A blog by Pilothouse Consulting
Cloud Computing
Office 365 for SharePoint hosting
Sep 12th
I decided to take a look at Office 365 to let Microsoft host SharePoint for us, but it turns that Office 365 wants to do a lot more thanjust SharePoint hosting for you.
Here is our current collaboration/document management setup
- We host our own SharePoint server on a dedicated server which is probably an overkill as far as the hardware goes, but it nice to have.
- We let Google apps handle our email. Google docs are ok, but I prefer SharePoint for document and list management.
- Our main public website uses a simple solution of DreamWeaver + SVN
The initial setup process for Office 365 is very simple. My initial impression of the admin page was really good.
I did not move email hosting to Office 365 as it was not my intention and Google seems to be working just fine, plus Android in it integration is great.
I was a bit disappointed with the way SharePoint was set up. It seem like you get one site collection and you are forced to have a top level site with a custom publishing master page. Collaboration and document management are supposed to take place at the sub sites.
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http://pilothouse.sharepoint.com – main site collection setup with a custom publishing master page. The intention here is that you would move your public website here.
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http://pilothouse.sharepoint.com/teamsite – sub site with a team site template
I believe that Office 365 would be better off just focusing on internal collaboration and document management instead of trying to build a so so external site on SharePoint. After looking around this setup I decided that I like the flexibility that we currently have with our SharePoint setup and will not be moving anything to Office 365 just yet. Also, I don’t have a Windows 7 phone to see how well the integration works; I assume for some organizations it will be important.
Overall, I never felt that the publishing feature was how you start selling SharePoint ot a business that has not used SharePoint before, but ti certainly seems a strategy for Office 365. We’ll see if they change it soon.
We recently updated our sharepoint training dates. Click here to see the schedule.
Office Web Apps vs. Google
Jul 1st
Recently Google updated its Google Docs service and Microsoft officially released Office Web Apps. Office Web Apps servers several purposes:
- Provides a free limited web-based version so that people can upgrade to the full client product
- Provides web-based editing of Office documents in SharePoint (If someone does not have a client on his computer or phone)
- Competes with Google Docs
Google “Document” is definitely more feature rich than Office Web Apps Word Document which is missing some obvious features such as:
- Inline commenting
- Version comparison
- HTML/CSS editor
What’s interesting is that SharePoint List concept is not present in Microsoft’s approach (well, it’s in a completely different online offering). Google, on other the hand, is trying to add SharePoint list functionality to its spreadsheet by adding Add/Edit forms mapped to rows in the Spreadsheet tables and a small amount of business logic. Of course, right now it’s nowhere close to SharePoint + InfoPath + Designer combination. Also, I am not sure that Google convergence will work out. It will be interesting to see what happens when people try to build more complex apps on top of Google spreadsheets or whether Google’s Wave paradigm will be more successful.
For using Office Web Apps with SharePoint, check out this video: http://edge.technet.com/Media/How-Microsoft-IT-Enables-Office-Web-Applications-in-SharePoint-2010/ The later part shows co-authoring feature of editing the same Excel with multiple people (just like Google Docs).
Intuit – when cloud computing does not work
Jun 16th
As a company, we rely on a number of Intuit services as well as their accounting software. Generally, we like to host our own applications if we believe that we can do a better job than the external provider. In the case of Intuit, they have been decent with their online services but not that great. I believe a big part of it is that they outsource too much themselves.
It’s amazing that most of their sites have been down for 20 hours now. This situation gives a bad reputation to online/cloud services.
