The new version of Microsoft SharePoint has a lot of new capabilities that make it appealing to businesses and developers. Ed Bott shows four of them that should pique your interest.

Over the years, Microsoft SharePoint has earned a reputation as a top-shelf, top-dollar, top-down working environment for Really Big Corporations. Companies that are big enough to hire small armies of custom developers and pay big bucks to integrators who can spend months putting together a SharePoint site. I’ve used a couple of those sites in the past, and they worked just fine. But I’m glad I wasn’t the one who had to set them up or keep them running.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised when I installed a beta copy of SharePoint 2010 last fall on a test server here. Compared to my experiences of three years ago, the experience was vastly improved. I found it remarkably easy to set up. More importantly, I found SharePoint 2010 equally simple to use, right out of the box. There’s still plenty of room for developers and integrators to get involved, but this time around they should be able to spend their time building interesting applications instead of tinkering with plumbing.

Last week I rebuilt a couple of servers using the final SharePoint 2010 code, which was released to manufacturing at the same time as Office 2010. If you have an MSDN or TechNet subscription, you already have access to everything you need; that was my starting point. A lot of SharePoint features don’t make sense until you begin using them, which is why I recommend setting up a small pilot site (use a virtual machine and it’s even easier). That way, you can quickly see whether SharePoint makes sense in your organization.

In this post, I’ll show you four areas worth paying close attention to. READ MORE

Usually, tuning up a PC requires a lot of work, spending much money on new components, or both. ReadyBoost can speed up slow or overwhelmed PCs without either one.

There’s no such thing as a fast-enough computer. No matter how hot your CPU runs or how much RAM you have, eventually you’ll run out of performance — usually, just when you need it most. Fortunately, Windows 7 comes with a cheap and easy way of improving system performance: ReadyBoost.

Windows 7’s ReadyBoost is Microsoft’s latest take on a very old idea for improving computer performance: caching. With a cache, you gain speed by keeping frequently accessed data as close as possible to the CPU cores. The faster the cache, the closer it should be to cores. That’s why high-end processors, like the Intel i7 quad-core CPU, have their own on-board cache.

Caching used to be easy. You used caching on uniprocessor, single user systems to free yourself from the slow I/O jail, whether that I/O was from the system bus to the processor or from the hard drive to the bus. As multiple-CPU and core systems became more common, simply placing fast RAM between system components with varying I/O throughputs was no longer enough. System designers had to contend with making sure that the available data to the processor was the real, newest data. READ MORE

Ever thought a product or a platform could “give you scalability?”  Now the availability of cloud computing is compelling IT shops to plan for new architectures.  And suddenly those who thought they had scalability, don’t.

If you believe that a scalable architecture for an information system, by definition, gives you more output in proportion to the resources you throw at it, then you may be thinking a cloud-based deployment could give your existing system “infinite scalability.”  Companies that are trying out that theory for the first time are discovering not just that the theory is flawed, but that their systems are flawed… and now they’re calling out for help.

“Tell you what,” the development tools vendor told me on the day Microsoft officially launched Windows Azure, “This solves the whole scalability problem forever, doesn’t it? Just stick your application in the cloud. Infinite scalability!”

Scalability, we’re told, is the inherent ability of an information system to acquire more resources and continue to perform normally. But before a business invests in any bigger or better resource, such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, or Windows Server, it’s sold on the premise that the resource can grow as the business gets bigger. The system will be just as affordable, efficient, and practical in five years’ time as it is today. For years, that premise seemed reasonable enough. READ MORE

Windows Server 2008 introduced a series of programs called RemoteApp that appear as if they are running on a local computer, even though they are accessed remotely. With Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, these programs can be grouped along with entire virtual desktop sessions, and both can appear in the local Start menu of your desktops. It is a pretty neat trick.

The result is that it’s easier for IT administrators to deploy and maintain remote apps. You can make changes to the apps in one place and the changes are transmitted to the various end-user desktops that are allowed to see them. RemoteApp also makes managing software licenses more cost effective, since you can have tighter control over who uses what software programs when. Finally, it makes it a more natural experience for end users; they can use the Windows search to find these remote apps, and they don’t have to do anything different to launch them compared to their locally-installed apps that are on their desktops.

RemoteApp isn’t unique: Citrix has been selling something similar for years. What is unique, though, is RemoteApp’s level of integration with the underlying Windows 7 OS, and how it can offer something similar for relatively low cost, too. (We’ll get to the licensing issues in a moment.)

To pull this off, you first need to update your Windows 2008 Server to the R2 version, which really means doing a re-install of a new server OS. Then you need to add some additional Microsoft software to your R2 Server, which will look like the following when you have everything set up.

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Cloud computing is everywhere these days, but one of its more mundane uses is in providing anti-virus (AV) and anti-spam endpoint protection. Here’s what these services offer, and the features you should look for.

The idea is that you don’t have to worry about your users forgetting to install the latest virus signatures or turning the protection off, or, as in the case of the recent McAfee fiasco, incorrectly tagging  a legitimate file as malware. The cloud gives you the opportunity to instantly see what is happening across your network and find out which PCs are protected.

Cloud-based AV simplifies deploying new PCs, too, because there is less software to install on each one. AV scans happen more regularly, since they are initiated by the cloud service and (again) they don’t depend on individual user behavior. Cloud AV solutions cost about the same or in some cases less than the traditional desktop AV software.

The cloud AV services all operate the same way: A small agent or client piece of software runs on each desktop, and makes a connection to the central monitoring server in the cloud. As long as the desktop user has an Internet connection, updates to the virus signatures happen automatically and frequently. The client uses as little memory footprint as possible, since most of the heavy lifting (in terms of protection and processing) happens in the cloud. READ MORE

The lesson in the frustrating Pull Me-Push You approach of multiple teams working on SQL Server virtualization is that old mindsets and turf protections can kill any project. Beyond that key realization lays a number of real technical issues to solve. Here’s what to look out for and what to ignore.

Cloud buzz aside, virtualization chatter still dominates in IT circles. The primary discussion is two-toned: “Why should we bother?” and “How would we do it?” Among the first of the follow-up questions is “How well will our Microsoft SQL Server databases work with virtualization?” It’s a legitimate, straightforward question that, unfortunately, is often met with an onslaught of contradictory answers.

Varying technical opinions are common among database administrators (DBAs) and software developers. However, in this case the variation in responses is usually determined by the answerers’ perspectives rather than by actual database server performance metrics.

Take DBAs, for example. “DBAs don’t want to change their server environments,” says Brent Ozar, a Microsoft SQL Server expert with Quest Software, and a Microsoft Certified Master for SQL Server 2008. “They’re probably unhappy with their server performance today on physical hardware, and in their minds, things can only get worse.” READ MORE

Many companies are offering video-based training to bring Windows 7 users up to speed. We compared several of the options — from free videos to corporate training tools — to find out whether you really can learn it all by watching.

While Windows 7 offers many improvements and new features (along with some things that not everybody may like), some things about Windows 7 are new and different.  For example, as a Windows XP user I have to come up to speed with jump lists, pin lists, sticky notes, the screen-capture “Snipping Tool,” and Aero Shake. Nor am I the only one who needs to come up to speed quickly with new features in order to become productive. The computer users that your IT staff supports have the same challenge.

At minimum, users want to avoid losing productivity by fighting and cussing at things that no longer work as they used to, and the IT Help Desk would prefer users to get up to speed on their own. (Which is why IT Expert Voice has an entire screencast series called, “I know it’s in here somewhere.”)

There’s no shortage of training materials, ranging from books (some written by IT Expert Voice authors) to in-person classes. Microsoft has plenty of information within Windows 7, as well as on the Microsoft web site. There are thousands of magazine articles, and, no doubt, tens-to-hundreds of thousands of blog postings. READ MORE

Virtualization has many an upside, not the least of which is its value to disaster recovery efforts.

“Before virtualization, disaster recovery was so expensive to implement that organizations had to choose only the most critical applications to protect and hope for the best for the rest,” says Jeff Nessen, practice director of platform virtualization for Logicalis. “With a carefully planned virtualization strategy, disaster recovery can now be provided for a much broader range of applications and data.”

However, if virtualization isn’t executed with thoughtful precision, the whole virtual mess can tumble even the mightiest of corporate recovery plans.

“When implemented and designed correctly, a virtual environment is an armored bunker 200 feet below the surface where all your eggs are stored; incorrectly, it is a basket on the edge of a wall with very high crosswinds that may cause the basket to tip over at any time,” says Gregory L. Smith, senior product architect at SunGard Availability Services. READ MORE

It’s not especially easy to deploy, but Windows 7 supports simple software RAID. Here’s how to do it, using low-cost storage you already own: a bunch of USB flash drives. (I’d say I created a RAID array of USB drives simply to demonstrate the technique, but really… one reason to do this is because, well, I could. We techies can be so easily amused.)

There’s no such thing as enough disk room or a safe-enough hard drive. The moment you think you have enough hard disk space, you find yourself collecting high-definition videos or your hard disk starts whining and clicking. One solution to both problems is to use an ancient computing technique that dates back to when a big hard drive was 5 MBs and came in a casing as large as a washing machine: redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID).

RAID has several benefits. The first is that RAID has the potential to deliver vastly increased data transfer rates. In theory, the input/output transmission rate of a RAID system can be more than ten times greater than a ordinary hard drive.

RAID pulls this trick off by “striping” data across the array’s disks. In English, this means that a file can be distributed across the array so that it can be read or written much more quickly. For example, With RAID, the system will place a file on the media so that while the first part of the file is being read from disk on one array, the second portion is already being picked up from disk two.

By enabling parallel data transfers, data throughput can be multiplied by the number of drives in the array. For example, a four disk RAID could have four times the throughput of an equal-sized single drive. A RAID that’s designed for speed and nothing but speed is called RAID Level 0.

The other major advantage of RAID is that you can mirror data from one drive to another, the most immediate form of backup one could imagine. Its disadvantage is that on RAID Level 1 you can use half a RAID’s maximum drive space for data storage. You also don’t gain the speed boost you get from RAID 0. Advanced versions of RAID let you retain more of the drive room while maintaining your data security. Unfortunately, in Windows 7, you can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. READ MORE

Mobile users face large obstacles in keeping up with reasonable backups. There are several solutions available, each with a common denominator that requires us to remember to perform backups in the first place.

In some cases, Windows 7 BitLocker aids your capacity to encrypt removable and backup media, depending on the media involved.

Portable Hard Drives

Ranging in size from small to huge, portable hard drives are a fairly easy way to keep backups in order—especially backups consisting of just data. Windows 7, as in prior Windows editions, contains the infamous Backup.exe software in Professional+ editions. Backup.EXE allows compressed and regularly scheduled backups (so long as you remember to plug in the drive); drives can also be BitLocker-managed and encrypted. You can do a quick backup of just data files (example, your /user directory), or mixtures of the whole enchilada and all the data, or just those files that have changed, in your favorite backup combo.

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