Will Microsoft Surfaces change everything?

Okay so the video looks cool, the feedback on the device looks good.  As best I can tell it looks like an iPad running Windows 8.  I have been testing Windows 8 for a few weeks now and it is a smooth, clean OS which solidly puts Windows in the table touch space.

Surface is an important step for Microsoft.  The development of the slate market has been obvious since I posted this diagram over 2 years ago.  The tablet (called slate in the diagram) is a natural technology for the cloud.  The tablet clearly fits between the space of Mobile Phone and Lap Top.

To date the tablet has been dominated by Android and iOS.  So tablets remain kind of big phones.  But even hard core tablet users like myself have to sit down all the time to get key work done.  It would seem that current iPads and Android Tablets are limited by restrictions of mobile phones.

So far Microsoft has not been able to get in to this space.  Its domination of the PC market has not extended to tablets.  But it is also fair to say that Android and Apple tablets don't pose to serious a threat to PCs, yet. I can't really imagine giving up my PCs to use an iPad alone.  Can you?

Surfaces looks to be the first tablet which might replace a laptop.  So far my testing of Windows 8 has convinced me that it is finally the real thing.

My prediction in 2010 was that Apple would be the first owner of this space, and that Google would be limited by lack of hardware expertise.  So I predicted that as of 2011 the tablet space (which I called the slate at the time) would be owned by Apple, but by 2015 Microsoft Windows 9 tablet would take over.

Lets see.

You can restore a site collection to the same web application it was made

Well you can, but first you have to remove the site collection you backed up. This code will do it 

Backup-Backup-SPSite –Identity http://sharepoint.abc.com/sites/testsite -Path “c:\site collection backups\testsite.bak” 

Remove-SPSite –Identity http://sharepoint.abc.com/sites/testsite 

Restore-SPSite –Identity http://sharepoint.abc.com/sites/testsite2 -Path “c:\site collection backups\testsite.bak”

http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/31048/restore-spsite-reports-no-content-databases-are-available-for-this-operation

Now the reason for this is a bit tricky.  Remember that everything in the same site collection sits in the same database instance.  SharePoint puts a lot of GUIDs in to a database.  So if you try to take a backup of a site collection and restore it to another site collection in the same app you get the error:

 Restore-SPSite : No content databases are available for this operation

Even if you delete the site collection from the Web Application it will not work.  You need to run the remove-SPSite command to remove the GUIDs from the site collection.

This is covered in Microsoft support post

Error message when you try to restore a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site collection by using a different name: "No content databases are available for this operation" http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926321

This post is for SharePoint 2007 but the same issue remains in 2010.  Just had it.

MSDN Video, installing SharePoint 2010

Check out this great MSN video: Installing SharePoint Server 2010

Good introduction overview of building SharePoint 2010.

How to configure an RSS feed on a Sharepoint 2010 list