Installing March Public Update for SharePoint 2013 in a CloudShare Environment

Microsoft released its first public update for both SharePoint Foundation and Server 2013 last March. As you can read in several blogs on the Internet about this update, it is a mandatory requirement in order to install new SharePoint updates coming in the feature. For instance, you can read this statement in Stefan Gossner’s blog post (Note: Stefan is Senior SharePoint Escalation Engineer at Microsoft):

Due to a change in the package configuration introduced after SharePoint 2013 RTM the March Public update is a mandatory requirement in order to install subsequent SharePoint Updates.

In this article, I will show you step-by-step how to install this first public update for SharePoint Server 2013 in a CloudShare Environment.

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Getting Started with SAP HANA in Less Than 60 Seconds (Really)

Yes, you can get access to a fully functional SAP HANA environment in less than 60 seconds. Click here to begin: http://developers.sap.com/hana

Let’s take a few steps back. We are all very busy. We barely have time to do our primary tasks, let alone look forward and plan a few steps ahead. For me, evaluating a new technology is always something I worry about, especially when it comes to enterprise-scale software. Getting started setting up the necessary hardware, installation, and configuration all require time I do not have. Furthermore, there’s always something that goes wrong. Always.

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SharePoint Color Palette Tool

A couple of months ago I wrote an article about the new look of SharePoint 2013, focusing on the new Site Collection themes for SharePoint. I gave a couple of examples for the new built-in themes included in SharePoint 2013.

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Creating a Sysprepped Windows Server 2012 Image

One of the advantages of running Windows Server 2012 is the highly improved Hyper-V engine. In my time working on deployment scenarios I have found that creating a reliable baseline VM is critical to my success in getting farms deployed quickly and easily. To this end I have found that getting a new VM server with the OS installed to the correct level with patches, the SharePoint prerequisites, and all of the customizations that I like to have on a server already installed and ready to go in minutes, is pretty important.

This is where Sysprep comes into the picture. We have been using Sysprep to prepare images since Windows XP as it allows us to generalize the critical system GUIDs, and when the image is launched, post-Sysprepping it will create new GUIDs and allow you to re-register the system. While this has always been a recommended practice for deploying the same VM over and over, it has not been a required function until Windows Server 2012.

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How to Debug SharePoint Autohosted Applications using the Windows Azure Service Bus

As you know SharePoint 2013 introduces a new development model, known as the App Model, that allows you to create and deploy applications for SharePoint On-Premise and SharePoint Online in Office 365. If you want to know more about how to build applications for SharePoint, I recommend you to visit the Build apps for Office and SharePoint portal created by Microsoft. There you can find a lot of useful information and resources about this new development model, how to build apps, and so on.

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Blogging Tips from a Marketing Point of View

As the Marketing Director for CloudShare, one area of our website that gets a lot of attention is our blog.  We have consistently grown the number of visitors to our blog by 12% every week in the last year.  That’s significant and largely due to our regular writers, MVPs, and guests (thanks guys and gals)!

Each week I talk to a few different MVPs, partners, or others on the CloudShare team about blogging for us and I get asked the same questions -  How much should I write? Do I need to include pictures? How do I know people will want to read what I’m writing about?  Unanimously everyone says “I’d love to blog, I just don’t have the time to sit down and write”.  Isn’t that the truth!

Last week Lydia Bronze shared her technical blog writing tips.  This week I’m following that up with marketing best practices to go with that.  After all, who doesn’t have their own blog, or write for their company’s blog today?

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How to Write Successful Technical Blog Content

The CloudShare community is one year old!  Thank you for reading and sharing your comments and questions.

At the beginning of 2012, we started the CloudShare Community blog to help us tell the story of how people are using CloudShare, engage in conversations with you, and keep customers up-to-date on our new features, products and services. We’ve seen it as a golden opportunity to learn more from our readers and allow you to tell us exactly what you’re interested in. We enjoy sharing knowledge and experience with you and the community at large.

Through the blog we’ve been able to reach a diverse audience worldwide. We have grown the monthly number of visitors to our blog by 1266% (that’s not a typo)!

Posts on our blog have spread organically to Microsoft TechNet forums, MSDN forums, StackOverflow, Twitter, LinkedIn, Scoop.it!, Paper.li and in tens of thousands of private blogs, seen by hundreds of thousands of business professionals. Read the rest of this entry »

Upgrade VMWare Tools on CentOS 6.3 Using GUI

What is VMWare Tools and why do I need to install it on the guest operating system? 

VMWare strongly recommends installing VMWare Tools on the guest operating system in order to prevent the loss of important functionality.

The VMware Tools package has various essential features such as synchronization of time in the guest operating system with time on the host, support for drag and drop functionality, copying and pasting between guest and host, and improved mouse performance in guest OS.

I decided to write this post for those who are not very familiar with Linux systems or prefer using Linux systems with GUI.

This is a short guide explaining how to upgrade (or install) VMWare Tools on the CentOS 6.3 operating system using GUI.

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How to Install the RTM Version of the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012

Microsoft recently released the RTM version of the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 (read the announcement on S. Somasegar’s blog) as a step forward in their development support for SharePoint and Office 2013. In this article, I will explain how to install the final version of the tools in a CloudShare environment where Visual Studio 2012 + Preview 2 of the Office Developer Tools is installed.

Let’s start!

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How to configure SharePoint 2013 Content Databases in read-only mode

Read-Only Databases is a feature available when upgrading or moving SharePoint 2013 content databases to avoid any data loss and allow users access to the information stored in the system. In this mode we can backup content databases with the latest information available, and at the same time guarantee our SharePoint users can read existing data, but not modify it. In this article, I will explain step-by-step how to configure an existing content database in read-only mode:

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