I’ve also been a little delinquent in getting my slides from my talks this month posted, so here you go!

Office365 -How the Cloud Makes IT Easy and Why That’s Difficult – SPSOzarks

This past June Idera started up a SharePoint equivalent of a very cool program they had been doing to help out the SQL Server community, the Advisor and Community Educator (ACE) program, and I was lucky enough to be one of the initial group of SharePoint folks selected by Idera to be SharePoint ACEs. Myself, Liam Cleary, Nedra Allmond, Wes Preston, and Michael Lotter are in the initial class of SharePoint ACEs, and Idera will be resetting the program every year with a fresh group of SharePoint experts to recognize and award. The best part about the ACE program is that it really helps me do a lot more of something that I love doing in the SharePoint community: speaking at events like SharePoint Saturdays all over the country, as Idera is able to sponsor me and help me cover my travel costs inherent in going to so many of these different events, as well as continue to do webcasts and other events that are also sponsored by Idera.

Because of the ACE program, I’m able to submit to many more SharePoint Saturday events than I have in the past, such as the three I’m going to be heading to this September! Three! Wow So if you’re interesting, here’s where I’ll be speaking and what I’ll be covering:

• SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, this Saturday, Sept 8th. For more info, check out http://sharepointsaturday.org/ozarks, I’ll be doing one of my favorite talks: Why Office 365 Makes IT Easy and Why that’s Difficult.
• SharePoint Saturday Redmond, Saturday Sept 22nd. For more info, check out http://sharepointsaturday.org/redmond, I’ll be doing a new talk on Identity in Office 365, as well as participating in a panel session on Cloud Computing.
• SharePoint Saturday Michigan, Saturday Sept 29th. For more info, check out http://sharepointsaturday.org/michigan, still waiting to hear about what I’ll be talking about there

I’ve got a few more possible speaking opportunities coming up, but they’re a little bit more than a month out so I’ll save them for another day. If you see Idera sponsoring a community event, make sure to thank them for their support of the community and don’t hesitate to talk to them about the ACE program and find out how you might be able to be an ACE next year!

This was the first time I’ve gotten a chance to talk about Office 365 since the preview of the next major wave of changes for the platform were announced, and I think this is going to be a really interesting time to start looking at the platform if you haven’t yet. I’m going to start working on getting my thoughts put together in a separate blog post, but the one thing I realized last week as I was preparing for my talk was that the new release fits really well into it. I think that’s the case because there’s a lot of new compelling functionality that we’re going to see rolling into Office 365 soon, but at the same time there really are a lot of considerations that organizations are going to have to keep in mind if they’re going to be successful with it in the long run.

But since there’s a lot I want to cover there, I’m going to save that for another post. I had a wonderful time in Louisville and especially enjoyed changing a few people’s minds about what Wave 2013 holds for all of us in the SharePoint and Office 365 space (CA Callahan, I’m looking at you ) Anyways, here’s my slides from the weekend:

So, here’s the situation: SharePoint needs SQL Server to operate. I tend to think of SharePoint needing SQL Server like humans need oxygen: we often take the act of breathing for granted, but we really notice when we’re having trouble doing it. SharePoint is the same way with SQL Server; it puts just about every piece of data about a farm and its contents into SQL Server databases and when something goes wrong with those databases SharePoint really has problems.Now, that being said, SharePoint is also very particular in how it uses SQL Server. Its databases have to be set up in a very specific way, with some pretty inflexible configurations, and SharePoint reserves the right to change any of the details of those configurations any time it wants (usually via patches and updates).

Now, this relationship isn’t exactly new news. Nor is the fact that Microsoft does not support the modification of SharePoint’s databases or the access of their contents directly through SQL Server, and instead requires that the data in those databases be accessed through SharePoint’s UI, its object models, or its administrative interfaces. Lots of people way smarter than me have written quite a bit about it in the past, but like a bad penny I keep seeing the topic come up and kind of felt like putting my own thoughts out there on the matter, so here goes.

Because of how particular SharePoint is about its SQL Server databases, Microsoft has made some pretty definitive statements about what you can and can’t do with those databases. In general, it’s like this: don’t touch them. Don’t add things to them, such as indices, views, triggers, or new columns. Don’t delete anything off them either, or create new tables within them. Specifically, Microsoft has a knowledge base article on what is not supported, that I really suggest you read: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841057. On the other side of the coin, there are specific things that you can do, but they’re really more maintenance-oriented things like defragmenting indices or creating maintenance plans for backups. The main source I use for what you can actually do with SharePoint’s databases is this article on TechNet: Database Maintenance for SharePoint 2010 Products.

One thing that I think people often overlook, and sometimes it seems like they’re eager to do so, is an important statement in that KB article I linked to above:

Read Operations Addendum
Reading from the SharePoint databases programmatically, or manually, can cause unexpected locking within Microsoft SQL Server which can adversely affect performance. Any read operations against the SharePoint databases that originate from queries, scripts, .dll files (and so on) that are not provided by the Microsoft SharePoint Development Team or by Microsoft SharePoint Support will be considered unsupported if they are identified as a barrier to the resolution of a Microsoft support engagement.

In plain English: querying SharePoint databases can lock data in those databases and cause performance issues, and can put you in an unsupported state. Yep, even running a query against a SharePoint database can be unsupported, a situation that I see a lot of people either ignorant of or willing to look past. Are there times where you may need to do it? Sure, but I would do my darnedest to avoid having to do that in a live Production environment without first trying to exhaust every supported approach to get the info I need the right way or to copy the database out and query it outside of my live Production SharePoint environment.

So that’s why I like to think of SharePoint’s databases as being a lot like Kuzco in Disney’s movie, the “Emperor’s New Groove”:

I’m embedding the slides from that presentation below, along with links to some of the tools and info that I mention in the presentation. One important link I do want to call out is to a white paper that I’ve written for Idera Software on the same subject, which can be downloaded from Idera’s website at http://www.tinyrul.com/SPTrouble. It’s a handy companion to the presentation, each was an outline for the other and my perspective is that you’ll get more from the two combined than you will with just one or the other.

Here’s the slides:

And here’s the links to resources that I mentioned in the presentation:

• Microsoft’s ULS Log Viewer: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer
• LogParser: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=24659
• Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool: http://pal.codeplex.com/
• Microsoft’s MSDN/TechNet Forums for SharePoint: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/category/sharepoint/
• SharePoint forums on StackExchange: http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/
• The #SPHelp Hashtag on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/search/sphelp
• My Idera whitepaper on Troubleshooting SharePoint: http://tinyurl.com/SPtrouble

Speaking of Idera, they also invited me to do a free webinar last month on the subject of SharePoint Disaster Recovery, which was a great opportunity for me to do yet another new presentation I’d been working on: Backup is not Backup, Restore is Backup. I’d been wanting to try to encourage a different perspective with SharePoint DR: one stressing the importance of making sure you’re able to actually restore your content when it counts rather than just getting it backed up and forgetting about it. The webinar went very well, and I really enjoyed the conversations in the chat room during it in addition to the overall opportunity to deliver it. If you didn’t get a chance to join us, Idera has published a recording of the webcast, which you can go here to download: http://www.idera.com/Events/RegisterWC.aspx?DoThis=TY&EventID=403

Additionally, here are the slides for that talk:

That’s all I’ve got time for right now, but I’m going to challenge myself to get another blog post up this week on a technical SharePoint topic that keeps coming up for me time and time again, even though its been around for quite a long time on the SharePoint platform: how to access SharePoint’s databases. Hopefully I’ll be able to get that done this week, we’ll see if its possible with the upcoming July 4th holiday here in the United States or not.

Until then, have a great one and I hope the slides are useful!

Seriously, if you’d like to learn a little more about SharePoint Backup and Restore, head on over to the registration site and sign up!

In case you missed my earlier post about the webinar, here’s some info: The session is called Backup is not Backup. Restore is Backup, and I’ll be talking about the need to focus on what you need to do after a SharePoint disaster to bring back your valuable content. Something I’ve seen a lot of organizations do, and something I’ve been guilty of myself in the past, is zeroing in too much on getting their SharePoint backups set up and running, without thinking about how they’re going to use those backups when they need them.

The great folks at Idera are sponsoring and hosting this webinar as a part of their Secrets of SharePoint series, so please don’t forget to tell them thank you for their support of the SharePoint community (and specifically my webinar)!

• I really enjoy talking about SharePoint Online It’s a great platform, but I do think it’s just as important to help educate people on its shortcomings and how you can overcome them as it is talking about all the great things it can do.
• I have so many friends in the local and greater St. Louis SharePoint community, and got to see them all again, which was AWESOME.
• It was a very well run event, and it’s very comforting as a speaker to be a part of a smooth sailing ship like that. My hat’s off to the whole SPS STL planning group, they did a fantastic job.
• I learned some really good information about Identity and Authentication in Office 365 thanks to my good friend Neil Sly. Neil’s been getting really hands on with stuff like ADFS 2.0 and Single Sign On configuration, and it showed in his talk last Saturday. Thank you Neil!
• I had an absolute blast travelling to and from the event with my brother from a different mother, Enrique Lima. We had some great conversations about SharePoint and technology on the way over on Friday, and in general just yucked it up all weekend long
• You may also want to keep an eye on my blog later this week, if things go according to plan I’ll have some much more detailed information about the stuff that Enrique and I talked about on our way home from St. Louis yesterday morning, it was a very productive drive!

I would really like to thank everyone who came out for my two sessions on Saturday, the audiences in both were great. I love presenting when I am talking with the audience and get a lot of questions and discussions, it just really makes it more of a productive dialog than when I’m just talking at a group, and that was definitely the case on Saturday. I’m embedding my two presentations below if you are here looking for my slides, and you can download the PDFs of those decks from my account at http://www.SlideShare.net/ferringer.

Here’s the slides from my talk on SharePoint Online Development:

And here’s the slides on my second talk, SharePoint Online as an Extranet solution:

Check out the first link for the full slate of speakers and sessions, I’m looking forward to delivering two different sessions related to Office 365:

• SharePoint Online as an Extranet: Is It Hot or Not?
• Same But Different: Why Developing for the Cloud is like Developing for SharePoint but SO Much Different

Hopefully I see you this weekend in St. Louis!

It’s a subject Sean McDonough, who co-authored our two books with me, and I have covered quite a bit already, but I wanted to go in a different direction this time around. A lot of my focus on SharePoint DR in the past has looked at all the things you need to do before a disaster takes place, but this webinar is going to help you start thinking about what you need to do after a disaster to successfully recover your SharePoint environment.

The title of the webinar comes from a phrase I heard someone say back at the last Las Vegas Microsoft SharePoint Conference in 2009, “Backup is not backup. Restore is backup!” (I wish I could remember who it was that said it to me but its a bit of a blur for me, between the information overload and the general Vegas experience) If that sounds a little strange, let me explain. The phrase, one that Sean and I have also inscribed on a lot of books that we’ve signed for giveaways over the years, points out that backing up your SharePoint isn’t enough: those backups don’t mean a thing if you can’t restore them successfully. That emphasis on restore, the idea that you need to be able to put those backups to actual use if you want to get value out of them, is what I’ll be talking about in this webinar.

The best part, thanks to Idera, is that this webinar is free to attend and view. All you have to do is head over to https://www.vconferenceonline.com/event/regeventp.aspx?id=686 and register for it, and you’re all set – assuming you remember to log in and attend the actual event. Hopefully I’ll see you on June 20th in the chat room!

There’s a few different things I want to cover with External Access, so let’s start with this: while External Access is very similar to a type of on-premise SharePoint configuration known as an Extranet, it’s important to understand that it is not intended to serve as a full-fledged Extranet. An Extranet is a private platform designed to allow both internal and external users collaborate on shared projects, tasks, documents, and information, which does sound quite a bit like External Access in SharePoint Online. External Access is great because it provides a lot of the things that are hard to implement and configure in an on-premises SharePoint Extranet such as account provisioning and password resets, but Microsoft is smart in not calling it true Extranet-level functionality. (Another reason they do this is that External Access is considered to be a “Feature Preview” right now, which I cover below)

With Extranets you also have the ability to segment your external collaborators out and very tightly control what aspects of your environment they can access; doing things like preventing them from seeing what other users from other organizations you’re collaborating with. You can implement technology that may force them to use certain operating systems or antivirus software in order to connect to your sites, or you can configure specific log in procedures such as two-factor authentication. With SharePoint Online and External Access, none of those things are possible. Those differences are important to keep in mind when considering External Access, it’s a great option for sure but you need to remember that you’re not getting a top to bottom Extranet solution with it.

Another tricky thing with External Access is the kind of account that an external user needs in order to be able to join a SharePoint Online site as an external user. This is one of those areas where Microsoft has made it a bit confusing because of the distinctions they’ve made around account types, but it’s also been confusing because Microsoft has been changing the parameters pretty frequently. In the Office 365 Beta you could join as an external user if you had one of the following types of accounts:

• A Managed ID (see my post on Account Management for more info)
• A Live ID from Live.com, Hotmail.com, MSN.com, or another Microsoft website where you can create accounts with Live IDs based in the same domain
• An EASI ID (a Live ID you create with your own email address, see my post on EASI IDs for more info)

But when Office 365 hit its production release known as General Availability in the Summer of 2011, you could only grant PALs to other Managed IDs, which was a big drawback given what people had seen in the Beta. Then in the Fall of 2011 Microsoft added support for external users with Live IDs, but not EASI IDs, which was even more confusing (and one of the reasons why I wrote my post on that type of Live ID). Well, as of pretty much today, we’re back to where we started in the Beta and you can now invite external users who have EASI IDs in addition to Managed IDs and Live IDs. This is a big improvement, because it allows your external users to have a familiar, and hopefully consistent, email address that they can use to log in with, reducing confusing and frustration for your users.

Something to keep in mind when planning out how you want to allocate your PALs to external users is that there is a finite amount of them you can use, somewhat… By default each Office 365 subscription comes with the ability to grant up to 50 PALs, which would lead you to believe that’s the maximum you can allocate. But if you read the latest Service Description for SharePoint Online (I recommend that you do that if you want to get an exact picture of how Microsoft defines a given service within SharePoint Online), you’ll find an interesting passage:

“50 PALs are included per tenant. Current “Feature Preview” allows for usage rights of up to 1000 external users without requiring additional PALs. Microsoft reserves the right to charge for additional PALs beyond 50 at the time the next major Office 365 update.”

Pretty encouraging, isn’t it, if you want to have more than 50 users because it’s saying that you can have up to 1,000! But also notice, Microsoft is defining External Access as a “Feature Preview”, which means that they’re still trying to lock in exactly how they want to provide this feature to their users and are essentially turning everyone who takes advantage of it right now into their Beta Testers! And, if you decide to go above that 50 user threshold, there’s a definite chance that they’re going to decide to charge you for those extra users down the road, probably when it exits from the “Feature Preview” stage. Oh, and there’s one other thing, as my friend Dan Usher has found, Office 365 Support doesn’t always know how to increase the number of PALs allocated to your account, so you may have issues trying to add those extra accounts depending on who you talk to in Support.

One final thing, then I’ll wrap this up as its gone far longer than I intended it to. As with everything in Office 365, External Access can tend to differ a bit between the Professional and Small Business SKUs (the “P” class) and the Enterprise SKUs (the “E” class), so you need to watch out for that. So far the biggest difference I’ve seen is in how you enable the feature and provision accounts but there may be other areas to watch out for as well. There are a couple of good walkthroughs online about how to enable External Access, but they all tend to cover how to do it for the E SKUs (Office.com’s Help Site and SharePoint MVP Corey Roth both have good posts on it). This is fine, but it references how you go about accessing Office 365′s version of the SharePoint Central Admin site, which isn’t available for P SKU subscriptions (since they only come with one SharePoint site collection).

In a P SKU subscription for Office 365, External Access is enabled by default, so you can skip over the configuration instructions in those posts and go straight to your SharePoint Team Site. Once in the Team site, click the Site Actions menu and select the Share Site option from the bottom of the menu. From that point on your experience should match what Office.com and Corey instruct you to do, but it can be a bit confusing if you’re trying to get around your Admin site and find the top level sites they talk about since you don’t have them in the P SKUs.

Ok, that’s a wrap. If you’ve got any questions about External Access or want me to cover something in this post a little more closely, just let me know in the comments below. Otherwise, I’m going to work on wrapping up my last post in this series on Identity in Office 365, which will be on Lync Federation. Until then, feel free to try and catch me on Twitter!