First look at Office 365 public beta - Part 1

Good news! Microsoft has just released Office 365 Online simultaneously for 38 markets (including India) in 17 languages!

There was an invite to the public beta of Microsoft Office 365 via email from MSFT today!. The registration process was simple where it asks to choose a subdomain  name - which is then prefixed to sharepoint.com - so if your subdomain is xyz then the address of your O365 public website will be xyz.sharepoint.com. You can of-course use your own domain name. After the registration process, it goes on and creates you email ids and websites in Exchange and SharePoint respectively.

So what's on Offer in Office 365?

1. Office Web Apps - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote
2. Email & Calendar (MS Exchange)
3. Website and Collaboration (SharePoint public and Team site) 
4. Instant Messenger (Lync)
   
   All this is protected with MS Forefront security

Once the registration process is over it redirects to a SharePoint Team Site. There is also a public site bundled, that shows up at the public url - http://xyz.sharepoint.com.

Quickly sign up for the public beta here - http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/office365/online-software.aspx

In the coming days, i am going to explore it more and write about the cool features, especially on the SharePoint side of things. Watch this space!

Renaming a SharePoint 2010 Server (Standalone)

Before my Training sessions, I setup the lab by Installing & Configuring SharePoint 2010 and all other tools on one physical machine and then we ghost the Hard Disk image to the rest of the machines. Once that's done, we power on the boxes and find that all of them report 'duplicate name on the network' error. So the Network admin then renames the boxes and SharePoint no longer works.

For MOSS 2007, we had some stsadm commands which used to do the trick. Since, powershell is available now, we can use PowerShell cmdlets for SharePoint.

Here's how a SharePoint 2010 server rename is done -

1. Fire up the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell (recommended to run as Administrator)

2. Run the following Powershell command -


Rename-SPServer [-Identity] <originalservername> -Name <newservername>


where <originalservername> is the current name of the Server and <newservername> is the new name of the Server.

For example, if your current server is called MACHINE01 and new server name will be BOX01 then you can write -

Rename-SPServer -Identity MACHINE01 -Name BOX01

3. Run IISRESET / noforce

4. Rename the Server and restart the machine. Start the management shell again.

4. Modify alternate access mappings for Central Admin using PowerShell -

Although the server has been renamed, the Sites will be having the old server name in their URLs so one has to change the Alternate access mappings for Central Admin and other sites. This can be done using the cmdlet called Set-SPAlternateURL as shown below -


Set-SPAlternateURL -Identity <old URL to the central admin site> -Url <new URL to the central admin>


For example if the old central admin site was at - http://machine01:8080 and the new server name is BOX01 then you will write -

Set-SPAlternateURL -Identity http://machine01:8080 -Url http://box01:8080

Now you will be able to get into the Central Admin site. You can then go and change the alternate access mappings for the rest of the sites through the Central Admin site instead of doing via PowerShell.

Here's the official Technet page for this topic.

Note: Never use the _ (underscore) in your host names because it causes problems with Cookies and your SharePoint sites will not work. Also avoid the - (hyphen) as far as possible in host names.

Long time no blogging

It's been ages since i have not blogged here, meanwhile the winds of change have swept through SharePointland and most residents, including myself, have switched to 2010. SharePoint 2010 is here with Visual Studio 2010, InfoPath 2010 and Office 2010.

Over the last year i have had the good fortune of getting to work on all kinds of SharePoint projects involving InfoPath 2010 (lots of SharePoint Workflows), Visio 2010 and TFS 2010 as well.

My friend, Arno Nel (SharePoint MVP and founder of SharePointMagazine.net has given me a blog site on
http://vijay.spoint.me where i will be blogging about SharePoint 2010.

So let's hope that I find enough time and stuff to blog about SharePoint 2010 and all the new exciting stuff that's happenning in the Microsoft space!

SharePoint 2010 Technical Preview Released

Good news, the SharePoint 2010 Technical Preview has been released. Here are the direct links where you can learn more -
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/IT-Pro-Video.aspx
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/Get_Ready.aspx
I still haven't downloaded it and tried coz it's 64-bit and right now i do not have a 64-bit box.