Your Entrance Ramp to Understanding and Using SharePoint Server 2010

Your task: Understand SharePoint Server 2010 and learn to use it effectively in your work.

But how do you get there? Where is the entrance ramp?

How to Scale Out a SharePoint 2010 Farm From Two-Tier to Three-Tier by Adding a Dedicated Application Server

Three-Tier SharePoint Farm

Microsoft provides some good documentation on different SharePoint 2010 Farm deployment scenarios in the TechNet Library.  One of those is about how to deploy a three-tier SharePoint 2010 Farm, which is the second most common topology for a SharePoint farm.

from an existing two-tier SharePoint 2010 Farm (the most common SharePoint Farm topology).

A lot of SharePoint Server Farm Administrators eventually get to the point where they need to scale out and the most commonly desired way to do it is to add a dedicated Application Server and move the SharePoint 2010 Service Applications to it (shown in the diagram to the right).

I have written a detailed blog post with screenshots on our SharePoint Help site that walks through how to add a dedicated application server to an existing SharePoint 2010 two-tier farm:

http://sharepointsolutions.com/sharepoint-help/blog/2011/02/how-to-scale-out-a-sharepoint-2010-farm-from-two-tier-to-three-tier-by-adding-a-dedicated-application-server/

SharePoint 2010 Social Networking: Part 5a - Bookmarking and Tagging Database

In this post, I will dive into the details of the social bookmarking and tagging features of SharePoint 2010.  As I said in a previous post, my aim with this series on SharePoint 2010 Social Computing is to bring a new level of enlightenment to how the features have been designed to work, their intended use, and benefits.
I am actually going to break this discussion up into four separate posts because of the depth of the subject area and the investment Microsoft has made in the features.  The work that Microsoft has done to enable social bookmarking and tagging within SharePoint 2010 is both broad and deep, and a single blog post on the subject would be too long.
Here is how I am going to break up Part 5 of my series into four blog posts:

Part 5a - Intro and Central Database of Bookmarks and Tags For All Users < You are here
Part 5b - Bookmarking and Tagging User Experience
Part 5c - Browsing Bookmarks and Tags
Part 5d - Searching Bookmarks and Tags

SharePoint 2010 Social Networking: Part 5b - Bookmarking and Tagging User Experience

This post is Part 5b of my SharePoint 2010 Social Networking series.  The other parts of Part 5 are all related to the Social Bookmarking and Tagging features of SharePoint 2010:

Part 5a - Intro and Central Database of Bookmarks and Tags For All Users
Part 5b - Bookmarking and Tagging User Experience < You are here
Part 5c - Browsing Bookmarks and Tags
Part 5d - Searching Bookmarks and Tags

Just Released: Our Cool New Site Provisioning and Governance Tool

SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce the release of our newest SharePoint 2010 software add-on, Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 (SPGA 2010). The “cool factor” on this one is off the charts and you’re going to want to check it out.

As an IT professional, you know how hard it can be to maintain the kind of control you want on SharePoint 2010 sites. New sites propagate like bunnies and can quickly get out of hand, often leaving you with a backlog of work to get them approved, created and provisioned the way you want – keeping your organization’s taxonomy, governance, and look-and-feel intact.

Not any more.

SPGA 2010 allows you to create site request profiles, from which your users can select the kind of site they need. You set all the boundaries on the front end, including workflow for approvals if you like. Then, when a user fills out the site request form, they set into motion an automated set of processes that quickly and automatically approve, create, and provision the site. There’s no way they can mess up your site uniformity or company standards, because you’ve baked everything into the profile in advance.

Is that cool or what?

Users are empowered; your workload is reduced; everybody’s happy.

Take a moment and look over the SPGA 2010 product page. You’ll be amazed at the difference that this powerful tool can make in your life.

Expand Your Workflow Creation Options and “Power Up” Your Workflows

SharePoint Solutions announces the release of our newest software product: Workflow Essentials 2010 (WE2010).

Once installed to your SharePoint server, Workflow Essentials snaps right into SharePoint Designer 2010’s Workflow Designer “Activities” and “Conditions” to give you nearly double the workflow creation possibilities.

SharePoint 2010 Training? Here's the Place to Start.

Your organization is implementing SharePoint 2010, and you need to learn to use it.

Where do you start?

SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce our brand new introductory course in the basics of SharePoint 2010. Introduction to SharePoint 2010 – Using SharePoint Foundation 2010 is a 2-day hands-on course on the basic concepts and basic features of SharePoint 2010. The basic features covered in this course apply not only to SharePoint Foundation 2010, the free version of SharePoint, but to all editions of SharePoint 2010, since the other editions are built on the foundation of the free version.

SharePoint 2010 Social Networking: Part 4 - Diagram

I have created a diagram that attempts to give the "big picture" of how the social computing features and processes in SharePoint Server 2010 fit together:

(Note: This is the fourth post in this series. For the first post and a table of contents, go here.)

Social Computing Processes in SharePoint Server 2010

As you can see the diagram is a mix of functional and technical. In general that is my goal for this series of blog posts as well.

Add SharePoint Reminders Functionality to Your SharePoint 2010 Implementation

Some features are just so obvious that it might never occur to you that they’re not included in SharePoint 2010. Doesn’t it make sense that since SharePoint has a collaborative calendar feature, and alerting capabilities, that it would also have SharePoint Reminders functionality right out-of-the-box? Well, it doesn’t. And that lack has bothered people for quite some time. There just hasn’t been a really slick, elegant way to get that functionality into SharePoint. Until now.

SharePoint Solutions has added SharePoint Reminders functionality in the new version of our Alert Manager product, SharePoint Alert Manager for SharePoint 2010. It bolts transparently onto SharePoint 2010 and the SharePoint Reminders functionality shows up in the interface itself.

Ever Get Push-Back on Implementing SharePoint My Sites?

This is not technically a post that is part of my SharePoint 2010 Social Computing series of blog posts. But, it is relevant to that series.

I've noticed over the past seven years as a full-time SharePoint educator and consultant that I get more push-back on SharePoint My Sites than I ever would have expected. This phenomena happened in 2004 with SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and it continues to happen in 2010 with the latest version.