I hope that you had a bit of fun with my first “choose your own adventure” story. (Do yourself a favour and read that first!)
Writing that one was most fun. Did you suddenly think of the names of current and former colleagues as you read it? 🙂
Anyway, now it is time for you to sit on my virtual knee and listen to the moral of that story because believe it or not, I actually had a really important point to get across.
Hey there!
Sorry it has taken me a while to get back to the Cisco articles. The “choose your own adventure” post took longer than I thought it would and I also was side tracked blogging about annoying programming issues with XML and Javascript.
This is the last of the Cisco fanboy series of articles and really its more a tidying up of loose ends. To call this last article a Cisco fanboy article is a bit of a stretch actually, since we are now moving to a broader level of governance and accountability, and is therefore not really about Cisco, so I’ll start a new series more appropriately titled and continue from where this article leaves off.
I started the series with the intent of starting with a seemingly innocuous scenario (Cisco TFTP backups), demonstrating how SharePoint can be leveraged as an okay point solution. I then tried to slowly expand the scope to the broader issues of complex infrastructure management management, while sticking to a Cisco/IP network oriented theme in an attempt to get technical thinkers (like Cisco guys) to think beyond nuts and bolts. This also demonstrated how thinking past ‘the point solution’ can being more substantive benefits.
Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco FanBoys (final housekeeping) – Part 6”
(start the working week with a laugh)
I was writing a post and adding my usual dose of sarcasm and piss taking of IT department stereotypes. As I wrote it, the piss taking became larger than the topic itself (which was about the risks of IT departments trying to sell SharePoint to the rest of the business). So I’ve now largely abandoned my original topic and am just writing this post for the fun of it.
Any child of the 70’s and 80’s will have read the “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories, where you are presented with a choice and according to the decision made you then turn to the directed page.
Here I present the world’s first SharePoint Choose Your Own Adventure story. The premise of this story is that our trusty IT department has been bitten by the SharePoint bug and thinks it would be great for the organisation. The book is entitled:
(ya like my 3L1T3 PH070SH0P SK1LLZ ? 🙂
Continue reading “Selling MOSS – A Choose Your Own Adventure Story”
When I am in SharePoint Admin (Nazi) mode, I flatly refuse to accept any significant customisation/code changes unless they are packaged up as a solution that is activated via features. Some developers hate this and feel I am being “difficult” and I get the old chestnut excuse “oh but this will now take me twice as long to do“. I have little sympathy for them, and in fact I see this as a good test of whether a developer has a decent appreciation or understanding of governance.
This is because all they are doing increasing my governance risk because they do not want to do the extra work to make their work easier to deploy/ upgrade/retract etc. The risk increases exponentially when you maintain a farm with several WFE servers.
When consulting to clients, I deliberately try to scare the crap out of younger developers who are been earmarked to work with SharePoint and try and instil a sense of what governance is all about. These sorts of considerations tend not be given too much thought until you have been through something bad happening 🙂
So when Yoda Sezai put me onto a codeplex project called STSDEV, I took a look and was very, very impressed.
Now all you developers have no excuses!! Stop what you are doing and go to codeplex and watch the introduction video right now!
I like it so much, I’m thinking of now mandating that all development is performed via STSADM projects 🙂
CleverWorkArounds Rating: Exceptional
Welcome to part 4 of my series on demonstrating SharePoint’s usefulness for storing Cisco configuration backups. What a hard slog it’s been! The last article (part 3) of this series focused on how to modify an open source C# TFTP server to upload files into a SharePoint document library using the SharePoint SDK.
Here is the quick recap on what we have covered so far
Now both the WEBDAV and SDK methods had some issues. The WEBDAV method was obviously easy to set up because pretty much any application (theoretically anyway) can be made to work with it. I, however, had reliability issues with this method as part 2 detailed. The SDK method was much more reliable, but had its own problems. Many people would be uncomfortable with having to perform custom modification of an existing open source TFTP server, but more importantly, there are security implications with this method too.
So we have one remaining method that we can explore. This method is still based around modifications to the TFTPUtil source code but instead of using the SharePoint SDK, we instead use the SharePoint web services.
Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco Fanboys (and more developers) – Part 4”
As I write this series, it is getting less and less about Cisco and more and more about SharePoint. This article is definitely developer centric, but since Cisco guys tend to be interested in the guts of the detail, I decided to keep going :-).
If you read my articles I tend to take the piss out of IT role stereotypes just to make it more entertaining reading. Sales guys and IT Managers tend to cop it the most, but I also like to have a dig at the expense of the nerds too. Cisco nerds on the whole are a great bunch, but I have to say, the scariest nerd I have ever met drank Cisco kool-aid in jumbo size!
If you have gotten to this article after reading the first two and you are scoffing at my audacity to suggest you TFTP your configs into SharePoint, chances are most people think you’re scary! If you are hitting this series of articles for the first time, go back and read part 1 and part 2 before being scary!
Seriously now, I thought that this would be a 2 part set of articles, but I got all bogged down in the methods of getting files into SharePoint. The WEBDAV based methods described in the previous article is easy to do, but ultimately is not the recommended method. So now, we will look at the ‘proper’ ways to do it and see if they are worth the effort. They work okay, but are more complex and I’m not convinced that the governance issues are necessarily worth it for many readers.
Degree of difficulty for this article is varied.
CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for an application developer): 
CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for a non developer): 
Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco Fanboys (and developers) -Part 3”
Here I am back again, illustrating some of the interesting possibilities that SharePoint offers for Cisco people.
To recap my last post, I showed you a little perl script I wrote to get an IOS router or switch to dump its current configuration to a TFTP server. I then used one of several freeware TFTP servers to show how you can have a TFTP server save the captured file into a version enabled document library.
I then hit a snag in relation to using a Windows Service to do this task. In this article we will delve into this issue in more detail. In addition, I ended up delving much deeper than I intended. So, like my branding series, this is going to turn into a multi-part series too, covering some application development, configuration, security and governance issues. How many parts it will end up being is anybody’s guess!
This is a technically oriented series of articles for the most part, so for you people who like the governance and finance stuff, you may not get too much out of this one. Although this article (part 2) focuses on my issues and observations with the Windows WEBDAV client, if you are one of these people who have ‘special’ feelings when you see those pretty blue Cisco boxes like the image above, then you may find some useful content here. 🙂
SharePoint developers and architects may also find this of interest.
Continue reading “SharePoint for Cisco Fanboys (darn WEBDAV) – Part 2”
Cisco nerds! This series is just for you! I know that you think you’re way too cool for collaborative portals, especially a Microsoft one at that. Instead you are more interested in delving into the IOS command line, to perform arcane arts such as debugging that OSPF route redistribution into BGP or getting off on planning and implementing a large scale DMVPN solution. Maybe you’re into QOS and VOIP and simply dig all of those DSCP-COS mappings, class and policy maps and the like.
Although packets, cells and frames are your world, *nix is cool, Nagios is your idea of a portal and anything remotely connected to Microsoft fills you with contempt and is beneath you right? 🙂
Well if this is you, I do understand your point of view because I was you once, but after some therapy, I’m now out of rehab and doing just fine!
Having Cisco/general networking expertise will help you with this article, so depending on who you are, the amount of caffeine required to follow this will vary:
CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for a CCNP or CCIE):
CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for a non Cisco person or CCNA 🙂 ):
I’m still on holidays, and the cricket between Australia and India was great (despite the poor umpiring), thus this post will be brief by my standards!
A question I often get asked by clients is along the lines of “Do I have to upgrade from Office [insert old version here] to use the latest version of SharePoint?”
Microsoft technology evangelists (very nice people too I might add) often mention the “Fair, Good, Better, Best” mantra when explaining the intricacy of integration with Office client tools and the Office Server (SharePoint). You can read it for yourself via the latest version of the white-paper can be found here.
The content in this white-paper is good, but I’m amused at the choice of terms for the client and server combinations. IT Managers, if you want me to paraphrase the entire content of the article I can summarise it like this.
Continue reading “"Fair, Good, Better, Best" or "Crap, Unbearable, Barely Tolerable, Good"?”
A while back I tried to make records and collaborative document management an interesting blog topic by using death metal music to get my point across. Today I have another SharePoint related bone to pick with the world. Hmm, how to make it interesting?
Aha! … Kung fu baby!
(Apologies to all you people who’s work access blocks youtube – read this article at home).
(Back in the late eighties and early nineties, I used to go to the only Chinese movie theatre in town. Jet Li and Jackie Chan left me in awe, and I couldn’t understand why the western world didn’t get it. Such a pity that it took crap movies like Rush Hour and Lethal Weapon 4 to show the world what they were missing).
But, where was I? That’s right – SharePoint and company readiness.
