Why I Love Office 365

Oct 212011
 

OK, so my company is a Microsoft partner, and we’re supposed to like everything that they throw our way right? That’s actually not true. I’ll certainly give most things that they do a fair shot. It’s also true that I’m willing to sacrifice a certain amount of capability for either ease of use, or for the way that Microsoft products work well together, but as I noted in a previous post, I only gave up my BlackBerry when Microsoft came out with a product that was worth using.

My company is small (currently 6 people) and widely distributed. Cloud solutions make perfect sense to us,and we have been using Exchange Online for over 2 years now. Our requirements for SharePoint went beyond what was possible in BPOS’ offering, but since migrating to Office 365 6 months ago, the  new SharePoint online fits the bill, and more and more of our corporate assets live there now.

UnlimitedViz is currently primarily a SharePoint services company focused on Business Intelligence, and a significant portion of those services involve architecting SharePoint environments at a lower level, which involves sizing servers, making resource decisions, etc. I personally love designing solutions and watching them come to life. We are certainly more than capable to maintain our own SharePoint infrastructure, so why would we want to use an admittedly more limited version of the product that is maintained by someone else?

Pretty much because it’s maintained by someone else.

As mentioned above we’re small, and we need to be focused on what we do best, which is providing services to our customers, and building product. Maintaining internal systems, no matter how good we are at it, is a distraction, and a significant cost, both capital and operational. The per user cost of Office 365 is pretty simple to justify from just a cost standpoint, but there are many more benefits that are brought to the table.

No matter what the location of a team member, they can easily access what they need to. Lync brings that down to the voice and IM communication level. No need to mess around with access methods, VPNs, Firewalls, Reverse Proxy servers and the like. We can get to our content easily on site, at home via whatever device we happen to need. Granted, I could set that stuff up on-premise, but now I don’t have to! I also know that my data is safe, and the performance is going to be good. Two months ago, Exchange online suffered an outage for about two hours (the only hiccup I’ve experienced so far). My initial reaction was “what can I do to fix this”, but that was quickly superseded by  “It’s not my problem to fix”, so I just sat back and got other work done.

As we bring more customers onto Office 365, supporting them just gets simpler. A simple client request can be acted upon immediately by launching a browser window, and connecting to their site, seamlessly. With most onsite installations, I need to start a virtual machine, connect through a VPN client, and then hope that the correct tools are installed on the VM, or the client site, depending on the access mechanism. I try to keep a VM image available for every type of VPN client used, which is a hopeless and necessary task due to the incompatibilities between clients. In my opinion, the world will be a better place when VPN clients are eliminated (or at least consolidated”).

Customers using Office 365 don’t need VPN clients, and it makes it that much easier (and cheaper for them) for us to support them.

There a a whole bunch of great features about Office 365 (Shared OneNote files accessed via Windows Phone, browser and client is a good one, not to mention Lync), but the reason that I really like it is that it’s solid, it works, and it lets my business focus on using its tools, not maintaining them.

Upgrading From WSS 3.0 to Search Server Express

Sep 212011
 

About a year ago, I wrote a couple of articles (here and here) that discuss the merits of using Search Server Express 2010 instead of SharePoint Foundation. It really boils down to the fact that you get more stuff, and it’s still free. As opportunities for Foundation arise, we have been installing SSE and our customers are quite pleased with the result.

I recently had the opportunity to perform an in place upgrade of a WSS 3.0 site that we had built a few years ago to Foundation, and I of course decided to use SSE instead. As it turns out, the upgrade wasn’t quite as straightforward as I had hoped.

Normally, when you perform an in place upgrade from WSS to Foundation, you first install the bits, and then run the Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, which in turn detects the pre-existing WSS installation and offers to upgrade it. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen with SSE. The Wizard only prompted for a new or existing Farm. 

The next step was to uninstall SSE, and to Install Foundation, once this was done, the Wizard did detect the existing installation, and properly upgraded the entire farm. Once this was done, I thought “why wait?” and I went ahead and laid down the bits for Search Server Express and then for Office Web Applications.

Everything seemed alright, but when I tried to start the services on the server, they simply weren’t there. It also wasn’t possible to create the corresponding Service Applications for either SSE or for the Office Web Applications. After much head pounding, I decided to uninstall everything, OWA, SSE, and Foundation (CAREFULLY as outlined here..), and then Install SSE alone, joining it to the Pre-existing farm.

Once that was done, everything showed up properly, and I was able to properly start the appropriate search services, and OWA services, and to create the appropriate service applications.

So as it turns out, order of operations is pretty important in this scenario. If you want to upgrade from WSS 3.0 to Search Server Express 2010 (using the in place upgrade approach), you’ll want to follow these steps:

  1. Install SharePoint Foundation 2010 on your server
  2. Run the Products Configuration Wizard, and perform the upgrade
  3. Uninstall SharePoint Foundation from the server, removing it from the farm
  4. Install Search Server Express 2010 on the Server
  5. Run the Products Configuration Wizard, and re-join the existing farm
  6. Test the site to ensure that it’s functional
  7. (optional) Install any appropriate Service Packs and/or hot fixes for SSE
  8. (optional) Run the Products Configuration Wizard to update the databases (if step 7 was performed)
  9. (optional) If desired, Install Office Web Applications, and any appropriate Service Packs for OWA
  10. Run the Products Configuration Wizard to complete the OWA installation
  11. Start all necessary services, create the necessary service applications (search is a big one….)
  12. Create a basic Search Center and configure your site collection to use it.

Hopefully this helps any other folks in the same situation.

Bye Bye Blackberry

Nov 302010
 

It’s old news by now, but I didn’t want to write about this until I had a little usage under my belt. I’ve also been too busy to write, I have about 5 other posts queued up that I just need to get to, but I wanted to document my experience with my new Windows Phone 7.

In a nutshell, I absolutely love it. I couldn’t imagine going back.

I’ve been a Blackberry user since around 1996 with the original RIM 950. For years Blackberry was not only an innovator in mobile messaging, but their devices were rock solid. I don’t know how much abuse my Blackberries took over the years, including being dropped in water (yes that kind of water), dropped kicked, whatever. After a fall that cracked its window, my 8800 kept on ticking. The Blackberry was also top notch for message delivery through it’s BES for years. Other contenders came on the scene, but I always felt that all I wanted in a mobile device was email.

If you’re reading this, you know that I live in a Microsoft centric world,and although it would have been politically expedient of me to use a Windows Mobile device,I was never impressed with them. I was never tempted by the iPhone, which I regard as more of a toy than anything else. I was beginning to become interested in the Android, but remained leery from a reliability standpoint.

I was however becoming increasingly frustrated with the performance of the BlackBerry, particularly when it came to consuming web content, which was increasingly becoming a requirement. Web content was also very hard on the battery, and when travelling, I was lucky to get 8 hours without a charge. Another big cloud of doubt to me was the relevance of BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) in a world of Exchange ActiveSync. It just seemed like way too much overhead and licensing to support mail/contact/calendar sync.

Everything changed when I heard about the Windows Phone 7 this past spring. Finally, Microsoft would have a product that not only competed, but in my opinion leapfrogged the competition. In my opinion, RIM wasn’t doing anything particularly innovative, so I resolved to try it out when it became available.

My biggest concern is that the vision that was spelled out in the original announcements wouldn’t be realized, or would be in some way compromised (we’ve seen this before from our friends in Redmond). I was thrilled to find that this wasn’t the case.

I received my Samsung Focus 2 1/2 weeks ago. I removed the SIM card from my Blackberry, put it in my Focus, and the Blackberry (a curve) hasn’t been turned on since. The first thing that I was asked was my Windows Live ID, and it immediately started to fill up with contacts and pictures from Facebook and Windows Live. A quick configure of 2 Exchange accounts (one on BPOS and one on premise) and everything was centralized nicely.

I have had precisely no problems with it in the past 2 weeks. Most interestingly to me, is that I’ve experienced no dropped calls in that period. My running joke was always that it wasn’t a mobile call unless it got dropped at least one. I always blamed the carrier, but I’m using the same SIM! It’s anecdotal, but the phone itself is at least good.

Working with office apps is very very slick. I particularly like the way that it works with OneNote content in the cloud (on Windows SkyDrive). In fact, the phone itself is a really nice demonstration of the overall benefits of cloud computing, in particular device independence. Combining the phone, the PC, and the new EXOPC slate that I recently acquired, makes for a pretty slick demonstration.

It’s not perfect – I have yet to be able to get the Office hub to talk to SharePoint, something pretty important to me…. but it does render nicely in the browser.

Reliability is of course something of a question mark yet. I have managed to drop it twice with no ill effects, and I’m not really anxious to put it to the test. I am however pretty hard on stuff, and if it’s fragile, you’ll likely hear it here first.

I just find myself pleasantly surprised by the way it works as I discover them, and that’s nice. It’s also pretty nice having something from Microsoft that’s pretty much the coolest thing in its space. At least for now. A big tip of the hat to the designers from here.

I don’t leave the Blackberry angry… it’s served me very very well over the years, but we appear to have gone our separate ways, and I wish it well. Given that I live in RIM’s back yard, it really is too bad, but I have made my choice, and I’m very, very happy with it.

Office Web Applications Installation Issues–Be VERY Careful

Sep 222010
 

I’ve recently had a few issues with Office Web Applications (the other OWA). I’m of course referring to the versions that run on SharePoint. In all cases, the typical installation routine is to lay down the SharePoint code (either Server or Foundation), configure the farm with the Products configuration wizard, then install the Web Apps and run through the Wizard again. There are variations on this, and you can use Powershell instead, but in all cases, you need to run through the configuration wizard after you lay down the Office Web Apps code.

The problem arises when you start uninstalling stuff.

In the first case, I was working with an Enterprise farm, and I needed to uninstall the SharePoint bits completely, so I would then remove the server from the farm, uninstall the bits, and then re-join it. So I went ahead and did that,but hit a rather nasty error when I tried to reinstall the SharePoint bits – “The install in progress conflicts with a previous installed MS Office 2010 Server Product.”. It turns out that it was the Office Web Apps Installation that I hadn’t removed first.

No problem,right? I’ll just uninstall the Web apps and all will be good. Unfortunately, no. I went to Control Panel, Selected the Office Web Apps, selected Uninstall and got an error stating that Office Web Apps had already been uninstalled, and would I like to remove it from the list. Not cool. I eventually had to resort to hacking through the registry and removing references to the apps (it was a dev farm so no problem). The second time I did this (yes I know, fool me once shame on you….) I wound up having to re-stage the whole server.

So then logically, you should really make sure that if you’re going to uninstall the SharePoint bits, you need to be very careful that you remove the Office Web Apps beforehand (and run the Product Wizard).

This brings me to my next scenario. I was recently working for a client that had SharePoint Foundation installed, and wanted to search PDFs. It turns out that this isn’t possible with Foundation (it was in WSS with a registry setting), but you now need to install Search Server Express. No problem, it’s free, and it’s a better solution anyway. I downloaded it, and installed it, and guess what error I got? “The install in progress conflicts with a previous installed MS Office 2010 Server Product.”. Well, I’ve seen that one before. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Search Server Express doesn’t like installing on top of Office Web Applications.

This time, all I needed to do was to uninstall Office Web Apps. No problem, I uninstalled it from control panel and all looked good. I then ran the Products Wizard to make sure everything was going to be put back properly, and the first thing that it asked me was whether I wanted to create a new farm, or join an existing farm. Excuse Me?????

So here’s the other big thing to note. If you uninstall Office Web Apps, it will remove the server from the farm. It might have been nice to know that ahead of time. Luckily, it was a complete install, and I had all of the necessary credentials handy including the farm passphrase.

In case you’re wondering, yes, Office Web Apps went back on top of Search Server Express just fine.

So just to recap:

1. Never, ever, uninstall a SharePoint 2010 product is the Office Web Applications are installed

2. You can’t install Search Server Express on a server with Office Web Applications already installed (they can be installed after)

3. Removing the Office Web Applications removes the server from the SharePoint farm.

License State Error Joining a SharePoint 2010 Server to an Existing Farm

Aug 072010
 

I ran into an interesting error this week at a client site. They had been having server trouble, and that involved setting up a new instance of the operating system, and obviously all of the SharePoint bits needed to be reinstalled. Once that was done, I ran the Products and Technologies configuration wizard, set it to join an existing farm, entered the farm credentials and everything was good until Step 3 – where it connects to the configuration database. At that point it choked with:

“The license state for the current server doesn’t match the farm’s license state.”

My first impulse was that I had used the wrong key when installing the bits. Trying to join an Enterprise farm with a Standard server, or vice versa could cause this, but I was able to confirm that I had used the right key.

After a fair bit of head scratching, I realized that I had committed the mistake that I always commit with 2010, and I had forgotten to install the Office Web Applications. I had indeed installed them on the farm, and the rebuilt server did not yet have it installed. After installing them, I was happy to see that the server joined the farm successfully.

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