Category Archives: BPOS

Zevenseas Produshare review

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In a previous article I mentioned a product called Tunnelpoint. Well they came up with something new: Produshare. I’ve been in the opportunity to test this, just a few they days before it was announced.

What is it
ProduShare is a product of codezeven (sister company of zevenseas). The same engine that drives TunnelPoint also makes it possible to do one click installs in your SharePoint environment.

The goal of ProduShare is to make a better SharePoint customization experience (no assembly). This platform empowers partners to sell and deploy solutions across SharePoint installations (hosted and SharePoint online).

So, I started off with login into the produshare website, with my account of Tunnelpoint.
I immediately went to the page which shows all the products they would be offering:

  • Demo weather webpart for sharepoint
  • Timesheet by Daniel McPherson
  • Stock quote site template
  • Preview pane
  • PreviewPane developed by Paul Grenier
  • Team Status Twitter like functionality
  • And… some MS Sample Masterpages (different colors)

I started with the Masterpages, selected one of them, and the site gave me a dialog in which I had to choose Sharepoint BPOS site and then just had to press Install Now :-) .
So I did and a few seconds later Sharepoint online looked like this:

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Great, for BPOS where I can’t get direct access to my server.
To revert back to your old design (mine was a standard blank sharepoint site), you just have to select the Masterpage again in Produshare and press the button [Revert Branding].
As you can see in the Sharepoint Designer picture below, they installed a few new MasterPages in your site (from now on, you could also change it from here.).

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So let’s try another item…the: Demo Weather webpart for SharePoint
This one display’s the weather (duh), and uses weather.msn.com

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you can even edit the location (as you can see in the picture above) and the degree type (F or C), by editing the webpart and changing the parameters: wealocations and weadegreetype.
Question to myself: Could I display the same content by using the RSS webpart?
Yeah, almost, but not as nice as this one above, at least not that fast. The RSS webpart just display’s the text.

I’m not going to go over every single product that is offered, I just wanted to show you the main picture here.

The nice thing of this all is that now you can act on this data. It is in Sharepoint, so you can create an alert or a workflow whenever your stock drops (with the stock qoute site template for example)

Pro’s:
- easy to use and install
- some nice webparts to use (and I assume this collection will grow)
- Nice interface

Con’s:
- using the Tunnelpoint site to configure your SharePoint environment (which is one click to many, but he.. who’s counting).

I just found 2 things

1. you configure your SharePoint URL’s in Tunnelpoint. So did I with my BPOS environment.

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As you see in the picture they say: “if Domain\UserName enter Domain in Domain input box”. I tried this several times, but the connection test constantly failed. I solved it by entering nothing in de [Sharepoint Domain] input box, and entering <username>@<domain> in the [Sharepoint username] box.

2.  When I want to view all products from all categories, I apparently do not get to see the new items. For that I have to select “New” in [Select Product Category]. 

BPOS Partner Guide Webcasts

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2 webcasts about BPOS.
Webcast #1 shows you how to create a trail account for your customer.

Webcast #2 shows you how to create a new Services Administrator and sign on with that account.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:42209624-f7e1-41d1-9830-f876a6937185&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Creating new BPOS Admin and Login with SSO Tool">Video: Creating new BPOS Admin and Login with SSO Tool</a>

link to original source

Tunnelpoint SharePoint Services

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With the help of Peter de Haas I found a few SharePoint specialists who have been able to design a very easy but powerful system to connect SharePoint to external services/data without the need to install anything.

With the help of the services they provide, you can do some nice things, for example:

  • post updates to a sharepoint list which then get posted to your twitter account (you could use this for a team all twittering in just one account).
  • Fill in an adres and a city in a sharepoint list, and they will provide you with the driving directions (google maps), from your location stored in your tunnelpoint account.
  • Import a RSS feed into an Sharepoint List.

I did some testing with our BPOS account, and this really works easy. Just a simple few steps you have to do to get it up and running. I tried to import my RSS feed into our BPOS account, it’s just a matter of minutes:

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and the result:

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You can try it out yourself @: http://tunnelpoint.com/

*edit
I did have some problems with the mobypicture services. After publishing this blogpost, I received a Direct Twitter message from one of the specialists of Tunnelpoint. He connected me to another person here in Holland, and within no time I got an email from him, asking me what the problem was. The problem is solved now (my fault) Applause.

Review BPOS Training

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Yesterday I followed a 1 day crash course on BPOS at QWISE.

It was just what i needed to get me to look into the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite of Microsoft. I already signed up for an account, but did not have the time to really look into it.

My first impression is that it is a great product, especially for small company’s which do not have a IT department and are considering to buy a server. If your company’s only needs mail, then this product is surely the way to go. You will also get document management (SharePoint) and Communications (OCS).

The exchange part of BPOS is really great. No on-premises servers needed. And it works like a charm.

SharePoint is less then you’re used to if you run it on-premises. Especially when you’re used to the enterprise version. No Excel Services, no enterprise data search, no My Sites. But this will be solved in a future release for sure. The D-version (dedicated) of BPOS can do more, but prices are still unknown (and you’re company must have +5000 users)

Office Communicator is also great. The only problem we had is that after changing our default domain, we could not authenticate with our new domain. Which is rather important off course :-)
edit: i just installed ocs and the login tool on a VM @ home, and the login with the new domain is working now.

Some things I wrote down:

  • only €12,78 (thx Peter) for an account, with a minimum of 5 account.
  • You can sync your AD and BPOS with the AD Sync tool.
  • To migrate your current exchange, you can use the Migration Tool. You don’t have to migrate with a big bang, but can do this gradually.
  • Keep note of the admin login credentials, it’s really difficult the get them again so write them down.
  • When you register the “Ship To” address is used to determine in which datacenter your data will be stored. For some company’s this can be important (legal issue’s)
  • There is only a sync between your AD and BPOS when you use the AD sync tool (which cannot run on a Domain Controller, Server 2008 or x64). Because no passwords are synced, this can cause mismatching between AD and BPOS.
  • you’ll get 5gb mailbox storage per user license and 250mb sharpoint storage per user license. Which you can divide the way you like.
  • The sign in application does not work on Home SKU’s (i.e vista home)
  • Bij exchange co-existance (on and off premises), you don’t have shared calendar’s
  • Mailbox migration (especialy from exchange 2003): watch your language settings. You could end up with 2 inboxes (inbox and inkomende email = dutch)

Great Product :-)