I have also found that I enjoy the business development side of things as well.  I love helping people.  I want to make my colleagues’ daily lives easier and I want to make our customers experience better.  I am always thinking about how to innovate and improve business processes.  I have been very busy, but it’s fun.

On top of my busy work life, Kristen and I are also planning for our growing family.  We are expecting our first child this Winter!  So just like the Nissan commercial, I gotta get a bigger car.  I’m thinking about an SUV, but we’ll see.

I am going to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in October and to SharePoint Saturday Denver in November.   My last SharePoint event was SPSNYC.  I finally got to meet some of my virtual SharePoint support team from twitter in person!  Kristen and I stayed a couple days and explored Manhattan; it was awesome.

So thanks for sticking with me.  I will have more juicy SharePoint content coming soon. 

While there are many emerging resources about this integration, the configuration of ADFS, local UPN suffixes, powershell modules, Microsoft Online directory sync, SSO, and other pieces can be a pain.   Since there are so many pieces, dependencies, and documentation to read through, I had to contact Office 365 support.  They were helpful in providing me a few resources which I will share in a moment, but ultimately referred me to their consulting division as they do not support the on-premise ADFS configuration.

Here are the resources they sent over:

#1 – A fantastic 50 minute video titled “Complete Setup Details for Federated Identity Access from On-premise AD to Office 365” by Steve Plank

#2 – A list of links to online documentation

AD FS 2.0 TechNet Article

AD FS (Product Information)

Office 365: Identity and Access Solutions (Microsoft Tech Ed Online)

Office 365 community (http://community.office365.com)

Plan for and deploy Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 for use with single sign-on

I was recently trying to provision a sub site in SharePoint 2010 Server Enterprise edition using the Enterprise Search Center site template,  until I ran into the famous error – An unexpected error has occurred.

To recap how I got to this point I performed the following steps.

1. Using the Silverlight site template picker I chose the template and entered in the site’s title and url.

2. Then I immediately witnessed this error:

3.  To the Cloud… 

In my research of this scenario I came across Paul Grimley’s post on this issue.

He states that to get around this issue, the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure features must be activated at the site collection.

4.  Lets test…  SUCCESS!  I activated the publishing infrastructure feature and I was then able to create an Enterprise Search Center site.

Corey Roth states that the above error may actually be presented in one of  two flavors of this error.   The first which I explained here, and another which is much more helpful – “The SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure must be activated at the site collection level before the Publishing feature can be activated.”  I’m not sure what dependency this site template has on the publishing feature, but I hope this will help someone else get past this issue.

If you are configuring SharePoint Foundation follow the first link until step 4, then switch over to the second link.

Configure the PDF iFilter for SharePoint Server 2010

Configure the PDF iFilter for SharePoint Foundation

It’s interesting that you must use a VBScript to add the pdf file extension to the Foundation Search Crawler settings.  I have tested the Foundation steps successfully.

We’ve finally got a SharePoint Saturday coming to St. Louis.  I have submitted a session to present on Upgrading and Migrating to SharePoint 2010.  I’m still working on the presentation, but here are some major points I’d like to cover.

• Preparing to upgrade (hardware, software, pre-upgrade checker)
• Pre-upgrade checker in depth, what it provides
• OOB upgrade\migration approaches from SharePoint 2007
• A quick demo of a database attach upgrade and the status pages in Central Admin
• Some potential issues (customizations, 3rd party software, Fab 40 templates)
• How to get around these issues
• Some other content migration approaches – 3rd party tools
• Feature comparison of Metavis, Metalogix, and Axceler’s migration tools

I hope to include as much information as possible from my experiences in SharePoint consulting and SharePoint hosting.  If you have any ideas on additional content I would love to hear them!  This is a work in progress.

If you live in or around the St. Louis area and you would like to network and learn more about SharePoint,  please join me for SPSSTL Saturday April 30th, 2011 at the Washington University campus.  I hope to see you there!

Video are now available from the New Zealand SharePoint Conference 2011.

Some great sessions from big names in the community.

Enjoy!

There have been a lot of web hosting companies recently throwing together new offerings around SharePoint.  I don’t blame them as SharePoint is taking off around the world.  Companies are starting to realize it’s power and flexibility as an enterprise collaboration software solution.  I worry that many organizations will try their first move to the cloud with these inexperienced providers.  I hope to persuade those of you who haven’t made the move yet to consider Fpweb.net as your first choice from the start.

So why Fpweb.net?

- We have focused our business and hosting offerings solely on SharePoint.

- We have customers all over the world.

- We are heavily active in the SharePoint community.

- Simply ask on twitter what SharePoint hosting provider you should choose, wait 5 minutes, and start counting all the SharePoint MVPs and authors who recommend us.

- We can help you choose the right solution to meet your business needs.  From choosing an appropriate SharePoint SKU, to building a scalable server topology, to customizing SharePoint in order to revolutionize and streamline your business processes; we do it all.

- We cater to individuals and organizations of all sizes and requirements.  It doesn’t matter if you are a 2-person startup or a fortune 500 company.

- We have an array of different SharePoint hosting plans that will allow you to take advantage of this awesome product at quite a price savings vs. an in-house deployment.

Do you simply want to save money in purchasing hardware and staffing?  No problem.  Do you want to host machines for training or demos? Check.  Do you need help designing a highly available SharePoint farm?  We’ve got you covered.  Do you want to install your custom solutions or 3rd party software?  Yep, you can do it here.  Do you want to integrate your corporate AD accounts into the hosted SharePoint farm?  Yes, you can do that too!  Do you have an on-premise farm that you want to migrate to the cloud?  We will assist you!

Here is a quick overview of our Hosted SharePoint plans:

SPF = SharePoint Foundation

SPS = SharePoint Server 2010

Multi-Tenant: SPF Starter and SPF Group

Overview: Browser Access Only, no Server console access.

SPF Starter is generally a good solution for: Consultants, small intranets, demo sites

SPF Group is generally a good solution for: blogs, sandboxed solutions, small intranets

Semi-Dedicated Virtual: SharePoint Foundation Pro and SharePoint Server Pro

Overview: Shared SQL backend, server console access to the SharePoint web front end

SPF and SPS Pro plans are generally good solutions for small business intranets with customizations, 3rd party solutions,  and low volume public websites.

Dedicated Virtual: SharePoint Server Enterprise, Duo, Treo

Overview:  These SharePoint 2010 Server environments combine or split up the server roles (Domain Controller, Web Front End, Application Server, and SQL Server).  You would have server console access to all servers in the farm.

These environments are generally good for medium sized intranets, public websites, and extranet collaboration portals.

Custom Environments:  HA, Geo, Custom

Overview:  These are fully redundant farms for  large intranets, ECM solutions, or large volume websites.  If your SharePoint solution is business critical, consider one of these.  These build upon the Treo and can include redundancy at all server roles.

Keep in mind that any of these hosted solutions are scalable and mobile.  Scalable in that more processing power can be added at any time.  Mobile in that each type of plan can be upgraded to a more robust option.  Also, I always recommend considering a smaller development\staging farm as well as a production farm.  This smaller scaled farm will give you a place to test your customizations and site modifications before deploying to production.  All of the solutions mentioned here are based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010.  We offer the same plans in the 2007 flavors as well.

I hope that this information has helped clarify what we do and our hosting plans!

If you would like more information please feel free to contact me with your questions and contact information!  I look forward to working with you!