A Quest to Be

Why is my SharePoint Web Apps Playing Hardball

Came across this one yesterday:

"The Office Web App cannot open an Office document in Office 2010 if multiple versions of Office are installed."

Ever had this experience? A Microsoft program that was working just fine stops working all of a sudden.   Suddenly what seems like a typical day at the office quickly becomes a cascading debacle.   Now, to get things done users have to resort to creativity. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm definitely a fan of creativity but there are times when creativity should be a last resort; not the only resort.

The problem here was with SharePoint Office Web App (OWA). OWA is cool because it allows users to edit Microsoft documents right inside the browser without having to launch the application. It even allows multiple users to work on documents and spreadsheets simultaneously. How cool is that? Collaboration, centralization, integration!

That's all good right - so what's the issue?

Apparently when an older version of certain Microsoft products (say Live Office 2007) and a newer product (say Office 2010) are installed, they share certain DLL files. However, if the older product is installed after the newer product, the older guy imposes its will and overwrites the newer shared file with an older version; causing some features of the newer product to not work properly or not work at all. Bummer!

If you've had a day when your Microsoft products were humming along and suddenly things came to a screeching halt, a possible cause is the DLL overwrite issue.

Running Microsoft Office Diagnostics seems to solve the problem. Here is how to get to Office Diagnostics.

Start > Programs>All Programs > Microsoft Office>Microsoft Office Tools>Microsoft Office Diagnostics>Run Diagnostics

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A Quick Introduction to SharePoint

What is SharePoint?

For me, SharePoint is the convergence of all the tools one would ever need in a small business or office environment to efficiently and effectively deliver the exact results that are needed from any number of scenarios. Remember back in the day what word processing was one program (WordPerfect), spreadsheet (Lotus 123) another, graphics generator another, and presentation program yet another. To those of us who lived in that world, whether on the end user or the back office support side, using these tools with any level of consistency was indeed a great challenge. Today, SharePoint makes it possible for all these different and diverse needs to come together within a seamless web interface; seamlessly integrating all these programs and utilities into a personal efficiency workspace. At its core, SharePoint is a Microsoft tool that integrates virtually all their products, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, SQL, Visio, Outlook and even Paint into a single product that enables all of them to intelligently speak to each other. And with a little wrangling even a non techie person can create an incredibly efficient workspace.

What can you do with SharePoint?

For most people, this is the only question that matters so here goes. 

Imagine that you work in an environment where many people work on developing documents that ultimately need to be finalized and approved by one person. Well, SharePoint can help you with that. Since Word is tightly integrated with SharePoint, you can create your document, load it up to your SharePoint portal, send a link to your reviewers and each of them can access the document, make their updates; even all at the same time. When they're done, you can just grab your final document, PDF it and viola; done.

Maybe you work in a fast pace environment with lots and lots of mini projects and you need a task list to simply keep track of your project activities; SharePoint can do that too. Right out of the box you get a built in task list that allows you to create tasks and assign them to your team. They'll even be notified based on your due dates.

Your share drive is a hornet's nest. You can never find anything there and when you do find what you're looking for, there are multiple copies; sometimes five or six. Well, SharePoint can help you with that too. You can move all you documents into SharePoint and tag them intelligently so that even a caveman can find them. Best yet, all your documents will are searchable in SharePoint so finding them will almost be like Googling.

So you are always collecting information from people but the information you collect is all over the place; email, yellow stickies, excel spreadsheets, your (not so smart) phone, dinner napkins. With a SharePoint you can quickly create a list and a cute little web form to collect and store all this vital information in a single location.

No wonder SharePoint has become so popular right?

In a sense, anything that you do today that has to do with data/information, documentation, process tracking, projects, communication, newsletters, announcements, calendars, photo and video storage, can be accommodated with the right SharePoint solution.  These are just a few highlights of what's possible with SharePoint.  Be sure to come back and see what other gems await your arrival.

Here are a couple of Tutorials:

1. List Tutorial
2. Grouping Tutorial

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What is grouping?

Grouping in SharePoint is a really just a way to organize like, meaning similar, data in expandable or collapsible groups so that the data can be accessed quickly. Grouping is typically assigned to views of SharePoint lists and libraries. It's a really powerful to get the stuff that you need at your fingertips rapidly.

How to Group

To group content in SharePoint you must first create a new view or use an existing view.

You can follow the steps here to Creating or Modify a view.

While on the Create or Edit view page in the Name section select Group By to expand the section.

1. Select the First group by the column from the dropdown arrow and select Fiscal Year from the list.

1. In a grouped view you can group by a maximum of two categories. If you'd like to further group by a sub-category, select the Then group by the column dropdown arrow and select your second category.

1. Next, you can set your group to either Collapsed or Expanded by default. This is especially useful if you grouped view is likely to return a large number of items.
   1. Select Collapsed to collapse the list be default or Expanded to expand it by default.

That's it. Now you can group your views in SharePoint to get your Group-On.

Help! My SharePoint is Broken - Can you fix it in ten minutes.

That was the subject line of the frantic email I received from one of my customers who was in the middle of budget season and was trying to gather input from about 100 users.  Against my better judgment she decided to start creating folders to store documents rather than just setting up the right Meta Data structure and have users fill out a slick SharePoint form.  Anyway, she was frantic because she had received about 120 documents that were now stored in several folders that she needed to review.  Somehow she kept on reviewing the same document over and over again.  She was looking for a way to easily keep track of all the documents she had reviewed without getting all discombobulated; yea that means confused.

So here is my 10 minute OOB Swiss army knife fix that I used to help her.

1. I created a status column in the document library to help her track items she had already reviewed with values Reviewed and Pending.  As she reviewed the documents, she just changed the status to Reviewed or pending.  Then I created a couple of views: a Not Yet Reviewed view which excluded all the items she tagged and a view for each of her values (Reviewed and Pending).
2. Then I created a flat non-folder view of all her documents.  One of the nifty things you can do with SharePoint views is flattening the heck out of that sucker.  So even if you're storing your documents all old-skool-like in folders, you can just tell SharePoint to show all documents without folders.  Here's how you do it.

Create a new view or modify and existing view.  While in the view, scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for Folders. 

Click the + sign to expand it if it is collapsed.

1. Select Show all items without folder.
2. Under Show this view – Select In all folders.
3. Hit OK to save your work and that's it- all your documents in one list. 

In just 10 minutes I was able to get my user back on track doing what she needed to do; administer the budget process, not SharePoint -with practically no effort at all.  Hope this little tip will help in your time of needs. 

If you've had similar experiences with SharePoint I'd love to hear your comments about them.

How Did SharePoint Choose you?

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How SharePoint chose me

What is SharePoint?  When I was first introduced to Microsoft's products some years ago I had this vision in my head of an integrated environment that maximized the use of the entire office suite into one cohesive product.   Little did I know that Microsoft had a miniature spycam that was scraping my brain matter to ultimately use it to their advantage.   Ok, so I can't take credit for what ultimately became SharePoint but SharePoint is the fulfillment of a vision that lots of IT professionals have been envisioning for a long time.  My foray in SP land began In January 2008 when I was hired as an IT project manager with the company that was really just starting to use WSS for very basic collaboration.   For me it was definitely love at first sight; I saw possibilities that they weren't even able to conceive in their own minds. And so I put on my SharePoint cowboy apparel and off I rode on a quest to become a SharePoint guru; I’m still riding by the way.  At first I had to wrestle with the SharePoint administrator who was really doing it part-time.  After nibbling at a few things over time I was able to gain his trust and he handed over the admin keys.  I haven't looked back since.

As I was thinking about my SharePoint experience it dawned on me that I didn't really choose SharePoint, instead SharePoint chose me.  SharePoint has that infectious potential to just suck you into her slick and sexy world without you ever suspecting that you're being drawn in.

One moment you are interacting with a basic list, and then you're creating new views to get different perspectives of your information, your metrics.  Then before you know it you're sitting in SharePoint designer creating data views and developing workflows to further manipulate your data because SharePoint has sucked you in.  She has chosen you.

But, as great as SarePoint is, she can be a baaaad girl at times. Your customer needs a slick looking form for data entry and a method of routing the form around for approval.  So you sketch it out and you fire up Designer to build your custom form.  It's looking really good in Designer so you preview it in your browser to see what it looks like.  Dang...error.  You go back to designer and comb through code view to try and find errors in the code. Needle in a haystack!  You eventually figure it out but only after a few extra hours of trial and error.  And then finally, it all works just like you envisioned it.   Yep, that’s how she does it; she sucks you in and then she just simply becomes a part of you.

 A Quest to fix SharePoint in 10 minutes.

 How did SharePoint choose you?

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Use Scarcity as an advantage to find the job that you need

Scarcity is a powerful economic principle.  The law of scarcity dictates that the less of a commodity is available the more you can charge for it; and sometimes the greater the demand. Let’s use gas as an example; the less gas there is, the higher the price at the pump and the greater the demand for what is available.  As I was thinking through my stint of unemployment and trying to figure out how to market myself, the law of scarcity popped into my head.  And as I thought through scarcity I also thought through supply and demand; these two things are symbiotic.  

From a job market perspective, the fewer people there are with a particular skill-set, the more the people with a specific particular skill will be paid and the greater the demand. As I looked at my own background I thought about the things that I like to do versus the things that I am capable of doing.  I also looked at the things that I am capable of doing versus the market demand for those things.  I discovered that the demand for my skill-set was slanted towards some of the things that I am capable of doing (mainly Microsoft SharePoint) but not necessarily love to do.  With that discovery I changed my marketing strategy to focus more on the demanded skill-set. Are you selling what buyers are buying? 

 What I discovered by changing my self-marketing model is that when you shift focus to what employers demand, you get much more love and attention; and who doesn’t want love and attention?

Your resume is an infomercial; you get one chance to be the gal or guy.  Yep, that’s it.  If you are not able to get the attention of the recruiter’s indexing system/process in 30 seconds or so, your infomercial gets cancelled. 

 Here are some tactics I employed to get an acceptable job offer in less than six weeks.

 I was displaced from work on Feb 8

• I did nothing for a week or so because I needed the time to clear my head
• I spent two days and dumped all my skills and experience and dropped everything in a word document
• I combed through my skills and started looking at job boards to see what jobs were out there that matched my skills and other requirements
  • I discovered that there were many jobs that fit my profile
• I refocused my resumes to the demand curve that I discovered
• I swapped out my resumes on job boards on a regular basis to keep it current and relevant

 Results

In the past few weeks I’ve had seven or so phone screenings, three face to face interviews and today I received my first job offer.

 In a job market such as this, scarcity is a great commodity.  If you have specialized skills and experience you need to showcase them in a manner that will put you out in front of the competition because at the end of the day, businesses and employers will pay for what they need.

What do you think?

 Guerilla market your-way-to-the-job-you-need-on-the-way-to-the-job-you-want

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Share your Wealth….of SharePoint knowledge that is!

So my daughter called me today because she needed some help with a task she was working on.  We spent about a half hour on the phone talking through the process; which was totally jacked up. 

Rant:  It never ceases to amaze me how jacked up business processes (even core ones) can be. 

 After analyzing the problem we determined that a mature SharePoint solution was probably the right permanent fix for this particular problem; but that certainly wasn’t going to happen in 30 minutes.   Anyway, after a few more minutes of digging, we came up with an Excel workaround that will solve the problem for the moment. Booyah!!!

Sometimes we take our gifts and talents for granted because we don’t know what they are or in fact how valuable they are to others.  If we are paying attention, we can use our skills and talents as the enabling force in the lives of others. 

Use everything you’re given…It won’t go to waste.

 “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me".”

Erma Bombeck

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