SharePoint 2003 task

Michael and I have been presented with a challenge involving SharePoint 2003, to attempt to resolve a very strange compatibility issue. A content editor is used to input text and images into a SharePoint site, it uses a Rich Text editor to format the text, for some reason the Rich Text Editor (RTE) will work perfectly fine using Internet Explorer 7, however it will not work in any newer versions of Internet Explorer or any other web browser. This is a very odd Error as it is assumed that Microsoft would try keep it compatible with future updates.

Along with the Microsoft SharePoint research, over the next few weeks we will be looking into this issue and will attempt to resolve it.

RE

Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise

We now have access to an extended trial of Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise Edition. This will now enable us to actively use and test features of the service that the University may upgrade to in the near future. We will now begin to look at complex workflows, integrating InfoPath Forms, and RSS Feeds amongst others. In a just couple of days we have managed to give the site some basic branding, after coming across many difficulties trying the same thing in the Small Business Edition. As always we will keep posting with our progress.

99.9% Uptime

“UK authorities are currently investigating Microsoft’s claims that its 99.9 percent cloud uptime is in fact true, after a series of outages left Office 365 users without email or communications.

The Advertising Standards Agency is investigating a complaint over “marketing communication on Microsoft’s website” specifically in regards to the uptime claims the company makes in its advertising material.” – ZDNET (http://lncn.eu/wxy6)

After only a few months of going live, Microsoft have already failed at meeting their 99.9% up-time guarantee, personally this comes as no surprise considering that BPOS was notorious for it’s downtime. Microsoft have already paid out refunds to all the companies that were affected by the outages, so they are keeping their promises concerning down time refunds but will Microsoft improve their actual up time or remove the advertisement?

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What does Windows 8 mean for SharePoint?

Last week Windows 8 developer preview was released into the world, users were able to install Windows 8 as their new operating system or install it as a virtual machine. One of the biggest new features of Windows 8 was the Windows phone 7 style front page view, the applications and widget ’tiles’ are made mainly from HTML5 and java which is a new direction for Microsoft, but what does this mean for SharePoint?

So far there has been no word from Microsoft as to what Windows 8 might do for SharePoint, but there have been some theories thrown around the internet as to what the new OS could do for SharePoint. One blogger (http://lncn.eu/eghw)thinks that it could greatly improve the SharePoint experiance. “Making Windows 8 widgets from SharePoint lists will be ideal to show important information to the user: Sales forecasts, New team members, Team workloads, New documents published, Internal news and many more.” This could make SharePoint administration much easier to keep up with on large networks, this wouldn’t just benefit administrators but all users, having lists be updated in tiles, allowing them to read announcements and access new documents directly from the Windows 8 front page, this would greatly improve SharePoint’s userbility in my opinion.

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SharePoint Online Vs SharePoint 2010 Server

We are still aware that a migration to Microsoft Office 365 is not definite, we have been hired to research the best migration options for the university. However, it appears that we have not touched on SharePoint 2010 at all in the last few months so we thought we might write a little about it today.

Today we have started to compare Microsoft SharePoint On Premises with SharePoint Online to see which has the most features. I will post the features that one system has but the other might lack, in a table here.

Feature SharePoint 2010 Enterprise SharePoint Online
SharePoint Time Jobs YES NO
Business Data Connectivity Service YES NO
External Data Column YES NO
Business Data Web Parts YES NO
External Lists YES NO
Business Data Integration with Office Client YES NO
Business Connectivity Services Profile Page YES NO
Records Center YES NO
Word Automation Services YES NO
Business Intelligence Center YES NO
Chart Web Parts YES NO
Data Connection Library YES NO
Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Services YES NO
Calculated KPIs YES NO
Dashboards YES NO
Decomposition Tree YES NO
Excel Services and PowerPivot for SharePoint YES NO
Many Search features (about 16) YES (FAST) NO
Single Site Collection Search NO YES
Secure Store Service YES NO
Web Analytics YES NO
Lightweight Public Facing Site NO YES
External Sharing NO YES
Office Web Apps NO YES

So there appear to be a fair amount of features SharePoint 2010 is capable of that SharePoint Online isn’t. However, do keep in mind that the list was extremely long and there are many features the the both of them share, this is just a minority really. Many of the features may not even be needed in the University environment, we will be looking into some of these features so we can better measure the difference between the two SharePoint options.

RE