A poster showing the components of Windows Server 2008 R2 has just been posted to the Microsoft Download Centre.
The poster contains views of the Active Directory Domain Service, Hyper-V, File Services, IIS, RDS, BranchCache, DirectAccess and Management. Plus a list of Acronym definitions used in the components.
Click the image or link below to start the download.
Organizations know the value of their information, and that using it effectively can be an advantage. But as organizations grow, understanding where that information is stored or which the latest version is becomes more complex. Finding a solution to this problem then becomes the IT Departments challenge, and in some cases they are seen as the cause of the issue in the first place. As IT Professionals, when addressing this issue the pitfall to avoid is to think that this is no more than a storage problem.
In fact, what is actually required is a way of:
In this 2 part post We’ll cover how deploying SharePoint into an organization provides the capabilities that address the requirements above.
SharePoint comes in two versions
For complete awareness, there is also another product that shares the SharePoint name, SharePoint Workspace 2010 (Formally Microsoft Office Groove 2007).
Both of these products share platform and management capabilities, but the first big difference is that SharePoint Foundation 2010 can download for free.
When we talk about shared capabilities within these products that enable collaboration, primarily we are looking at:
When we compare this list of capabilities to the requirements above we can start to connect them.
Extracting information from silos and making it more widely available.
Within a SharePoint site, teams can create libraries to store the information that once lived on their local computers or in emails. These libraries can hold documents of many descriptions, calendar information, custom lists and tasks, and even newsgroup style forums. All provide a means to move the information locked up in various silos into mainstream view. Once in these libraries, the search service in SharePoint can help people find this information quickly.
Achieving this in a way that remains relevant to each department or team of employees.
Creating one site for everyone has both advantages and disadvantages. The more your organization grows, the more congested a single site could become. While the storage engine behind SharePoint, which is SQL Server, is fully capable of handling the quantity of information being stored, people will be put off if the sites are not easy to use or if they have take much time to wade through multiple search results. SharePoint provides a solution to this through the ability to create multiple sites. Now each team can create a view of their information based on how they work best, but still share this information and make it available to other teams.
Enabling people to share information widely, yet in a secure and controlled fashion.
One possible reason information is locked away is that teams may not want to distribute it broadly. Documents may be in early draft form, or subject to change. To help prevent this scenario teams can allow access to sites and libraries using the security model.
SharePoint makes collaboration very easy, yet this ease of use is also something to be wary of, so planning how your sites and site collections will be created is very important.
In the next post we’ll cover more details about the capabilities within SharePoint.
In the previous post we looked at how SharePoint can help improve collaboration within an organization. In this post we will look with more detail at the capabilities in SharePoint that make it more than just a web front end to a file share.
As discussed before, each department could have its own site within SharePoint, allowing them to make the site more relevant and to present their information to the rest of the organization in a more meaningful manner. A Document library offers an easy central location to store information and share documents, but for a department the library offers more. One feature is Workflow; out of the box, SharePoint Server 2010 provides a set of predefined workflows that can be used to guide and track common tasks such as document review or approval. For those outside the process, what this means is that when they visit the library they will see the final documents and not ones that are halfway through a review cycle. If the built-in workflows do not meet your needs, you can also use Office SharePoint Designer to define your own workflows, or you can use Visual Studio to create code-based custom workflows.
For Workflow, or for that matter, Documents Libraries to work, documents have to be added. As soon as you start to post and process documents in this manner, security becomes a factor. Security in the form of, who can read documents, who can write to the documents, who can upload and download documents from a library, and finally how to recover documents in the event of an incident.
To address this, SharePoint security features include:
Up to now we’ve covered items such as document libraries for collaboration, but SharePoint goes beyond that. Social media sites have become a massive engagement platform in the world: Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, and Youtube all boast millions of users. SharePoint 2010 has social computing and collaboration functionality built in to enable organizations to use similar techniques to spread and share information. Since SharePoint 2007, the Wiki functionality similar to Wikipedia has been available.
Organizations now have an arsenal of tools available to them to improve collaboration and tools that are familiar to a new generation of the employees entering the workforce.
![clip_image002[4]](http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/alanlemarquand/WindowsLiveWriter/ManagingyourEntireWorld_D828/clip_image002%5B4%5D.png "clip_image002[4]")
In the previous two posts the focus was on management of Microsoft Windows based products, either in a physical or virtual configuration, by using the System Center products. However, the modern datacentre is not all Windows based servers and contains a variety of different hosts that all require management. IT Departments therefore look for tools that can simplify this heterogeneous management task.
For a number of years Microsoft’s management product, Operations Manager concentrated on just the Windows environment. With the release of System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 new functionality built into the product along with partnerships with key vendors now extend its capabilities beyond just Windows based servers.
The cross-platform functionality that is built into Operations Manager 2007 R2 now supports monitoring of the following operating systems:
What this now means is that from the Operations Manager 2007 R2 console you are able to see the state of these servers and perform remediation on them if issues are reported.
As well as providing built-in functionality to monitor non-Windows environments, Operations Manager 2007 R2 Connectors provide a method of alert forwarding to remote systems, such as an Enterprise Management System (EMS). These connectors are two way, so even after Operations Manager 2007 R2 forwards an alert to a remote system, the alert data is synchronized throughout the lifetime of the alert. The result of this data synchronization is a robust and seamless systems management environment. Such an environment enables cross-organization support processes to take advantage of the resources and strengths of formerly independent support groups.
Currently Available Connectors
These connectors coupled with the cross-platform extensions now go some way to enabling IT Departments to monitor their entire data center from one console.
*This connector can be installed and configured for potentially any remote system that is hosted on a Windows system or on a supported UNIX system.
Microsoft recently started running a series of chat sessions where senior Microsoft executives talk about the areas they are working on and where you get the opportunity to pose questions to them. You can pre-submit your questions when you register or ask them live during the chat. The chats are specifically designed with the user group leader and members in mind, together with other technical community experts. Each is an hour in length, repeated at different times of day so you don’t need to attend at 3:00am just because you don't happen to live in Redmond. Upcoming events include Microsoft executives from Windows, Office, Developer Tools, Exchange/OCS, Microsoft Research, Microsoft IT and more. In addition, we'd love to hear from you with suggestions as to who you would to hear from.
If you would like to register for any fire side chat, please go to http://ug.gitca.org/sites/FireSideChats and click on the register link. You can also find the up to date list of Fire Side Chats at the site, as well as a link to a survey so you can give us feedback.
Here are the Fire Side Chats we have scheduled for the remainder of 2009 and early 2010: -
You can find more details on each of these (and register) at