Office 365 HIPPA Compliant

Pretty excited we are now supporting this HIPPA Privacy and Security Standards for Office 365 - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_in_health/archive/2011/12/14/microsoft-office-365-cloud-based-productivity-service-complies-with-hipaa-standards-for-data-protection-and-security.aspx. This question has come up a lot and will allow health related organizations and agencies to get some real significant cost savings utilizing Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync.

SharePoint - Presidential Memo to Records Management

On November 28, 2011 a new Presidential Memorandum was sent out regarding Records Management - http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/11/28/presidential-memorandum-managing-government-records

In the Mandate there are two notable action items that should be top of mind with your customer and open the door for a discussion:

1. “Within 30 days of the date of this memorandum, designate in writing to the Archivist of the United States (Archivist), a senior agency official to supervise the review required by subsection”
2. “Within 120 days of the date of this memorandum, each agency head shall submit a report to the Archivist and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that describes the agency's current plans for improving or maintaining its records management program…”

This is a great opportunity for Federal Agencies to utilize what they own, specifically SharePoint, to assist you with building records management solutions. As a starting point, customers such as USDA where they have implemented a SharePoint 2010 Standard-only solution (no additional 3^rd party software was required) to deliver cost effective Records Management - USDA Records Management Case Study.

If you required DoD 5015.2 certified records management solutions, Microsoft does have ISV partners that have built solutions that adhere to these standards.

Gartner Rates Microsoft a Leader in Enterprise Search

I am happy to say the Microsoft has again been ranked as a top Enterprise Search provider in the marketplace - http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1835DKL&ct=111123&st=sb. You will see that some Enterprise Search providers dropped in rankings and some were removed.

As you can see, FAST is not slowing down and we have an extremely strong roadmap for it. It is a very fiscally responsible Enterprise Search solution when you consider it as part of your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when investing with SharePoint Enterprise. FAST provides tons of added features and capabilities to solutions such as Portals, Sites, ECM, Document Management, BI, Social, Composites, Platform Development, etc. Plus if you know how to configure SharePoint Search; FAST search is configured and managed through the same screens and procedures thus requiring less ramp up time.

Even if an organization just needs a pure Enterprise Search solution, FAST is a great Enterprise Search platform. Having SharePoint in the mix, is great value additive because many other Enterprise Search ends provide you no user interfaces. Yes FAST does have services so that other applications tiers can tap into it. However having a web portal like SharePoint immediately available with numerous web parts to start building search screens and search applications is a huge time and money saver. Plus, when Enterprise Search is made accessible through SharePoint, you get to take advantage of all the other SharePoint features to deliver a more engaging user experience. For instance:

• You can create blogs from the search team to the users
• Wikis to explain to users how to do advanced search
• Stream training videos
• Maintain documents and FAQs
• Create a Search Knowledge Base
• Create support forums
• Manage technical specifications about line of business data that is index
• Etc.

Productivity Hub now supports SharePoint 2010 SP1

The SharePoint 2010 Productivity Hub has just been released support SP1 - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28178. This has been a rather popular web site to install into SharePoint for knowledge management around Microsoft products. I have also seen customers take it and extend the content delivered in this site to support applications, business processes, etc. that are unique to their organization.

There were some issues with running this because unless you installed this because many customers upgraded to SharePoint 2010 SP1 but the installer files were targeted for a pre-SP1 build of SharePoint 2010. This has now all be resolved and is ready to go.

SharePoint Online Service Descriptions Updates Fall 2011

Service Descriptions
Some of you may be aware but many of the service descriptions associated to Office 365 have been updated in the past month. It is really easy to find all of the Office 365 Service Descriptions – just search on “Office 365 Service Descriptions”. I highly recommend that you bookmark these locations because this is where the new service descriptions are always released. To save you a few seconds:

• Multi-tenant service descriptions - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=13602
• Dedicated service descriptions - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=18128
• Dedicated Federal service descriptions - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=23910

Now the reason why I say bookmarks these is when there are changes to the service descriptions this is where you can get the updated documentation. This Fall has seen a few updates to service descriptions and for readers of this blog (whom are generally SharePoint people) there have been some updates.
SharePoint Online Multi-tenant Updates
In November 2011 there was an update to the SharePoint Online service description. There are a couple updates that you should be aware of:

• Business Connectivity Services (BCS) – is now available. Yes we heard about it at the SharePoint conference but now it available in the service descriptions. It supports WCF Web Service End Points (basically you need a WSDL web service available). This is great if you are trying to go completely cloud and you want to use Azure (PaaS) to use such things as Azure services, SQL Azure, App Fabric, etc. with SharePoint Online. So if you have complex data structures you want to manage and integrate directly in SharePoint use SQL Azure. If you can use App Fabric to connect premise back end applications, making those services available through SharePoint Online.
• A new capability available for partner accounts that are using Windows Live ID. Please read the service description for specifics. I personally think this is a huge new offering because SharePoint Online in general is a great solution of Partner Portals (Extranets). Nothing against doing an extranet on premise (and they work well), but it just takes more configuration and management than what system administrators what to take on responsibility for. With this partners can be given secure access to areas of content in SharePoint Online and they do not have to manage accounts in AD, Forms Auth, etc. This is absolutely huge and when I sit back and look at what SharePoint Online is offering as a whole, SharePoint Online has so many redeeming qualities for Partner Portals.
• There are a lot of new “Notes” that have been added to the service description that clearly communicate some of the most common questions that I have had over the past few months. I highly recommend reviewing these.

SharePoint Online Dedicated Updates
For the SharePoint Online Dedicated plan was updated in October 2011; there have been some updates that you should be aware of.

• Increased storage the max storage limit to 120 TB (which is 4 times more than previous). That is a whole lot of storage available to an organization. All the rules associated to purchasing extra TBs of storage to get to that 120 TB still hold the same.
• There is a new Administration portal for you to manage configuration requests, a new reports area providing analytic reports on usages and such, and support documentation.
• Active Directory Rights Management with IRM is now available for document libraries. SharePoint Online (both dedicated and multi-tenant) to store documents that had rights added prior to upload in SharePoint (and it is still supported). However the challenge is the document cannot be indexed. Now for SharePoint Online Dedicated, the document library IRM configuration is available so you can set rules on a document library and when the document is taken out of the SharePoint Online site, the IRM rights will be applied based on the setting in the document library. Documents put in a library using this new way are searchable.
• There is new support for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions to scan SharePoint Online for sensitive content, PII, etc. Read the documentation for details.

As well there have been October 2011 updates to the “Custom Solution Developer’s Guide” and “Custom Solution Policies and Process”. I would review these. As well in the Custom Solution Developer’s Guide there is a listing of the SharePoint 2010 third-party solutions that are approved to run in the dedicated cloud. This is an evolving list and addition to this list is accomplished by having a customer basically take a third party solution through the approval process.
Finally there is a new document called “Content Migration Policy and Storage Design for SharePoint 2010”. This is a really interesting document because it actually gives you some real insight into the storage architecture and how we manage quotas for site collections and such. I would even say a premise deployment of SharePoint 2010 should read this document take some best practices from it to implement on premise.

FAST for SharePoint 2010 Case Studies

There is a new FAST Case Study that for FAST for SharePoint 2010.  IMF - http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000011274

Here are two other good FAST for SharePoint Case Studies:

• Case Study – General Mills Research (FAST) - http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-FAST-Search-Server-2010-For-Sharepoint/General-Mills/General-Mills-Frees-More-Time-for-Innovation-with-Research-Focused-Search-Application/4000007255
• Case Study – Mississippi State Department of Transportation (FAST) - http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-SharePoint-Server-2010/Mississippi-Department-of-Transportation/State-Transportation-Department-Saves-Lives-with-Better-Business-Insight/4000007073

InfoPath 2010 and Digital Signatures

I have had several questions about InfoPath 2010 and support for Digital Signatures. The answer is yes, InfoPath 2010 supports them and there is even more improved capability. Here are some good references.

• This provides good general information about InfoPath Digital Signatures - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath-help/digital-signatures-in-infopath-2010-HA010381868.aspx
• This provides information describing in more detail the improvements with SharePoint and InfoPath 2010 - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/infopath/archive/2010/02/18/digital-signature-support-in-infopath-2010.aspx
• This is a good article about the event model around digital signatures and how you create customizations around those event - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa948780.aspx