Does your SharePoint cloud or virtualization strategy sound like a Dilbert comic?

You know you want SharePoint, but there are so many choices. How do you start? What do you need to know?

Original image credit: dilbert.com

Here are just a few of the choices you'll need to think about:

What SharePoint cloud hosters don't tell you

Seeing how much hype there is about cloud computing / hosting / software as a service, I thought it would be good to share some of cloud computing’s dirty little secrets. Few people in the industry talk about these, and customers usually don’t find out until there's no going back.

Cost

Whether hosting SharePoint costs less than hosting it on premises greatly depends on how you measure cost. Hosting companies measure it in terms of setup costs (your initial investment) and the monthly plan cost (your marginal cost). But you need to measure "cost" in terms of cumulative cost from the day SharePoint is made available. Here's why…

Making use of hosted services provides a cost-effective way to deploy SharePoint to your organization. However, it’s like renting an apartment vs. buying a house: you don't need a down payment to rent, but you never stop paying rent. The service fee is a constant monthly expense that never goes away.

Need a second service? There’s another monthly fee. The problem of course is that you never actually get ROI with this model. It’s more like a reverse ROI. You start out ahead of the game, because you had few start up costs. But after a few months, you get further and further behind, because at some point you’ve paid as much in service fees as it would have cost to do the implementation in house. And you keep on paying. Indefinitely.

Who has the cheapest SharePoint 2010 hosting? Maybe you do.

I get asked this question a lot, "Who has the cheapest SharePoint 2010 hosting?" Simply put, it depends on how many users you have. The "users" are the people who will access SharePoint. These will include your employees, sub contractors, partners, vendors, and anyone else who needs to view or upload data to your SharePoint system.

So how does the number of users affect who has the cheapest hosting? Let's see…

Join me at SharePoint Saturday, NYC for Creating SharePoint Custom Field Types with Visual Studio

I am excited to be presenting a session on Creating SharePoint Custom Field Types with Visual Studio at SharePoint Saturday New York, July 28, 2012.

SharePoint has many customization options for the user interface and for the data model. SharePoint custom field types are unique in that they provide an integrated mechanism for customizing SharePoint user interface, data storage, data entry, data validation, and rendering. Best of all, these customizations stay with your data anywhere a List View Web Part or List View Form Page is used.

Boston Area SharePoint Users Group May 9, 2012 Meeting

REGISTER
Register for the next meeting. It's FREE, but space is limited.

PRESENTER 
The presenter for our next meeting is Donal Conlon, of Jornata. He will be presenting "Implementing Forms Based Authentication." 

SESSION ABSTRACT 
There are many reasons to not use Forms Based Authentication and many reasons to use it. This session talks about the do’s and don’ts of FBA, planning for authentication, what your options are and goes through a live demo of configuring it successfully.