Rix Bits

Like many others, I patiently await the delivery of my new HP Slate 500 tablet PC.  Having been a long-time fan of tablets, this latest incarnation is especially exciting.

As I started thinking about how I would fit this new device into my SharePoint Consultant toolbox, I started thinking about some of the ways that I’ve used my old tablet PCs in the past.  One particularly useful technique I’ve used is to do quick drafts of my SharePoint presentations using handwriting on my tablet.  Those who’ve never used a Tablet PC might respond, “why not just write it out on paper?”  (sigh…) Paper is dead. :)  Plus, there are other advantages to the tablet.  Among them is the ability to distribute my handwritten slides electronically to others for feedback or collaboration.  Not to mention being able to add images, side notes, etc to my slides, as well as re-ordering the deck on the fly.

Below is a demonstration on my first tablet, a 2005 WinXP Toshiba convertible.  I thought it would be particularly useful to see how well even the old tablet performs, and show how Windows has for years included a lot of functionality that even today’s newer devices still don’t include.

What tools or methods do you use when preparing a presentation?

[UPDATE: I’m now a Surface Pro user! Stay tuned for a future post using PowerPoint on the Pro.]

Last nite I was a guest speaker at BDPA Columbus’ Information Exchange networking meeting at CSI International.  My topic was on how to use Facebook effectively, particularly as adults (in contrast to my presentation to young high school students).

Last week the annual DogFood Conference, a local conference centered around technical presentations on Microsoft technologies, took place.  In addition to listening to some great presentations (my colleagues Mario, Veenus, and Bill were among the presenters), I also volunteered to work the registration table.  I was able to see how many people had registered, and folks were pouring in bright and early.  The waiting list seemed almost as long as the registered list!

A few technologies took center stage in many presentations – cloud services, SharePoint, and Windows Phone 7.  This to me makes perfect sense, since the level of interest and activity in these spaces is huge.  Anyone looking to get an update on what’s hot with these technologies right now would have been well served by attending.

As a SharePoint geek, I was tickled by the handful of people at the conference who uttered the phrase “what is SharePoint?” : )  Yeah, I know – not everyone has surrounded themselves with SharePoint and all things Microsoft like I have… but that still baffles me.

Anyway, if you missed it, at least you can check out the slide decks that have recently been posted.  Also, you can see the Twitter convo that occurred around the #dogfoodcon hashtag.  Other than that, all I can say is, you shoulda been there. : )

Well, if you’ve been keeping up with the latest Microsoft news, you might have heard that MS has been pretty excited about their upcoming release of Office in the Cloud – Office 365. In a nutshell:

• we’re talking Microsoft Office suite, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync (instant messaging and presence) being offered ‘online’ with pay-as-you-go pricing
• we’re talking no more server patching, updating, or upgrading
• we’re talking a subscription-based option for businesses that want to purchase Office
• we’re talking about cloud services being offered to public schools as a no-cost or low-cost hosted service
• we’re talking access to all your productivity tools and enterprise data wherever you go, across PC, phone, and browser

Last week I spoke to a group of local high school boys about how to safely and responsibly use tools like Facebook and Twitter.  As you can probably guess, those tools are very popular with kids these days.  The problem is, they many times use them inappropriately or recklessly.

Lately I’ve been looking over the XML code contained in the Application Definition File for some SharePoint Business Data Catalog work I’ve been doing. As I normally do, I used Visual Studio as my XML viewer of choice. But I had to pause for a second to sit back and appreciate how Visual Studio 2010 makes looking at all that XML code a lot nicer. : )

Saturday’s SharePoint event here in Columbus, Ohio was great.  I give kudos to the folks that worked hard to put it together, and who pulled off bringing together such a great lineup of speakers.  If you’re a SharePoint junkie in Central Ohio and you missed the event, I now shed a tear for you. (wiping away fake tear)  The only consolation I can give you is that you can scroll down a little to see the slides from my presentation.  Although it doesn’t include the live demos I ran during my talk, it at least gives you a peek at what I think are some of the main points of interest as it relates to document management in SharePoint 2007 and 2010.

There – don’t you feel better now? :)

On August 14th 2010 I’ll be joining an all-star lineup of SharePoint speakers at Columbus’ SharePoint Saturday, an all-day event filled with sessions on a large range of different SharePoint topics.  These Saturday events happen all over the country, but I believe this is Columbus’ first one.  The firm I work for happens to be one of the sponsors.

My topic will be Document Management in SharePoint.  So of course my challenge is now to condense all the kool stuff that SharePoint can do as it relates to enterprise content management into a 75-minute talk.  Of course, I know from experience it’s much better to have too much content to work with for a presentation than not enough.  :-)  

I also want to try to make sure I don’t get caught up into too many of the super-kool SharePoint 2010 DM features like the Content Router, taxonomy tagging, the Document ID service, or Office Web apps, and try to spend more time on the SharePoint 2007 feature set.  I know many of us are excited about our future plans to move to SharePoint 2010, but for now, when the Saturday sessions are finished, the reality is that on Monday most of will go to work needing to be able to put our new knowledge to work in a 2007 environment.

Planning on coming out this Saturday?  (my presentation occurs around 3pm according to the schedule)  Got a DM topic you want to make sure I cover?  Let me know – I’ll slip a slide into my presentation just for you! :- )

The results are in – the BDPA Columbus team scored 12th out of 22 teams in the 25th Annual BDPA High School Computer Competition! Congratulations team!

Here’s a few key facts to put this achievement in perspective:

The high school students are currently wrapping up the final part of their computer competition.  Kudos to all of them for hanging in there. Today was an 8am – 4pm all day marathon for them, as they work together throughout the day to finish a challenge programming assignment.  This year’s assignment centered around a fictional construction company, and involved many aspects, including the design of a login interface, a Requests for Proposal submission form, and a system to generate estimates based on construction costs.  I anxiously await hearing back from the students to see how they think they did.

The High School Computer Competition is an important part of the BDPA conference, whose focus is on highlighting and developing the African-American presence in the IT industry.  I also find it interesting that this same week there are a couple more conferences of similar perspective going on.  The National Association of Black Journalists Conference is happening this week in San Diego (10TV’s Jerry Revish told me about that one as we both waited to board the plane leaving Columbus), and this week also marks the 100th anniversary and conference of the National Urban League.

So, lots of history going on this week.  Let’s see if our BDPA Columbus team can also make history in their competition today.  Go Team Go! :-)

This week I will be traveling to Philadelphia with a group of talented high school students as we all attend the 2010 Black Data Processors Association (BDPA) National Conference.  These high school students have spent almost every Saturday morning with me for the past few months learning ASP.NET web development skills in order to compete in this year’s BDPA High School Computer Competition (HSCC) at the Conference.  I’ve been teaching concepts such as object-oriented programming, master page development, and page event handling.  And I believe their Saturday commitments will pay off, as I’ve seen them make great progress in their understanding of the concepts.

It should be a great event for all of us.  In addition to the Competition, the Conference includes a Youth Technology Camp, Career Fair, Technology Expo, and great workshops on topics like ‘IT Workforce Development’, ‘Business Process Management’, and ‘Cloud Computing’.  And of course there’s the National BDPA Golf Classic, which I would attend if I had any golf skillz whatsoever. :- )

Expect to see a retrospective post from me once I return, and feel free to follow my real-time Tweets live from the conference using the hashtag #BDPA.

Maybe I’ll see you there! :- )

Every blogger hopes that their blog is useful and interesting to their readers.  I’m going to try to add some value to my blog very soon by posting some info regarding solutions I’ve recently discovered for a couple of SharePoint and InfoPath quirks I’ve bumped my head against recently.  When I scour the Googleverse/Bingiverse and don’t find a solution to my issues, I figure that might be a good sign that it’s time for me to add a new Rix Bit. :)

If you happen to like reading my blog, you might be interested in some of the other blogs from my talented peers at ICC, like our SharePoint Infrastructure guru Veenus (MCP/MVTS).  More ICC bloggers will be added to this list in the future, so stay tuned.

Since it’s only 10-minutes, I thought I’d go ahead and post my slides with live narration, in case you weren’t able to attend last night’s COSPUG meeting (that means you, Brian!)    I’m also interested to hear any feedback or comments on the topic – what has your own experience been trying to use SharePoint outside the office environment?  Post a comment below.  Thanx.

Today I’ll be presenting a Lightning Talk on SharePoint at the Central Ohio SharePoint User Group meeting.  That means I’ve got no more than 10-minutes to dazzle the crowd with my thoughts about the challenges of using SharePoint outside of a controlled office environment, specifically as it relates to:

• Access
• Installation
• Device integration
• Learning Curve
• Choice of tools

This is a free event, but if you show up please don’t heckle me. :)

UPDATE: I posted a video of this presentation with live narration.

There’s an online techie forum I subscribe to, in which a conversation got started regarding Twitter.  They were discussing the relevance of Twitter versus ‘more popular’ services like Facebook.  I got a slight suspicion that maybe they simply had not been given a good reason why Twitter was a useful tool for today’s techie, and since I also remembered being in their shoes oh so many twitter-months ago, I decided to respond and see if I could shed some light on the subject.  Let me know if you find this useful as well.

This weekend in Columbus, Ohio a whole room full of smart people are giving their time to make websites for non-profit organizations.  It’s called Give Camp, and it’s a 3-day all-night marathon of coding goodness.  Local developers work thru the wee hours of the night helping organizations with their tech needs. Follow the official Twitter hashtag (#cmhgc) to see real-time tweets and pictures.

I couldn’t participate myself, partly because I do a little techie volunteering myself on Saturdays.  I help teach .NET web development to high school students through the local chapter of BDPA and the HSCC program, a national competition which this year will take place in Philadelphia.  Today they learned a little more about accessing MySQL databases with .NET (explaining datasets and connection strings to teenagers is not as easy as you might think). :)  I’m proud to say that they’re doing a great job grasping the material, including object-oriented concepts.

It’s great to see Central Ohio talent giving back to the community.  I hope the Give Camp folks can stay awake long enough to dot[notation] every I[nterface] and cross every [app domain] T[hread]. ;-)

Today I teamed up with James Bender and Bill Sempf to present the SOLID principles at the nPlus1 ArcSummit in Columbus, Ohio.  My part of the talk focused on the first two principles – Single Responsibility and Open Closed.  There was great participation in the room of software developers, architects, and project managers.  It was very illustrative to hear everyone talk about the pros and cons of the principles, and I think I might have gotten more out of the talk than my audience did.  What was also great was that I was able to insert some SharePoint sidebars into the talk as well – I don’t go anywhere without mentioning good ole SharePoint! :)

My slidedeck is below:

I’ve spent the last couple of months developing a customized document management system in SharePoint 2007 for a client.  Many interesting challenges have surfaced as a result of working thru the different requirements for this solution, and I thought it might be useful to write about them.  Check back from time to time to read the ongoing saga.  Now, of course, it would be a miracle if I were able to discuss them here in any kind of logical order, so I’m going to settle for random thoughts instead. :)

Today Microsoft released Office Web Apps (aka Google Apps killer) 1 week ahead of schedule.

I immediately jumped into Office 2010, specifically Excel and OneNote, to see just how easy it would be.  Made some quick docs, then went to the Backstage to push them to the cloud.  Very seamless process – everything just worked, and the fidelity and parity on the web side for my client-created documents was very impressive.

The first thing I thought about was how it was nice to be able to create content using tools I already know, and have been using for about 2 decades. :)  My attempts at using Google were decent, but having to learn a new system, no matter how similar to my other experiences, was less than appealing.

The 2nd thing I thought about was using this to post some spreadsheet content for one of my study groups, who in the past have fought my attempts at getting them to use cloud-based collaboration tools.  Perhaps the familiar interface will make this latest effort more successful. :)

I’ve yet to try my Office Mobile 2010 software on my Windows 6.5 phone to see what’s offered there.  But so far, it’s looking like a good start.

Last week I presented along with Steve Caravajal at the Columbus region Microsoft SharePoint/Office 2010 Launch Event, sponsored by ICC.  There are exciting features coming from the new 2010 suite, and it looks like the product teams put some good thought & work into these new versions of Office & SharePoint.

My slide deck is below, and the other slide decks from the event should soon be posted to the ICC website.  Stay tuned.

So, it’s been about 6 weeks since I’ve stepped into the role of full-time SharePoint consulting. In that short time I’ve already worked with several clients, and I’m definitely enjoying the variety. But juggling different clients also means that I need to keep my self organized, and to do that I use kool tech! :) So I thought I’d share some of the tools I’ve come to rely on over the past few weeks to keep this SharePoint train running like a well-oiled machine:

Last month I took a new step in my career, and began a journey into full-time SharePoint consulting.  I’m now a SharePoint Solutions Architect for ICC, an IT services firm and Microsoft Certified Partner here in Columbus, Ohio.

So far, it looks like my timing was pretty good, as the excitement among our customers seems to be continuously building as we near the launch of SharePoint 2010.  One of my primary tasks at ICC is to help us prepare to be effective in the delivery of SharePoint 2010 services, specifically in the area of application development.  That means I’ve had to spend a lot of time recently getting acquainted with all this SP2010 goodness. :) And as I’ve started diving deep into its many offerings and improvements, I can say that the excitement seems well worth it.