Entries Categorized as 'Business'

Get the best communication tool for your Utility firm!

Date March 17, 2011

Now you all may think how is SharePoint beneficial for a Utility sector, right? For any industry, communication is the key passage for information sharing, decision making, so on and so forth. SharePoint helps provide this benefit to all the industries across the spectrum. Same payback it will provide to the utility industry as well. Using SharePoint Server 2010, employees or workforce of the utility sector can collaborate, communicate and manage documentation and data ingeniously.

Using SharePoint server 2007, you can update, share, and discuss data such as customer communications; employee authored content, interactions with service providers and experts engaged on projects; and news related to the company, that too all under one roof. Taxing to and fro of emails can be dodged. In SharePoint Site, staff and management will be able to glance through or make changes in the company content right at one place. Less storage space is also required. News stories meant for the company’s intranet folio which essentially needs to be analyzed by the concerned superiors before getting posted can be done swiftly concurrently at the central space.

Using another such solution from Microsoft, i.e., Dedicated Exchange Server, employees and employers can enhance their email communication. The main advantage using Hosted Microsoft Exchange is that it can be integrated with SharePoint site. It also allows for wireless synchronization, archival of emails, download of heavy attachments even on the phone, access to contact list, so on and so forth. Cheap Exchange hosting services are available in the market. Also, application hosting and free hosting templates for project management, content management, document management, etc. are easily available these days.

SharePoint is Great for Social Networking!

Date March 2, 2011

The corporate world today has deemed SharePoint Site as the full-bodied web solution, however there is much more to find out about SharePoint and its usability features. So why do you think SharePoint is the finest tool for social computing?

Whilst you make a social network by means of SharePoint, users, private spaces, etc. are by default being developed for each user you adjoin. These individual spaces are known as My Sites, which operates similar to other existing social network sites, however with additional features and abilities. The My Site feature in SharePoint allows to see and administer data, links, calendar, associations, and other private data.

Originally speaking, in SharePoint Server 2010, each My Site has an integrated blog. Additionally, users can generate new SharePoint sites and fasten them to an on hand Team Site. This provides a blog to the team that adjoins additional content and value along with their document repositories, calendars and lists. SharePoint also allows for blog archiving which can also be indexed. Thus, it makes the blog a storehouse for combined facts and data.

People Search is an imperative SharePoint Server 2007 feature for big or emergent organizations. It helps search and find exact people much easier. Several kinds of search features are available to use, for instance the By Expertise search feature. Also, search results can be differentiated by tabs such as job title or by social distance.

Microsoft SharePoint Services also has integrated wikis for information sharing and information and group collaboration on content. SharePoint Wiki features include approval workflows and permissions, document check-in, and version history. There is also an option to use hyper-V hosting with a dedicated SharePoint server. SharePoint price is also not too expensive.

Free hosting templates, hosted blackberry, and Exchange host are also available through SharePoint hosting providers.

Three ways to take down your competitors

Date October 19, 2010

Online business markets are fiercely competitive and site owners are becoming increasingly aware that they have to outperform their rivals in order to succeed. There are many ways to help your business to stand out from the crowd and be noticed and some of these methods are ethical and some of these are not.

If you are currently tempted by unethical techniques which may help you to do better than your online competitors, stop and think about it carefully. Unethical and even illegal techniques are not beneficial for online businesses in the long run. You may think you can use them, achieve results quickly and get away with it without any repercussions but this is highly unlikely. Whatever search engine optimization services you opt for, they reflect on your business reputation and brand too. Please tell me more! »

Small Business Server and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

Date October 19, 2010

Email hosting is very important for all kind of business—be it small, medium, or large. Keeping this in mind, consequently Microsoft designed its Small Business Server package including significant components like Microsoft Exchange in it. As you know the Microsoft Exchange Server features electronic mail, calendaring, managing contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage, etc. Microsoft Small Business Server package would have been incomplete without this component, isn’t it? Yes!

Hence, if you glance through, Microsoft has been upgrading the SBS versions over the period of time which also meant upgradation of the Microsoft Exchange Server. For instance, Small Business Server 2003 includes Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 which is 32-bit only and doesn’t install on the various 64-bit versions of Please tell me more! »

SharePoint Logging Database

Date September 20, 2010

SharePoint Server 2010, without doubt, is a bunch of exciting features and options, some of which were not available in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007. And one of the features that really enthuses me in SharePoint 2010 is the Logging Database feature. Logging Database, named as WSS_Logging, helps aggregate logging data or information from the server farm into one central location. SharePoint aggregates all of the raw logging data accumulated in the text files under the 14 hive and imports it into this wonderful logging database. This is the only database in SharePoint that Microsoft will be happy to let the developers directly read, query and build reports against it. For someone who spends time in front of customers helping them to maintain a healthy and stable farm, logging database will be a constructive app in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Foundation.

The logging database by default contains the following information from all servers within the farm and it is fully supported to query this database directly.

• ULS Logs
• Event Logs
• Selected Performance Monitor Counters:
o % Processor Time
o Memory Available Megabytes
o Avg. Disk Queue Length
o Process Private Bytes (OWSTIMER and all instances of w3wp)
• Blocking SQL Queries
• SQL DMV Queries
• Feature Usage
• A host of information on search crawling and querying
• Inventory of all site collections
• Timer job usage

The Logging Database in SharePoint Server is one of the many new concepts that will make the life of many SharePoint administrators quite a bit more enjoyable. So catch up on this soon! There is a lot of juice in the SharePoint family of products including Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server 2007, and associated free SharePoint templates!