Andy’s Techie Blog

‘SharePoint as a Help Desk’ On Tour–Manchester

I may have mentioned once or twice over the last couple of weeks I’d been invited to the Manchester SBSC group to deliver the presentation I gave at AMITPRO a few months ago.

So last Thursday I made the trip up to Manchester and as I’ve done every time I’ve presented to a user group I thought it’d critique myself again (in the interests of self improvement of course!)

But before that the rest of the event.

First I’d like to thank Simon Belt for organising the event and for very kindly hanging around for a couple of beers afterwards.

Next, thanks to the group members for their kind welcome and for not heckling.

Finally the other speaker of the night, Gary Duffield of QA. Garry attended WPC this year and gave a great presentation which summarised the key points that came out of the event and where Microsoft and their partners are heading in the near future. The session was very much discussion based and it was great to see that interactivity and gave everyone some good ideas to think about.

Garry also has a blog you can check out.

So onto my presentation.

On the whole I was pretty happy. I’ve had some nice follow up comments which I always appreciate.

What did I think though?

Preparation

I mentioned in my previous review that I’d used OneNote to put together an outline to work against and I was pleased with how it helped me last time. Because of the way i put it together it made the presentation much easier to pick up and and repeat (it’s the first time I’ve ever done a talk twice!). That said the first time around I created the presentation and then delivered it shortly after I’d finished it so it meant I knew everything inside out. While I had gone back through my notes when preparing I didn’t quite know it in the same way as first time around. Luckily the notes helped so while I did forget to do a couple of things it was very easy to pick that up.

As a result I actually didn’t build-up the application as much as last time. I did do enough to get my point across though even if I did race through a lot of it. I don’t think there is a lot I can do about this other make sure I’ve got enough time as possible and know the steps as well as I can. Building a fully working SharePoint application and explaining everything along the way in a hour is an ambitious thing to do but worth racing through if it gets people thinking about how they could do it.

Speed

When I gave this presentation for AMITPRO I didn’t use a slide deck (it wasn’t actually intentional) this time since very few people in the room knew me I started with the slides to introduce myself. There weren’t many slides but because of how much content there is in the demo to get through it stole a bit of my time. I’ll bear it in mind next time if it’s a packed agenda and maybe go back to the PowerPoint free presentation Guy praised me for last time.

Demo

I know a good workman shouldn’t blame his tools but I’m going to anyway. My laptop is a couple of years old now. It’s got an Intel mobile chip (so no virtualisation extensions!) with 3GB of RAM. While it just about ran the two virtual machines I used it very obviously struggled at times and it slowed the presentation quite a bit which wasn’t helpful when I had so much to get through. When I purchased the laptop I never really expected to be using it for running virtual machines for demoing SharePoint to a user group. Times have moved on though and user group presentations aside, the ability to run virtual machines on the go has lots of other benefits. I’m not planning on rushing out and getting a new laptop but when my next hardware refresh comes around I’ll be able to factor it in.

Not too much to complain about on the whole!

It was also good to see how another user group runs. Other than AMITPRO the only other time I’d been to another group was when I visited the Bristol group for the SBS 2008 launch. That was a slightly different format because of the SBS launch so I’m counting this as my first time!

Thanks again for to everyone who attended the meeting. Would be great to hear any comments you have!

Sorry Bill Thompson, I think you’re wrong

Just came across an article on the BBC News site by Bill Thompson called “Learning to love computer codes”

The article talks about how Bill read through the recently released source code to MacPaint Apple donated to the Computer History Museum.

Bill then goes on to talk about how he thinks everyone who uses technology should have a basic understanding of the nuts and bolts that make up an application or operating system.

He talks about how his partners daughter is learning Latin to help with her fascintation with acient Rome and Greece and that the same applies to programming.

My partner’s daughter is currently learning Latin because she is fascinated by the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome and realises that unless she understands the language used at the time she will always be forced to see their world through the filter of another person’s understanding, because everything she reads will be in translation.

If she knows the language herself then she will at least have removed one of the layers between her and Suetonius.

I believe that the same is true of programming, and that anyone using computer technology should have at least a basic understanding of what software looks like and how the lines of code in Pascal or BASIC or C control the operation of your laptop, mobile phone or pacemaker.

It’s a nice sentiment but one that I think is way off. Yes, learning Latin will help when studying history but the same principle doesn’t apply when it comes to using technology.

Should I learn how the internal combustion engine works so I can drive my car?

or know that sound waves are converted into electricity to use a telephone?

People don’t need to know any of these things, they just want to make use of them.

Surely the whole point of mass adoption of technology is that it’s easy for the layman to use?

It’s a nice sentiment and it would be really great (and would make my job easier!) if people had a basic understanding of the technology they use but on a practical basis it’ll never happen because they don’t need to.

Manchester User Group–Thursday 19th

Just a quick reminder! I’m speaking at the Manchester SBSC group tomorrow night (19th).

I’ll be going through the “SharePoint as a Help Desk” presentation I did at AMITPRO a few months ago

The meeting is at 18:30 at QA’s training facilities on the 3^rd Floor, Westminster House, Minshull Street, off Portland Street, Manchester M1 3HU

I’ll be staying overnight so if anyone wants to put the world to rights afterwards (or just talk geek!) let me know!

Creating an Activity Log with SharePoint

I was reminded of an old Notepad trick on LifeHacker yesterday.

Basically if you create a new text file, add .LOG as your first line and then save the file, every time you open it after that the date and time is automatically added for you.

LifeHacker then suggest you can use this as an activity log to help keep you focused on productivity. At the end of the day you can take a look and see what you’ve done with your time!

It also suggested that you added a shortcut to your taskbar so you can get to the log really quickly.

I’m all for improving productivity but decided I could improve on this a little so created something similar in SharePoint.

On our companyweb site I also have my own site that I use for testing things out and keeping track of information specific to myself (http://companyweb/andy) so this seemed the perfect place for it.

First thing was to create a new custom list called “Daily Activity Log”

Adding it to the quick launch bar means I can get at it quickly while on my site.

One new list!

Next I created a new standard view

From here I made my new view the default view, displayed only the "Created” and “Title” fields (in that order) and set the sort order to “Created" and Descending (newest on top)

Scrolling down the page I set the filter options to only show the entries for today.

After that I clicked the NEW button to display a form so I could fill out an activity entry.

You could also rename the “Title” field to something more useful but I haven’t here as this post will be long enough!

TADA!

I now have a complete list of entries from today and the “created” field gives us the same timestamp effect we had in notepad.

To mirror the LifeHacker suggestion I then created a new shortcut on my desktop.

The target is:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://companyweb/andy/Lists/Daily%20Activity%20Log/NewForm.aspx”

(This path will be different if using the 32-bit version of Internet Explorer on a 64-bit operating system)

You can get the URL by clicking the NEW button and copying the URL from the address bar.

I also changed the icon to make sure it looked different to the main Internet Explorer icon!

I needed to create the shortcut to Internet Explorer as you can’t pin internet shortcuts to the taskbar – Windows tries to pin them directly to Internet Explorer instead.

Once pinned to my taskbar I now have one click access to creating a new activity entry.

To improve on this some more I created another view. Instead of using a new standard view I used my previous view as a base.

I set the name to “Entry History” and scrolled down to the “group by” options and grouped by the “Created” column and set it to a descending sort (newest on top) with a 30 groups per page which effectively gives us months worth of history at a time.

I left the default grouping at “collapsed” but this is just my preference.

I only created this today so only have one groups worth of information.

All done!

This means I’ve got a tracking system for my daily activities where I can easily add entries, view what I’ve achieved today as well as go back and look at previous days.

There are plenty of ways to improve on this further. Some examples that spring to mind.

• You could add a category field if you wanted to track types of activity. You could then create views and filters around these. (You may want to see how many times you made a phone call during a day for example)
• You could add a “minutes spent” field and have SharePoint total up this field. This would let you know how many minutes of productivity you’re getting out of your day.
• You could share the list with a team of people and use the “created by” field to group and filter on usernames so you can see what each person is getting up to
• If you had personal site like I do you could drop the list onto the web part page so the current list is always displayed – dashboard style!

Just a couple there. The whole idea is that it’s quick and easy to use so you wouldn’t want to customise it too much.

Possibly a little overkill when compared to the simplicity of the notepad based solution but once this is setup it’s done and your old data is very nicely tidied away but you still get easy access to it.

Book Review–Daemon

I’ve got out the blogging habit! Not an intentional thing but something that annoys me when it does.

I finished reading a book this week and enjoyed it so much I thought I’d give it a mention.

I actually picked the book up in March. I was in a book shop and the cover and title grabbed my attention (Look at it! It’s screaming “buy me you geek!”)

I got it home, read a couple of chapters and didn’t go back to it until the weekend just passed.

I wish I hadn’t left it so long! It really drew me in. I was reading it in bed earlier in the week and totally lost track of time and before I knew it I’d been reading for four hours! It did mean I got through most of it though

I’ve mentioned on the blog a couple of times in the past that I’ve got a very specific taste in fiction which makes it really hard to find anything as there isn’t really a genre that fits it. “Techno-Thriller” is what they seem to get labelled under but they rarely have their own section in book stores. Amazon had this one down as “Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Thrillers” and “Fiction > Adventure Stories & Action”

So the plot,

Here is the description from the back of the book

Matthew Sobel is dead, but his final creation survives.
A man is found brutally murdered – and the only possible perpetrator happens to be dead. As more killings follow, it becomes clear that mass carnage is being planned and organised from beyond the grave.
The Daemon is seemingly unstoppable, and murder is the least of its capabilities.
A lethal program designed by a twisted genius, the Daemon inhabits the systems on which an increasingly interconnected society depends. In a world where everyone and everything is online, nothing is out of its reach.
Just don’t turn on that computer…

Without giving away too many spoilers, imagine if a program (or series of programs) were created with criminal intent to make use of the Internet to fulfil it’s goal? This could mean anything from making use of government databases such as automatic number plate recognition services and social security details to simply the ability to scare someone by controlling light switches!

Or to put it another way, if you’ve played any modern computer game you’ve seen how clever and involved the virtual worlds they create are. What if the game engine ran on the Internet and the game world it controlled was actually the physical world?

What is really frightening about the book is that most of the concepts aren’t entirely based in fiction. While some of the technology is what you’d call “bleeding edge” it all feels entirely plausible.

This is in part down to the author “Daniel Suarez” who when not writing books is actually systems consultant so knows his tech!

Another interesting thing about the book is where it came from. Having written the book Daniel struggled to get a publisher to entertain it (as I imagine happens hundreds of times a week across the world!).

Convinced he had a product people would buy he got it in front of bloggers who write about topics that are in the book who wrote posts about the book. He created his own publishing company and used a print-on-demand service to create the books!(full details in an article on Wired)

As I said above it really drew me and the only disappointing thing was when it finished!

This is mainly because the book is a two-parter so the story didn’t get wrapped up (the second book is called Freedom tm). The bonus is I’ll have a whole other book to read

Neither books are particularly expensive so I recommend any self respecting geek has a look!

The book also has a supporting website (TheDaemon.com) which also has links to more reviews as well as some information about the technology behind the book (Hypersonic Sound Systems look very cool, especially with how they are used in the book) and a couple of sample chapters from both books.

SharePoint as a Help Desk–On Tour!

I’ve been waiting to post this as I wanted to make sure it was shared on the official site first!

As you may or may not know (if you read this blog or know me you should!) I can quite happily ramble on about SharePoint in a small business context for a long time. So much so that I get to stand up in front of the AMITPRO members and bore them from time to time

So after the last time Simon Belt from the North West SBS group asked if I’d go up to Manchester to bore them too and give a repeat performance and I was happy to say yes.

The meeting is on August 19th at 18:30 at QA’s training facilities on the 3^rd Floor, Westminster House, Minshull Street, off Portland Street, Manchester M1 3HU

Full details of the event are here

Let me know if you’re planning on attending?

I’ll be staying overnight so if anyone wants to chat about all things SBS-related I’ll be happy to do so.

Also if you’re in and around the North West region and have never visited an SBS user group meeting why not make this your first?

I’ve been told there will be pizza!

SBS 2008 Migration Gotcha

I was recently migrating a client from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008.

I was using the Microsoft method (backed up by the techniques in Dave Overton’s book!) and having ran the source tool on the old server I kicked off the migration on the new server and got this error.

Weird….I’d ran the source tool without issue?  

So I rebooted and ran it again yet I still repeatedly got the same message.

I found an article on the official SBS blog outlining the error but it basically says the resolution is to run the source tool.

Confused I decided that there must be a log somewhere so called up a command prompt (did you know you can do this during setup? press SHIFT+F10) and changed to the log directory.

SBS 2008 keeps all the major logs in one place.

C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Logs

There is a post on the official SBS blog about this with full details.

So I opened the setup log and saw lots of passes until I got to this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Outlook 2010 – Auto Complete Files

Just a quick one as a reminder as it caught me out!

You’re probably aware that Outlook stores the names that appear when you type a mail recipient in an .NK2 file.

In the past when moving a user between PCs all we needed to do with grab the .NK2 file from the old PC and copy it to the new PC.

Turns out Outlook 2010 doesn’t use an NK2 file anymore!

If you’re using Outlook 2010 look at your contacts folders. You should see a folder called “Suggested Contacts”

This where the names are now stored.

The idea is that you can easily manage them and more importantly because the names are stored in your mailbox they will follow you around on different PCs.

So the main thing is how do you transfer them across from an old PC running an older version of Outlook?

There is a Microsoft Knowledgebase article detailing the whole thing here.

Simply put,

Outlook has a command line flag “/importNK2”.

Grab the NK2 file on the old PC from one of the following locations.

• Windows XP
  Drive:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
• Windows Vista and later versions
  Drive:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook

Browse to the folder “%appdata%\Microsoft\Outlook”

Make sure the NK2 file is in that folder and the filename matches your Outlook profile name.

e.g Andy.NK2

Run Outlook with the switc

Outlook.exe /importNK2

Done!

The KB article says that the import process renames the file with a .file extension but this didn’t seem to happen when I did it. (though it might have just been me!)

Note if you perform an upgrade from an old version of Outlook to Outlook 2010 this should have been done for you automatically

Vintage Computer Festival at Bletchley Park

Last Saturday fellow geek Richard Tubb and I travelled down to Bletchley Park for the first ever Vintage Computer Festival here in the UK.

I’ve been to the National Computer Museum before but this was a far more interactive experience.

The mansion and various marquees around the site were filled with tons of retro systems that were all powered on and ready for use.

It was geek heaven!

Every possible system from my childhood from Acorn, Commodore, Amstrad and Sinclair was there and it’s amazing the things people are still doing with them!

For example, this is a compact flash card plugging into the back of a Spectrum!

I even found my first love

While the Spectrum +3 wasn’t the first computer that came into the Parkes household (there were lots!) it was the first that was actually mine.

This is the power supply from said computer.

It’s difficult to explain WHY I took this picture but if you’re a bit of a geek you’ll get it

As well as the equipment on show there were various speakers and we sat in on Christine Finn’s presentation which talked about how “organised” computer collecting came about. She’s an archaeologist by trade which gives her a different insight into how and why we should keep old technology other than the reasons someone like me would have! She gave a really good presentation about her experiences in Silicon Valley during the dot-boom in the 90’s and it’s subsequent bust.

She wrote a piece in the Guardian a few years ago which is worth checking out.

She also has a book on the subject called Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley which Richard purchased and had signed!

In addition to the computers on display a large chunk of the mansion was taken over by the Retro Computer Museum.

This organisation keep old computer systems alive for the purposes of gaming! This was also one of the other lectures we took in. They were raising awareness of what they do and it was interesting to see the difference in body language when moving from the actual presentation to the Q&A session. Their enthusiasm really jumped out and they very much of the attitude that the old systems should continue to be used for their purpose and not locked away in a box.

Due to funding they don’t have a permanent site so hold an open day twice a year. The next one is at that the end of October so I’ll be certainly be visiting! There is also a much larger event going on later in the year but there is a full post to follow on that

So the games itself.

Every possible system you could think of was there to play with

From the Atari 2600 to Commodore Plus 4 to Amiga 1200 to Neo Geo, to Playstation 3. If you can think of it, it was there.

Richard and I played Battle Chess on an Amiga 1200 and Sensible Soccer on an Amiga CD32!

Also, one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen .

Guitar Hero on the Commodore 64.

Picture courtesy of Richard Tubbs Flickr Account

Someone created an adapter to plug a Playstation guitar into the machine and coded a game for it! The 8-bit beeps were amazing though we both sucked at the game itself.

 Picture courtesy of Richard Tubbs Flickr Account

As mentioned above there were a couple of marquee tents on site. One of them was entirely dedicated to the Amiga and were were there when they announced the launch of a new Amiga – the X100.

I can’t really tell you anything about it though as they didn’t bother to give the speakers microphones so didn’t hear a word they said! I think this site may have some more information over the coming months.

We ended our day at the Spectrum tent.

While the coolest thing I saw was Guitar Hero the geekiest think I did has to be this,

Picture courtesy of Richard Tubbs Flickr Account

Tweeting from a Spectrum!

I came across a video of this on YouTube recently (and shared it via Facebook and Twitter of course) so it was great to actually see it in action.

As I’ve already mentioned there is still an awful lot of things going on with some of these “old” systems. We even saw a recently developed game, complete with modern packaging. It looked amazing.

Richard couldn’t resist much more and came away with a couple of purchases. Just as he was making his mind up he realised he didn’t have a tape deck to load programs from. A gentleman stood next to us said that an MP3 would work just find and proceeded to pull out his iPhone and played the sound Galaxians would make during loading.

It’s common sense when you think of it but all the same ingenious!

I picked up a book called Electronic Brains: Stories from the Dawn of the Computer Age and even managed to get it signed by the author Mike Hally

We had a really great time and the event was actually run on Saturday and Sunday. Next time I’ll definitely be there for both days!

SharePoint as a Help Desk @ AMITPRO

Urgh….I meant to do this a lot earlier but I’ve had a crazy week since the AMITPRO meeting last week. I’ve got a back log of posts I want to put together but between holidays, hospitals and a couple of major client projects I’ve been at full tilt since then.

Anyway, back to the point!

Last time I spoke at an AMITPRO meeting I posted a brief “critique” of myself so I could figure out where I went right and wrong so I thought it was worth doing again.

First of all though a big thank you to everyone that attended!

We had a really great turn out and as well as our regular crowd there were a lot of new faces as well as appearances from some familiar faces we haven’t seen for a while. Thanks everyone for making the effort.

So what did I think?

Demo – Something I’d mentioned in my last critique was that I’d wanted to have a lot more structure in the demo itself. This was even more important subject matter and I’d used OneNote to great effect to give myself an outline to work against which meant everything went far more smoothly.

Speed - I didn’t quite feel as rushed as last time. By that I mean myself. I really did go through the demos quite quickly because I had a lot to try and do in a short space of time but I felt a lot more relaxed when speaking which will be down to experience and the fact it’s not the first time I’ve presented to the group.

Slides – Even though Guy very kindly made it look like I’d dropped the dreaded slides I had put together a very small deck that I didn’t get to use. I was still running the Office 2010 beta on my laptop and when I tried to open the file I got an error. Because I was literally minutes from speaking I just made the decision to drop them. When I checked it again afterwards it turned out I could have clicked through the error and used the slides. Which brings me onto my next point.

Organisation (1)– There had been a mix up at the venue about the room we’d booked and we were in a room for 10-15 with almost 30 people. I’d already started to setup in the smaller room when we needed to move. Also since I’m involved with the organisation of the event I had to help sort the new room,  get everyone moved and setup again. I then ended up speaking first instead of second so I was in a massive rush to get started as we were now running late.

Organisation (2) – While the previous point was a little out of my control this wasn’t. I’d setup my demo on my home setup with the intention of copying it to my laptop I’d use on the day. On the morning of the meeting I took my virtual machines to the offices with intention of tweaking my machines and going over my notes. We had such a busy day at the office that it just didn’t work out that way.

At around half three I realised I needed to setup a scheduled task to make everything easier. However, my server machine was running like a dog and generally unresponsive. I’d run a couple of VM’s on my laptop before no problem but was now panicking. After a bit of investigation I found a couple of articles that indicated that laptop hardware can go into reign in the CPU when VMs are running as it thinks the system is actually idle (though I don’t know if this actually true!)

So in my panic I uninstalled Virtual PC 2007 and installed Windows Virtual PC so I could make a setting change that would overcome this. At the same time I totally forgot that the VM’s aren’t directly compatible so it was almost four thirty (i.e time to leave!) and I had no way to run the demo! I quickly got rid of Windows Virtual PC, loaded Virtual PC 2007 back up and left for the meeting.

On the way I realised in my rush I hadn’t copied my slide deck onto the laptop. Once at the meeting I had to fight a dodgy 3G signal to try and remote back to the office and grab the file. My intention was to get everything prepped while the other speaker was on but I ended up going on FIRST!

I was quite lucky in that other than the slides everything from a demo perspective went to plan.

The lesson to learn was that I should have included the actual laptop the demo would run from as part of demo build instead of just assuming it would all work as expected.

Thankfully I’d prepared my demo and notes in such a way that I was able to get back on track quickly even though I was quite flustered at the beginning

All in all I was pleased with how it went.

I still don’t think I’m a natural presenter but hopefully anyone who was there learning something. If they did then it was mission accomplished.

I got some very nice comments from people in attendance and via Twitter and e-mail the following day which were much appreciated.

There was a TON of stuff I’d actually prepared that I just didn’t even cover because of time and the fact I didn’t want to go on for too long and have everyone lose interest. I joked during the presentation that I can talk for HOURS about SharePoint but in all honesty I was being serious!