Digital Marketing Platform Group - UK, MEA

Video: WCM in SharePoint FIS 3/3 - Key Capabilities

2011-03-17T17:30:45Z

In this video we take a look at the key capabilities in SharePoint 2010 before taking a deeper dive into how these capabilities can add value to organisations.

Video: WCM in SharePoint FIS 2/3 - Fundamentals & Constructs

2011-03-17T17:25:40Z

In this video we walk through the fundamental principles and constructs that enable WCM in SharePoint 2010. We look at the ABCs of WCM in SharePoint before, exploring building blocks such as the Master Pages and Page Layout.

Video: WCM in SharePoint 2010 - 1/3 - Overcoming Marketing and IT Challenges

2011-03-17T17:18:00Z

In this vdeo we give an overview of Web Content Management, highlighting some of the challenges marketing and IT encounter today with the web content management process. Following on from this we take a look at how SharePoint for Internet Sites helps organisations overcome these challenges and satisfy the strategic objectives of organisations today.

Video: A former Dreamweaver Web Developer describes how easy it was to begin creating sites in SharePoint 2010

2011-03-01T13:30:32Z

Demo: Rich Media and Digital Asset Capabilities in SharePoint 2010

2011-03-01T13:07:00Z

The following demo takes you through the Rich Media and Digital Asset Capabilities in SharePoint 2010. In this demo you will exploring the capabilities of the Asset Library, Metadata Navigation, one-click page creation, and the Media Web Part.

A Detailed Overview of Why & How One Customer Has Built Their Site on SharePoint 2010

2011-02-11T18:54:00Z

In the following post Simon May describes how Applicable Limited, a Microsoft Partner in the UK has rebuilt its website http://www.applicable.com using SharePoint 2010.

Applicable Limited, a Microsoft Partner in the UK has rebuilt its website at http://www.applicable.com using SharePoint 2010 with the help of an extended team drawn from its own service delivery group, and associate Microsoft Partners with specialist development and design skills.

Applicable chose SharePoint 2010 because of the enterprise social collaboration and web site themes of the 2010 release. You can read from Microsoft directly about the capabilities of SharePoint 2010 so I won't repeat that positioning here, but this isn’t just a web site it is a response to the culture shift towards social enterprise collaboration we are observing in the community that includes our customers, suppliers, partners and competitors.

In building the site Applicable kept in mind several objectives:

• To clearly position what the company does, and showcase its capabilities in managing and hosting its own complex SharePoint 2010 farm.

• To provide a razor sharp focus on the purpose of the business, what is going on 'now' through social media including Twitter, YouTube and Linked-In; and case studies, services, information for the CIO or head of IT, and positioning about cloud collaboration services.

• To provide a focus area for key partners including Microsoft. Driving potential customers to very specific pages, with a call to action, to respond to our marketing.

• To engage with people outside Applicable; from customers, partners, suppliers, and even with competitors. Engagement is two-way. Static web sites do not foster two-way engagement. Consequently the site must be editable by people with no special skills in web formatting or HTML.

Together with our partners, we achieved all these objectives, and more.
There is one click access to the topics we are interested in engaging with customers about, as well as all the usual information such as links to events, offices, partners, products and jobs. The sites contain SharePoint 2010 blogs and enterprise wikis for specific information, and have different permissions pertinent to the teams responsible for them.

Curating content is being devolved to managers in the company who use the Office 2010 style 'ribbon' user interface in the browser and the WYSIWYG editor to edit directly the content for which they are responsible. Content owners do not require special knowledge of web content management technologies in order to achieve their objectives. All that is required is the ability to use Office 2010, and a web browser. The AJAX enabled interface means that most end user actions do not require page load, making for a very positive user experience.

To keep the main pages under control there is a light touch publishing workflow to ensure governance of the main content pages.

Keeping the content on the site fresh and engaging was a major goal for the SharePoint implementation too. Bliss Systems, a specialist development partner, built our Social integration with Twitter, and several custom format regions through special Applicable web parts for SharePoint 2010. Our Twitter feed @appl1cable is on the home page. The web part is reused inside the site to highlight focus areas and events by twitter hashtag.

The Applicable.com SharePoint site runs on a server farm, with an additional SQL Server 2008 backend, which is setup in a mirror configuration across 2 datacentres for high availability.
The SharePoint servers and SQL Servers are running Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit.

The SharePoint servers are virtualised servers which have been assigned Dual CPUs and 8GB of RAM each. The use of virtualisation combined with the ease of adding additional servers to the SharePoint farm, allows for rapid expansion of the farm if resource requirements increase.The content databases are stored within SQL Server on a NetApp SAN which also allows us to provision large amounts of extra disk space when and if required and gives very low latency access to the SQL content which is at the core of SharePoint.

The farm is hosted within a datacentre with 1 Gbit/s bandwidth and links to other international networks to allow for fast page loads when combined with the virtualised hardware. The front end web servers accept incoming requests and serve the site content, while indexing and searching - synchronisation with Active Directory and the central administration of the site is separated. The web servers are separated in a DMZ network to provide the best security and separate the website from the SharePoint administration and our Active Directory environment. Only limited traffic is allowed to reach the web frontend servers on port 80 and any traffic destined for our internal network will be filtered by an additional firewall level.

The combination of Applicable best in class service delivery capability plus specialist help from Microsoft Partners with the skills required has allowed Applicable to deliver the new site with the latest technology, hosted on its own high availability infrastructure, with a great set of engagement capabilities that can be adapted and grown to support business objectives for the foreseeable future. Of course everyone involved learned a lot as well, and that will directly help Applicable SharePoint customers as they look to move to the latest release to enjoy these benefits for themselves.

Angus Fox, Product Management , Applicable Limited @appl1cable

Podcast: Deploying SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites with Social Media Features

2011-01-25T15:23:36Z

How do you launch a uniquely designed, full-featured, social-media enabled Internet site in a month?

It’s fast and easy with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites.

Hear both sides of the story: from the client's business challenges and goals, to how the design and development teams at Blue Rooster created the solution to address them. Walk away with creative ideas for implementing many robust features of SharePoint, including: flexible templates, adaptive video streaming, simple content management, and social media aggregation tools.

http://bit.ly/f7NFuW

Some reasons to reassess SharePoint as your Internet Solution with the latest release

2011-01-19T17:00:00Z

SharePoint 2010 Hosting News have compiled a great summary of some of the key reasons why organisations, who initally refused to entertain MOSS 2007 as an internet sites solution are reconsidering in large numbers. The original arcticle can be found here: http://www.sharepointhostingnews.com/index.php/archives/339 .

I have distilled some of the key reasons into Problem, Solution and Benefit below.

Technology Rationalisation

Problem: Companies are incurring excessive costs to run multiple systems.

Solution: Leveraging existing intranet investment to power the extranet and internet sites in addition.

Benefit: Massive reduction hardware, licensing and operational costs.

User Rationalization

Problem: Productivity suffers when content creators have many interfaces to learn, navigate and switch between just to do their daily tasks. Training time and costs on top of this can amplify the problem.

Solution: Learn one single platform.

Benefit: Content creators become more productive which increases time to market.

Broad Platform Capabilities:

Problem: Today organisations are investing in a multitude of different systems just to run their internet sites. Separate search, separate BI, separate social and separate digital asset management solutions.

Solution: SharePoint bakes all of these capabilities into a single unified platform.

Benefit: There is no need to incur the additional, complexity, hardware cost, license cost, integration cost or operational cost of running an array of systems when one single system can achieve this.

Partner Eco-system:

Problem: Many organisations who have chosen niche WCM vendors can run into challenges when looking to recruit staff and partners. Often these vendor specific skills are scarce and securing them requires paying a high premium.

Solution: SharePoint skills are over abundant in the market. In the UK alone there are over 450 official SharePoint partners and thousands of consultants. On top of this information, guidance, tutorials and support is freely available online.

Benefit: Operational and development costs are greatly reduced and quick and easy to find.

SharePoint site wins "Best of Industry Award"

2011-01-12T16:39:00Z

Here is some useful collateral to help debunk any myths that SharePoint is not fit to purpose when it comes to building top class - compelling and engaging - Internet Sites.

Holder Construction recently won an award for having the best website in their industry for 2010. You can read all about it here:

http://www.tradingmarkets.com/news/stock-alert/irm_mat_northridge-wins-best-of-industry-award-for-sharepoint-website-1385569.html

I've extracted some great sound bites below that you can share with customers.

“The Best of Industry award was presented to Northridge for its design and development of the Holder Construction website which is based on industry-leading Microsoft technologies including SharePoint and SQL Server.”

“The "Best of" distinction from the Web Marketing Association recognizes the single top scoring entry within an entire industry. The SharePoint-based Holder Construction website won the Best of Construction Industry category.”

“Judged on seven criteria including design, innovation, content, technology, interactivity, copywriting, and ease of use. “

“effectively illustrates how SharePoint can be utilized to allow non-technical users to manage their online presence with ease."

Video: Creating Content-Centric Sites with SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management by Andrew Connell

2011-01-06T18:13:00Z

In this video Andrew Connell, SharePoint 2010 Most Valuable Professional (MVP), takes us through the planning and creation phases required when creating content centric Internet/Extranet facing solutions. We will see how SharePoint 2010 is architected and built to make it easier to create publishing sites that empower non-technical authors to make changes independent of IT.

In this session, you’ll learn how to create compelling content-centric sites using just the browser and SharePoint Designer 2010 including creating custom page types, page templates, modifying the user experience as well as enforcing certain business rules for content publication and storage.