra functionality comes with it, such as content-based search, user maintainable meta-data, versioning and powerful collaboration functionality for things like creating project Web sites.

SharePoint is a glue technology that holds together database storage in SQL Server, Web provisioning for easy manipulation, and, as I mentioned before, easy integration with Microsoft Office. Support for lists and document versioning make it very easy to justify in project-based environments, where a portal for team coordination and document libraries for data consolidation make sense.

WSS supports blogs, which help subject matter experts share their insights without clogging in-boxes, calendaring for coordinating events and milestones, wikis that help form the basis for documentation once a project is completed, surveys to gain consensus from the team without a time-wasting meeting, presence to facilitate ad hoc meetings, and issue tracking to keep the problems with any project in sight. This is the Swiss Army knife of collaboration solutions and provides some major building blocks for customization.  Read more... (430 words, 2 images, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)

Share/Bookmark

Share/Bookmark

Searching the Internet returns a long list of cheap budget host providers, all offering hosting plans with prices ranging from free to under ten dollars a month.

The two most noticeable features of these plans are the large amounts of storage space and data transfer included in each plan. Consequently, these three items, price, storage and data transfer, then become the criteria the novice buyer uses to evaluate the various hosting plans; and they usually select the plan that provides the most storage and data transfer for the least amount of money.

What the novice buyer fails to realize is that there is another list of criteria that have far more impact on the true value of these hosting plans. These criteria are kept hidden deep inside these companies "Terms of Service (TOS)" and/or "Abuse of Service (AOS)" policies that greatly restrict how the storage and data transfer may be used, and greatly diminishing the value of the services offered at the budget price.

So what might the first-time buyer find if they were to search for and read the TOS or AOS? The two biggest restrictions usually imposed on these budget plans are the amount of computer processor time your site can use and the number of connections that can be made to your web site at the same time.

The processor or CPU time is basically the amount of time applications running on your site use on the server. Most people have observed on their own personal computers that the more programs opened cause the computer to run more slowly with each open program. Each program is calling on a portion of the CPU's processing power, which is a finite resource. Consequently, too many programs running at the same time can slow down performance and even bring the computer (server) to a total halt.  Read more... (1327 words, 2 images, estimated 5:18 mins reading time)

Share/Bookmark

Share/Bookmark