Are you drowning in a sea of paper work? Do you have documents coming out of your ears? Can you quickly find the contents of a file? Are they missing? Well I get questions quite frequently from subscribers and one of the questions that I receive more than once is what do you recommend for our company, for our business as a good solution for just managing and taking control of the documents that we use?
And I got to tell you I may, I have the Microsoft action pack subscription so I run Windows 2003 server here in our office and I use Window SurePoint services. And just to kind of clear up what that is Window SurePoint services, you can almost think of it as really a platform if you will for doing things for your company such as managing documents, creating an internet in your company that may have things like a shared calendar, a discussion, a place to hold discussions. You can maybe have your own small type of help desk. it's kind of like your own internal community site.
But in steroids to the fact that you can save and edit and revise documents using that in Microsoft office. You can actually publish. You can actually treat as a document service so why I like SurePoint services. I mean it's got a big brother in Microsoft office SurePoint server 2007 and SurePoint services is kind of like the engine to that car. Okay, the SurePoint server is the car with things like a GPS and flat panel TV’s inside the car and all that. And that’s what you’re paying for the server side of it.
Okay, so this is what I use. Now I did have to go and download and install the Adobe IFilter and you may have to make a couple tweaks to the Windows registry on server in order for it to crawl PDF documents but at the end of the day you create what's called document libraries in SurePoint services and you can grant permission to access those libraries to various users and groups. They can then in turn revise documents and control and keep track on who’s making changes to what documents and this works with the Microsoft office documents and so with spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations or documents all that sort of thing.
And then also as I said PDF documents can be crawled and also become searchable using the free Adobe search folder now. The SurePoint service is absolutely free, and you can get in couple of ways, you can download it. There is a piece of software called Search Server 2008 Express which has the SurePoint services built-in and I just want to talk a little bit about of course again the price you can beat, because it’s absolutely free. If you buy Microsoft office SurePoint service about $4500.00 for the server and then it’s about $100.00 at least per user thereafter.
But there is something you should know about when it comes with a very special type of SQL Server Express that unlike the normal free MSDE or server express. Let me show you to a 4 gigabyte data base that is not the case. In fact it's called the Windows internal data base. But essentially that’s what it is, so you normally have to worry about you know it was growing. Now you got two types of install which called the basic install and advance install. I did a basic install of Window SurePoint services.
You do have to make sure the IS server is running on your server. That you have the SMTP’s server started and common files are supported. You also need to install .net three data and ASP.net two data and those needs to be enabled.
Make sure you go and grab before you're going to start adding content you want to kind of think through how you're going to set up SurePoint services. So you want to make sure that the user’s permissions group all that is configured. Whatever document libraries you're going to need for example, my company I have a document library for clients. I have one for vendors. I have one for products that we’re working on. So those are some of the document libraries.
And then as I said we got the IFilter from Adobe which is a free download. We have to do a couple registry acts so to speak. And then we just simply started copying files over. If you have Internet Explorer, you can view what's called an explorer view and you can actually you grab bunch of the documents and move them over or you can within the SurePoint services you can tell to upload all of the documents.
Now another cool feature is your ability to connect a SurePoint document library or site to Microsoft outlook including as well as a calendar. So those files can be available to you offline as well as online. And they can stay in synchronization with one another.
Also you can do the same thing with the calendar. One of the things that I do is when I got the original office 2007 enterprise it was not in the ability to automatically save as a PDF. You have to go get a special add-on from Microsoft. But now I believe through a service background update that that just part of it now.
So typically if I know if it’s a document I’m not going to need to edit or have other people revise, I’ll just save it as a PDF. If not we have a decent flat base scanner with a paper tray and we’ll scan documents, convert them to PDF on a share folder in the network and then we’ll ultimately import those into SurePoint where they are searchable very, very quickly.
The office or the Microsoft Search Server 2000 Express, what a Microsoft describes as a enterprise level search and includes the ability now in the search within the documents, within SurePoint. But can also search for heads as well on sites like Google and Yahoo and so forth. So it’s more robust and my advice in one of the other—well, for me the Window SurePoint services has three data, using the adobe IFilter really did the trick for us. It’s absolutely free of cost. Well, that is you know that’s a qualified word. You have to have Microsoft Server 2008 in order to be within licensing the agreement of the software.
But other than that that if you already have it then you have got the very basic, a very nice document management system in and out of itself. Now if you want to upgrade to more programs and applications and you’d want to look at the Microsoft office SurePoint Server 2007.
So there you have it and hopefully that answers your questions. I love SurePoint services. It’s relatively easy to use and that saves something. It’s not that hard I will tell you. If you don’t sit and put some forth added to it, it’s really easy to get it totally screwed up. So put some thought in that and how you're organized your company. What team site? You know what site you're going to need with document libraries, spent a little bit time learning this software before you start importing lots and lots of documents into it.
But it’s got a great search feature and you can keep track of who’s working on documents, what revisions are out there and what's been checked out, what's been checked in, all of that of are within SurePoint services. You don’t need to purchase the SQL server in order to make it run the one that comes with it will do you just fine.
But of course you can run it actually within the Sequel server binding as well. This is Bruce Naylor from Frugal Tech and remember to come to our website FrugalBrothers.com. On June 30th, we’re giving away an Apple iPod Nano. It’s 4 gigabyte edition. We’d love to have you there. All you got to do to win is two things, one subscribed to our YouTube channel and to be present to our live chat room.
So at FrugalbBrothers.com, go to the homepage, click the link that says “Frugal Tech Live” and we’re webcasting everyday for a weekday from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. I’ll talk to you later.
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