Nerds and CFO’s. If there is ever a group of people who don’t know how to talk to each other, it would be those two. Perhaps, I should write a book and call it “Nerds are From Mars, CFO’s are from Venus” (ok for those of you who did not get that little joke go here).
Now, not so long ago, I was a serious nerd. Not in a ‘have the latest gadget and bash Microsoft ‘cos it’s cool’ sense, but I got very deeply involved in the guts of the technology. I was heavy into infrastructure and security. Got a few certs to make my business cards and CV look good, etc. In addition, I *thought* that I understood business. I wrote reports and memos that used all the right ‘business sounding’ cliches. In my security work I wrote lovely risk assessments, good security policies, etc. I wrote technical architectures in loving detail, outlining the technical vision and strategy for the company going forward.
Continue reading “Learn to talk to your CFO in their language – Part 1”
I thought that I was getting pretty good at deciphering odd SharePoint errors. After all, most of the time they are not very friendly! After the subsite/site collection issue of yesterday, you would think I would be in for an easier day today!
But it was not meant to be…
Continue reading “Darn IIS and Service Packs!”
I recently encountered an nasty, nasty error that threatened to cause me a lot of grief.
I exported a site to a new site collection and initially things looked okay. However, I soon started to encounter strange errors such as:
Continue reading “Gary Lapointe is a genius (and has good music taste too)”
Well, here we are! After delving into dark arts where everybody but metrosexual web designers fear to tread (HTML and CSS), we then delved into the areas that metrosexual web designers truly fear to tread (packaging, deployment and even some c# code!). Finally, we get to the area where everybody is interested until it happens to get in their way! (Ooh, I am a cynical old sod tonight).
That is Governance!
Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 7 -The ‘governance’ of it all..”
There has been a bit of a gap in this series between part 5 and 6 – and fortunately for the both of us, I think this is the penultimate post in my series on SharePoint branding. While it has been an interesting exercise for me, I must confess each successive article is getting harder to write as my interest is shifting 🙂 So many sub-disciplines within MOSS – I think I might delve into WCM soon :-).
Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 6 – A "solution" to all issues?”
Just a really quick post – more event handler stuff to come… (*sigh* – I’m not a coder! Go and read my pal Sezai’s blog if you want a fix in that area).
Situation: I created a list with 2 columns
Skills was a lookup column against a list of skills. Discipline was a single line of text.
Continue reading “SharePoint Event Handlers – things to look out for”
Pretty much since I started with MOSS2007 (and back in the pre 2007 days too), I’ve required smarter drop down choices for my columns. Basically, I needed a secondary drop down list filtered based on the choice from a primary drop down list – the whole category/sub category thing. Seems amazing to me that it is not available out of the box.
On my to-do list was to write a detailed post critiquing all the workarounds out there (such as Patrick’s Javascript method and Dattard’s designer work) and rate their cleverness – as per the branding series.
Continue reading “Finally – clever filtered lookups!”
This is an opinion piece, a different tack than a lot of my other topics. I’m going to attempt to use heavy metal music as my metaphor to get my point across. No idea if I will succeed :-).
Opeth \m/ \m/
Firstly, SharePoint, in my opinion, is a collaborative platform, more than it is a collaborative product. In the same way that Lotus Notes can be argued as a messaging platform. Both have their core competencies and solve particular types of problems. However, they can also be customised and sophisticated applications can be built upon the foundation they provide. Note my emphasis on the word collaborative.
Continue reading “SharePoint sucks at document management – or does it? A metal perspective”
So, here we are at the fifth article in my series on SharePoint branding. By now, we have left all the master page stuff way behind, and we have created a custom feature to install our branding to a server.
To recap for those of you hitting this page first, I suggest you go back and read this series in order.
- Part 1 dealt with the publishing feature, and some general masterpage/CSS concepts and some quirks (core.css and application.master) that have to be worked around.
- Part 2 delved into the methods to work around the application.master and core.css issue
- Part 3 delved further into the methods to work around the application.master and core.css issue and the option that solved a specific problem for me
- Part 4 then changed tack and introduced how to package up your clever branding
Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 5 – Feature Improvements and Bugs”
One thing you will first notice in planning a MOSS install is the sheer number of service accounts used. Without proper planning, it is only going to result in a poor set up and most likely be insecure. Despite the complexity of having to learn what each service account is required for, MOSS2007 does a reasonable job in working in a restricted configuration. Properly configured, the majority of these accounts can run with minimal security privileges.
If you follow all the best practice guides, and religiously read Joel’s stuff, I would be preaching to the converted.
Continue reading “DCOM Fun with SharePoint”
