We make running SharePoint in the cloud easy, with management of your solution from the network to application layers. Our teams of cloud and SharePoint specialists will deploy your SharePoint cloud and provide round the clock support and troubleshooting. We can also help you get the most out of SharePoint with SharePoint Professional Services delivered by our team of on-staff SharePoint MVPs. Services include design, customization and training.

Cloud Servers for SharePoint support SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, Standard and Enterprise editions. Each of our starting configurations is built to meet common SharePoint workloads and can be customized to meet your specific needs. Cloud Servers for SharePoint also include a dedicated firewall for enhanced security of business critical SharePoint environments.

For more information on Cloud Servers for SharePoint visit rackspace.com or contact us today.

One of the reasons for the broad appeal of SharePoint is that you can utilize it for a number of communication and collaboration uses – from simple sites and document management to complex business intelligence reporting. The power and endless possibilities of SharePoint often generate a wealth of questions about how to best utilize this pocket knife of an application.

With unparalleled SharePoint hosting expertise, Rackspace can definitely help.

We’ve taken a look back at our best SharePoint webinars of 2012 and asked our own team of SharePoint experts and MVPs to weigh in on the most common questions. We’ve compiled their responses to the most frequently asked questions about how best to develop, deploy and manage SharePoint sites and applications into this SharePoint eBook.  Check it out for answers to your most pressing SharePoint questions.

And if you want to try it for yourself, we’re offering a free 45-day trial of SharePoint 2013 Site Collection.*

Check out our lineup of December SharePoint webinars and give SharePoint 2013 a spin.

Webinars include:

Monday, December 17^th 10:00 a.m. CST (1.5 hour session)
Installing and Configuring SharePoint 2013 on a Test Machine - with Todd Klindt, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Monday, December 17^th 2:00 p.m. CST
Another App Store? What for? - with Tom Resing, Racker and SharePoint MCM

Tuesday, December 18^th 1:00 p.m. CST
SharePoint 2013 – What’s Hosting (or the Cloud) Got to Do with It? - with Jeff DeVerter, Director, Rackspace Services for SharePoint

Tuesday, December 18^th 3:00 p.m. CST
Let’s Play with Upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to 2013 - with Shane Young, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Wednesday, December 19^th 1:00 p.m. CST
SharePoint 2013 – A More Social Enterprise - with Laura Rogers, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Wednesday, December 19^th 2:00 p.m. CST
Sharing Content, Now Easier than Ever! - with Jennifer Mason, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Wednesday, December 19^th 3:30 p.m. CST
Working with Documents in SharePoint 2013 - with Jennifer Mason, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Thursday, December 20^th 10:00 a.m. CST
Why Smart Businesses are Hosting their SharePoint with Rackspace - with Jeff DeVerter, Director, Rackspace Services for SharePoint

Thursday, December 20^th 12:00 p.m. CST
What’s New with Web Content Management in SharePoint Server 2013? - with John Ross, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Thursday, December 20^th 2:00 p.m. CST
What’s New for Branding in SharePoint 2013? - with Randy Drisgill, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Friday, December 21^st 10:00 a.m. CST
What’s New with Office Web Apps? - with Javier Barrera, Racker and SharePoint Engineer

Register now for the week of SharePoint 2013 webinars, and be sure to take SharePoint 2013 for a test drive through our free 45-day trial.

*For a limited time, enjoy a free 45-day trial of SharePoint 2013 Site Collection. This promotion runs November 11, 2012 – March 31, 2013.

SharePoint Tuesday events are virtual open forums hosted on the third Tuesday of every month. These hour-long virtual Q&A sessions give you access to Rackspace SharePoint thought leaders, and we encourage you to bring any question — big or small. If you’ve joined us in the past, then you know SharePoint Tuesday isn’t a typical webinar series. There are no set topics of discussion. Instead, each week we give you the opportunity to jump on the chat and ask your specific questions to our team of experts.

If you missed our November event, we’ve got it archived for you right here, to listen to on your time. Who knows? The solution to your SharePoint issue might be addressed in this session!

In Episode No. 11 (November 20) Microsoft MVPs Laura Rogers and Tom Resing answered questions from participants on a variety of SharePoint subjects including:

• Migrating a SharePoint 2007 site to a different web app within SharePoint 2007
• Exporting a Document Library while maintaining security settings
• The best way to pass List Item data between different site collection lists using MOSS

Download the SharePoint Tuesday episode No. 11 mp3 or watch the flash video from November 20, 2012. We only have one more session left this year and hope you can join. The last SharePoint Tuesday session of 2012 comes just in time for the holidays — December 18^th from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. CST.

You’ve come to the right place. Rackspace’s team of SharePoint experts this week is hosting several webinars that dive into all of the ins and outs of SharePoint 2013. And if you want to kick the tires, we’re offering a free 45-day trial of SharePoint 2013 Site Collection.*

Check out this week’s webinars and try SharePoint 2013 for yourself.

Webinars include:

Tuesday, November 27^th 12:00 p.m. CST
Installing the Workflow Server in SharePoint 2013 – with Shane Young, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Tuesday, November 27^th 2:00 p.m. CST
What’s New for Branding in SP2013 – with Randy Drisgill, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Wednesday, November 28^th 12:00 p.m. CST
SharePoint 2013 – A More Social Enterprise – with Laura Rogers, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Wednesday, November 28^th 2:00 p.m. CST
Sharing Content, Now Easier than Ever! – with Jennifer Mason, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Wednesday, November 28^th 3:30 p.m. CST
Working with Documents in SharePoint 2013 – with Jennifer Mason, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Thursday, November 29^th 12:00 p.m. CST
What’s New with Web Content Management in SharePoint Server 2013? – with John Ross, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Thursday, November 29^th 2:00 p.m. CST
Installing and Configuring SharePoint 2013 on a Test Machine – with Todd Klindt, Racker and SharePoint MVP

Friday, November 30^th 12:00 p.m. CST
Why Smart Businesses are Hosting their SharePoint with Rackspace – with Jeff DeVerter, Director, Rackspace Services for SharePoint

Friday, November 30^th 2:00 p.m. CST
Another App Store? What for? – with Tom Resing, Racker and SharePoint MCM

Register now for the week of SharePoint 2013 webinars and be sure to take SharePoint 2013 for a test drive through our free 45-day trial.

*For a limited time, enjoy a free 45-day trial of SharePoint 2013 Site Collection. This promotion runs November 11, 2012 – March 31, 2013.

Among the top 50 SharePoint influencers are Rackers Laura Rogers (No. 11), Shane Young (No. 12), Jeff DeVerter (No. 29) and Todd Klindt (No. 50).

Rackspace was specifically recognized as the only hosting provider in the SharePoint ecosystem. In the hosting section of report, Influencer50 wrote: “This category is, of course, a misnomer. There are no hosting firms which are particularly interested in SharePoint, with the notable exception of Rackspace. This, in turn, is entirely related to Rackspace’s acquisition of SharePoint911 in early 2012. The SharePoint911 team includes six SharePoint MVPs and its consultants have authored a dozen books on the subject. IT is one of the industry’s leading SharePoint consultant firms, and contributes four influencers to our Top50.”

Influencer50 determines the list by scoring each “player” based on market reach, frequency of impact, independence of impact, expertise, persuasiveness and thoroughness of role. From there, a field of hundreds of players whittled to 50 based on their scores.

Influencer50’s SharePoint Influencers list comes on the heels of another report from harmon.ie, which ranked two Rackers in the top 10 of the top 25 most influential online SharePoint influencers. On that list, Rogers ranked No. 4 and Klindt at No. 6. According to harmon.ie, the top 25 influencers were identified using a formula that determines retweet frequency, blog reach, citations by other influential bloggers and related factors to measure the impact of individual SharePoint community members.

How do the changes announced at SharePoint Conference affect you and me? SharePoint 2013 and Yammer will affect some more than others. The new products will affect some sooner than later. Attendees learned a lot and are using their new knowledge to figure out a strategy for change. You can too.

Resources For You

My co-worker Jennifer Mason gave her perspective earlier on the keynote. Her big takeaways? Microsoft wants you to consider SharePoint in the cloud and Microsoft is putting the user of SharePoint first in their product design. I also noticed a new message about Yammer. Yammer’s Silicon Valley startup influence is expected to effect change of product development practices at Microsoft. See for yourself. The keynote is available on YouTube in HD (click the image to watch).

Yammer, the cloud and the new App Model for SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 were the focus of all of the breakout sessions I attended.

The App Model

The App Model is a huge shift that will open opportunities for many developers who may have never considered SharePoint Development before. In the past, SharePoint Development was done on a SharePoint Server only and in .Net only. The App Model removes both those requirements. SharePoint Development can be done in Visual Studio on the desktop and SharePoint resources can be used by code run on servers that don’t even run Windows!

Microsoft has released a ton of new information for you to learn more about the Yammer changes and the App Model this week to compliment conference announcements. Here are a few examples:

• Office Web Apps Server overview, Microsoft TechNet, Updated November 13^th
• Announcing the Latest Release of Office Developer Tools, Apps for Office and SharePoint Blog, November 12^th
• Yammer SKU plan and pricing: details direct from SharePoint Conference, Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog, November 12^th

Rackspace also released a bunch of content for you this week to help with the changes including:

• A free 45-day trial of SharePoint 2013 for you to learn on
• Five blog posts from four Rackspace SharePoint expert conference attendees
• Rackspace Delivers End-to-End Services for SharePoint, announcing our new SharePoint 2013 offerings

Tom’s Conference Photo Album

Part of the excitement of the conference is the community of attendees. Now that I’ve shared some technical details, I want to share a little bit of that community in photos I took or was in.

I wish I had pictures of all the great things my co-workers were doing at the conference, but I don’t. In lieu of that, I’ll share some highlights of the conference events and attendees I encountered.

Above is a picture of me in the middle of five other Microsoft Certified Masters in SharePoint. Overall, around 60 of the about 120 MCMs were at the conference, highlighting the importance of the conference in the minds of some technical leaders.

I participated in a book signing with four of my Microsoft Press co-authors Wednesday. Most of the SharePoint book authors were present at the conference and many were signing books.

Seeing as Rackspace is headquartered in Texas, this picture of my friend Eric Shupps is appropriate. Eric, who goes by the SharePoint Cowboy, encouraged attendees with good humor in an excellent technical presentation I attended.

Throughout the week, the Rackspace booth employed an artist making a picture inspired by our MVPs and one MCM. I’m the one with the eight-bit glasses.

Watch for more informational posts following up the conference on the blog feed of our experts at http://sharepoint911.com.

Next week you’ll want to dive in and try out some of the great new features you learned so much about, but where will you go? You could invest several hours into building out a new SharePoint 2013 Farm and even more hours reading about best practices to do so – but for many of you this may be more than you need. If you just want to jump in and start playing you can visit the Rackspace Services for SharePoint page and sign up for a free 45-day trial of SharePoint 2013.

The free trial includes three site collections:

• Main content site
• MySite Host
• Content Type Hub

In addition, you’ll receive three user accounts:

• Admin account (full access)
• Contributor account
• Viewer account (read-only)

Also, if you were at the conference and have feedback for our team (or if you missed us but have feedback to share) please tell us what you think via the form that’s also on the Rackspace SharePoint page.

You can now choose between Dedicated SharePoint 2013 and a SharePoint 2013 Cloud Image (a new Windows image for Rackspace Cloud Servers). To help you get started, we’re offering the opportunity to try SharePoint 2013 at no cost through a free 45-day trial.

For our dedicated environments, we offer a full production SharePoint environment configured and managed by our SharePoint experts. This is ideal if you’re looking to use SharePoint as more than a document repository and if you require your own hardware. Foundation, Standard Server and Enterprise Licenses are available.

With SharePoint Cloud Images, which are accessible through our Cloud Control Panel, we offer the ability to spin up and down a SharePoint environment in our public cloud. This is ideal for developers who need a test environment or customers trying to familiarize themselves with SharePoint functionality. The Foundation License is available.

SharePoint 2013 adds a host of new and important features that customers have been asking for to enhance their businesses, including better app availability, more collaboration options, stronger search capabilities and content management and business intelligence updates. And with several Microsoft MVPs on staff, Rackspace Services for SharePoint is fully-equipped to build your end-to-end SharePoint solution backed by our trademark Fanatical Support.

To let you test drive the new features in SharePoint 2013 and get a feel for how a hosted SharePoint solution works, you can sign up for the 45-day free trial now. The offer runs through March 31, 2013.

We’re also offering a SharePoint 2013 VM for 45 days at no additional cost with the purchase of any new dedicated SharePoint environment. This offer is available to current and new customers migrating SharePoint 2007 or 2010 environments to Rackspace. Foundation, Standard or Enterprise Licenses are available and we’ll offer full support of the VM, operating system and application. Once the free 45-day trial expires you’ll be given option to move to a fully licensed SharePoint 2013 VM.

We urge you to check out our new SharePoint 2013 offerings and take advantage of the limited 45-day promotions. And, as always, we’d love to hear your suggestions on how we can continue to improve your SharePoint solutions; so drop us a line in The Product Suggestion Box.