|
|
Email — you may be addicted to it, you may hate it, abuse it, love it, or eschew it. Whatever your relationship, troubled or otherwise, email is and continues to be one of the world’s few, new, great things. When it comes to “killer-apps,” it is the undefeated heavy-weight champion of the world. Email is the backbone of social and commercial intercourse. Commerce flows through it, along with pain and joy, and work and play, and many of the hours of my day.
While you may order that inflatable, remote-controlled zeppelin online, the acknowledgement nevertheless comes via email, as does the receipt, and the shipping updates.
Email is the truck that moves freight – light and heavy – on the information-super-goat-trail. Plain, simple, elegant, boring, your-grandma-has-an-AOL-address-type email remains the venerable heavy lifter of the online world.
Strangely, it has also become the de facto identity management tool. It is universally used to authenticate just who we are, on everything from my bank to the myriad of social and anti-social real-time networking sites. When we forget just who we are, it’s the delivery method of choice to jog the memory or to trigger a reset — ironically, given how totally insecure it really is, likened to a postcard.]
But, the core problem with email is not security. The real problem with email is it’s really stupid. It’s dumb as a bucket of overripe bananas. I mean it. It’s really god-awful stupid. It can’t help it. It was designed that way.
Continue reading Dumb Blobs
I thought it was a joke. Who could blame me? After all, the announcement began: “Starting on April 1, 2009…” Then again, Microsoft usually ain’t one to make “April Fool’s” jokes.
I read the announcement again. I clicked the buttons. The download started. I double-checked the URL — “Perhaps it was a fancy phishing scheme,” I thought to myself. “Better check.” “Free” often means free trouble.
I Googled. I got half-a-dozen links. I clicked the Wikipedia entry. It said: “SharePoint Designer 2007 is available as license-restricted freeware.”
Hey, if Wikipedia says so, it’s got to be true, right?
Here’s the scoop, the lowdown, the straight poop: Continue reading Free Beer, SharePoint, and an April Fool
A few days ago, a reader of this humble blog asked if I knew a way to embed “Skype Presence” in a SharePoint Web Part.
I didn’t. But, I was intrigued. (That’s a bad sign… as it usually means I’m going to stay up until the wee hours.)
It turns out to be pretty easy-breezy, with a few caveats. I’ll explain those below. It’s easy because lots of stuff today is “widgetized.” A few minutes on the Skype site turned up some Skype web-widgets—– basically HTML code one can embed on a blog or web page — that gave me what I needed: HTML that would display Skype “presence” by Skype name (what I call a SkypeID).
Realize, I’m no code slinger, but it looked to me that one could simply modify the HTML, adding in different Skype names, and then stack it up in a CEWP. So that’s what I did. Continue reading Skype Me, Dr. Memory!
[The exciting sequel to "The Cuneiform Code"]
Having established the elements, theories, and principles, what I really wanted was pretty simple. I know what I wanted to keep (element one); I had a place to keep it (element two); and what I thought was a simple way to find it all again (element three).
Element One — Know what you want to keep:
What I wanted to keep were all the bits and pieces of information that are crucial to a sane IT operation. Here’s the dirty secret. There is a vast amount of stuff — facts, figures, incantations, mystical folklore, secret handshakes, twiddles and tweaks — that IT folks have to remember to keep tens or hundreds or thousands of computers happy and healthy. There’s even more to remember if you want to keep a vast army of squeaky users happy and healthy too. To most folks IT stuff is voodoo. I needed a simple system to remember all the voodoo, Papa Legba be dammed. What I wanted was a simple system to track all these assorted permutations, combinations, and incantations. Continue reading Cracking the Cuneiform Code — The KM Supremacy (2 of 2)
In theory, knowledge management is easy. Then again, in theory, lots of things are easy. In practice, things are never quite as easy as they sound. Nevertheless, lightly armed, I set out to put a few of my theories into practice.
There are three essential theoretical elements to effective knowledge management. I call these “Gavin’s Three Essential Theoretical Elements To Effective Knowledge Management.” Unfortunately, “GTETETEKM” does not lend itself to a memorable mnemonic, so let’s just call these the “KM-3.” Continue reading The Cuneiform Code (1 of 2)
The retail release of Windows Home Server (WHS) hit the web- shops in early October. My copy arrived as fast as a flying monkey. The retail price was, as promised, less than $200 ($179 from NewEgg to be exact — a sweet deal considering what you’re getting).
It’s an “OEM” version, by the way; there’s no “consumer” version. It seems that most folks are expected to buy it pre-installed on a preconfigured “home server.” The OEM version in my grubby mitts is supposedly for “system builders,” folks that are going to bundle it with some hardware and sell it as retail turn-key system. Sure… That’s me. I am now officially a system builder. Wahoo! (ahem)
So far, the only downside to all this is, according to the shrink-wrap license, I’m my own end-user support. Apparently, the “system builder” is responsible for end-user support.
I bought it, I built it, and I sold it to myself. I must say, it was a great sales experience. I was very attentive to my needs and I seemed to know just what I wanted. Then again, when and if it comes to needing some support, I suppose I could just put myself on hold for an hour or two, ask a bunch of incomprehensible questions, cop an attitude, and then blame it on the “drivers.” That’s easy enough. “Have you tried rebooting, sir?” I’ll ask myself. Continue reading Son of Fronkensteen
For all you folks that have been ever so gently bugging me about sharing my damn DAM system… Between minor brain freezes and other lovely things like work and spending two weeks tasting wine in Burgundy, Beaujolais, Cote du Rhone, and Provence; well, time just slipped away. I apologize. [and.. Yes, I have stories to tell … sordid tales of love and the GPS lady, but those will have to wait…]
I’m back, and now I’ve knocked “sharing the DAM thing” off my “to-do” list. Read on. Continue reading Wham, Bam! DAM
In previous versions of SharePoint, I was often frustrated with how difficult it was to do things I thought should be simple. It was probably my ignorance, or it could have been SharePoint’s obscurity and overall lack of good documentation, but it seemed a herculean task to simply filter information by a dynamic variable like “current user.”
The trouble was even though it had a setting for “current user” buried deep in some of the “filter” options; it returned the information in the form “Domain\LOGON_USER” or the common name (Firstname Lastname). I never could figure out how to easily extract just the portions I needed and to use that portion in any of the off-the-shelf web parts or data views. As I said, perhaps it was just ignorance. Continue reading Fun with MOSS – Data Views and Custom Filters
You may remember my April adventures with a beta of Microsoft’s “Windows Home Server” (AKA: WHS). WHS is a neat little consumer product. I think it also has some applicability in the NGO-SOHO space. It’s perfect, for example, for a nonprofit with fewer than ten or so people in need of automated backup and some easily expanded shared file storage.
Since that foray into Betatown, MS released a new WHS version, the so-called “RC1″ or “release candidate 1″ edition — just a little bit closer to an actual commercial release. Just between you and me, I don’t pretend to follow Microsoft’s various mystical and mysterious machinations as it (slowly) walks a product to market. RC1, or Beta 3, or CTP, they’re all beta’s to me. It means you can’t buy it, yet. It also means install at your own risk. A beta, by any other name, is still likely to break your heart, eat your hard drive, and maybe shred your collection of precious Godzilla DVD rips. Continue reading Dancing with Abby Normal…
While there are lots of consumer-level products to manage digital images, photographs and the like, institutional options, it seems, are not that plentiful. Moreover, those options that do exist tend to cost a pretty penny. I don’t mean Adobe “Album” and Picassa. They’re wonderful products; I use Picassa myself. It’s great for an individual, [...]
|
My Flickr Fotos
These are photos from my Flickr collection. see more...
|
