Category Archives: Web Strategy

SharePoint 2010 Pricing Explained

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A simple question many clients have asked me is ‘How much does SharePoint cost?’ Unfortunately, the answer doesn’t always seem so simple. The goal of this article is to help. Below are some pricing and licensing details to help you put together some budgetary ideas. In addition, there are some licensing details around SharePoint that everyone should know. They can be very helpful before buying and that might help you save money.

Quick Disclaimer: Exact pricing should always come from Microsoft or from your Microsoft Partner. Please use this article as an informational resource, but not as an official quote.

Budget Scenario 1: Deploying a SharePoint Intranet in a Small Business

As a small business, you likely may not be in a Microsoft licensing agreement. Thus, you’re probably looking at two popular ways to acquire access to SharePoint. The first, more traditional way, is to buy a software package such as SharePoint outright. However, the newer and quickly becoming the most popular way is to use SharePoint as part of Office 365. So, what does pricing look like and what things should you know?

On-Prem Products Est. Pricing Notes
SharePoint Foundation 2010 N/A Licensed through your Windows Server Client Access Licensing (or CALs).
SharePoint Server 2010 $4,926 USD Licensed per server. (Same server SKU for Std. or Ent. CALs.)
SharePoint Server 2010 Standard CAL $95 USD Licensed per named user or device.
SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise CAL Std CAL + $83 USD Licensed per named user or device. (This is priced as an add-on to the Std. CAL.)
Office Web Apps 2010 N/A Licensed through your Office 2010
volume licensing.
Cloud Products Pricing Notes
Office 365 – Plan P1 Small Business $6 USD per user/month Provides SharePoint Team Sites and web-based Office file viewing.
Office 365 – Plan E1 Midsize to Enterprise $8 USD per user/month Provides most SharePoint Server features and AD sync for easier user access.

Budgeting and Licensing Tips and Hits

  • Enterprise CAL – Since the Enterprise CAL and features are priced as an add-on, you can mix and match! You can save money by buying only the Enterprise CALs you need vs. for every user.
  • No matter the on-prem version of SharePoint, if you have purchased Office 2010 licenses through volume licensing, you have access to the Office Web Apps download and product key. This is a great add-on especially for users who want to access Office files on both their PC and mobile device.
  • “Free” – It’s Awesome, but be careful! While there’s no price to install, Foundation and the Office Web Apps are not truly free. Make sure you have enough Windows CALs for Foundation or Office licenses for Office Web Apps to cover your users.

Budget Scenario 2: Deploying a SharePoint Intranet as an Enterprise

Start your budget research by pulling out your Microsoft agreement. If you have an Enterprise Agreement or a Select Agreement, check if your users are already licensed for the “Core CAL” or Enterprise-level CAL. These packaged server CALs are designed to provide users with access to most of Microsoft’s most popular server products (including SharePoint). Depending on which one you have, you are probably already licensed for user access to SharePoint. Okay, so what’s left? And again, what things should you know?

Budgeting and Licensing Tips and Hits

  • Server licensing – As long as your users are covered through a CAL package in your agreement, you only need to budget for the number of SharePoint servers you plan to deploy.
  • Software assurance – Acquiring SharePoint through a Microsoft Licensing Agreement will likely mean that the server pricing will be a bit more, but that includes new versions. Since SharePoint 2013 is coming quickly, this isn’t a bad thing at all!

Budget Scenario 3: Deploying SharePoint Public Internet Sites

One final scenario is becoming more and more popular, to use SharePoint as a powerful web content management system. So, does this change pricing? Yes, it mostly makes it more simple to understand. However, there are a couple of licensing details to know that are unique to the public facing aspect of this scenario. So let’s begin by looking over the pricing details:

Website Products Est. Pricing Notes
SharePoint Server 2010 for
Internet Sites, Standard		 $11,793 USD Licensed per server.
License includes all Standard features.
No CALs / Unlimited external users.
SharePoint Server 2010 for
Internet Sites, Enterprise		 $41,392 USD Licensed per server.
License includes all Enterprise features.
No CALs / Unlimited external users.

Budgeting and Licensing Tips and Hits

  • Unlimited User Details – Users can include anonymous and authenticated users. So what about internal users? Website content creators, approvers, and admins are included. But, you can’t use this for your internal intranet too.
  • Domains, the “Gotcha” around Enterprise – You probably noticed the big price difference between Standard and Enterprise. Besides the additional features, why might you need Enterprise? Domains. If you plan to host websites with unique domain names, besides prefixes, you will need the Enterprise License.
  • FAST Search – Beyond multiple domains, Enterprise also includes licensing for FAST Search. This is important if you want things like thumbnails in a visitor’s search results. Just remember, FAST requires a separate server (and thus another server license).

Final Thoughts

Remember, these are prices should only be used for early budgetary planning. There may be additional details and possible discounts not discussed here (such as non-profit and government pricing). Be sure to talk to your Microsoft Partner to get the most current and accurate pricing. Also, when planning a SharePoint project, don’t forget to account for other costs. You may need to budget for SQL Server licensing and any other development, management, or add-on software you plan to use.

Further Reading

Below are some additional resources you may also find beneficial.

Lessons Learned – SharePoint 2010 Fixed Width Design

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There are a lot of posts out there regarding applying a centered fixed width design to a SharePoint master page. However, as I researched the subject for a recent project, I found it hard to find solutions to all the little issues that seemed to continue to pop up.  So, I wanted to create an article that, if you are reading this now, provides you with a complete set of steps to apply a centered fixed width design using the v4.master as the base. That way, it’s Foundation and Server compatible!

Before I go further, I want to acknowledge a couple people who’s posts I found very helpful as I figured things out. If you haven’t read them, check out:

Getting Started – My First Draft

After reading a few articles (including the two noted above), I started by creating a custom master page and CSS file. Then, I did to following:

  1. Linked the CSS file to my master page using the SharePoint specific method, example: 
    <SharePoint:CssRegistration ID="CustomCssRegistration" name="<%$SPUrl:/css/demo.css%>" runat="server"/>
  2. Modified my custom CSS file, example: 
    body.v4master {
    overflow:auto !important;
    background-color:#43709C;
}
#s4-workspace {
    width:1000px;
    margin-left:auto;
    margin-right:auto;
}
#s4-mainarea {
    background-color:white;
}
  3. Modified the s4-workspace DIV with the s4-nosetwidth class so it wouldn’t auto-resize to 100%, example: 
    <div id="s4-workspace" class="s4-nosetwidth">

This resulted in the following look:

At first glance, this isn’t too bad. But, there are some issues.  Some are easier to see than others. There’s an annoying scroll bar that shows up on the right for no reason. The content section doesn’t fill to the bottom of the page (something many want to see).

In addition to those, I found two other issues when testing. When I clicked “Add Document”, the dialog box view had problems. The box width was the same as my workspace and the position of the workspace changed because a scroll bar would appear on the far right.

In addition, if I clicked on Datasheet View for any list, my background color now became the datasheet background color. This basically made Datasheet View useless.

A Better Design – Finding Solutions

After doing further research, trying a few things, using the F12 Developer Tools in IE9, and testing, I found solutions to all the issues. To make a long story short, the end result looks like this:

Here’s my updated CSS with explanations of the changes:

body.v4master {
    overflow-x:auto !important;
    background-image:url('../images/blue.jpg');
    background-repeat:repeat;
}
#s4-workspace {
    overflow-y:auto !important;
    width:1000px;
    margin-left:auto;
    margin-right:auto;
    background-repeat:repeat;
    background-color:white;
}
html.ms-dialog #s4-workspace {
    width:auto;
}

First, in the “body” selector, I changed the background to an image so it wouldn’t affect the datasheet view. Then, by adjusting overflow to “overflow-x”, the unnecessary scroll bar  on the far right was removed from the dialog box view, but retains the auto scroll bar on the bottom for users who have windows or screen sizes smaller than the fixed width.

In the “#s4-workspace” ID selector, I added the “overflow-y” property to remove the right scroll bar from view (unless necessary). Also, by moving the background property from “#s4-mainarea” to “#s4-workspace” and adding the “background-repeat” property, the white background filled to the bottom of the page with the fastest load time. You can also leave the properties in the “#s4-mainarea” ID, but it seemed to slow the fill process.

Finally, I added the “html.ms-dialog” selector and pointed it to the “#s4-workspace” ID. By adding this selector, I could fix the dialog box width issue without giving up fixed width anywhere else.

Concluding Thoughts – A Few More Tweaks

The above helped me achieve a win for my project and I hope it will help you! As my project continued, I ran into a couple of additional items I thought I would share. The project design called for a colored border on the left and right sides of the content area. To do this, I added a custom DIV tag around the “#s4-workspace” DIV tag. Then, I applied my custom border using padding. Below is an example of the updated CSS. Enjoy and happy designing!

body.v4master {
	overflow-x:auto !important;
	background-image:url('../images/blue.jpg');
	background-repeat:repeat;
}
#demoID {
	width:1000px;
	margin-left:auto;
	margin-right:auto;
	padding-top: 0px;
	padding-right: 5px;
	padding-bottom: 0px;
	padding-left: 5px;
	background-repeat:repeat;
	background-color:silver;
}
#s4-workspace {
	overflow-y:auto !important;
	background-repeat:repeat;
	background-color:white;
}
html.ms-dialog #demoID {
	width:auto;
	padding:0px;
}

9 Ways to Drive User Adoption to Your Intranet Site

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As a SharePoint consultant, I enjoy collaborating with clients on SharePoint projects to benefit groups, departments, or the organization as a whole. In order for SharePoint or any intranet site to successfully benefit users and the organization, it must be used.

You may have heard the stories of the many intranets that aren’t used, that become outdated and neglected. So how do you help ensure that your SharePoint implementation is successful? How do you drive user adoption? This article will review 9 proven strategies that can make your implementation a success story.

1. Engagement and Buy-in from Across the Organization

Unfortunately, many organizations’ first attempt at SharePoint is as an IT department project. Marketing departments may weigh in, however often only to the frustration of IT. The end result is often a good intranet site that may be initially well designed, but missing many functional and operational requirements because they just weren’t discovered, discussed, or defined. Even worse, department heads may not know it’s coming, or feel that it’s something “pushed” at them, rather than for them.

Starting with executive leadership, it is important to bring every group in the organization into the planning of your SharePoint implementation. Bringing all of these groups together will help remove internal political barriers, create a clear vision, and build excitement across the organization.

Even if a phased approach is necessary to meet all requirements and objectives, each stake holder will feel like they were part of the process and their needs were heard. They will know that even if they aren’t getting “x” in this release, it’s coming and it’s planned. In the meantime, they will likely use the site and keep their support behind the project.

2. Make it Yours

The average user does not know what SharePoint is, and more to the point, may not want to learn another Microsoft product. For users to want to invest their time and consideration into a technology, they must form an emotional connection to it. Apple is a great example of a group who really understands that. So, what can you do?

Create and establish an identity for your intranet site. Use naming, design, and overall user experience to help inspire that bond. Rather than just another software product, this identity helps your intranet become the one where every individual feels ownership.

3. Governance and Training

With SharePoint, governance and training are key to a successful launch. There is so much you can do with SharePoint. It is important to ensure users know what they can do and how they should do it. Your intranet shouldn’t be the Wild West. Plan out metadata, content types and how content will be clearly organized, roles and responsibilities, and policies and guidelines. Then, build training around those things. The objective should be to enable users to successfully incorporate the use of your new intranet into their daily activities.

Provide users with tailored training for each functional group, such as administrators, owners, approvers, and end-users. Be sure that the training follows your defined Governance and your intranet’s identity. What about post-training? There are many self-paced SharePoint training programs available that are built as plug-ins for SharePoint. Two well-known solutions are:

The Productivity Hub 2010

SharePoint Tutor 2010

Both of these solutions include content and videos to help end users learn at their own pace. And of course, don’t forget to provide a trusty “cheat sheet” with how-to’s for the most used features.

4. If Replacing, What Worked Before? What Didn’t?

For many, an intranet project is a replacement or upgrade project. Take time to analyze your usage reports and be sure to account for popular pages, content, or features that should be in your new intranet deployment. In addition to proving what did work before, these same reports can act as a measuring rod for comparing the success of the same feature on the new site.

One key to remember when upgrading SharePoint–don’t just migrate old content. This is a fresh start, so take the time to inventory current content and migrate only relevant material. The extra time can greatly increase the overall value for users and there are many tools available to help make this an easier task to accomplish.

5. Use Your Fan-boys

As you begin to build-out your Intranet, is there a department most excited to get started? Can you involve those users early in the process? If so, these users will feel vested in the solution and will likely act as champions for its adoption.

Having an excited group of early adopters can also be helpful in providing early feedback if issues are found. They will often be willing to share a successful project, rather than just getting frustrated when something doesn’t work. In addition, they tend to be willing or even anxious, to coach and encourage others through the learning curve.

6. Don’t Discount the Value of Personalization

As Facebook and Twitter have become household names, today’s users are accustomed to a web experience that allows them to tag and share content, receive a stream of information they want to see, and to connect with people they know or want to know. Successfully incorporating the social features of SharePoint 2010 can boost adoption by provide the social experience. This is an area that does involve some planning and well defined governance. Don’t let that scare you, let it inspire you to ask how your organization could best use news feeds, activity feeds, micro-blogs, knowledge bases, etc.

Another key reason to consider personalization features such as My Sites, is for external access. There is likely a measurable value, perhaps even a security necessity, to ensure that when users such as sales personnel and executives store and access their documents from mobile devices and laptops, they interact with an organizationally governed and audit-able location, rather than using personal storage cloud services.

7. Executive Engagement and Organizational Alignment

Nothing can kill the long-term success of an intranet project like the loss of executive interest and/or a lack of return on investment. It’s essential to the project to ensure that:

  • There is a clear understanding of the business objectives.
  • That priorities stay in the right order.
  • That the expected return on investment for the initial phases is met.
  • There is an active communication channel with the executive leadership.

Often in a SharePoint project, there are important initial “wins” that will bring measurable benefit. Developing these initial “wins” with the active engagement of the executive leadership can provide early project approval and executive user adoption. In addition, the executive team can provide clear vision into how the SharePoint project matches the strategic objectives of the organization, thus ensuring alignment from the very start.

8. Mobile Support

Most everyone carries a smartphone these days and many have or would like to have a tablet device. While SharePoint will automatically create mobile pages for most content, there are many native client applications available for mobile platforms. While not the right fit for everyone, remote access to the organization’s Intranet can be a major driver for user adoption. This is especially true for organizations with outside support staff, sales teams, executives, board members, etc. If this applies to you, you may want to establish a planned deployment of a particular client app, or provide users with a list of accepted client apps.

9. Well Executed Search

Even with a well-designed site including easy to use navigation, we live in the search engine age. Users will often simply use search to find what they need. This is one of the top features that can make or break user adoption. SharePoint offers a vast multitude of features, integrations, and management tools to ensure that users receive the right results. With that said, be sure to spend time early on testing and tweaking. If you get it right, search alone can become a major driver for why users come to the site.

In Conclusion

Of course, these drivers only scratch the surface of information and support available to help you build your adoption strategy. So if possible, utilize the experience of a consulting firm such as Pinnacle to help you plan for success and avoid pitfalls. Also, be sure to review the tips and insights available from the active community of Microsoft MVP bloggers.

SharePoint for Public Websites: Top 6 Things to Consider

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In only 10 years, websites have greatly evolved from their beginnings as simple sites. “Gone are the days of static text, flat images, and broken links,” as Eric Riz wrote in his article, SharePoint: Should you use it for your public website? And as the landscape continues to change and people do more and more business over the Internet, today’s Internet visitor demands more from their website experience. They not only want a website to be informative and to look good, but they also want it to provide real-time information, dynamic content, social interaction, and an immersive interface. In other words, today’s sites must be interactively pleasing, not just aesthetically pleasing.

So what about SharePoint 2010? Just like any technology platform, there are pros and cons and debates over whether SharePoint is always a good fit. But with its extensibility, audio and video integration, and social capabilities, it can be a very powerful and strategic option. In fact, if you have SharePoint already within your organization, another benefit you can realize is that there is little or no duplicated staff training necessary, no separate systems required for your Intranet vs. your external-facing website.

But before we go further, let’s do some foundational work. Many are unaware of SharePoint’s public website capabilities although many already use SharePoint. So, if this idea is new to you, stop over at a site called, WSSDemo. This site lists many public-facing SharePoint sites, and even categorizes them by industry.

In addition, many of Microsoft’s sites are built on SharePoint and serve as good examples. (Tip for spotting SharePoint sites: When looking at the URL, if it has /Pages/ and the webpage ends in .aspx, then it’s likely a SharePoint site.)

So, is your business considering SharePoint for your public website? In this post, we will review 6 key things to consider when planning a SharePoint public website project.

1. Licensing and Support

In order to use the full SharePoint Server product for your Internet website, the server licensing comes in 2 flavors, Standard and Enterprise. However, there’s no client access licensing. Only the “for Internet Sites” server licenses are required, but within your production environment, you will need licenses for each running server instance.

Another nice thing to note is SharePoint’s support community. Beyond Microsoft and its partners, there are many third-party developers of management tools, web parts, and templates. In addition, there is a thriving SharePoint developer community on CodePlex with many downloadable open-source tools.

2. Planning

It’s essential to have a well-developed game plan for your new SharePoint site. As with any website project, you are likely to plan a website face-lift. Thus, you will want to take time to define and approve your brand strategy and the look and layout of your site. Do you plan to stay closer to the “out-of-the-box” look, or do you want to significantly customize? In SharePoint, the key to remember is the more Master Pages and Page Layouts you have, the more time is involved in the design and the building of the site.

In addition, SharePoint website projects often require planning and strategy regarding development. In a well planned development process, you have separate environments for development and testing. While Microsoft licensing often allows for these additional environments, hardware resource requirements still need to be planned and allocated.

3. Staging

Publishing information on a public website should always involve a staged process, that includes SharePoint. This is an important consideration regardless of whether you’re a small business or a large organization. SharePoint includes powerful publishing features from simple approval workflows to multi-farm content deployment paths. So be sure to plan out your content approval process and then utilize SharePoint to complement, or even enforce, your plan and process.

4. Web Standards and Accessibility

These two items are important to consider for any public website and SharePoint 2010 comes a long way from its predecessors in being compliant and flexible around ASP, CSS, and JavaScript. As you plan to customize, check out the many resources online to help you, for example, SharePoint’s CSS classes and IDs.

SharePoint 2010 is WCAG 1.0 and 2.0 compliant out-of-the-box and Microsoft has put a lot of work into interface enhancements such as in-browser dialogs, keyboard support, and tab access. In addition, attributes such as labels, descriptions, and tooltips, are built into SharePoint. So, as you customize and brand your SharePoint site, think about accessibility standards and ensure that added content and pictures maintain those same brand standards.

5. Custom Development

As you plan your project, you will likely customize your site’s branding and layout and will probably look at extending functionality to include powerful e-commerce functionality, such as customer order entry, order status, etc. Happily, there are some great resources to help you with SharePoint enhancements and development.

To start, check out the “Patterns & Practices SharePoint Guidance” project on CodePlex. It includes a hands-on lab and good reference material. Next, there’s a great SharePoint Dev Wiki at Nothingbutsharepoint.com. And finally, enlisting the help of an experienced consultant company such as Pinnacle, can be valuable to you in reaching your customization goals.

6. Security and User Logins

As with any website project, security is a key item to address early in your site’s architecture discussions. For most public websites, many visitors will simply browse. Thus, anonymous access is all that’s needed. However, if you are looking into an online store with checkout, a vendor or dealer portal, etc., the major benefits come from interactions after login.

SharePoint can use domain logins through your Active Directory, but most companies don’t want to be limited or exposed and choose to configure Forms Based Authentication or use a third-party authenticator such as Live ID or Facebook. SharePoint offers significantly better support for these options compared to its predecessors, so it’s important to think about which authentication method you want to use, how you want visitors to login, and how you want to manage user accounts.

Summary

Planning and strategy is key. As a platform, SharePoint has truly grown since its first release. Today’s latest SharePoint 2010 sites work well on Firefox, Safari, Chrome, iPads, and more. So while the features are there, the strategy must support your online and business goals. The result of that combination is a site your visitors can easily use and navigate to find your content.

5 Reasons Why We Switched to the WordPress Blogging Platform

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Maybe you’ve noticed, but things on this blog look a little differently than they used to. Recently we decided to switch to using the WordPress blogging platform here on our website. I wanted to take a couple of moments and outline five reasons why we switched and hopefully give you some insight into your own blogging platform. While I consider myself a huge WordPress fan my goal isn’t to get you to switch, but to show you the mental process we used which might cause you to think you through your’s as well. Continue reading →

New Internet Marketing Offerings

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Over the past several months Pinnacle employees have been strategizing on how best we can help your business achieve success through Internet Marketing. We strive every day to help make businesses better through making technology work, and today is one of those days! Today we are pleased to announce to you that we offer Internet Marketing Solutions. This is a great step in the right direction to get your internet marketing off the ground or to help manage what’s currently working for you.

This set of solutions includes:

  1. Internet Marketing Consulting (Social Media, blogging, SEO, and Email Marketing)
  2. Custom Email Market Strategy
  3. Custom Email Templates
  4. 10,000 Bulk emails monthly
  5. Dynamics CRM 2011 online (2 licenses)

Additional Packages also include:

  1. Custom lead scoring
  2. Web traffic analytics
  3. Custom web forms builder
  4. 40,000 Bulk emails monthly

CONTACT US today to talk to us about your internet marketing needs.

5 Ways To Increase the Quality of Your Email Marketing

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In a Pew Research study performed in December of 2010, adults were asked what activities they participated in while online.  An overwhelming 92% said that they send and read email. More than social networking, more than researching and conversing about a hobby, more than checking the weather – Email. In fact in 2010 107 trillion emails were sent. That’s 33,900,000 emails per second. Email is such a part of my life that even though my phone automatically checks for new email every minute I still navigate to Outlook and Gmail every time I log into my computer.

The greatest question any business can ask itself is, “how can I best leverage email for marketing?” which is a fantastic question, but one that also causes a great deal more questions. What about SPAM? How often do I send email? Who do I send them to?

Email Marketing can be the most frustrating form of Internet Marketing, but if done right, the most rewarding. So here are five ways you can boost your Email Marketing efforts:

  1. Make it easy to sign-up: Put a single sign-up form or link to your sign-up form on every page of your website. At Pinnacle we put the entire form in the footer of our website so it’s on every page. For better results place your form or link in the top 750 pixels of your page.
  2. Give them something to look forward to: Save some of your best content for your newsletter. Remember, the reason they are on your email list is because they requested to receive updates from you. Give them something worth reading.
  3. Ask people to read: Use other channels of influence to increase your subscribers. Also, post links to your newsletter on Twitter and Facebook.
  4. Send often, but not annoyingly often:  The average person cleans out their inbox every 12-15 days. Sending two newsletters per month is often ideal. Test your list to see how often you should send messages to your followers.
  5. Design a beautiful email:  Use an HTML design for your email template. A newsletter that is all text is boring and hard to read. You need to grab the reader’s eyes immediately when they look at your message.

These are just some basic steps, but if you follow them it will increase the quality of your email marketing efforts.