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@travelingdarren "@joeloleson Can you point me to any documentation on suggested server HD capacity for a new SharePoint deployment for my SysAdmin?"

Some people are just looking for the quick and easy answer for those….

• Quick answers from my blog: Disk Allocation and Disk I/O
• Mike Watson’s post on SharePoint and Storage (great links and cliff notes on storage)
• Quick Top 10 SQL Storage Optimization Techniques (best practice) – Deep and Awesome
• Quick Samples for Planning: MS IT Sites and Storage, SharePoint file sizing, user per site samples, File Server Sample Data File Sizes
• If you read only one paper, make it this one, I call the SharePoint Storage whitepaper titled "Performance recommendations for storage planning and monitoring (.doc)
• A Plethora of Key Capacity Planning Resources when it’s not just about disk storage…
• Other posts by me: How many servers per my X TBs? and  What Not to Store in SharePoint
• Also start with the table in this Technet article as MAX boundaries to work with "Plan for software boundaries"
• For more Microsoft resources go to the Best Practices Resource Center and Performance and Capacity Resource Center

Some people want the whitepaper, the decks and the documentation:

• SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper – the millions of items whitepaper by Knowedge Lake, MCS and Fujitsu
• Integration of SQL Server 2008 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Check out the info on db compression, transparent encryption, and resource governor
• Planning and Monitoring SQL Server Storage for Office SharePoint Server: Performance Recommendations and Best Practices (white paper) – Referenced above.  This paper went through a lot of hands to get this much best practices in one doc.
• Database maintenance for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (white paper) – Bill Baer’s (MS IT) Great resource
• 10 Things To Optimize your SharePoint Server Indexing – Easy and Quick Blog Post – Must Read.

The three layers you need to worry about – 1. List Scale 2. Site (& collection) Scale 3. Database Scale

• Working with Large Lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007" – Great resource from Steve Peschka… Hands down helps you setup your scalable lists better than any other resource more at Revisiting List Scalability
• Tips on Site Collection Sizing
• How large for a single SharePoint content database? compare with SharePoint Tech Content Database sizing and capacity planning (backup/restore implications)
• SharePoint Governance through Database Design Considerations

Bottlenecks most people forget: Network (between WFEs and SQL), Backup Disk IO Network usage, SQL Disk blocking, front end and backend Memory (worker process and SQL processes), antivirus disk contention

Don’t trust anything in this capacity planning tool as far as storage goes, but it’s not a bad one for sanity checking your planning SharePoint Capacity Models.  The help files go into the assumptions, and may be helpful.  If you’re doing your ownt testing you should look at the Performance Counters and VSTT: SPDataPop WSSDW.exe

Plan enterprise content storage – few guiding principals, but in my opinion, too high level to be useful

What about planning for your IIS logs and other log locations?  "How do I troubleshoot SharePoint, So many Logs" (Look at the locations so you can monitor them.)  What else is on my C drive (here’s some legacy WSS 2.0 file location answers that are pretty decent.

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Is the File Server Dead? – Before you start doing massive migrations this is a must read.

A generic resource on RAID configuration Planning the Layout and RAID Level of Volumes.  Also get a reality check with this real world data from Microsoft’s Intranet Portal MSW – Deploying and Supporting Enterprise Search.

There was a session at Teched on Storage that went over really well "OFC357 How to Plan for SharePoint Storage Management for Multi-Terabyte Deployment" you’ll have to bug Mike Watson or Todd Klindt for their deck.  My deck on SharePoint Admin Fundamentals from Istanbul does have disk capacity recommendations:

Need cloud scale?  See Massive Scale Deployment – Modularity in SharePoint Farms

If you get done with this post and decide you need to fix various things… Check out a recent post of mine on Automating and Scripting SharePoint Administration and refer to Gary LaPoint’s STSADM extensions for additional help.

A rumor among the SharePoint community was reported as saying that a recent hotfix has fixed a design limit of 260 characters for uploaded document full file URL (includes domain, site collection, site and list name characters.)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956056/

Snippet from the above KB:

"This article describes the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 issues that are fixed in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package that is dated August 26, 2008.

Consider the following scenario:

• You enable advanced usage analysis logging on a portal.
• The SharePoint site contains a document that has a full file URL that exceeds 260 characters.
• When the document is accessed by users, or the document is crawled by the SharePoint search process on a particular day, visits to the site on that particular day are logged.

In this scenario, when you open Site usage reports, usage for that particular day may have a value of 0."

You can see how if you’re looking for a bullet that refers to the limit in a list of "fixes" it looks like this issue is fixed.  What is fixed is usage logging in a site that happened to have a doc that exceeded the limit.  How did it get in there?  Some API that didn’t prevent it… a mistake.

So I’ve got confirmation from the test team that it is still by design that it is by design that full file URL length for an uploaded document is 260 characters. 

Really you should keep it under 256 characters so people can include the links in link lists.  Also when you start looking at the lists with a view the URLs get even longer, so let’s avoid using 32 character GUIDs in our site collection or list names.  If you’re worried about users putting in really long Site Collection names Bamboo has a site creation management web part for this.  SharePoint Happenings has a free site managment one, and you can also find one in the Extranet Collaboration toolkit.  These are all reference in a recent article on free user management and self service site management (part 2) and site management SharePoint suites (part 3) with much more detail.  You could also manage both list and site creation via workflows with any of the common workflow SharePoint partners like Nintex or K2 or…. 

I know there are some out there who are into automation… So with a limit of really a few hundred (don’t push the sites 2000 limit (you’ll regret it)) sites in a site collection you don’t need to worry about collision of numbered sites.  Also consider a reasonably short character set giving you flexibility with a max of 50,000 site collection names.  You can accomplish this with much fewer characters even with a randomizer.

People have been searching for the formula to finding value out of twitter.  My previous post on 10 steps to finding business value in twitter.  Now that you’re using twitter, you’ll find these will launch your experience and value into hyperspeed.

I use SharePoint as my community example throughout, if you’re not a SharePoint person you can easily replace with .NET or whatever.

1. Twitter to Facebook – Add the facebook twitter app at http://apps.facebook.com/twitter then put in your twitter account.  One draw back… if you tweet a lot you get a lot of wall posts, including replies.  It does say it comes from twitter so the techy people should understand, but your family may be confused.  It does allow for a nice interesting threaded discussion on your wall.

2. Blog to Twitter (to Facebook) –  Twitterfeed.com as simple as logging in and putting in your RSS.  I suggest putting "Blog:" so we can tell immediately what this is.  Cool thing it can automatically be shortened even.

3. Twitter & Blog to FriendFeed – Yet another aggregation service, but I like this one better than legit.  FriendFeed.com consolidates all your twittering and blogging and flickr and about 50+ other services.  Scoble is recommending it based on the ability to see what you’re doing across the web.  My initial feedback is, yes it’s worth it.  You don’t have to spend any time there, but it is a decent way to provide web consolidation of your various feeds.  This will make your twitters and all the rest available via RSS via a "Home Feed."  (You can view and subscribe to my friend feed at http://friendfeed.com/joeloleson)

4. Twitter to blog with Twitter Widgets – You may or may not have seen my recent post on SharePoint Widgets and Webparts.  The Twitter widget that you see on my blog is from widgetbox.com.

5. Use Global Search – On twitter.com in "Find People" you can search.  http://twittersearch.com/statuses?searchstring=sharepoint or http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23sharepoint If you search for SharePoint, you can see recent tweets where people use the term "SharePoint."  The real value I’ve found in tweetdeck the ability to add a search for "SharePoint." There are always some interesting tweets from people who are having conversations, people needing help, or people beyond help.  Tweet deck adds a pane so you can watch your normal following, plus this pane.  I’m also a fan of the twitscoop pane.  If you follow twitscoop you can add this pane.  This will show you current trends, from Windows7 to DOW to Palin.  The latest SNL Palin with Tina Fey… if it’s any good :).  You’ll stay ahead of the days trends and news minus the commercials and repetition.  Without doing much I can simply do a quick scan and see how I can help people in the SharePoint community.  Obviously it’s much easier to do when they follow me or @ contact me.

Using search.twitter.com you can actually subscribe to the RSS feed of query.  http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?lang=en&q=sharepoint 

6. Use Hashtags – hashtags.org has setup indexing if you follow @hashtags and use one.  Check out their site hashtags.org for more information #SharePoint, whether you follow hastags or not, it will be much easier for all of us to see your posts if you include #SharePoint or SharePoint in your interesting SharePoint posts.  Many events will have special tags like #TEUS08 (Teched US 2008) or #Gartner (Gartner Symposium).  Hashtags will give you visibility outside your followers as people search or even retweet these tags.

olivermarks #cse I’m at Cloud Summit Executive conf at Computer museum mountain view ca, high end saas business discussion

#Gartner new analyst video now available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/gartnervideo

More on hashtags on the twitter wiki.  That’s another place to learn and get better.  There are some people that are annoyed by hashtags and would prefer you use the new Track options.  I don’t want IM notifications, I simply want to be able to filter the relevant community related content.

7. Follow to be followed – Enter your real name in your profile.  If you search for your full name and can’t find yourself, how can anyone else?  Those who understand the value of twitter, understand that those you follow dictate the level of interesting conversation.

Secret: I follow people who follow SharePoint.  This means I look at the followers of SharePoint, SharePoint MVPs, and MS SharePoint people.  I now follow over 1000 people and see 10 tweets every 5 minutes.  I went from having a tight following of just SharePoint folks to a much broader base of SharePoint Users, Admins, Developers, and people who occasionally complain about SharePoint amongst other social networking and news contacts.

8. There’s MORE! It’s not just marketing or lame status updates – I actually find a lot of conversations revolve around development, support, even venting can be therapeutic. 🙂 Let me give you a glance into the future.  Today there’s a lot of people who don’t get microblogging.  They wouldn’t see twitter as a place to go for answers… cause what can you really get in 140 characters?  In the future people will say… I do a search or pose my question to my favorite microblogging interface and ask my 5000 friends (followers) and within seconds I can have the answer and a source (URL.) Your following becomes very valuable.  Think about the millionare game show.  If you could ask your 60 second million dollar question to twitter, google, or facebook.  You’d have a different experience on each.

LLiu Finally! Someone said "everyone is a marketer – support, dev, etc." I heart you man! 🙂 Social media not just a marketing thing. #nms08

9. Retweet incredible things and big announcements – RT at the beginning of your post means ReTweet.  This is a way of passing on an important or incredible message.  It’s amazing what you can fit in 140 characters, but these will give you visibility.  I recently retweeted where someone lost their teenager daughter.  In the next 10 minutes I saw the message retweeted a half dozen times.

RT @genochurch‘s 14 yr old daughter is missing http://tinyurl.com/5yodvb. Please retweet! (via @tranqy)

This one spread like wildfire on twitter.  I see a rate of 20 tweets per minute of this tweet now.  <Update>More like 250 per minute according to this article</update>

10. Twitter Mashups and Community – There is so much possibility here.  When you mashup maps and twitters you get twittervision.com and twitspy.com.  Look at election.twitter.com and you can imagine a sharepoint.twitter.com where you see the top recent tweets and topics and realtime rolling search results.

Developer?  Check out the twittervision API

Did you know you could follow Barack Obama and Joe Biden or Stephen Colbert?  They’ll tell you what to watch and where to go.  Mccain isn’t on twitter?  Guess we shouldn’t be surprised.  I’d like to follow Palin.  Not just what people are saying about her… (in election.twitter.com you can do this.)

Twitter – Life or Death?  Add the Red Cross and they can tell you where to go, what to do, and communicate with you if there’s a disaster.  You can imagine using your phone to respond… Very practical.  In your profile you can update where you are, or use twitteriffic on your phone to send GPS location.

If advised to evacuate, do so immediately. Wear protective clothing, take important papers, tell someone where you’re going. #LAFIRE 11:11 AM October 13, 2008 from web

CA Wildfire evacuation shelter is at San Fernando High School San Fernando High School 11133 Omelveny Ave San Fernando, CA 91340 #LAFIRE 10:55 AM October 13, 2008 from web

The dev.twitter.com guys are doing a bunch in this area…

"What kinds of new methods will you be adding to the API?

Well, search-related methods, as you might guess. We’re embracing the concepts of searching and filtering statuses, and we have a bunch of ideas about how that’s going to fit into Twitter. Expect the ability to filter many API responses by provided search terms, for example (ex, an API method that can answer the question, "what are the people I follow saying about ‘iPhone 3G’?")."

One last thought… Have you looked at http://status.twitter.com/  Have you ever considered building one of these for your users?  You can communicate your downtime, people could subscribe to the feeds.  It’s essentially a team blog with the whole intention of speaking broadly to your user base, but then allowing them to comment without having to pick up the phone.  The 2 way communication from the small twitter team to the millions of twitter users may seem daunting, but now compare that to your environment.  It can definitely increase user/client satisfaction.

Imagine if you were the NSA or secret service and you had to write an app to make sense out of all of the various phone conversations happening around the globe.  That would be awful to hear everything at once right?  Both the Noise (twitter) and the App filter (various twitter consumer app interfaces) exist.  The pure noise of it would sound like a nightmare I once had.  I call it the rolling ball of sound.  It’s loud noises and conversations and scary screaming all rolled up, and moving fast toward me coming from some other dimension.  Before you drop this let me take this NOISE and tell you how Twitter is more.

First you don’t hear the noise of everyone’s conversations, unless you "follow" random people.  Here’s how I’ve made sense of twitter and found it useful in a business way.  My non geeky friends and family don’t use it yet, (they have figured out facebook at least) so currently it’s just my geeky business associates and those types of friends.

Here are 10 Steps to Find Real Business Value in Twitter:

(NOTE: If you’re not a SharePoint person and came by this post, replace it with your favorite thing… some sport, some technology, whatever community you want to be apart of, are an an expert in, or even if the desire and passion is there…)

1. Create an account by going to twitter.com and be sure to use the keyword SharePoint in your profile so we can find you.  Also when you (tweet) be sure to include SharePoint when it makes sense, in your tweets so we can find those as well.

2. Search for friends with keyword, example SharePoint. Go to https://twitter.com/invitations click search, and you’ll see 174 results (as of today 10/6).  The first result is "sharepoint".  The twitter for the SharePoint team blog, not a bad one and not a very frequent one.  (last post 2 days ago).  Let me suggest a few… sorry if I leave off any of the good ones… gannotti, sptweeters, SharePointMag, LLiu (long time twitter fan), bfox11b, lespaulrob, joeloleson, mysharepoint, etc… if you need more look at who I’m following or any of those in this list.  It’s quite easy to add people to follow.

Here’s an example of the "sharepoint" tweets in the form of an RSS feed (ding ding ding you don’t have to be sitting on twitter.com or whatever app to get this, you can subscribe to the simple feed in an RSS reader) the team blog:

SharePoint Team post 64-Bit and the Admin Toolkit Download Trend http://tinyurl.com/3gjjp7 07:49 PM October 03, 2008 from twitterfeed

New SharePoint site: Pinal County site hosted on SharePoint http://tinyurl.com/4g9tr4 12:50 PM October 02, 2008 from twitterfeed

New SharePoint site: Intres (Netherlands) site hosted on SharePoint http://tinyurl.com/3zsrkp 12:19 PM September 30, 2008 from twitterfeed

SharePoint Team post Announcing August Cumulative Update for Office SharePoint Ser.. http://tinyurl.com/4yc4pr 06:19 PM September 29, 2008 from twitterfeed

There are 321 followers right now of the SharePoint twitter feed, and looking at these posts you can see the relevance of the content.  Imagine you posting your tweets and having people find out about your blogs… nice huh?  A twitter best practice from buckleyplanet that I learned over twitter… It’s about the URLs.  The one liner status updates that say you’re shopping… not so cool.  I’m shopping for an iPhone.  Cool.  I’m shopping for my daughters birthday. Cool.  I’m standing in the line at Starbucks.  Not cool.  I’m standing in the line at the launch of XBox 720. Cool.  Sometimes it’s the extra little bit of info that makes it interesting and makes us want to know what’s going on.  Working on a SharePoint project.  Boring.  Working on a gnarly SharePoint Memory issue details at http://tinyurl.com/blah Supercool!

3. Outside of SharePoint, but not too far, you will find some very interesting tweeters that will make it fun and informative to watch.  Remember it’s not about the noise, it’s about the business value.  These are awesome tweeters.  My favorites: Twitscoop – This account will make sense of the noise and tell you what is going on.  It’s better than a news wire and faster.  Awesome summary of the buzz… what people are talking about.

"You are now following twitscoop.

One subject on twitter right now: http://tinyurl.com/45oo9n – no need to comment, this tells it all… This is clearly a market crash 🙁 about 1 hour ago from web

Friendfeed is down, twitterers complain: http://tinyurl.com/6zv7mg 07:36 AM October 05, 2008 from TweetDeck

Twitter is all about the apparently false report of Steve Job’s heart attack: http://tinyurl.com/45orm7 AAPL stock suffering badly right now 07:08 AM October 03, 2008 from web

Apple just denied the heart attack rumour 07:03 AM October 03, 2008 from web

Steve Jobs rumoured to have had a heart attack: http://tinyurl.com/3janld 06:38 AM October 03, 2008 from web"

Twitscoop as a user account follows only 16 people (as of now), but if you look at those they follow you’ll see some awesome ones.

Another personal favorite is Scobleizer / Robert Scoble.  He totally gets this stuff.  If you’re confused about what to twitter look across 10 of his posts and you’ll be fascinated by his views and perspective.  If you only follow a handful, he’s likely one to follow for buzz.  He’s a great filter of what’s going on cause he’s following TONS of people, and tons follow him.  Check him out!  He’s unstoppable.

• Name Robert Scoble
• Location Half Moon Bay, California, USA
• Bio Tech geek blogger @ http://scobleizer.com

20,986 – Following
35,273 – Followers
14,473 – Updates

Here’s a snippet of recent twittering.  Notice all the @username things?  Those are replies.  You simply put in an @ sign in front of the username to reply.

@RoyalAntsJosh I’d respond well to such a resume (of LinkedIn/Facebook profiles) but not everyone would. I’d play it straight. about 21 hours ago from web in reply to RoyalAntsJosh

It’s amazing how bad resumes are. Here’s my tips for job seekers: http://tinyurl.com/4kdn2r about 21 hours ago from web

@MichaelYurechko I love SNL’s portrayal of Biden and Palin. Hilarious. 11:40 PM October 04, 2008 from web in reply to MichaelYurechko

I’m watching Saturday Night Live. Tina Fey makes me want to vote Republican so we can have these funny skits every Sat. night! 😉 11:39 PM October 04, 2008 from web

Ever heard of the ticker feed at a news station?  All the press people follow the ticker and simply repeat what’s being said on the wire.  You’d find that very little news is actually created, it’s repeated over and over and over.  I’ve found some *really* awesome news twitter accounts that have great feeds. 

My favorite: ricksanchezcnn he’s awesome and he’s really figured out twitter.  He was twittering he real life experiences with the hurricane.  Tons of feeling in his tweets.

If you aren’t seeing much volume follow cnnbrk it’s CNN breaking news.  It’s pretty chatty if you’re looking for a filtered view, but otherwise it’s a nice "wire" like experience.  You can get news and sports updates in a near real time push fashion.

3. Now that you are following the voices in the SharePoint community, once you follow these people and reply to their stuff they will want to follow you.  Ultimately getting people to follow you is what you want.  Why?  ‘Cause they are an audience.  A following allows you to say, hey I just posted a cool blog about social networking.  It generates traffic, traffic is money, money is good.  (Not necessarily the root of all evil when our economy is taking a dump, and when you’re looking for two coins to scratch together.)

4. Reply – Communicate – It will take a little while conversing with these people to get a decent following, but twittering replies is the way to do it.  Here are some good examples of good tweets.  Remember people won’t even know you are on there until you start communicating and replying to people who are twittering.  Twitter is the most realtime of communication, but it also has the ability to be seen weeks afterward.  When I was traveling, I’d get people replying to my travel updates.  I was posting… hey headed from SEA to BKK and then put in my coordinates or flight info so people could tell me if there was any delays that I didn’t see.  Also in the future I can imagine my family following me and being interested to see that I caught my flight or whatever.  But basically I’d get people replying and example: How were the Bangkok riots, and I would fill them in when I got the replies. 

timheuer Writing text on a Path in Silverlight – http://tinyurl.com/444nrr 6 minutes ago from web

ricksanchezcnn Check out this ink on the show. We’re having an impact. http://www.miamiherald.com/… 19 minutes ago from web

breakingnewsire WORLD: Computer chip allows control over teens’ car speed: Starting next year, a move by Fo.. http://tinyurl.com/4wb7md 1 minute ago from twitterfeed

joeloleson SPJAuto Freeware Antivirus – Free as a software concept: Body: I am an advocate for free softwa.. http://tinyurl.com/4ckynt 1 minute ago from twitterfeed

politicalticker Election could decide future of the federal courts http://tinyurl.com/4y43gt 17 minutes ago from Twitter Tools

gannotti is at the airport getting ready to head to Atlanta 28 minutes ago from mobile web

LLiu Gartner’s Adam Sarner: "Half of social media campaigns will flop.” (http://is.gd/3Bhq). My take: Social Media is Dead. Long Live Community! … about 1 hour ago from twhirl

politicalticker CNN POLL: Majority think U.S. headed for depression http://tinyurl.com/4hrdm6 about 1 hour ago from Twitter Tools

shanselman Heading to building 37 about 1 hour ago from twhirl

joeloleson Retweet @arnonel: New Laptop Nice. What kind? about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

arnonel @joeloleson I just got a hot new laptop 🙂 good news for me at least…hehe about 2 hours ago from twhirl in reply to joeloleson

(Notice the thing behind the word "from"… those are the apps people are using to post.  The twitterfeed we find out is automatic posting, the twitter tools is an app, and web is someone sitting and posting directly on on twitter.com.  You can find new and cool tools for twittering in style.  Look at 6 for more info.)

rprakashg @joeloleson just downloaded fring, like it so far. Thanx for the tip about 14 hours ago from mobile web in reply to joeloleson

rprakashg @joeloleson read your post on consulting, right on the money. Its fun when you can do a mix of consult/speaking/teach etc. 09:29 PM October 03, 2008 from web in reply to joeloleson

rprakashg @joeloleson couldn’t agree with you more on bills, I hate it as well. How is post MS life treating you? see u’ve been travelling quite a bit 08:01 PM October 01, 2008 from web in reply to joeloleson

buckleyplanet @joeloleson good fun until the snow hits 08:24 PM September 28, 2008 from web in reply to joeloleson

MossLover @joeloleson That is really scary… 09:31 PM September 24, 2008 from digsby in reply to joeloleson

5. Do it Automatic! Too hard to have to login and post your blog URLs and titles?  So you want to publish your blog posts automatically???  Sure you do.  Follow the instructions on twitterfeed.com  (The Yahoo toolbar is my wife’s doing.)  Here’s a screenshot of me setting up my blog to automatically to be picked up twittered.

6.  Twitter is the platform, not the interface… I would suggest.  Many people abandon twitter because to them they see the horrible flat ugly web page of twitter and after finding only a couple of people they know they say "what a waste of time" or "I just don’t get it."  If you see the shopping or boring tweets then yeah it’s boring.  Go away for a while then come back after you find a new way to view your feeds… which is what you’ll see here…

Twitter.com (what I see, and as you can see the richness is based on who one follows…) 

I started to really understand twitter after using the mobile app Twitterrific.  This app color codes replies and keeps them for me for weeks so if I’m only checking on a weekly basis (not bad for the beginning, you don’t have to stare at the screen) or wanting to see if people are responding to my blog posts or something.  I have since found a few others I’m liking.  TweetDeck is very slick.  It shows your replies in columns and has slick buttons for picture inclusion and location inclusion.  On my mobile device twitterrific allows me to include GPS coordinates or URL of location, and including pictures is integrated.  My newest favorite on mobile is Fring.  It combines the power of chat (yahoo chat, google talk, ICQ, SIP, twitter, AIM, and MSN messenger) plus SKYPE!  It brings in the contacts and presence information and allows you do calls and chat over your data service on your phone.  I talked with a buddy on my cell phone without calling him… saving tons of minutes.  I guess that’s another story, but while I was chatting with bob fox I was getting twitter updates and was able to switch communications with multiple people simultaneously.  I see idea of combining VOIP, Video, Chat, and Twitter feeds as a movement, and the value of getting all this stuff on your mobile device is HOT.

Figure: TweetDeck

Twirl is a cool app that shows the tweets as little toasts that show in the bottom corner (kinda like the Outlook messages that come in.)  It makes it very easy to post and shorten URLs and see who you’re following and those following you.

Figure: Twirl is on the right, but I can close the app and just let it notify me.

There was a good blog post by Leslie Poston on Useful Twitter apps along with their features and what she finds useful.  The comments are worth reading as well.  There are more and more of these free apps that are really making this otherwise useless chatter really interesting and useful.

7. Don’t abandon it if it doesn’t make sense the first time or first few months even.  It takes some practice to get in the groove of it and for your tweets to be noticed.  Make it something that’s background and not in your face.  5 minutes once a week might be reasonable until you get the following.  The following will come faster if you can do one line a day, but don’t give up.  If you’re shy and you don’t care about people going to your blog, then you won’t see the immediate value.  I find people now running into me and being up to date about where I’ve been what I’ve been up to and our communications and friendships are much more rich due to their understanding and virtual friendship (even if it’s been mostly one way push).  Next time I run into scoble or mike gannotti I’m going to have a lot to say… just as an example.  Even running into Scott Hansselman (and hey I’m not a developer) I found I wanted to go to his sessions and find out more about what he was doing based on his tweeting.  I don’t read his blog, but his tweets have been interesting.  Wierd huh?

8.  Take a minimalist approach if you don’t get it – AC doesn’t get twitter, hopefully this post will help :).  Having a profile and getting just a few tweets/posts out there will give you some minimal visbility to then get a following.  Andrew Connell (AC) has 10 posts and 76 followers.  We recently saw he’s one of the most popular SharePoint bloggers, but doesn’t get twitter, just doesn’t make sense.  If all he did was setup automatic feeds, and I know he uses google alerts (try subscribing to your name if you have a unique name). and he does care what people say about him and his blog.  The minimalist approach would be to setup the auto blogging thing from #5 and then once a week hit twitter.com and click on @replies.  For 5 minutes of investment he can see if people are responding to his posts.  I know he spends more time than that on his comment moderation.  Then if he were to simply reply to those people by putting in the @username and his response.  He’d have a massive following with a super minimal investment and his fans would love him even more.  He’d also get more blogging visibility.  Just because you don’t have a lot of followers doesn’t mean that all the other millions of people don’t have access to your tweets/posts.  When you post your blogging URLs it goes into a massive feed dump for anyone sitting on twitter.com or the other dozens of twitter apps that consume all tweets and then as people search, those posts no matter how old are searchable, archivable, and consumable.  Lasting value.  Free marketing and true business value can be had.  Eyeballs…

9. Don’t waste time with it – You don’t have to sit and stare, you either have replies or don’t.  You either have something interesting to post or not.  You decide the amount of exposure you have with it.  If you’re posting ever 10 minutes, you’re going to be annoying people.  Make sure you have something kind of interesting to say.  Again, look at some of the twitter greats, they are often also bloggers who have something to say.

10. Have fun with it.  It’s designed to be informative and help you keep in touch and up to date.  One liner blogs sound pretty wierd, but finding out that their is an earthquake from friends before anyone else way before the news is an amazing life experience.  Am I Right? Scoble….

(I forgot to mention another tip… You can have your facebook status automatically updated by twitter if you add and configure the "twitter" add-on application inside of facebook. That way your tweets that broadcast your blogs for example will notify your friends on facebook!)

I am an advocate for free software.  From trials (nice) to free lower level software (personal/student/home editions) with an upsell or encouragement for enterprise (levels of support, special features, etc…) for paid.  I was going to give my Dad a lesson on Free Antivirus and Free Spyware removal products…  why not share my lessons with the rest of the world…

In SharePoint we have WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) which in reality is NOT free.  It requires you have the Windows license.  On the desktop do I say that Windows Defender (Make sure you have this… it’s a no brainer!) is NOT free?  No, but it requires a copy of XP or Vista (Genuine Advantage validation) right?  Ok, so given that let’s pretend like Microsoft doesn’t care if we call it free (I know PR does care).  In this example we see it as the broad brush, it’s the one that anyone can have with their copy of Windows Server 2003/2008.  (Actually when it comes down to it, it’s likely someone like the Fed or the EU that keeps us playing these stupid is it a Windows service or Windows technology games.  So likely we can’t even blame Microsoft PR.  They can’t call it free, or it would be a problem with Windows Antitrust and bundling and all that junk.  Grrr.  It’s not a simple life.

The upsell is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard or Enterprise edition.  The upsell is features, services, and sure you can get other things like support and all that goodness.  I see these no brainer upgrades happen all the time.  The feature comparison and upsell happens as people become more fully aware.

So my dad has been running with no Antivirus or Antispyware, and I was freaking out.  Dad you have to have SOMETHING!  So here’s something for my dad.

The best freeware Antivirus is Avira AntiVir Personal (hear that, Personal Edition).  The license itself is pretty clear – "This free Avira AntiVir Personal – Free AntiVirus is intended exclusively for private use on a
single workstation. You may copy the complete program package and pass it on to others for private use only.  The free Avira AntiVir Personal – Free AntiVirus may not be used for commercial or professional purposes."

About.com does a suprisingly decent review on three of the best "Free" Antivirus products. (Not free trials, but actual freeware that doesn’t expire!)  (Note these are not for commercial use, not a problem for you, Dad.) 

AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic, AVAST 4 Home Edition, and AVG Free Edition.

From About.com, "Each of the products tested has been certified (VB100%, ICSALabs, or Checkmark) to be effective at detecting 100% of in-the-wild viruses. But the list of in-the-wild (ItW) viruses is miniscule in comparison to the number of actual known viruses. The ItW list also omits certain types of threats, including adware and spyware, thus it may not be representative of the actual threats confronting users today."

Just navigating the Internet to find the legitimate download locations of these products prior to finding the correct links was extremely painful.  There is TONS of junk download pages on antivirus which WILL give you malware and spyware and throw some useless trial of a Noname antivirus product that will force nag you to upgrade and WILL expire in 15 days.  These 3 at least are decent products with a decent plan for upsell.  What a mess the Internet has become with pages with ads and fake links that are spider traps and junk thrown at the Googles of the world to increase relevancy and trying to seem legitimate.  I was looking for a codec and an hour later after wading through the slums of the Internet found a decent alternative.  It’s sad.

Notice that you’ll see things like this…  Ad driven products, donations, and greyed out features are common place.  (You won’t find that in WSS, you’ll find a fully featured product and you don’t know what you don’t know.)  It takes MS Sales or some knowledge of SharePoint Server to really know what you’re missing out on.

For Spyware I like two programs and I actually recommend both.  Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware 2008 and Spybot Search and Destroy (ad driven) "the best (according to PC World, PCMag.com, …) privacy software available" and run off donations. (cool!)

These products will help you identify spyware and other unwanted junk on your desktops.  If you have spouses that download and play games you’ll find random toolbars and desktop icons (and that’s MILD) amongst other unwanted and horrible spyware on your machines.  These products will help you at least identify and remove 90% of it.  Being free the best features such as more of the realtime service features or custom scheduling or some of those other "greyed out" features are in the fully featured products.  Often it’s just a little bit more.  Whether it’s $15 or $100 Antivirus and Antispyware removal is a necessity.  You’re under constant attack by simply opening your browser and having an IP.  If you do neither of these and talk to no other machine that has either of these, then we don’t have to talk.

Let me warn you about something else I’ve seen lately… horrible things on the internet not safe for your Grandmothers.

Tell me what’s wrong with this screenshot!

See the tiny text Ad Feedback?  Right under it you see an orange box around a yellow button saying click here to start your download?  If you click on this button you are actually clicking on an AD!  You have to continue to go down the page to click on Download Now.  You can imagine with poor resolution (like your Grandma’s) you wouldn’t even see the Download Now link.  If you do click it, you’ll see one more similar AD and hopefully you didn’t click on that one, and then in the background the download should start.  Right?  What happens if it doesn’t?  Well that’s pretty common these days with IE security.  We may get the bar at the top saying something needs to run, but that might not come down either.  So what does Download.com tell you to do?  They tell you to put them in your trusted sites… GREAT.  NOT.  Now a large bulk of the software on the Internet is now in your trusted sites.  Not something you should have to do.  I’ve been *REALLY* annoyed by these types of issues.  People trying to be smart about auto loading the software so I have to run some control, and ADs that trick you into doing stupid things.  Facebook is littered with poorly placed ads with arrows with the words next.  Hate that.  It’s going to get worse in the future.  This isn’t the best example screenshot, but you get the idea…  Nagging annoying ADs that look like legitimate links, buttons, and applications are the bain of our existence and at the same time… our inevitable future.

Action Items:

Ok Dad,  here’s what you do.  1) Make sure you’ve run the latest Microsoft Update and have the latest Windows and Office Service Packs (those will be discovered in the scan, and make sure it’s set to automatic download, but not automatic install). 2) Make sure you’ve got the latest Windows Defender, then at least pick one of each… 3) Antivirus: (AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic, AVAST 4 Home Edition, and AVG Free Edition)  and 4) Antispyware (Spybot S&D or Lavasoft Ad-aware).  Then make sure you 5) run full scans using these two products on a recurring basis.  Depending on the product it may do some automatic scanning or only run on demand.  Note if it doesn’t have a tray icon…  Even if it does you should run the full scan after a clean reboot once a week.  Since it’s free you may have to force it to run.  If you install software, especially ones that you aren’t 100% aware of, you should run the products to do some verification.  Free isn’t the full answer, but it does get you by in this economic uncertainty.  If you’re willing to shell out some cash you’ll find it will run as a service and run in the background and run in the night and all that jazz.  The upsell will come with some built in designs that are convincing, or maybe the donation… 

I did fail to mention Microsoft Live One Care… ever heard of it?  It’s got a 90 day trial and is Microsoft’s solution to Antivirus and Antispyware as well as a bunch of other desktop security.  I haven’t seen it used in the enterprise space, so I don’t have a lot to say about it.  Pretty cheap too… "Get always-on protection and maintenance for up to 3 PCs for just $49.95 (USD) * a year."  I have friends that swear to this (new solution) and others to Symantec Norton, Mcafee and Trend (the long time proven products).  It’s nice to see Microsoft doing strong things in the security space.  They do need to do more to lead.  They’ve really taken a strong position in fighting antivirus and spyware.  Note: (OneCare does not support the Windows XP Professional 64-bit operating system)  In the enterprise space it’s ForeFront Client Security which has real management and reporting.  For SharePoint the dominant antivirus vendor is Microsoft ForeFront for SharePoint (with SP2).  That team has done an incredible job to meet the performance requirements and react quickly.  Their competition has been late and lacking, but that’s for another post.