Hi all

Welcome to the fourth post about the adaptive change that cloud computing is going to have on practitioners, paradigms and organisations. The previous two posts took a look at some of the dodgier side of two of the industries biggest players, Microsoft and Amazon. While I have highlighted some dumb issues with both, I nevertheless have to acknowledge their resourcing, scalability, and ability to execute. On that point of ability to execute, in this post we are going to expand a little towards the cloud industry more broadly and the inevitable consolidation that is, and will continue to take place.

Now to set the scene, a lot of people know that in the early twentieth century, there were a lot of US car manufacturers. I wonder if you can take a guess at the number of defunct car manufacturers there have been before and after that time.

…Fifty?

…One Hundred?

Not even close…

What if I told you that there were over 1700!

Here is another interesting stat. The table below shows the years where manufacturers went bankrupt or ceased operations. Below that I have put the average shelf life of each company for that decade.

Now, you would expect that the bulk of closures would be depression era, but note that the depression did not start until the late 1920’s and during the boom times that preceded it, 660 manufactures went to the wall – a worse result!

The pattern of consolidation

What I think the above table shows is the classic pattern of industry consolidation after an initial phase of innovation and expansion, where over time, the many are gobbled by the few. As the number of players consolidate, those who remain grow bigger, with more resources and economies of scale. This in turn creates barriers to entry for new participants. Accordingly, the rate of attrition slows down, but that is more due to the fact that there are fewer players in the industry. Those that are left continue to fight their battles, but now those battles take longer. Nevertheless, as time goes on, the number of players consolidate further.

If we applied a cloud/web hosting paradigm to the above table, I would equate the dotcom bust of 2000 with the depression era of the 1920’s and 1930’s. I actually think with cloud computing, we are in the 1960’s and on right now. The largest of the large players have how made big bets on the cloud and have entered the market in a big, big way. For more than a decade, other companies hosted Microsoft technology, with Microsoft showing little interest beyond selling licenses via them. Now Microsoft themselves are also the hosting provider. Does that mean most the hosting providers will have the fate of Netscape? Or will they manage to survive the dance with Goliath like Citrix or VMWare have?

For those who are not Microsoft or Amazon…

Imagine you have been hosting SharePoint solutions for a number of years. Depending on your size, you probably own racks or a cage in some-one else’s data centre, or you own a small data centre yourself. You have some high end VMWare gear to underpin your hosting offerings and you do both managed SharePoint (i.e. offer a basic site collection subscription with no custom stuff – ala Office 365) and you offer dedicated virtual machines for those who want more control (ala Amazon). You have dutifully paid your service provider licensing to Microsoft, have IT engineers on staff, some SharePoint specialists, a helpdesk and some dodgy sales guys – all standard stuff and life is good. You had a crack at implementing SharePoint multi tenancy, but found it all a bit too fiddly and complex.

Then Amazon comes along and shakes things up with their IaaS offerings. They are cost competitive, have more data centres in more regions, a higher capacity, more fault tolerance, a wider variety of services and can scale more than you can. Their ability to execute in terms of offering new services is impossible to keep up with. In short, they slowly but relentlessly take a chunk of the market and continue to grow. So, you naturally counter by pushing the legitimate line that you specialise in SharePoint, and as a result customers are in much more trusted hands than Amazon, when investing on such a complex tool as SharePoint.

But suddenly the game changes again. The very vendor who you provide cloud-based SharePoint services for, now bundles it with Exchange, Lync and offers Active Directory integration (yeah, yeah, I know there was BPOS but no-one actually heard of that). Suddenly the argument that you are a safer option than Amazon is shot down by the fact that Microsoft themselves now offer what you do. So whose hands are safer? The small hosting provider with limited resources or the multinational with billions of dollars in the bank who develops the product? Furthermore, given Microsoft’s advantage in being able to mobilise its knowledge resources with deep product knowledge, they have a richer managed service offering than you can offer (i.e. they offer multi tenancy .

This puts you in a bit of a bind as you are getting assailed at both ends. Amazon trumps you in the capabilities at the IaaS end and is encroaching in your space and Microsoft is assailing the SaaS end. How does a small fish survive in a pond with the big ones? In my opinion, the mid-tier SharePoint cloud providers will have to reinvent themselves.

The adaptive change…

So for the mid-tier SharePoint cloud provider grappling with the fact that their play area is reduced because of the big kids encroaching, there is only one option. They have to be really, really good in areas the big kids are not good at. In SharePoint terms, this means they have to go to places many don’t really want to go: they need to bolster their support offerings and move up the SharePoint stack.

You see, traditionally a SharePoint hosting provider tends to take two approaches. They provide a managed service where the customer cannot mess with it too much (i.e. Site collection admin access only). For those who need more than that, they will offer a virtual machine and wipe their hands of any maintenance or governance, beyond ensuring that  the infrastructure is fast and backed up. Until now, cloud providers could get away with this and the reason they take this approach should be obvious to anyone who has implemented SharePoint. If you don’t maintain operational governance controls, things can rapidly get out of hand. Who wants to deal with all that “people crap”? Besides, that’s a different skill set to typical skills required to run and maintain cloud services at the infrastructure layer.

So some cloud providers will kick and scream about this, and delude themselves into thinking that hosting and cloud services are their core business. For those who think this, I have news for you. The big boys think these are their core business too and they are going to do it better than you. This is now commodity stuff and a by-product of commoditisation is that many SharePoint consultancies are now cloud providers anyway! They sign up to Microsoft or Amazon and are able to provide a highly scalable SharePoint cloud service with all the value added services further up the SharePoint stack. In short, they combine their SharePoint expertise with Microsoft/Amazon’s scale.

Now on the issue of support, Amazon has no specific SharePoint skills and they never will. They are first and foremost a compelling IaaS offering. Microsoft’s support? … go and re-read part 2 if you want to see that. It seems that no matter the big multinational, level 1 tech support is always level 1 tech support.

So what strategies can a mid-tier provider take to stay competitive in this rapidly commoditising space. I think one is to go premium and go niche.

• Provide brilliant support. If I call you, day or night, I expect to speak to a SharePoint person straight away. I want to get to know them on a first name basis and I do not want to fight the defence mechanism of the support hierarchy.
• Partner with SharePoint consultancies or acquire consulting resources. The latter allows you to do some vertical integration yourself and broaden your market and offerings. A potential KPI for any SharePoint cloud provider should be that no support person ever says “sorry that’s outside the scope of what we offer.”
• Develop skills in the tools and systems that surround SharePoint or invest in SharePoint areas where skills are lacking. Examples include Project Server, PerformancePoint, integration with GIS, Records management and ERP systems. Not only will you develop competencies that few others have, but you can target particular vertical market segments who use these tools.
• (Controversial?) Dump your infrastructure and use Amazon in conjunction with another IaaS provider. You just can’t compete with their scale and price point. If you use them you will likely save costs, when combined with a second provider you can play the resiliency card and best of all … you can offer VPC

Conclusion

In the last two posts we looked at some of the areas where both Microsoft and Amazon sometimes struggle to come to grips with the SharePoint cloud paradigm. In this post, we took a look at other cloud providers having to come to grips with the SharePoint cloud paradigm of having to compete with these two giants, who are clearly looking to eke out as much value as they can from the cloud pie. Whether you agree with my suggested strategy (Rackspace appears to), the pattern of the auto industry serves as an interesting parallel to the cloud computing marketplace. Is the relentless consolidation a good thing? Probably not in the long term (we will tackle that issue in the last post in this series). In the next post, we are going to shift our focus away from the cloud providers themselves, and turn our gaze to the internal IT departments – who until now, have had it pretty good. As you will see, a big chunk of the irrational side of cloud computing comes from this area.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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My next door neighbour is a builder. When he moved next door, the house was an old piece of crap. Within 6 months, he completely renovated it himself, adding in two bedrooms, an underground garage and all sorts of cool stuff. On the other hand, I bought my house because it was a good location, someone had already renovated it and all we had to do was move in. The reason for this was simple: I had a new baby and more importantly, me and power tools do not mix. I just don’t have the skills, nor the time to do what my neighbour did.

You can probably imagine what would happen if I tried to renovate my house the way my neighbour did. It would turn out like the Ikea fails in the video. Similarly, many SharePoint installs tend to look similar to the video too. Moral of the story? Sometimes it is better to get something pre-packaged than to do it yourself.

In the last post, we examined the “Software as a Service” (SaaS) model of cloud computing in the form of Office 365. Other popular SaaS providers include SlideShare, Salesforce, Basecamp and Tom’s Planner to name a few. Most SaaS applications are browser based and not as feature rich or complex as their on-premise competition. Therefore the SaaS model is that its a bit like buying a kit home. In SaaS, no user of these services ever touches the underlying cloud infrastructure used to provide the solution, nor do they have a full mandate to tweak and customise to their hearts content. SaaS is basically predicated on the notion that someone else will do a better set-up job than you and the old 80/20 rule about what features for an application are actually used.

Some people may regard the restrictions of SaaS as a good thing – particularly if they have dealt with the consequences of one too many unproductive customization efforts previously. As many SharePointer’s know, the more you customise SharePoint, the less resilient it gets. Thus restricting what sort of customisations can be done in many circumstances might be a wise thing to do.

Nevertheless, this actually goes against the genetic traits of pretty much every Australian male walking the planet. The reason is simple: no matter how much our skills are lacking or however inappropriate tools or training, we nevertheless always want to do it ourselves. This brings me onto our next cloud provider: Amazon, and their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model of cloud based services. This is the ultimate DIY solution for those of us that find SaaS to cramping our style. Let’s take a closer look shall we?

Amazon in a nutshell

Okay, I have to admit that as an infrastructure guy, I am genetically predisposed to liking Amazon’s cloud offerings. Why? well as an infrastructure guy, I am like my neighbour who renovated his own house. I’d rather do it all myself because I have acquired the skills to do so. So for any server-hugging infrastructure people out there who are wondering what they have been missing out on? Read on… you might like what you see.

Now first up, its easy for new players to get a bit intimidated by Amazon’s bewildering array of offerings with brand names that make no sense to anybody but Amazon… EC2, VPC, S3, ECU, EBS, RDS, AMI’s, Availability Zones – sheesh! So I am going to ignore all of their confusing brand names and just hope that you have heard of virtual machines and will assume that you or your tech geeks know all about VMware. The simplest way to describe Amazon is VMWare on steroids. Amazon’s service essentially allows you to create Virtual Machines within Amazon’s “cloud” of large data centres around the world. As I stated earlier, the official cloud terminology that Amazon is traditionally associated is called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This is where, instead of providing ready-made applications like SaaS, a cloud vendor provides lower level IT infrastructure for rent. This consists of stuff like virtualised servers, storage and networking.

Put simply, utilising Amazon, one can deploy virtual servers with my choice of operating system, applications, memory, CPU and disk configuration. Like any good “all you can eat” buffet, one is spoilt for choice. One simply chooses an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to use as a base for creating a virtual server. You can choose one of Amazon’s pre-built AMI’s (Base installs of Windows Server or Linux) or you can choose an image from the community contributed list of over 8000 base images. Pretty much any vendor out there who sells a turn-key solution (such as those all-in-one virus scanning/security solutions) has likely created an AMI. Microsoft have also gotten in on the Amazon act and created AMI’s for you, optimised by their product teams. Want SQL 2008 the way Microsoft would install it? Choose the Microsoft Optimized Base SQL Server 2008R2 AMI  which “contains scripts to install and optimize SQL Server 2008R2 and accompanying services including SQL Server Analysis services, SQL Server Reporting services, and SQL Server Integration services to your environment based on Microsoft best practices.”

The series of screen shots below shows the basic idea. After signing up, use the “Request instance wizard” to create a new virtual server by choosing an AMI first. In the example below, I have shown the default Amazon AMI’s under “Quick start” as well as the community AMI’s.

Amazons default AMI’s

Community contributed AMI’s

From the list above, I have chosen Microsoft’s “Optimized SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1” from the community AMI’s and clicked “Select”. Now I can choose the CPU and memory configurations. Hmm how does a 16 core server sound with 60 gig of RAM? That ought to do it…

Now I won’t go through the full description of commissioning virtual servers, but suffice to say that you can choose which geographic location this server will reside within Amazon’s cloud and after 15 minutes or so, your virtual server will be ready to use. It can be assigned a public IP address, firewall restricted and then remotely managed as per any other server. This can all be done programmatically too. You can talk to Amazon via web services start, monitor, terminate, etc. as many virtual machines as you want, which allows you to scale your infrastructure on the fly and very quickly. There are no long procurement times and you then only pay for what servers are currently running. If you shut them down, you stop paying.

But what makes it cool…

Now I am sure that some of you might be thinking “big deal…any virtual machine hoster can do that.” I agree – and when I first saw this capability I just saw it as a larger scale VMWare/Xen type deployment. But when really made me sit up and take notice was Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) functionality. The super-duper short version of VPC is that it allows you extend your corporate network into the Amazon cloud. It does this by allowing you to define your own private network and connecting to it via site-to-site VPN technology. To describe how it works, diagrammatically check out the image below.

Let’s use an example to understand the basic idea. Let’s say your internal IP address range at your office is 10.10.10.0 to 10.10.10.255 (a /24 for the geeks). With VPC you tell Amazon “I’d like a new IP address range of 10.10.11.0 to 10.10.11.255” . You are then prompted to tell Amazon the public IP address of your internet router. The screenshots below shows what happens next:

The first screenshot asks you to choose what type of router is at your end. Available choices are Cisco, Juniper, Yamaha, Astaro and generic. The second screenshot shows you a sample configuration that is downloaded. Now any Cisco trained person reading this will recognise what is going on here. This is the automatically generated configuration to be added to an organisations edge router to create an IPSEC tunnel. In other words, we have extended our corporate network itself into the cloud. Any service can be run on such a network – not just SharePoint. For smaller organisations wanting the benefits of off-site redundancy without the costs of a separate datacenter, this is a very cost effective option indeed.

For the Cisco geeks, the actual configuration is two GRE tunnels that are IPSEC encrypted. BGP is used for route table exchange, so Amazon can learn what routes to tunnel back to your on-premise network. Furthermore Amazon allows you to manage firewall settings at the Amazon end too, so you have an additional layer of defence past your IPSEC router.

This is called Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and when configured properly is very powerful. Note the “P” is for private. No server deployed to this subnet is internet accessible unless you choose it to be. This allows you to extend your internal network into the cloud and gain all the provisioning, redundancy and scalability benefits without exposure to the internet directly. As an example, I did a hosted SharePoint extranet where we use SQL log shipping of the extranet content databases back to the a DMZ network for redundancy. Try doing that on Office365!

This sort of functionality shows that Amazon is a mature, highly scalable and flexible IaaS offering. They have been in the business for a long time and it shows because their full suite of offerings is much more expansive than what I can possibly cover here. Accordingly my Amazon experiences will be the subject of a more in-depth blog post or two in future. But for now I will force myself to stop so the non-technical readers don’t get too bored.

So what went wrong?

So after telling you how impressive Amazon’s offering is, what could possibly go wrong? Like the Office365 issue covered in part 2, absolutely nothing with the technology. To understand why, I need to explain Amazon’s pricing model.

Amazon offer a couple of ways to pay for servers (called instances in Amazon speak). An on-demand instance is calculated based on a per-hour price while the server is running. The more powerful the server is in terms of CPU, memory and disk, the more you pay. To give you an idea, Amazon’s pricing for a Windows box with 8CPU’s and 16GB of RAM, running in Amazon’s “US east” region will set you back $0.96 per hour (as of 27/12/11).  If you do the basic math for that, it equates to around $8409 per year, or $25228 over three years. (Yeah I agree that’s high – even when you consider that you get all the trappings of a highly scalable and fault tolerant datacentre).

On the other hand, a reserved instance involves making a one-time payment and in turn, receive a significant discount on the hourly charge for that instance. Essentially if you are going to run an Amazon server on a 24*7 basis for more than 18 months or so, a reserved instance makes sense as it reduces considerable cost over the long term. The same server would only cost you $0.40 per hour if you pay an up-front $2800 for a 3 year term. Total cost: $13312 over three years – much better.

So with that scene set, consider this scenario: Back at the start of 2011, a client of mine consolidated all of their SharePoint cloud services to Amazon from a variety of other another hosting providers. They did this for a number of reasons, but it basically boiled down to the fact they had 1) outgrown the SaaS model and 2) had a growing number of clients. As a result, requirements from clients were getting more complicated and beyond that which most of the hosting providers could cater for. They also received irregular and inconsistent support from their existing providers, as well as some unexpected downtime that reduced confidence. In short, they needed to consolidate their cloud offering and manage their own servers. They were developing custom SharePoint solutions, needed to support federated claims authentication and required disaster recovery assurance to mitigate the risk of going 100% cloud. Amazon’s VPC offering in particular seemed ideal, because it allowed full control of the servers in a secure way.

Now making this change was not something we undertook lightly. We spent considerable time researching Amazon’s offerings, trying to understand all the acronyms as well as their fine print. (For what its worth I used IBIS as the basis to develop an assessment and the map of my notes can be found here). As you are about to see though, we did not check well enough.

Back when we initially evaluated the VPC offering, it was only available in very few Amazon sites (two locations in the USA only) and the service was still in beta. This caused us a bit of a dilemma at the time because of the risk of relying on a beta service. But we were assured when Amazon confirmed that VPC would eventually be available in all of of their datacentres. We also stress tested the service for a few weeks, it remained stable and we developed and tested a disaster recovery strategy involving SQL log shipping and a standby farm. We also purchased reserved instances from Amazon since these servers were going to be there for the long haul, so we pre-paid to reduce the hourly rates. Quite a complex configuration was provisioned in only two days and we were amazed by how easy it all was.

Things hummed along for 9 months in this fashion and the world was a happy place. We were delighted when Amazon notified us that VPC had come out of beta and was now available in any of Amazon’s datacentres around the world. We only used the US datacentre because it was the only location available at the time. Now we wanted to transfer the services to Singapore. My client contacted Amazon about some finer points on such a move and was informed that they would have to pay for their reserved instances all over again!

What the?

It turns out, reserved instances are not transferrable! Essentially, Amazon were telling us that although we paid for a three year reserved instance, and only used it for 9 months, to move the servers to a new region would mean we have to pay all over again for another 3 year reserve. According to Amazon’s documentation, each reserved instance is associated with a specific region, which is fixed for the lifetime of the reserved instance and cannot be changed.

“Okay,” we answer, “we can understand that in circumstances where people move to another cloud provider. But in our case we were not.” We had used around 1/3rd of the reserved instance. So surely Amazon should pro-rata the unused amount, and offer that as a credit when we re-purchase reserved instances in Singapore? I mean, we will still be hosting with Amazon, so overall, they will not be losing any revenue al all. On the contrary, we will be paying them more, because we will have to sign up for an additional 3 years of reserve when we move the services.

So we ask Amazon whether that can be done. “Nope," comes back the answer from amazons not so friendly billing team with one of those trite and grossly insulting “Sorry for any inconvenience this causes” ending sentences. After more discussions, it seems that internally within Amazon, each region or datacentre within each region is its own profit centre. Therefore in typical silo fashion, the US datacentre does not want to pay money to the Singapore operation as that would mean the revenue we paid would no longer recognised against them.

Result? Customer is screwed all because the Amazon fiefdoms don’t like sharing the contents of the till. But hey – the regional managers get their bonuses right?

Conclusion

Like part 2 of this cloud computing series, this is not a technical issue. Amazon’s cloud service in our experience has been reliable and performed well. In this case, we are turned off by the fact that their internal accounting procedures create a situation that is not great for customers who wish to remain loyal to them. In a post about the danger of short termism and ignoring legacy, I gave the example of how dumb it is for organisations to think they are measuring success based on how long it takes to close a helpdesk call. When such a KPI is used, those in support roles have little choice but to try and artificially close calls when users problems have not been solved because that’s how they are deemed to be performing well. The reality though is rather than measure happy customers, this KPI simply rewards which helpdesk operators have managed to game the system by getting callers off the phone as soon as they can.

I feel that Amazon are treating this is an internal accounting issue, irrespective of client outcomes. Amazon will lose the business of my client because of this since they have enough servers hosted where the financial impost of paying all over again is much more than transferring to a different cloud provider. While VPC and automated provisioning of virtual servers is cool and all, at the end of the day many hosting providers can offer this if you ask them. Although it might not be as slick with fancy as Amazon’s automated configuration, it nonetheless is very doable and the other providers are playing catch-up. Like Apple, Amazon are enjoying the benefits of being first to market with their service, but as competition heats up, others will rapidly bridge the gap.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

                      

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This third post in the “Who do SharePoint Projects Fail” series has been hard to write, not because I am struggling with ideas, but because I have too many! It is hard to put all the reasons why SharePoint projects go wrong into a coherent chain of logic.

In the first two posts in this series, we did a basic examination of wicked problem theory.

Part 1 introduced you to tequila slammers, as well as the pioneering work by Horst Rittel and the concept of wicked problems.

Part 2 also delved into the murky depths of academic history to demonstrate that even back in the seventies when ABBA stole the hearts and minds of teenyboppers around the world, at least some people had time to look at wicked problems in relation to building IT systems.

If you take away anything from part 1 and 2, it is this.

• Too many tequila slammers hurt
• Before you blame the product, the project manager, the stakeholders, the nerds, the methodology or anything else in vicinity, go back to the problem you are solving and determine its ‘wickedness’

Now we will finally look at this large, complex, scary beast known as SharePoint. I have no means to quantify how much of a percentage of project problems arise from issues related to “the product”, but it definitely happens. Unsurprisingly enough, it is easy to argue that some of the areas that I highlight below are people issues, but we still get to indulge in Microsoft bashing – and who doesn’t enjoy a bit of that eh?

Continue reading “Why do SharePoint Projects Fail – Part 3″

                      

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Hey there!

Sorry it has taken me a while to get back to the Cisco articles. The “choose your own adventure” post took longer than I thought it would and I also was side tracked blogging about annoying programming issues with XML and Javascript.

This is the last of the Cisco fanboy series of articles and really its more a tidying up of loose ends. To call this last article a Cisco fanboy article is a bit of a stretch actually, since we are now moving to a broader level of governance and accountability, and is therefore not really about Cisco, so I’ll start a new series more appropriately titled and continue from where this article leaves off. 

I started the series with the intent of starting with a seemingly innocuous scenario (Cisco TFTP backups), demonstrating how SharePoint can be leveraged as an okay point solution. I then tried to slowly expand the scope to the broader issues of complex infrastructure management management, while sticking to a Cisco/IP network oriented theme in an attempt to get technical thinkers (like Cisco guys) to think beyond nuts and bolts. This also demonstrated how thinking past ‘the point solution’ can being more substantive benefits. 

Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco FanBoys (final housekeeping) – Part 6″

                      

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Greetings SharePoint fans and Cisco people who are soon to be SharePoint fans! I’m back with part 5 of this series on leveraging features of MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 to help manage Cisco infrastructure.

For those of you who hate programming topics and have no interest in TFTP issues, we may well have finally gotten to a topic that you are interested in! For the rest of you, who have read the first four articles, we now shift our focus from getting Cisco configurations into SharePoint, to doing something useful with them once we have done so.

In this post, we will examine the out of the box capabilities of workflow in SharePoint and delve a little deeper into document libraries and content management. So this is more aimed at Cisco people than it is at SharePoint Pros. SharePoint people, much of the topics I cover in this article you may have seen before.

I personally don’t think this post has a high coffee requirement rating in terms of complexity of concepts, compared to the last two anyhow. However be prepared: it is a long read.

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating:

Continue reading “Sharepoint for Cisco Fanboys (beyond TFTP) – Part 5″

                      

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Welcome to part 4 of my series on demonstrating SharePoint’s usefulness for storing Cisco configuration backups. What a hard slog it’s been! The last article (part 3) of this series focused on how to modify an open source C# TFTP server to upload files into a SharePoint document library using the SharePoint SDK.

Here is the quick recap on what we have covered so far

• Part 1 illustrated how it it possible to use SNMP to tell a Cisco IOS device to dump its configuration to TFTP. We talked about the version control feature of SharePoint and why it makes sense to TFTP your configs to a SharePoint document library. We covered the WEBDAV network provider supplied with XP and Win2003 and finished off with a basic example using the TFTP server TFTPD32.
• Part 2 went into more detail about the issues you can face when using the WEBDAV network provider. It also went into more detail on 3 TFTP server products (WinAgents TFTP, SolarWinds TFTP Server and TFTPD32 and why TFTPD32 ended up being the best choice for this purpose.
• Part 3 then looked at a wonderful open source TFTP server written in C# called TFTPUtil. We modified the source code of this TFTP server to use the SharePoint SDK and upload files to a SharePoint document library.

Now both the WEBDAV and SDK methods had some issues. The WEBDAV method was obviously easy to set up because pretty much any application (theoretically anyway) can be made to work with it. I, however, had reliability issues with this method as part 2 detailed. The SDK method was much more reliable, but had its own problems. Many people would be uncomfortable with having to perform custom modification of an existing open source TFTP server, but more importantly, there are security implications with this method too.

So we have one remaining method that we can explore. This method is still based around modifications to the TFTPUtil source code but instead of using the SharePoint SDK, we instead use the SharePoint web services.

Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco Fanboys (and more developers) – Part 4″

                      

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As I write this series, it is getting less and less about Cisco and more and more about SharePoint. This article is definitely developer centric, but since Cisco guys tend to be interested in the guts of the detail, I decided to keep going .

If you read my articles I tend to take the piss out of IT role stereotypes just to make it more entertaining reading. Sales guys and IT Managers tend to cop it the most, but I also like to have a dig at the expense of the nerds too. Cisco nerds on the whole are a great bunch, but I have to say, the scariest nerd I have ever met drank Cisco kool-aid in jumbo size!

If you have gotten to this article after reading the first two and you are scoffing at my audacity to suggest you TFTP your configs into SharePoint, chances are most people think you’re scary! If you are hitting this series of articles for the first time, go back and read part 1 and part 2 before being scary!

Seriously now, I thought that this would be a 2 part set of articles, but I got all bogged down in the methods of getting files into SharePoint. The WEBDAV based methods described in the previous article is easy to do, but ultimately is not the recommended method. So now, we will look at the ‘proper’ ways to do it and see if they are worth the effort. They work okay, but are more complex and I’m not convinced that the governance issues are necessarily worth it for many readers.

Degree of difficulty for this article is varied.

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for an application developer):  

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for a non developer):    

Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco Fanboys (and developers) -Part 3″

                      

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Here I am back again, illustrating some of the interesting possibilities that SharePoint offers for Cisco people.

To recap my last post, I showed you a little perl script I wrote to get an IOS router or switch to dump its current configuration to a TFTP server. I then used one of several freeware TFTP servers to show how you can have a TFTP server save the captured file into a version enabled document library.

I then hit a snag in relation to using a Windows Service to do this task. In this article we will delve into this issue in more detail. In addition, I ended up delving much deeper than I intended. So, like my branding series, this is going to turn into a multi-part series too, covering some application development, configuration, security and governance issues. How many parts it will end up being is anybody’s guess!

This is a technically oriented series of articles for the most part, so for you people who like the governance and finance stuff, you may not get too much out of this one. Although this article (part 2) focuses on my issues and observations with the Windows WEBDAV client, if you are one of these people who have ‘special’ feelings when you see those pretty blue Cisco boxes like the image above, then you may find some useful content here.

SharePoint developers and architects may also find this of interest.

Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco Fanboys (darn WEBDAV) – Part 2″

                      

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Cisco nerds! This series is just for you! I know that you think you’re way too cool for collaborative portals, especially a Microsoft one at that. Instead you are more interested in delving into the IOS command line, to perform arcane arts such as debugging that OSPF route redistribution into BGP or getting off on planning and implementing a large scale DMVPN solution. Maybe you’re into QOS and VOIP and simply dig all of those DSCP-COS mappings, class and policy maps and the like.

Although packets, cells and frames are your world, *nix is cool, Nagios is your idea of a portal and anything remotely connected to Microsoft fills you with contempt and is beneath you right?

Well if this is you, I do understand your point of view because I was you once, but after some therapy, I’m now out of rehab and doing just fine!

Having Cisco/general networking expertise will help you with this article, so depending on who you are, the amount of caffeine required to follow this will vary:

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for a CCNP or CCIE):  

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for a non Cisco person or CCNA ):  

Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco Fanboys – Part 1″

                      

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Like my posts on IT governance standards, I produced this training material some time back when I was doing a lot of IT security work. I’ve since moved onto other IT disciplines, but I hope that this article is of some use to those looking for an introduction to WIFI security. I have divided the material into two parts. The first half is background and theory, and this post illustrates a practical example.

First up, let’s finish off a little theory to go with the first post.

Continue reading “WIFI Security: Background, Risks and Mitigation Part 2″

                      

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