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 »

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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CloudShare Going Mobile

I’m letting you in on something exciting we’re working on over here. We’ve been hearing there’s a need for software development, QA, and sales teams to be able to access their lab environments when they’re away from their desks or laptops. So the CloudShare product team has been cooking up a way for you to control your virtualized environments on CloudShare from your cell phones… Welcome to the ProOnTheGo BETA!

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CloudShare Feature Release – February 2013

Hi CloudSharers!

My name is Anand and I joined CloudShare 4 months ago as the product manager. This is an exciting time to be at CloudShare with a lot happening on the product front. I spent most of my career in the enterprise space mostly in development and testing. In my spare time, I enjoy hiking and exploring in and around the bay area, California.

My first blog is going to be on the release that comes out this Sunday, code-named “Quartet”. Our friendly RnD give names to our releases. We went through mountains, quirky names and now it is music records.

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How to Recover SharePoint 2013 Databases from Suspect Mode

I restarted my SharePoint server, opened Central Administration and encountered the following error:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server.

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Access and Manipulate Data in Your CloudShare SharePoint 2013 Farm from Anywhere with CSOM, REST and OData

SharePoint 2010 introduced the client-side object model (CSOM) to allow developers to write applications which interact with SharePoint from client-side code. In SharePoint 2013, Microsoft steps things up a notch by allowing developers to use Representational State Transfer (REST) in conjunction with the Open Data (OData) protocol to perform Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD) operations against SharePoint sites and lists for nearly every API in the CSOM. Through the magic of CloudShare web access, we can leverage the CSOM along with REST and OData to interact with our SharePoint 2013 environments from literally anywhere, using any type of client! All code samples in this blog post will be run from my local workstation over 1,000 miles away from my SharePoint 2013 server running in the CloudShare datacenter!

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How to configure the Site Access Request in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 introduces many cool improvements in terms of user experience when working standard sites. For instance, users can easily request access to a specific site by using the new site access request and invitation mechanism. At the same time, a site administrator can easily do a follow up of all the access requests to a specific site. In this article, I am going to show you how to configure the site access request mechanism in a SharePoint 2013 site.

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SharePoint 2013 Site Templates

SharePoint 2013 offers a vast variety of out-of-the-box site templates. One of the success factors of your SharePoint deployment is choosing the most suitable site template that meets your business needs.

I’ve been asked many times which site template can serve particular required needs and what differs one template from another, so I decided to write a quick overview of all the available SharePoint 2013 site templates and their common uses. I’ve also prepared a SharePoint 2013 environment configured with all site types for some hands-on experience.

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Setting up the CloudShare SharePoint 2013 RTM Farm to Support Apps

With the recent Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of SharePoint 2013, I figured it was time to see what the new app development model is all about.

Spinning up the farm

When it comes to getting a SharePoint environment spun up quickly, nobody beats CloudShare. Within days of RTM, they had a “SharePoint 2013 RTM Small Farm” environment ready to spin up.

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