Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

As you may know last week I gave a presentation at Microsoft Reading as part of a series of events showcasing SharePoint 2010, one of the slides in the deck was on the thorny subject of licencing prices, now I know from past experience that this is always a shall we say “lively” subject and I am also aware from the consultancy visits we have done over the past couple of years one of the most confusing and troublesome areas when it comes to making the decision to rollout SharePoint in an education establishment. So I thought I would be brave (Some would say fool hardy) and write this article on education prices for SharePoint 2010 in the UK and I hope that this goes someway to helping people decide and also clears up some confusion that seems to exist in the licencing world.

  I would also be very interested in hearing about education prices for this product worldwide so that I can update this post with more information and hopefully create a one stop shop before people plunge into the murky world of SharePoint licencing so any info gratefully received please comment or email me at dave@sharepointedutech.com .

 So here goes (Deep Breath) all of these prices I have gathered from the Ramesys website here there are of course many licence resellers available but the Ramesys site was the easiest to find the product details.

 You will require a SharePoint server licence which retails at £560.12 you then get a choice of device CALS or user CALS you DO NOT need both user CALS for adult or members of staff are £11.95 each and for your students that are going to use SharePoint £0.89p each, device CALS are also £11.95 each, another common misconception for schools is the need to purchase the internet connector licence this sells for between £4500 and £5000 and is another component that is not required by schools, Ray Fleming from Microsoft has also written a blog post to cover this and included a link to a document that covers the exemption of schools for the need of the internet connector licence here

 Also covered by your schools SharePoint licencing is parent logins these parents/guardians do not require user CALS and are covered by this letter from Microsoft here

So to summarise I have created a table of licencing for a fictitious school with 1000 pupils and 150 staff.

 There are also many ways to licence your school with Microsoft products including the Schools agreement or Campus agreement all of the prices I have shown here are based on perpetual select licence prices. More details can also be found at Ray’s blog post on SharePoint licencing here

A quick update:- Some questions where asked today via twitter about hosting a website on SharePoint and the internet connector licence well Ray Fleming came to the rescue with this information “You don’t need an external connector for a SharePoint school website unless people login. It’s fine for anonymous”

Todays Update (20/5/2010)

After looking into this a little more, it seems that a few things have changed with SharePoint 2010 licensing. As that’s just been released, I’m going to look into the changes, and then I’ll let you know how it affects this summary Dave.

I appreciate you taking the time to describe this simply, because I am sure there are lots of schools with similar questions up and down the country.

Ray

This is a small test post to try out the feature in Word (2007 or 2010) that allows you to post straight to a blog from word.

Make sure that in your wordpress admin section you have XML-RPC enabled. This is found under http://blogname/wp-admin/options-writing.php

Then in Word go to file (what they also call ‘backstage’), select Save & Send, Publish Blog Post. Fill out the fields such as blog URL and you’re ready to post.

Simple and useful, just what I like on a Wednesday morning.

  One of the big outcry’s in the Exchange world was with the release of Exchange 2007 and Server 2008 and the omission of the ability to backup and flush your Exchange logs, this meant that a lot of Exchange admins had to go out and purchase a 3^rd party backup tool, with previous versions of Exchange and Windows server all backups could be done with the tools built into windows, but this was taken away, but now I am pleased to say that this feature is now available again.

 We actually went out and purchased Backup Exec for Exchange which is great and gives you the ability to restore an individual mail from a user’s mailbox backup but is costly and if you wish to just do a quick backup to flush your logs is a costly solution.

 So how do you backup and flush Exchange logs with windows backup? Read on and all will be revealed.

 From the server running the mailbox role launch windows server backup from the start menu

From the backup interface choose “Backup Once”

Click next and choose “custom” you can choose a full server backup but for this example I will just select the data drive “E:\” that contains the Exchange folders.

Click on “Add Items” and select the drive you wish to backup

The important thing to note is to clear your exchange logs you must click on “Advanced Settings” and choose the VSS Settings tab

To clear the Exchange logs you must choose “VSS full backup” then click ok

Click next and choose whether to backup to a local disk or remote file share

If you choose the inherit option and have used this location before you will see another dialog box open as illustrated below

After you have clicked OK. to start the backup job running just click “Backup”

You can at this point click close and the job will continue to run to completion.

Please note the consistency check for Exchange does take a number of hours to complete on my Exchange mailbox server so please stick with it and it will complete.

Windows server backup may not be the backup solution of choice but if you run a small organization mail environment and just need a quick backup to flush your logs perfect and i am very pleased that Microsoft have listened to Exchange admins and put this feature back into Windows Server.

Now how about a Windows Server SharePoint Backup?

Today myself and Alan Richards from West Hatch presented a session at Microsoft Reading on different options for upgrade or migration with SharePoint 2010 and also had a great debate on virtualization using Hyper-V, and again should it be a wholly virtual environment or a mixture of both. We are presenting at 3 more SPEDU sessions over the coming couple of months but I thought I would share the slide deck with you that we used today. Any questions please contact myself or Alan via twitter, Chris also presented a session on SharePoint branding with Matt Hughes and their presentation can be found here

Myself and Matt Hughes from Samworth Acadamy had the pleasure in presenting to a group of teachers and techies about branding SharePoint. Slides are below, we deviated quite alot during the presentation but you should get the gist!

Any questions im @crmckinley and Matt is @mattmoo2

On the 24th June myself and Chris along with Darren White will be presenting a session at the SharePoint User Group UK meeting at Southampton university our session is titled “Our Journey to SharePoint 2010 Land” and we will cover the why, when and how we have moved from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 also we will touch on previous versions, as we have been using the product since SharePoint team services we will talk about the good bad and ugly in our journey. To book go to http://suguk.org/forums/thread/23655.aspx and see you there.

Dave and Chris

Here at Twynham we have had a case study written about us by Microsoft it’s all about SharePoint 2010. Click here or the image below to read it in full.

Dave and Chris are very pleased to welcome Cognitive as their first sponsor to the blog. We hope that you will find this partnership useful as we continue to blog about the world of SharePoint and technology. With SharePoint 2010 really beginning to take off we know that there are plenty of SharePoint experts around and also people in desperate need of these people, we hope that this is where you will benefit from Cognitive!

“Cognitive are delighted to sponsor the http://sharepointedutech.com/ blog; it was an easy choice really given how Dave managed to defeat the “Ash Cloud No Fly Period” to get back in time for Spevo via Twitter and the supportive SharePoint community!

Following Spevo and the imminent launch of SharePoint 2010 everyone is asking the burning question “When do I get to use it commercially?”  That’s where Cognitive can assist….

We work with a select number of end users, who are either planning an upgrade to 2010 or a product re-write to the latest version, and Microsoft Enterprise Gold level Partners adept at convincing Client’s to implement 2010. As  a key player in the expansion of Microsoft’s Enterprise Gold partners, and the exclusive staffing partner to several Microsoft president’s club members and end user clients, Cognitive offer you a variety of opportunities that will enable you to attain your desired career goals.

Our SharePoint search & selection practice has over 22 years Microsoft centric recruitment experience and, as such, you will be working with individuals who understand the Microsoft channel, take an active interest in your  existing circumstances and genuinely care about your career goals.

We look to ensure that your next move is the right one.

So if you want to ShareNews, ShareEvents, ShareIdeas, ShareCV or ShareCoffee then please get in touch.”

ShareNews, ShareEvents, ShareIdeas, ShareCV or ShareCoffee

If you have your nice SP2010 setup you may notice that when you go to open a PDF file it prompts you to save it rather than opening.

This is really annoying and would send everyone here at the school completely bananas! Not to mention the fact that we try to get everything on SharePoint only to force people to save it to their own area!

Never fear there is a solution. It’s in central admin.

Go there and click ‘Manage Web Applications’

Click on the web app you want to change, and go to ‘General Settings’

Scroll down the list until you reach ‘Browser File Handling’

Change the radio box from Strict to Permissive.

Click ok.

Go back to your PDF document and click on it – and it will open up without forcing you to save it somewhere first.

You may have noticed in the first screen shot there was no PDF icon. Well, follow this guide to right that wrong!