Over the New Year holiday I migrated to another server. This one is much more robust than the original. Just look at these specs:
Hardware: 1 Intel Pentium Xeon 2.8 Ghz, Dual Processor motherboard, 2 Gig registered DDR400 Ram, and RAID 1+0 with 4 80gb WD SATA Drives and RAID 1 with 2 40gb Seagate SATA Drives, 1 300gb WD EIDE Drive!
There is plenty of room for expansion too! Looking to upgrade the ram to a OS max of 4 gb soon. I would add even more drives but I am sure I am over stepping a recommended draw from a server pwr supply and I don't have any more mounting points.
Software: Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition R2 Release! This so cool! I was an old School with SUS and WSUS set up on the original server it is still much nicer to have WSUS built right into the management console. I have setup all the stuff now... Exhange SP2... IMF... RRAS... OWA (aka Outlook Web Access)...OMA (aka Outlook Mobile Access).. RPC over HTTP (aka Outlook Over the Internet)... Fax Services... Windows Mobile Security and Feature Pack Devices... VPN... ISA... and SQL 2005 Workgroup... I even fixed an email issue concerning smtp and recipeint filtering long battled against during this migration!
Next comes a upgrade of the SharePoint instance from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005 --- But what is the hard part you may ask?
Getting users to understand! I am pretty good with people but I've never faced such a challenge in all my years experience with being an IT consultant for many customers as I face with these users! My current goal is to get them exited about SharePoint - and to use it. I've never come across someone who wasn't floored by SharePoint and have been told by many colleagues in the business that SharePoint is a powerful selling point! These users avoid it like the plague. They insist on keeping several Excel spreadsheets open updating them live on the server constantly!
Lately I have been trying to develop a SharePoint Application of Lists to control workflow and enable speedier and more accurate data entry as a way to attract them to SharePoint. However it's been a tough haul because any question about their process is answered with "I don't knows" or I am just ignored! They finally gave me some input on my prototype today that makes me wander why the heck I am doing this in the first place. They said they wanted to use it but wanted to be able to type everything free hand! --- That's right --- It doesn't make since to me either? Why would you want to enter the date when it can autofill (editable of course but not enough). Why would you want to type in a job number when you can select from a list of current jobs? Doesn't it make more sense to point and click instead of typing in each and everything? Do they just want the freedom to invent job numbers that don't exist (like they do now)? Do they like skipping important fields and having inconsistent data? Do they like having to open Excel and doing this all very precariously inside a spread sheet? And does Management really care about their data at all?
