CloudShare Introduces – Port 8080, Faster Access, and Full Template Lists

It’s release weekend! This week we put a lot of focus on some large features coming early next year, and performance enhancements to our back-end. But there are three new features this week you should be aware of.

– Port 8080 open for Web Access
– SharePoint alternate access maps configured automatically
– Faster access to full template list when creating environment or adding a VM

If you have not yet discovered web access let me tell you what it is. Web access is a great way to share your web application running on your CloudShare VM without giving direct access to the VM. The Web Access URL is a uniquely generated URL for VMs running web applications such as SharePoint. Many of our templates come pre-configured with web access enabled. If it is not, simply enabled it by going to View Environment – > Edit Environment -> Edit Users & Access, and checking “Enable Web Access” like below.

Once you have done this you can reach web access in two ways. Both are found in the machine details and pointed out by the arrows below:

Now to the new features

Port 8080: Previously we had opened port 80 and 3695 via web access. Port 80 is the default for web applications, and the default port for the first SharePoint Web Application you create. Port 3695 on our templates is assigned for SharePoint Central Administration. Now we have opened port 8080 which is the My Site web application in our SharePoint templates. This gives you three possible locations for web applications.

Alternate Access Maps: Sometimes even SharePoint needs to be told where to go. Web access is a popular feature, and now that we added port 8080 it’s going to be even more popular. But when using SharePoint over web access you had to perform one additional step. That was taking your web access URL and adding it in SharePoint Central Administration as an External address in the Alternate Access Map settings. If you skipped this step SharePoint was unable to resolve to itself in the proper way. This could cause problems with certain site settings pages, and when creating sub-sites. What we have done is automated this for you! When we provision the SharePoint VMs for you, we now automatically enable web access, and add the generate web access URL to your SharePoint’s alternate access map before we give the VM to you. Just one less thing for you to think about!

Last week marked to first bi-weekly product update post, this week will be the first week where I tell you what’s coming! Now in the product posts I will be hinting at features to come. The features are the ones expected in the next release or two.

So what’s next!?

– A new RDP access method for Mac and Mobile devices!

– Increased performance for VM resume and provisioning

– Access to individual VMs as they resume

As you can see this release we put a lot of focus on increased usability via Web Access, and for our SharePoint users. Let use know what new features excite you the most! Or if you have any feature requests.

SharePoint 2013 access request settings