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”
Back when I was a lad (okay, back on mid 06) I had to plan, design and implement a fully redundant MOSS farm for a largish company that was an early MOSS adopter. I previously blogged some notes about how I went about doing Disk I/O planning, and one of these days I will get around to detailing my use of SQLIOSIM as well.
Back then there was absolutely no useful information to help me with this whole process apart from some stuff that Joel had written.
That has now changed. Microsoft have released a series of whitepaper/webcasts covering a variety of critically important infrastructure oriented topics. I’ve just watched the capacity planning one and it really is excellent (although my experience suggests their document storage ratio in SQL vs FileSystem is closer to 2x than 1.2 – 1.5x. )
CISSP readers, some of these would certainly qualify for type A CPE’s as well
Continue reading “New Technet Planning and Architecture webcasts”
(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”
Hi all
I thought with my last post that involved XSL/XSLT, I’d escape from horrid programming languages and write about more interesting topics but it wasn’t meant to be. This time round I had to delve back into the world of JavaScript – something I swore that I would never do again after a painful encounter back in 2000. (Yep, it’s taken me 8 years to face it again!)
But like everything else with SharePoint, by being a ‘specialist‘, you seem to have to use more technologies and IT disciplines than you would think possible.
As I progressed writing this article, I realised that I was delving back into branding again and toyed with the idea of making this part 8 of the branding series. But the governance topic in part 7 for me rounded off that series of posts nicely, so I will deal with this separately for now and perhaps refresh that series in the future.
Like a vast majority of my posts, this will also be a mini series.
CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for Metrosexual web developers): 
CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for the rest of us ): 
[Quick Navigation: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6]
Continue reading “More SharePoint Branding – Customisation using JavaScript – Part 1”
For those of you who are developers and have to program XSL and XSLT, you have my deepest sympathies. I thought that regular expressions were bad, but this takes the cake! Despite my best efforts as a SharePoint architect/consultant, I seem to invariably have to deal with programming issues more often than I’d like.
In saying that though, XSL/XSLT is very powerful of course and I fully appreciate why the Data View web part is popular among developers. Anyway, I digress. This post is about forms services and SharePoint Designer workflow, but I had to dabble into this world to solve my problem. A word of warning though, this is a workaround but it’s not that clever.
You create a SharePoint designer workflow and attach it to a forms library, configured to run in forms server mode (in the browser). You create a “Collect Data From a User” workflow action, and when the workflow recipient clicks on the task, the “Related list item” field in the task is not rendered in the browser.
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
Greetings SharePoint fans and Cisco people who are soon to be SharePoint fans! I’m back with part 5 of this series on leveraging features of MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 to help manage Cisco infrastructure.
For those of you who hate programming topics and have no interest in TFTP issues, we may well have finally gotten to a topic that you are interested in! For the rest of you, who have read the first four articles, we now shift our focus from getting Cisco configurations into SharePoint, to doing something useful with them once we have done so.
In this post, we will examine the out of the box capabilities of workflow in SharePoint and delve a little deeper into document libraries and content management. So this is more aimed at Cisco people than it is at SharePoint Pros. SharePoint people, much of the topics I cover in this article you may have seen before.
I personally don’t think this post has a high coffee requirement rating in terms of complexity of concepts, compared to the last two anyhow. However be prepared: it is a long read.
CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating: 
Continue reading “Sharepoint for Cisco Fanboys (beyond TFTP) – Part 5”
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”
