Open Documents from Word and other MS Office Apps

This concludes the series on integrating Sharepoint into things you do already without visiting the website. Remember this:  Sharepoint is not a website. Sharepoint has a website

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Managing shared Contacts is one of the biggest pain points that every clients has. It’s probably the first painpoint they encounter when they hire their first employee. Sharepoint will allow your clients to provide access to all corporate contacts by permission. Allow the sharing of contacts between departments and people (or not your choice). It will allow them to take the contacts with them on the road while offline. It will allow them to access their contacts anytime from any device. It will keep them updated and in sync. And most importantly, they won’t get lost when an employee leaves or accidentally deletes them.

Here’s how we do it:

Connect a Sharepoint contact list to Outlook

Make a new Sharepoint contact from Outlook

Make a new contact in Sharepoint and view it in Outlook

Use Contacts when Offline

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Here’s how to do it:

Connect a Sharepoint Calendar to Outlook

Now that we have our calendar available to us, let’s see how to use it.

Make a new Appointment in the Sharepoint calendar from Outlook

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“People have wanted Office in the cloud. Office 2010 is now in the cloud. People have wanted the ability to have online communications, OCS, and Exchange online in the cloud, Live Meeting in the cloud. SharePoint Online, the fastest-growing product in the history of Microsoft to $1 billion. SharePoint will be the fastest-growing product to $2 billion in the history of Microsoft this next year and in the next 18 months.” – Kevin Turner COO, Microsoft at WPC 2010

So why should your clients use Sharepoint?

• Available from anywhere on any device
• Yes, that’s right. Sharepoint is a mobile app
• Recycle Bins
• Users and Administrators get recycling bins. Try that with any other network share
• Workflows
• You can automate paperwork processes and make it less painful for everyone
• Version History
• Sort of like “previous versions” in Windows only better because you can preserve every change in real time.
• Check-Out
• Prevent two people from editing a document at the same time
• Form Standardization
• Where is the latest expense form? Did everyone get a copy? Eliminate that hassle.

What objections do your customers have to using Sharepoint?

• My customers like Files and Folders
• They are used to Files and Folders but they don’t really like them
• We tried it, no one used it
• Did you make them go to the website? Then you lost them there.
• They already have access to everything they need
• If they can find it and if they are in the office to gain access to it. With ever increasing mobility they need access to everything from any device they have at hand.
• They won’t go to the website
• Good, they don’t need to
• My files are stored in a SQL database?
• This is your fear not your customers. You need to know very little about SQL to be a Sharepoint admin.
• It’s too difficult to use
• I will show you how to make it simple
• My clients are too small
• No they aren’t. Even two people will find value in Sharepoint.

Repeat after me. Sharepoint is not just a website

In the rest of this series I will demonstrate how to access the data in Sharepoint without ever visiting the website.

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So who wrote this blog and what do they do for a living anyway?
We’re Third Tier. We provide advanced Third Tier support for IT Professionals.
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Things not to do:

• DO NOT reset the password for the Sharepoint service accounts
• DO NOT change the password for the sharepoint services logon account
• DO NOT change the account that the app pool runs as

All of these things will waste you time and just complicate things.

the example I am about the give occurred on an SBS 2011 server but the procedure will apply equally to any Sharepoint Foundation 2010. The only change to the procedure that you will need to make is database name and sharepoint service account names.

In this post I am standing on the  shoulders of Adam Zou and Shawn Song, of Microsoft partner support who helped walk me through the process. There is a case record here: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/partnerofficesharepoint/thread/dec8834c-876b-4b22-9f0d-dc213a0f0fac/

Here’s is what you should do:

1. In SBS 2011, the problem stems from an expired password on the account named spfarm. You might have trouble finding this account in your active directory. It is located in Active Directory Users and Computers, under My Business OU – Users – SBSUsers and is called Sharepoint Farm Account. This password has expired and you need to reset it. Reset it to a complex password that you’ll remember.
2. Next open Services.msc and sort by the Logon As column. Change the password to the one you just set for each service that logs on with that account.
3. Open the Sharepoint 2010 Management Shell. This is Sharepoint’s powershell console. Enter the the following: Set-SPManagedAccount -UseExistingPassword -Identity domain\spwebapp  Being sure to put in your domain name where the command string calls for domain. For good measure, I did ran this command for spfarm, spwebapp and spsearch.
4. Still in the shell, run this command: Repair-SPManagedAccountDeployment
5. Open an elevated command prompt and run IISreset /noforce
6. At this point you may want to see if everything is running, it may be and you might be done. Be sure to check your sharepoint website and the central admin site.

If any of the powershell commands gave you an error about permissions (which you’ll get if you’ve restore your server or your databases) then do this:

1. Launch an elevated SQL Management Studio 2010 and look for databases labeled as Suspect.
2. For each database labeled as suspect run the following SQL commands, replacing dbname with the full name of the suspect database:

ALTER DATABASE dbname SET EMERGENCY

GO

ALTER DATABASE dbname SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

GO

DBCC CHECKDB( Dbname, REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS)

GO

ALTER DATABASE dbname SET MULTI_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

GO

ALTER DATABASE dbname SET ONLINE

GO

Immediately following these commands you should see your databases come out of suspect status and sharepoint should now be working fully.

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Speakers are our own fabulous staff: Dave Shackelford, Cliff Galiher, Eriq Neale and Wayne Small

Our content has been selected by the guys to reflect the growing concern over compliance, business continuity, manageability and issues surrounding these that our customers are contacting us for help with. Case studies and examples will abound and they guys will show you how to configure the products they will be working with which including Exchange, Sharepoint, Terminal Services and Hyper-V. Expect the sessions to be intense with advanced material. Your brain will be exploding by the end of the day.

I’ll be posting more and more specifics about the content as the event gets closer. Let’s have a look at what Eriq is going to cover first:

Configuring and Using Remote Desktop Services Remote Apps – A Love Story

Many people have heard of Remote Desktop Services Remote Apps (formerly Terminal Server Remote Apps) but either haven’t had an opportunity to implement the solution or just are not sure how to. In this session, Eriq Neale will show how to configure RDS Remote Apps on a Remote Desktop Server and then go over several real-world deployment scenarios. We will also go over how to set up RDS Remote Apps to work with Remote Web Workplace on an SBS Server. Eriq will include case studies on when and why this technology is used.

Configuring RDS Remote Apps

Publishing an Application through RDS Remote Apps

Publishing an Application with multiple configuration options through RDS Remote Apps

Publishing an RDS Remote App through Remote Web Workplace

Please make your flights accordingly and plan to join us for a full day of intense training on October 21st.

Shout Out to Hewlett Packard, Symform and Storagecraft. Without awesome vendors that get the small business space and are willing to invest in partner education, this event would not be possible.

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