By home, I mean that since hubby and I are both in 'the business' (product development, tech consulting) he wound up putting a tower rack in our basement some years ago. We run more servers at home than I've seen deployed at many small companies (or possibly, some small countries).
Since we are both notoriously hard to buy gifts for, when our anniversary rolled around last year I told him what I really wanted. A server in the rack that was hefty enough to run several virtual servers under Hyper-V. Being a guy, I'm sure he thought this was almost (but not quite) as good as me saying I'd really like a busty woman to come to our house and give us both backrubs, so I did get a really awesome Hyper-V server for our anniversary.
I was amazed at how much iron you can get for your money these days. Since we lived in Boston some years ago we've purchased servers from PC's For Everyone, and our new dual-quad-proc (eight core) 1U server with 16GB RAM was just a little over two grand. That really floored me, coming from environments that typically budgeted tens of thousands of dollars for that class of compute power.
Of course, I failed to anticipate how busy I was going to be last year. I finished my last few classes in night school, consulting by day and studying on nights and weekends. Hubby set up the Hyper-V server and moved our domain controller to a virtual server, but the Iron Giant was not put to much use last year. Sigh.
But, I finished my MBA at the end of the year, and re-focused my brain cells on our server infrastructure. Before long I had our home portal up on SharePoint 2007, just in time to post the kids' summer activities schedules to the family calendar. Then, last week I took the plunge and set up the SharePoint 2010 beta in a separate virtual server, with the databases for both the 2007 and 2010 farms on an instance of SQL2008 (SP1, CU2) running in yet another virtual server. My virtual SharePoint kingdom is running like a top.
Having my first 'hands on' look at SharePoint 2010, the first things that jumped out while poking around the home page of my portal were:
- Pulldowns on the left, pulldowns on the right. Site actions was moved to the left on the default home page.
- The inescapable ribbon. Although you have to click on the 'Page' tab to see it, things like editing the page or setting permissions and properties are now exposed as big icons on an Office-style ribbon.
- Top-tabs and Uber-breadcrumbs (not the Microsoft sanctioned terms for these things, by the way). I created a document library for OneNote Pages (new!), and from the top 'Browse' tab you can see the normal bread crumb path, but the end of the breadcrumb path now shows your current view. There's a dropdown off the end of the breadcrumb path that provides actions to create/modify views. This is easier to find than the old view dropdown on the upper right corner of the screen.
- Other 'Top-tabs' for Custom Commands and Library Tools follow the default 'Browse' tab, and, there's a little folder with an 'Up' arrow that gives you a folder type of breadcrumb navigation if you need it. I'm thinking this might help people who are still using directories on a shared fileserver understand SharePoint navigation if they haven't yet made the leap.
- More 'page oriented', like a multi-page website that has neat document and list management capabilities. I have to say SharePoint 2007 has awesome document and list capabilities, but you sometimes wonder if the 'web page / web site' side of it was an afterthought.
- Selections of themes includes heading and body font selections - one small step in the direction of more 'point and click' customization on the look and feel front.
I wonder what I should ask for as an anniversary gift next year....
