Blogs

As I wrote the title, I reminded myself that I know this wish won’t come true; still, it’s a slow week so I’ll share it with you. I want a SharePoint that can stay up. Actually, I want a Windows environment that can stay up. OK, let me be more specific, I am not talking about crashes. SharePoint, like the rest of our server-based software suffers very few of these. I am talking about planned, necessary outages that are a side-effect of properly maintaining your Microsoft-centric server room. Server updates, BIOS updates, Virtual Host updates, software updates, security updates…where does it end? While I’m whining, why do so many of these things still require a reboot? How I would love to see a message that said “SharePoint will be a tad slow during the next half hour while the server processes required updates in the background.”

Having written the first paragraph, I am thinking about the comments I might get. No, I can’t afford enough redundancy to keep it all running “over there” while I am upgrading “over here”. We have redundancy built into to infrastructure, but it’s like the the E.D.S. on Deepwater Horizon, we don’t go down that road unless there’s an emergency. Like many smaller businesses, our failsafe/failover plan is designed to get us back up in the event of a hardware failure. Exercising the plan takes longer than waiting for the updates to run.  Ooh, ooh, what about turning to the Cloud? I could write an entire blog entry on why I am not impressed with Cloud-based solutions, oh wait, I already did. In fact, I wrote a series of blog entries on the subject. No, I am going to put this problem back where it belongs, on Microsoft and on the vendor that represents them. Actually, I am going to dump the problem on my Systems Administrator as a 2011 goal.

Like redundancy and the Cloud, reducing the pain involved with updates will cost me more money than I am spending today. Updates will be scheduled outside of business hours, when technicians are more expensive. That may be a fair compromise given that we don’t have to move everything out of prime-time and we don’t have to move anything into the wee hours. I will also take comfort in the fact that, even with a planned outage every 90 days, SharePoint is still a better place for those documents than the offsite file storage company.