Welcome to my blog on all things SharePoint. I have a range of articles that will interest you if you've made it as far as visiting my blog. I was awarded as an SharePoint MVP by Microsoft in July 2010. I currently live in New York and am an Enterprise Architect at AvePoint Inc.. I co founded www.NothingButSharePoint.com with Mark Miller in 2010.

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Check out my articles on NothingButSharePoint.com

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

This series was inspired by the chatter amongst SharePoint blogs on the best ways to approach customisations in SharePoint using Solutions.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8

Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

This series was inspired by a discussion had with Andrew Coates at a Perth SharePoint User Group meeting. This then turned into a 6 part series on Arno Nell's SharePointMagazine.net web site.

Initial post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6

Webcasts

I have recorded various web casts that I present at User Groups or just on a specific topic by request:
How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast
SPSource Webcast: Reverse engineer Lists to ListTemplates and much more
SharePoint Development with Unit Testing webcast
Perth SharePoint UG Web Cast on approaches to deploying artefacts (SPSource)
More...


Podcasts

I have been interviewed about Leveraging the SharePoint Platform by the SharePoint Pod Show: listen here .

RSS Feed Feed your read!

Archives

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Tag Cloud

Ajax, Apple, DotNetNuke, Enterprise Content Management, Error Resolution, Gadgets, General, Governance, Microsoft .Net Development, Mobile, SharePoint, Sharepoint Business Forms, Sharepoint Business Intelligence, Sharepoint Collaboration, SharePoint Development, Sharepoint Enterprise Content Management, Sharepoint Enterprise Search, Sharepoint Portal, US Migration, Web 2.0, Workflow
Nov 042007

Social Bookmarking tool - Diigo

 

Ok, I've been a big user of del.icio.us for the last few months and found a great add-on service called Diigo that allows you to extend the detail stored in social bookmarking but has backwards compatibility with del.icio.us with new features such as note taking etc. It allows you to not only bookmark the site but also for it to remember any sticky notes you add to the page etc. which is awesome for researching areas!

Group sharing function

It allows extra functionality over del.icio.us such as sharing bookmarks with groups in a better way than just referring like the del.icio.us. The comments you make are also visible and when you add a bookmark you can also see other users comments also enriching the experience further. The notes are in full rich text editor as well which is a bonus!

The group functionality allows you to add bookmarks to a group to share it around and also has a forums section also. There is a SharePoint group already out there but to date there is only 4 members!

It allowed me to select the SharePoint tag in diigo and then share these links with the SharePoint group which is an awesome way to share your links in a community.

 

Integration with del.icio.us

There are over 28,336 links in del.icio.us on SharePoint tag and from my experience with diigo I can see a lot of people moving to it and the great thing is it imports all your del.icio.us bookmarks in natively as well as when you adding them to diigo adding them to del.icio.us! Note it is not a synchronising tool.

Unread function

 

It even adds a check box to tag the link as unread to go back to it later...whereas to date I've been adding a tag called unread and deleting it at a later date. It's an excellent enhancement to the social bookmarking space!

Notification function

I really like Steve Pietrek's feed which is a posting of his links directly in his blog. The problem I found is that his links are basically already shown in my RSS feed that I've subscribed to already, but I always seem to find that he has a new blogger that I haven't found already...this group facility is another way to expose this information.You can subscribe to the link feed on an immediate basis, daily or weekly to receive an email OR subscribe to the RSS feed. Now all I need to do is convince Steve to use diigo ;-)

The collaboration group is also very interesting with over 220 members aleady!

Published: 11/4/2007  5:21 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Nov 042007

Facebook Enterprise 2.0 community

I'm a big believer in 'eating your own dog food' and I'm a heavy user of RSS feeds, forums and social networking sites to keep up with my areas of interest.

I've just been reading a forum thread on 'Do Enterprises WANT social networking?', there are plenty of experts in the field putting their views across which is excellent. The thread is part of the 'Social Networking in the Enterprise' Facebook group. There is just over 1000 members and it's growing rapidly, originally headed up by Mike Gannotti who's SharePoint blog is well within the top 10 feed reads for me with some amazing content around this space and also SharePoint.

There is a lot of related links included around web3.0 and the semantic web. Notably the SIOC project which interlinks blogs, forums, wikis and mailing lists into one database and an alternative here at OpenLink Virtuoso.

This article on 'Enterterprise Expertise Management Systems and Organisational Reality' also offers some great scenarios of the use of Enterprise2.0 in real life situations.

The key takeaway was that is seems to revolve a lot around getting Generation Y engaged within and organisation in a collaborative way in large scale enterprises across globally separated locations.


Another key point was that a lot of organisations have this on their road map but other requirements take priorities such as upgrades etc.


A suggestion was to attack it from a problem focus rather than a product focus where the key is to getting it in the door. So from a problem focus, introduce Enterprise2.0 by resolving the current internal issue of finding an expert in 'x' field.

Another strong link explained enterprise2.0 in a good way covering a few key areas also:

  • Integration between enterprise2.0 applications such as wikis and web content management systems. There is a big stream of decisions being made around what integrates with what. So announcements like SocialText and Atlassian integration with SharePoint are key moves for these vendors.
  • It also indicates all the vendors that are out there in the enterprise2.0 space and the main market they are targetting e.g. Media Industry, SME, Intranet, Extranet, Education etc.
  • It mentions what the big players are doing such as IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Oracle and SalesForce are doing.
  • It highlights the clear link between Instant Messaging and Enterprise 2.0 and therefore the drive for Unified Communications being pushed by Cisco and Microsoft among others. Cisco is definately playing catchup compared to the application integration that Microsoft can show at this point in time, but it won't be long before acquisitions and internal development keep them in the game in this UC race.

It also links to this article on facebook in the enterprise and where it's going. Key points of interest were:

  • There are lots of business focused groups already out there on facebook
  • Employees think that others give out too much information about themselves on line openly
  • LinkedIn has issues around employees using it for job searches as well as for connections with internal and external people.
  • Some online enterprise2.0 providers are creating controlled hosted closed networks to prevent links to external sources and to save hosting them internally which is increasing rapidly. Google Apps and Microsoft Office Live Workspaces are good examples of this also.
Published: 11/4/2007  5:20 AM | 4  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Nov 042007

OpenID bandwagon and SharePoint

Based on discussions I've been reading in my social networking feeds I've decided to get on the OpenID bandwagon, mainly because I don't want someone else to steal my user name that I always use of 'jthake' ;-) It's my branding!

There are heaps of sites already supporting OpenID which can be seen at the OpenID Directory.

WikiTravel

On my travels I found wikitravel.org and decided to check out my home town of Perth, Western Australia. Good to see how much content is in there! And it even mentions the worlds best pub...Little Creatures in Fremantle! "Mine's a pint of pils!"

OpenID Blogs

Anoather great addition is the fact that there are some many subject based blogs out there which support OpenID so you can go and submit articles there.

Poking about

There's also some not so useful, "poke" like apps out there such as "I make Mistakes". I guess it's very similar to facebook in terms of having one registration but access to multiple apps, it's just they are not all in one walled garden like facebook.

Google OpenSocial

Google's rumoured OpenSocial has been released although the link on the Zdnet article gives a 404 error. I'm dubious to the information based on this. But if so it's a hard facebook killer if MySpace and LinkedIn get on board and share their connections.

OpenID and SharePoint

Another great plug in for OpenID is to allow users to login and add comments on WordPress blogs with their OpenID. Very very awesome! This is very much like Windows Live and where they are going. Angus Logan is the guy making the biggest noise about this after making serious noise around SharePoint from Sydney last year. Now I'm sure if they can release an WIndows Live authentication for SharePoint, they can create an OpenID one too...guys?

There is a CodePlex project called DNOpenID that looks like it could be used as a provider for SharePoint.

Social Graph

I guess it does lead into the direction Brad Fitz was getting to around a Social Graph for all application platforms to see connections for all your apps such as facebook, myspace, linkedIn without having to add the same person to each app.

Published: 11/4/2007  5:17 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Nov 042007

SIOC Project

The SIOC project is evolving very quickly and has submitted to w3c in February 2007.

One great use is notitio.us which allows you to view del.icio.us links in a tree form. This tool is awesome for breaking down tag clouds from social bookmarks. What it did show is the typos in my tags and the need for me to go through and clean them up and amalgamate them as I've got better at tagging since starting to use this system!

Published: 11/4/2007  5:17 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Oct 112007

Enterprise Social book marking and SharePoint

I've just started reading Bill Ives blog which focuses on Portals and Knowledge Management. One article covers what IBM are doing in this space. I've been preparing for another presentation on Enterprise Social Networking and have been approaching it in a way of describing the consumer space and then how the Enterprise could leverage this.

Bill mentions David Millen's demonstrations on Enterprise Social bookmarking with a product called Dogear. In the consumer space this includes web sites such as de.licio.us and stumbled upon. It's an interesting angle IBM have progressed with in terms of showing colleagues who saved the same bookmarks and also view your colleagues bookmarks and save them to yours. This is a great way to show associations between colleagues and how they are connected.

There was also some great comments that made me laugh tonight from the Joho blog and coverage by Matt Hines also on this subject.

The My Links functionality is extremely low and only just ticks the box in Social bookmarking. Obviously this can be extended:

Tagging

Extending the category of each My Link List Item to have multiple categories (tags). A tag cloud could them be used to present the users My Links in a similar model to how the consumer tools do.

Filtering

de.licio.us filtering by clicking on relevant tags on the right hand side drill down into a collection of links either of a user or a search result list. This paradigm could be extended with My Links by spinning through all the categories and creating tag urls to results pages that add this tag filter to this.

Shared Links

A users My Links could have a count next to them to indicate whether the bookmark has been saved by anyone else. This count could link to a list of all users within the enterprise that have added this. In doing so, this would then show people with similar interests. The user could then view that colleagues My Link collection to see other bookmarks of interest...and even save them to their My Links.

RSS Feeds

The My Links could also be consumed as RSS feeds, and even filtered by category/tag which is currently not available out of the box.

When I first started thinking about this, I was wondering what kind of links employees in the Enterprise would tag. But anything of any relevance to the organisation would be useful and would show their interests. These bookmarks could be urls to internal portal pages, wiki pages, documents and blog articles. This is just another medium for employees to work in and collate information.

So who's up for writing these 'features' ?...

Published: 10/11/2007  6:27 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Sep 172007

Microsoft and Facebook

Was just reading a post on Ben McCormack's blog which mentioned the announcement that Microsoft have released a new Facebook toolkit. This did come as somewhat of a shock, I mean it's unlike any of the big vendors to play nicely with a competitor. I don't think they ever released a partnership with MySpace and that is based on a Microsoft Platform. They clearly don't see MSNSpaces as a competitor otherwise I don't think this would have been approved internally. I'm starting to believe the hype around Apple being the new Microsoft, maybe they've switched places!

It's an interesting step and will be good to see how this will either run alongside the new Live API with regards to signing in capabilities (Passport) or whether they'll have some smarts to synchronize them up. I guess the Facebook API was simply a web service and they've probably just wrapped that up and then an internal MSFT dev has put together a few WPF components and shown the right people.

I've been doing some extensive research into Enterprise 2.0 and have been following Web 2.0 for a long time. It's interesting to see the links between the two and also how SharePoint comes into the equation in both paradigms. Clearly MOSS isn't really affordable for consumers in the Web 2.0 space, but it is for Enterprise 2.0 - WSS is the less functional option. There's a lot of work being down on CodePlex to build on what is out of the box in terms of Blogs, Wikis, Site Templates etc. and a lot of this is accessible across WSS and MOSS which is great.

The Facebook platform and SharePoint platform are very similar beasts architecturally and in some ways functionality that would run well in SharePoint will likely appear in Facebook earlier on due to the demand and financial opportunities in the Consumer market. The Enterprise will follow slowly afterwards and will learn from the lessons of the "get it out there" approach.

Published: 9/17/2007  6:52 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Sep 032007

Share your OPML

I've been using GoogleReader since it first came out in beta and use it daily to keep up to date with various topics such as Sharepoint, .Net development, Enterprise 2.0 and the Latest Technology in general.
As I discover new feeds I add them and tag them to a category. I usually find these by reading referenced posts on blogs I read and then adding the new feed.
Share your OPML web site allows you to upload your entire OPML file (list of all your feeds) and then cit will suggest people with similar OPML lists. You can then crawl through them to find feeds you have yet to discover.
 
There is a top 100 list which shows what the most popular feeds are over those who have registered their OPML files which is great to see what you're missing out on!
 
A very neat tool with plenty of potential for further growth around recommendations. I'm sure it won't be long before something graphical hits the scene here relating to tag clouds and the like. There's plenty of good content out there and making recommendations is a great way to discover it!
 
It will be interesting to see whether Google Reader can do something similar with all it's users to recommend feeds based on what feeds you've subscribed to and what similar people have. But their is a huge privacy thing around this., potentially though, if you are clicking to share posts, they could simply just recommend based on what you share...
Published: 9/3/2007  4:55 PM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Aug 302007

Enterprise 2.0: Social Networking and Sharepoint

I am currently preparing for a presentation I will be running in October titled "Using Sharepoint 2007 to Facilitate Enterprise Level Social Networking”.
 
There is obviously quite a lot of content at the moment being posted in various sources on Web 2.0 for the Enterprise and the whole Enterprise Social Networking space.
 
From the various client meetings I've had recently around our Sharepoint capabilities I've found that most are just seeking it as a Document Repository or a Web Content Management System. Clients seem very fearful of the openness of the Collaboration and Web 2.0 functionality. Most aren't even aware of the Excel Services, BDC and Forms Server areas.
Microsoft have just published a new release of the Sharepoint Product web site which seems to be broken down a lot better in terms of the 6 core areas of the platform. I found the previous layout very techically focused, probably due to it being used prior to the release for the beta audience.
 
Sharepoint is such a huge platform and in my new role as a Solution Architect (primarily Technical Presales) I've found it challenging to target the correct core area for the client on the initial overview demonstrations.
 
Over the next few weeks I will be posting a few short summarised articles on this so if you're interested please subscribe to my feed.
Published: 8/30/2007  8:15 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Aug 292007

Get everyone involved and get them doing it everywhere!

I was just reading Kit Kai's blog post on "Can social networking technologies help?". A few interesting points were:

- the emphasis on blogs and all roles getting involved e.g. Project Managers with particular issues which introduced scope creep and how they managed it. The idea being that people can search for these things and if they are blogged about generically enough they'll come up again.
It's a great way of communicating historic things that people at the time might remember, but new people to that area will not. We have similar things in our organisation all the time about why decisions were made and what research was required to come up with the final design etc.

- the other key takeaway was offline ability with all these things. I think it is important to encourage people to be able to contribute whilst away from their desks, imbetween meetings or on the train etc. Enterprises want to be able to encourage that people in the organisation contribute as much knowledge as possible into the collaborative environment. Tacit knowledge is just such a risk in any organisation.

- Kit also mentions Facebook and LinkedIn which seem to be the big talking points because both are being used in Business terms. Businesses are seeing this quite negatively at the moment so it will be interesting if they relate Facebook to general Enterprise 2.0. Do Management perceive that it'll be a distraction to business and don't see the benefits of it. Will it become yet another overhead like E-Mail on day to day activities?

Published: 8/29/2007  11:15 PM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Aug 222006

Triple J Unearthed online

Graeme Heath pointed me to a great web site done by Triple J (an Australian Radio station) that promotes up and coming bands. You can rate, listen to and download (mp3) what you like. There's plenty of information on each band...gonna be hitting it up for some more music to listent to on the way to work! Only 3 (Fools of April, Razorlily)  bands from Perth in the top 100...come on Perth!
Published: 8/22/2006  12:00 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

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