SharePoint on Cloud from Microsoft Online Services

SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service for businesses. In SharePoint setting up a web farm and get it up running form small enterprise was always a challenge in terms of hardware cost, getting the expertise to set up the web farm, capacity planning etc.

Now Microsoft wants to bring SharePoint to the masses by exposing it in the cloud thus it takes care of the infrastructure, scalability of the web farm, maintenance & patching the systems with less or no downtime and calculation of volume licensing(ever did or try to find the licensing math) with as low as 10$.

Reach out to SharePoint Online for small business which provides information related to the small enterprises. Developers can reach out to Developer resource center for understanding developer features available. I believe there should not be major change Developer resource centers with the API for development.

Finally SharePoint also joins the Cloud band. hmm.. result of significant innovation and development in virtualization arena.

Deploying a Cloud solution step-by-step

Prerequisite:

1. You should have an compiled Azure Cloud service solution and its service configuration file handy
2. You should have invitation code to redeem Azure services to unleash Storage and hosting services

Once you have above prerequisites in place, log in to Azure portal using your Live Id and click on your hosting project and follow the steps depicted in screen snaps

Click on deploy to start the deployment


Browse and provide the local path for your cloud service package and its config



Click on "Run" to start the services in staging mode, Be patient here until you see a green symbol under WebRole. Once you get the solution running you can use the URL which is having the guid as the hosted application's URL

Browse to that URL check the features what you have done in that page. Once you are satisfied promote the application to production. There you get the proper name which you specified to your application instead of the guid

Configuring Azure development storage to existing SQL server instance

When we install Windows Azure SDK, Azure development storage and Development fabric by default mapped to a localhost\SQLExpress instance. I don't have an SQL 2005/2008 express editions in my box. So the following changes were required to leverage the existing SQL server instance



For DevelopmentStorage.Exe

1. Open C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\bin in explorer window and open DevelopmentStorage.exe.config file in text editor


2. Find the connection string named "DevelopmentStorageDbConnectionString" in connection string block, replace the server name from SQLExpress to the instance running in your machine


3. Find the hierarchy developmentStorageConfig->services->service name="Table-> replace the dbserver value from localhost\SQLExpress to the instance running in your dev machine

For DevtableGen.exe

Open DevtableGen.exe.config file in a text editor, replace the value of key "DefaultSQLInstance" from SQLExpress to your existing instance name. Save and close the editor. This file is used by DevtableGen.exe which Creates tables for use with the development storage table service

Now open your develpment storage UI, it should open with out showing any errors