A SharePoint Saturday on Monday #SPConfRU
June 23, 2011
It was a very pleasant and unusual experience for me this week to speak at the SharePoint Conference Russia – 2011. The conference was awesome and the crowd was much more interested in SharePoint than I was expecting. My session was the last before conference wrap up, and we stayed for almost half hour after the session for Q&A! The biggest challenge for me – surprisingly – was to keep speaking Russian, and not switch to English completely when using all the SharePoint terminology.
Having been to a number of different industry events in the US and Europe before, I cannot help comparing this conference to some of those. As far as I can tell, SharePoint Conference Russia is very close to the SharePoint Saturdays. The event is completely driven by community, in this case – Russian SharePoint User Group, and it is completely free to attend. (Thanks to the sponsors, and I am happy that my employer participated as the sponsor as well!)
- SPConfRu had simultaneous live stream online from all 3 concurrent sessions. Never seen this at any other SharePoint event really.
- The food was absolutely awesome :-) I’m not complaining about the food at other events, but here it was way better than one can expect to get a free event.
- Unlike other SharePoint Saturdays, good part of the attendees were seriously looking people in good suits – IT directors and CIO’s, not a typical attendee for a free event. I think this shows there is a lack of (and the need for) SharePoint-centric events targeted more at the business users and IT decision makers in Russia. There are no SPTechCon or SharePoint Best Practices here.
- Finally, the event was on Monday – so they had to call it SharePoint Conference instead of SharePoint Saturday :-)
So once again I’d like to say thank you to the SPConfRU organizers – Oksana and the team did absolutely great job, and I really look forward to more events from the user group in Russia.
BTW, here’re the slides from my “Planning SharePoint 2010 backup and recovery – where do I start?” session
New Home for Quest SharePoint Community
November 10, 2010
Just a quick post for those of you who have been following the Quest SharePoint For All community. We have moved the site to Quest Communities home and it is now available at http://communities.quest.com/community/sharepointforall.
I just posted my first blog entry there, a brief look back at the evolution of SharePoint administration and the challenges Quest Site Administrator has been helping to address since its first release in 2006.
So come join Quest experts, get insights from the product teams, connect with other users and the developers of Quest SharePoint products! And don’t forget to update your blog rolls and RSS feeds.
Book Giveaway: SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide
April 7, 2009
As promised last week, we’re giving away three copies of SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide, a book by John Ferringer and Sean McDonough.
If you’re following my blog, you already know about the new SharePoint community we (Quest Software) have launched at www.SharePointForAll.com. So I want to try and use this opportunity to bring more good people to the community.
To win your free copy of the book, you need to:
- Join the SharePoint For All community if you’re not a registered member yet. It’s very simple, but gives you access to the forums and downloads on the site. Downloads include pre-release Beta versions of Quest management and migration tools for SharePoint, as well as freeware tools such as SharePoint Disaster Recovery Advisor.
- Publish a link to SharePoint for all site on your SharePoint-related blog or on a publicly available SharePoint-related forum. It can be a link to the site’s home page, or any of the downloads, or any blog post on the Quest team blog, whatever is more relevant to the topic of your post.
- Finally, send an email with the two links to a special email address: get-a-book@sharepoint-recovery.com. Your email should include links to your profile at SharePointForAll.com community site and to your blog/forum post, and your name/contact info.
The first three winners will get the free copy of SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide. You can see my review of the book here, and read more about it on Amazon.com.
One more note, you cannot win the book if you work for Quest. Sorry, guys – I can lend you my copy if you want to read it :-)
Once again, many thanks to the publisher, Cengage Learning, for giving me this opportunity.
Technorati Tags:
book review, community, disaster recovery, Quest, SharePoint
SharePoint for all – new community site
February 25, 2009
Joel just anounced the new community site we’re starting here at Quest, SharePoint For All. We will try to use this site to share expertise, Quest product news, ideas, beta versions of new releases and even some research projects! Here you can also get first-hand answers from the product teams – our developers, product managers, consultants, – and of course your peers who may already be using the products.
All this is just getting started, and you can help us define what exactly SharePoint For All will become in the future. I encourage you to register and join the community now and get active on the forums.
The new community site also features the new Quest SharePoint Team blog. One of the recent posts there explains how Quest Recovery Manager for SharePoint fits into various different environments and allows to leverage existing backup infrastructure for granular data recovery. This is a follow up for Joel Oleson’s recent SharePoint backup and recovery webcast (see the recorded webcast here, and Q&A in a separate blog post).
So – watch the new team blog for the product news, and I will try to keep this blog for more generic SharePoint backup and recovery topics.
Free SharePoint Admin Book, Free SharePoint Admin Tools
November 13, 2008
In case you did not see Todd Klindt’s post about this, he’ll be giving away free copies of the new Inside SharePoint Administration book he wrote together with Shane Young and Steve Caravajal. All you need is subscribe to Todd’s blog and be among the first five to congratulate him on the book availability (see details in Todd’s original post). I’d also recommend you subscribe to Shane’s and Steve’s blogs. Just in case.
Good news for those who are not that lucky is that even purchasing the book you’ll get something for free. Every copy of Inside SharePoint Administration includes a CD with additional material and free evaluation copy of Quest Site Administrator – a great tool for centralized SharePoint administration and reporting. (Usual disclosure: this is one of the products I work on as a member of Quest SharePoint product group.)
BTW, Inside SharePoint Administration is available for pre-order on Amazon if you don’t want to take chances and rather would leverage Amazon’s guaranteed pre-order discount.
[Update, 11/19: The book is available on Amazon now, and Todd's book giveaway is complete. Congrats to the winners, and free evaluation copies of the SharePoint admin tools to the rest of us who purchase the book.]
Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, Quest, sharepoint administration
Joel, welcome to the team!
November 11, 2008
One of the most influencing minds in the SharePoint world, the most well known SharePoint blogger and evangelist, Joel “SharePoint Joel” Oleson has joined Quest Software. Specifically the SharePoint Product Management team that I am a part of. I am really excited. We met with Joel earlier couple times at TechEd and SharePoint Conference, but now this is a real chance work closer and get a fresh look at the SharePoint offerings protfolio Quest has. The only thing that concerns me is it’s probably going to be quite challenging to get hold of Joel even now, considering all the traveling he is doing over last few years :) but I’ll try my best!
Well, I guess what I am really trying to say here is to repeat Adam’s words: welcome to the team, Joel, and look forward to working with you!
Technorati Tags:
Quest
Speaking at ICS SharePoint Showcase in the UK
October 15, 2008
ICS Solutions, one of the leading IT solution providers and Microsoft Gold Partner in the UK are hosting a one-day SharePoint Showcase conference tomorrow, October 16 at their location in Basingstoke, England. There are about 10 ISV partners coming to the event to talk about their products, and I will be representing Quest Software there together with our Director of Marketing for SharePoint product line.
Sorry for the last minute notice (did not want to post this until I get the UK Visa), but as far as I know ICS has planned this conference to be the first in a series of similar events. Anyway, if you are attending the event tomorrow be sure to come by and say hello, or even better – book the 30-minute one-on-one meeting so that we have a chance to talk.
Technorati Tags:
SharePoint, Quest, conferences
“Converging Paths of SQL Server and SharePoint” Webcast
September 7, 2008
When someone downloads and installs Windows SharePoint Service with the default settings, the install wizard hardly indicates that SQL engine is being used in the back end. Is this a problem for SharePoint admins? And for SQL DBA’s? What happens when SharePoint grows in size and importance for the organization? Do the SQL DBA’s need to think about SharePoint backup and restore?
These were the questions discussed in a recent webcast by David Walker, ASP .Net MVP and specialist in enterprise apps architecture, and David Gugick and Doug Davis from Quest Software, where they are leading Product Management teams for Quest’s SQL and SharePoint product lines.
I missed the webcast but the recording is available for download the recording from Quest website. Although it was primarily meant for SQL Server administrators, it really helps to understand what common problems SharePoint and SQL admins are facing and why it’s so much easier to solve them together.
Technorati Tags:
database, Quest, sharepoint, sql
Backup and Recovery Solutions: When Do You Use Which?
August 27, 2008
I just came across a recent SharePoint Backup / Recovery Solutions blog post by Babar Batla, Principal Solutions Specialist for Microsoft. In his list, Babar has both Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007 and Quest Recovery Manager for SharePoint (and that’s the product I am working on). So do these products compete? Not really, they can actually complement each other! So, when do you use which?
With a recent release of Recovery Manager 2.2 we enhanced it to read and restore data from snapshots made with DPM as well as few other backup formats (see our web site for details). Adding this on top of DPM you can use the same snapshots in more SharePoint restoration scenarios:
- Granular restore with DPM is only possible for documents and sites. Recovery Manager adds restore of any SharePoint objects, from a list item or document up to a site collection (and everything in between!) – all from the backups you already have with DPM.
- Recovery Manager also gives more flexibility when the original server farm is unavailable: you can restore SharePoint data to an alternative SharePoint location or even a file share.
- In addition, organizations where backup operations are centralized can benefit from using tools like Rcovery Manager and DPM together, because this allows to separate platform disaster recovery task from document and site restore, and the latter can be delegated to application specific administrators.
Technorati tags:
backup Data Protection Manager DPM disaster recovery granular recovery Quest restore sharepoint
Operational Reporting for SharePoint
June 5, 2008
I recently wrote a new paper on how important it is to develop processes around visibility of SharePoint environment, and on what specific areas you might want to keep an eye. No matter which version of SharePoint you run, lack of understanding what’s in your SharePoint and how users use and access it can impact both the operational costs and organization’s ability to comply with security regulations.
Curiously, the topic seems to get more attention on the blogoshpere recently: Ron Charity posted about how SharePoint can become a risk from compliance perspective, and Joel Oleson just blogged about how the recently published version 4 of Microsoft Operations Framework applies to SharePoint practices, and where reporting fits into the story.
The white paper is called Seven Questions to Ask Yourself About Your SharePoint Environment and you can download it from quest.com. As with another paper on SharePoint recovery we wrote with Adam, I would really appreciate your feedback on this!
Technorati tags
SharePoint, reporting, compliance, Quest
