Rix Bits

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.