CloudShare Introduces – New SharePoint Templates

We have turned up the heat on new templates! We have two brand new templates that will help you get greater control over your SharePoint farms.

For you regular readers, you’re probably thinking, “Wait, today’s not a release day. You’re off schedule!” You’re right. We are. We shifted releases by a week, but now we’re back to our regular two week release cycle. So if you mark your calendars like I do with, “Super CloudShare Release Day!” go ahead and shift it one week forward. We’ve done this because some big things are cooking behind the scenes. Big features are on the way. In the meantime, we’re focusing on templates.

The first new template is an un-configured SharePoint 2010 Enterprise environment. The majority of our templates follow a standard amount of configuration. We do this with a combination of a standard AutoSPInstaller script ( available in the tools library ) and some manual configuration. Our goal with these templates is to hit 90% of the common SharePoint Development and testing use cases and leave 10% up to your expertise. SharePoint is a platform with thousands of pulleys and leavers. We do our best, but we know we might miss something which can result in “Template Rage.”

One of the SharePoint best practices is to NOT use the built-in configuration wizard and script your own deployment with tools like PowerShell, AutoSPInstaller, or ShareSquared’s SharePoint Composer and Maestro ( all available in the solution showcase “Tools” section ). This best practice is in order to avoid not having GUID in your database names, setting up services with the proper application pools, etc., etc.

We know many of your are not just developing web parts or information architecture. Many of you are also testing platform deployments and configurations. For example, configuring a SharePoint 2010 farm relative to your MOSS deployment. We’ve created a new Machine Template with SharePoint 2010 Enterprise installed, but without configuration, in order to give you more control. This will allow you to use your own scripts or a manual configuration to build out your farm exactly how YOU want it.

Next up is an SQL 2012 Standard template. We are in the process of adding a version of ALL the SharePoint templates with SQL 2012. But for now we give you an SQL 2012 Standard stand-alone template.

Do you have a template request!? Cool, tell us here.

We are excited about the slew of new templates that will be released soon. Happy CloudSharing!

4/16/2012
– New Sharing UI

4/2/2012
– Tool Library
– New Templates

3/18/12
– Revert Individual Machines
– Revert Suspended Environments

3/4/12
– New Website
– iPhone Support

2/19/12
– Walling of trial users
– Secure FTP

2/5/12
– Added port range 8000-8010 to Web Access

1/22/12
– Enabled support for more external agents over Web Access

1/7/12
– Support for Safari on Mac and iPad iOS

12/25/11
– Compressed content over web access – improved performance

12/11/11
– More granularity during environment resume

11/27/11
– Port 8080 open for Web Access
– SharePoint alternate access maps configured automatically

11/13/11
– Ability to Copy Environments

You may also be interested in reading about:

SharePoint 2013 site templates