So… I’m a Racker Now!

All of us at SharePoint911 are now Rackspace employees! Please allow me to rewind the clock a little…

You know things are going to get interesting when the owner of the small business you work for sets up a mandatory “all hands” meeting in the middle of the Christmas to New Year’s vacation time. The employees start to speculate what the news could be, and then we hear the words “The company has been sold”. After we all wake up from our individual panic attacks, we learn that one of our favorite partners, Rackspace is purchasing the company and we all need to be in San Antonio ASAP to discuss what this means. A bit of a shock given that we were all hoping for a calm start to 2012 (after the really busy 2011 we had).

We visited their corporate offices, which btw are in an old decommissioned shopping mall. From the outside it looks like any other out of business shopping center, but inside they have built a giant dotcom environment with café’s, a tether ball court, Zen meeting spaces named after game show and cereals, and even a twisty slide that you can take instead of the escalator if you desire.

That was very impressive, but the icing on the cake was seeing how amazing Rackspace as a company truly is. They are a publicly traded company that is committed to what they call Fanatical Support. In other words, rather than just say they want to be the best at customer service, they live and breathe making the customer feel awesome about working with them. They have been hosting SharePoint sites for a while now, and with our acquisition they want to become the leader in Fanatical SharePoint across the board. This doesn’t mean that all our customers need to even host at Rackspace! We will be servicing SharePoint projects (and my team will be branding them to not look like SharePoint) whether you host somewhere else or even on your own premises… but now we can also offer world class SharePoint hosting at Rackspace if you need it.

With anything like this, the future is not 100% written yet. But I’m really excited to be working with Rackspace and even more excited to be able to have their much bigger engine behind us. They are committed to keeping all the awesomeness of SharePoint911 while providing all the resources we need to take things to the next level. I can’t think of a better company to have bought us out!

Here is the official press release, wordsmithed much better than I ever could by profession marketing boffins:

http://www.rackspace.com/blog/welcome-sharepoint911-to-the-rackspace-family/

Also, here is a cool video of a day at the Rackspace offices. I won’t be located there, but I look forward to visiting throughout the year:

How to handle downtime by sending all requests to one HTML page

I had a nice little Sunday planned today, but it was interrupted by the SharePoint911 uptime monitors telling me that our web server had pooped itself (technical term… trust me). Shane did some poking around and found that the hard drive had died… we have backups but bringing it back online is going to take a bit (our clients always come first!). We decided to temporarily put up a maintenance page until we can bring the site back completely. I had to do some GoogleBing’ing to find a simple way to funnel all of the web links that point to our various pages and blogs to one page telling people we are working on the problem.

Turns out the solution is actually pretty simple. Any ASP.NET 2 app (including SharePoint) can funnel all web traffic to one HTML page just by placing a file named app_offline.htm into the IIS web root. Here is more information on the technique:

Taking an ASP.NET 2.0 Application Offline

I did run into two gotcha’s:

1. Make sure the file is over 512 bytes – Not sure why, but IIS thinks the file couldn’t possibly convey any useful information if its under that size and doesn’t use it.
2. Loading images on the page can be challenging, they need to come from another web app or server or you need to do a lot of extra work to encode them. I didn’t bother with this method but you can search for it on the web if you want… I just hosted the images from our public Dropbox folder.

Come see me present at Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim

If you are planning to attend the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, Oct 3rd-6th 2011, come on out to one of my sessions and say hello. I was fortunate enough to be selected to co-present a couple different sessions with John Ross this year. SharePoint911 will also have a booth at the show and a good portion of the team is likely to be hanging around there at any given time AND we should have our brand new (top secret) squishy farm animal to give away.

Here are the sessions I will be co-presenting. I think the session date and times are still somewhat tentative so be sure to check the schedule at the conference:

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Creating Beautiful and Engaging Web Sites with SharePoint 2010
Monday, October 3rd – 11:00 am
Randy Drisgill & John Ross
Level: 200
mySPC Link

The process of building, branding and delivering a beautiful web site is more than just skin deep. In this session we will walk you through best practices for planning, creating and deploying engaging web sites with SharePoint 2010. We will also share best practices around the branding process with lessons learned and examples from real world SharePoint branding projects.

NOTE: I want to be clear that this session isn’t about the mechanics of creating master pages and page layouts. There is another session that covers that topic. This is more of an overview of what goes into making public facing sites that don’t look like SharePoint.

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Branding and Customizing My Sites with SharePoint 2010
Wednesday, October 5th – 10:30 am
John Ross & Randy Drisgill
Level: 300
mySPC Link

The My Sites capability of SharePoint 2010 is the backbone of SharePoint's social capabilities. In this session, we'll cover how to customize your My Site deployment and how to apply custom branding. We'll also discuss how you can effectively control which web parts are deployed to your users.

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Branding a Public Website on Office 365
Wednesday, October 5th – 3:15 pm
Randy Drisgill & John Ross
Level: 200
mySPC Link

Are you considering building a website with SharePoint Online? Did you know that your Office 365 subscription includes the ability to publish a public facing Internet Site as well as the Team site? In this session, we will walk you through tips and best practices on how you can brand an Internet Site that runs on Office 365 as well as how to add a little style to your internal team site.

Pre-Announcement – IT Camp #3 – Orlando, FL (Saturday Jan 21, 2012)

I know there is going to be a SharePoint Saturday in Austin Texas around this same time, which should be a blast. But for those that don’t want to travel to Texas, we are going to have an entire SharePoint track at Microsoft’s IT Camp #3 in Orlando, Florida on January 21, 2012. For those that don’t know what the IT Camp is, here is a description as well as a link to the previous camp in Tampa:

Join system administrators IT professionals and database professionals in addition to managers at all levels in Florida that work with Microsoft technologies for a “IT Camp Saturday” event on January 21^st 2012. IT Camps are a free, one day learning event for anyone seeking professional development. This event serves IT professionals and students with a focus on IT Pro related technologies. IT Camps offer a conference style learning environment free of charge.

 

What:   IT Camp #3 – Orlando Florida

When:  Saturday, January 21^st

Where: ITT - 8301 Southpark Cir. Suite 100, Orlando, FL 32819

What time:  8am-5pm

 

Previous Camp: http://itcampsaturday.com/tampa/

So, save the date and come on out… it’s going to be FREE after all! And if you are a SharePoint Guru (or aspiring guru) in the Orlando or surrounding areas feel free to hit me up on this blog or on twitter about potentially presenting.

CSS Chart for SharePoint 2010

Personally I prefer to use the IE Developer Toolbar and Firefox for manipulating CSS in SharePoint 2010 but I know from the 100’s of people that have asked me that CSS charts are something people really want. Heather Solomon had the first CSS chart back in the SharePoint 2007 days and recently she has posted a preview of a new chart for 2010 and it looks like it should be a nice resource for everyone:

SharePoint 2010 CSS Reference Chart

SharePoint 2010 Mobile Devices and Scrolling

This was a posted a little while back, but I’m guessing some of you haven’t seen it yet. Over at the SPTechWeb site I wrote an quick article where I reviewed three of the more popular ways (they weren’t pioneered by me btw) of handling scrolling in SharePoint 2010 specifically as it relates to mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Android. The post was inspired by all the SPTechCon attendees that asked about mobile devices as well as my co-worker Todd Klindt for wanting to push the boundaries of SharePoint 2010 blogging for a public facing site.

SPTechWeb – SharePoint 2010: Mobile Devices and Scrolling

My SharePoint 2010 Branding Book has been Published!

Things have been a little crazy over the past month, but now that the holidays are upon us I have a spare second to actually toot my own horn a little (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Everyone probably already knows this, but I figured I should still do a blog post to announce that at the end of last month my SharePoint 2010 branding book was officially published:

Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design - Published by Wrox

This was my big project for 2010. Myself, John Ross, Jacob Sanford, Paul Stubbs, and Larry Riemann worked on creating a book for both beginners and professionals that want to learn about making SharePoint look as great as it performs. Here is the Table of Contents for the book:

• Foreword.
• Introduction.
• PART I: INTRODUCTION TO SHAREPOINT BRANDING.
• Chapter 1: What Is SharePoint Branding?
• Chapter 2: What's New in SharePoint 2010.
• PART II: BRANDING BASICS.
• Chapter 3: Planning for Branding.
• Chapter 4: SharePoint Designer 2010 Overview.
• Chapter 5: Simple Branding.
• Chapter 6: Working with Navigation.
• PART III: ADVANCED BRANDING.
• Chapter 7: Cascading Style Sheets in SharePoint.
• Chapter 8: Master Pages.
• Chapter 9: Page Layouts.
• Chapter 10: Web Parts and XSLT.
• Chapter 11: Deploying Branding in SharePoint.
• PART IV: OTHER BRANDING CONCEPTS.
• Chapter 12: Page Editing and the Ribbon.
• Chapter 13: The Client Object Model and jQuery.
• Chapter 14: Silverlight and SharePoint Integration.

You can purchase the paperback book online from several retailers like Amazon (http://amzn.to/bHau4J). Barnes and Noble lists the book as available for in store purchase but I haven’t seen it actually in any stores local to me yet. If you want to purchase it in store, you may need to request they purchase a few copies. Lastly, for those of you that want a digital version on your computer you can purchase an Adobe Acrobat version directly from Wrox (http://bit.ly/aEHwT6).
Thanks to my author team and everyone in the community that helped make this book a reality!