When I was working in a company that had Microsoft Premium Support, I used to get extremely annoyed with the first reply I got from the Nordic support centre in Stockholm because typically I had given all the detail necessary and that reply very rarely asked me anything at all useful for solving the problem. When I was later on a Nordic MVP tour of the MS Nordic Support Centre, I found out that one of the two criteria on which the boss of the support people was measured on was the quickness of that reply (the other was the speed in which a problem was "solved" which was why they…
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Most Topular Stories
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When a guaranteed reply within 48 hours isn't.
Mike Walsh's WSS and more23 Jan 2012 | 2:58 am -
Our New Free SharePoint Training Video Series
SharePoint Solutions Blog1 Feb 2012 | 8:10 amSharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce the release of the first two videos of a new free SharePoint training video series: SharePoint 101 – What Makes SharePoint Work. The free video series is the latest addition to our free SharePoint training video library, and introduces the viewer to key foundational SharePoint concepts and strategies, with a view towards helping organizations derive the most value from their SharePoint implementations. The videos may be accessed from the red “Free Training Videos” button at the top of our SharePoint Solutions home page at… -
Enabling Managed Metadata in Office365 (includes download)
Sharepoint Tips And Tricks6 Feb 2012 | 7:50 pmIf you have office365 or other hosted sharepoint solutions, you may find that the managed metadata column is not available to use - it shows an error that "the required feature is not enabled for this column type". There are two possible reasons. The first - you don't have a hosted site that supports managed metadata. To check if that is the case, check with your hosting company, or, if you have Office365, you should have a "manage term store" link in your sharepoint online administration centre. If you dont have that link, then you cannot have managed metadata - sorry. The other possibility… -
Google Chrome Update Brings Faster Browsing
Mashable!9 Feb 2012 | 1:12 amThe new stable release of Google’s web browser Chrome brings several improvements, most importantly faster browsing and more protection from malicious downloads. From now on, when you start typing in Chrome’s address box (or omnibox, as Google calls it), as soon as Chrome autocompletes the URL you’re likely to visit, it will prerender the page, making your overall browsing experience faster. As far as security goes, Chrome now does checks on executable files you’ve downloaded from the net. It matches the executables against a whitelist – a list of programs known… -
Groupon Reports Surprise Q4 Loss, Google Close To Launching Google Drive, Foxconn Servers Hacked
Fast Company9 Feb 2012 | 4:27 amBreaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.Flipkart Acquires LetsBuy. Two of India's biggest web retailers have joined forces. Flipkart, India's biggest ecommerce brand, has acquired LetsBuy.com, a company that's taken the lead in sales of electronics. The deal comes just a week after Amazon.com launched their aggregator site Junglee.com in the subcontinent. --NS--Updated 7:30 a.m. ESTGroupon Reports Surprise Q4 Loss. Groupon reported a net loss for its first Q4 earnings report, blaming it largely on high starter international taxes ($34 million) on the new…
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Mike Walsh's WSS and more
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When a guaranteed reply within 48 hours isn't.
23 Jan 2012 | 2:58 amWhen I was working in a company that had Microsoft Premium Support, I used to get extremely annoyed with the first reply I got from the Nordic support centre in Stockholm because typically I had given all the detail necessary and that reply very rarely asked me anything at all useful for solving the problem. When I was later on a Nordic MVP tour of the MS Nordic Support Centre, I found out that one of the two criteria on which the boss of the support people was measured on was the quickness of that reply (the other was the speed in which a problem was "solved" which was why they… -
Did Todd Klindt read my piece about SP 2010 Kindle-only "books"?
13 Jan 2012 | 11:42 pmIn the second half of December 2011 I wrote a piece about a new trend in Kindle books - private publishing of "books" covering a limited part of SharePoint 2010. The ones I mentioned were written by someone I had never heard of called Vishal Gupta and varied in price from a few dollars to something like 13 dollars. Well he's issued a few more, but perhaps of more interest is that a well-known and respected SharePoint MVP - Todd Klindt (one of the authors of the high-selling SP 2010 Admin Guide) - has joined in and has produced a Kindle "book" for less than 4… -
Another example of a good looking but totally useless web site (this time MS)
13 Jan 2012 | 11:26 pmAnyone who is wondering why in the past couple of months I haven't added many Microsoft SharePoint webcasts to the WSS v4 FAQ site needs look no further than this - very good-looking, but completely useless - web page http://events.microsoft.com/Pages/Home.aspx#m=;r=0;s=;yourrole=2;eventtype=2;level=2;timelength=2;v=list;pi=;mi=;si=;ai= The problem with webcasts and Microsoft used to be that each part of Microsoft made their own web casts. For SharePoint this meant (at least) Office; Channel 9; MSDN and TechNet. So rather than search each of these sources I used to go to a single… -
MS makes promises they can't keep for forum support for TechNet subscribers
7 Jan 2012 | 2:57 amThe Microsoft forums mostly are supported by "peers" - i.e. people like you and me. Any Microsoft support is only available in certain forums and is mostly provided by contractors working on Microsoft's behalf. As I explained in two earlier posts about the forums and Microsoft' role in them, support is not guaranteed (i.e. your post could lie there for years without any reply) unless you have a TechNet or MSDN subscription and in addition sign-up within that subscription for forum support. Then it used to be that Microsoft would in certain forums only guarantee that a… -
End of year look at SharePoint
30 Dec 2011 | 9:35 pm[When you lose the MVP title you immediately become a non-person and lose most of your contacts and certainly all access to non-public information - a bit of a shock after having that access for many years. As a result this end of year look is based entirely on publically available information.] SharePoint 2010 came out in May 2010 so we are now just over halfway through the usual three year cycle before the next version of the product. There are lots of indications of this. - new book releases have started to become a trickle - there are very few new MSDN and TechNet articles…
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SharePoint Solutions Blog
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Our New Free SharePoint Training Video Series
1 Feb 2012 | 8:10 amSharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce the release of the first two videos of a new free SharePoint training video series: SharePoint 101 – What Makes SharePoint Work. The free video series is the latest addition to our free SharePoint training video library, and introduces the viewer to key foundational SharePoint concepts and strategies, with a view towards helping organizations derive the most value from their SharePoint implementations. The videos may be accessed from the red “Free Training Videos” button at the top of our SharePoint Solutions home page at… -
Announcing Our New Introductory SharePoint 2010 Course for Server Administrators
3 Jan 2012 | 1:36 pmIn response to numerous requests over the last several months, SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce a new addition to our catalogue of SharePoint 2010 courses: Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators, a 3-day hands-on instructor-led course designed to give IT Professionals a jump-start and quickly bring them up to speed on installing and managing their SharePoint 2010 environment. Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators is aimed at IT Professionals who are responsible for installing, configuring, designing, and administering a SharePoint 2010… -
InfoPath Training
18 Oct 2011 | 8:54 amNeed InfoPath training? We've got just what you're looking for!SharePoint Solutions offers quality hands-on classroom-based InfoPath training.Learn the ins and outs of creating digital forms that your users won’t mind using.Four days is all it takes to master digital form creation in InfoPath 2010, and to learn the basics of routing those forms through common business processes using SharePoint 2010 workflow, through our new course, InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 No-Code Workflow Deep Dive (Intermediate).In this instructor-led 4-day “deep dive” course, you’ll learn:To… -
Method to grant account access to User Profile Service Application
7 Sep 2011 | 1:46 pmIn order to work with SharPoint's User Profile Service Application beyond a read-only capacity, a user account must be granted appropriate access. Otherwise, you'll encounter errors such as ActivityFeedPermissionDeniedException when attempting to perform operations such as ActivityEvent.CreateActivityEvent.The following method will grant access to User Profile Service Application for a specified account name of the format DOMAIN\User. 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425private static void GrantPermissionsToUserProfileService(string accountName){var upServiceproxy =… -
Method to determine account identity of 'SharePoint 2010 Timer' (SPTimerV4) Windows Service
7 Sep 2011 | 1:07 pmAs a developer of solutions for the SharePoint 2010 platform, you may on occasion find the need to determine the account identity of the SharePoint 2010 Timer Windows Service (SPTimerV4). The following method will return the service's account name for you. 1234567891011121314151617181920private static string GetSPTimerJobAccountName(){ string retval = null; ServiceController[] controllers = ServiceController.GetServices(); var cont = controllers.Where(c => c.ServiceName == "SPTimerV4"); ServiceController svc = cont.FirstOrDefault(); if (svc != null) { System.Management.SelectQuery query =…
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Sharepoint Tips And Tricks
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Enabling Managed Metadata in Office365 (includes download)
6 Feb 2012 | 7:50 pmIf you have office365 or other hosted sharepoint solutions, you may find that the managed metadata column is not available to use - it shows an error that "the required feature is not enabled for this column type". There are two possible reasons. The first - you don't have a hosted site that supports managed metadata. To check if that is the case, check with your hosting company, or, if you have Office365, you should have a "manage term store" link in your sharepoint online administration centre. If you dont have that link, then you cannot have managed metadata - sorry. The other possibility… -
The importance of synchronous event handlers
15 Jan 2012 | 7:35 pmIn SharePoint, we can create list item event handlers (or receivers). I have written about this in the past, and even posted some code for setting the security automatically on a list item as it is created.Now, there is one thing I wanted to write about this topic. Event handlers can be defined as either Synchronous or Asynchronous - regardless of the event type. By default, events were always asynchronous if they had the "ed" suffix (ItemAdded, ItemUpdated), and synchronous if they had the "ing" suffix (ItemAdding, ItemUpdating). However, sometimes we want to run our code in an "ed" event,… -
Event handler to archive items when deleted
16 Nov 2011 | 12:12 amA person just asked this on a mailing list I am on, so I thought I'd share this code. The requirement - copy a list item that is deleted to an archive list. The solution - event receiver that copies the item. The code below does the job, but again is only a sample - you still need to implement error handling, and there are hard coded variables there you will want to change. Note: this code is specifically for list items, not for documents in document libraries. You can easily change the code to support documents as well (see the CopyAttachments function for an example on how to copy files). -
Setting item permissions for new items
15 Nov 2011 | 11:28 pmA common question that I recently answered in a sharepoint conference is how to make a sharepoint list only show items to the users who wrote the items, and users specified in the item's properties.A good example of this is a task list where only the original creator of the task and the assignee can see and change the task. This is impossible to do in sharepoint out of the box, and that is where we, as developers, come in. The way to do it is by developing a simple event handler and attaching it to the list. I prefer to attach to ItemAdded and ItemUpdated - put the exact same code in both… -
Speaking in the upcoming Asia conferences
15 Oct 2011 | 10:25 pmNext month I will be in both Singapore and Hong Kong for the Asian sharepoint conferences. If you are coming, why not jump in my session to learn about sharepoint development? Who knows, there may be prizes... http://www.sharepointconference.asia
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Mashable!
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Google Chrome Update Brings Faster Browsing
9 Feb 2012 | 1:12 amThe new stable release of Google’s web browser Chrome brings several improvements, most importantly faster browsing and more protection from malicious downloads. From now on, when you start typing in Chrome’s address box (or omnibox, as Google calls it), as soon as Chrome autocompletes the URL you’re likely to visit, it will prerender the page, making your overall browsing experience faster. As far as security goes, Chrome now does checks on executable files you’ve downloaded from the net. It matches the executables against a whitelist – a list of programs known… -
‘Bachelor’ Contestant Courtney Gets Auto-Tuned [VIDEO]
8 Feb 2012 | 9:19 pmFans of The Bachelor are all too familiar with this season’s over-the-top contestant Courtney, who makes snide comments at the camera and likes to take off her bikini top. Now, a video has popped up on YouTube that has turned some of her signature phrases — from “Winning!” to “I do modeling” — into a catchy Auto-Tune clip. The contestants are vying for a rose from winemaker Ben, and Courtney has rubbed many of them the wrong way, and this video shows why. This is not the first time YouTube users have turned pop culture moments into Auto-Tuned videos. -
Facebook Talks About Social Games and Mobile Apps for 2012
8 Feb 2012 | 9:09 pmFacebook revealed its roadmap for social games and mobile apps for the rest of the year at the Inside Social Apps 2012 conference on Wednesday in San Francisco — and it’s good news for app developers. Want to create an app for Facebook’s Open Graph? The mobile space presents a huge opportunity to create cross-platform social games, said Carl Sjogreen, director of product management at Facebook, who spoke to a packed conference center filled with IT insiders about Facebook’s projections for the mobile social gaming and app space for this year. “You sort of had to… -
What Digital Non-Profits Can Learn From Companies Like Google
8 Feb 2012 | 8:46 pmDaniel Atwood works with organizations in the social sector to craft meaningful experiences for customers and constituents, and to find innovative product, campaign and messaging ideas in unexpected places. We live in a world where new digital products are solving problems daily — from managing our finances to remembering the groceries. Often, they’re solving problems we didn’t know we had, like the need to connect several times a day in 140 characters or less. Occasionally, they’re creating new problems (but that’s a topic for another conversation). What… -
Comment and Highlight on Websites with commentto
8 Feb 2012 | 8:30 pmThe Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: commentto Quick Pitch: Comment anywhere. Genius Idea: Commentto is a browser add-on service that allows users to highlight, bookmark, comment, save and share bookmarks and excerpts on websites. Do you ever want to add extra knowledge to a news story or other content on the web? Well, browser add-on commentto lets you comment on anything you want. Commentto allows users to highlight…
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Fast Company
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Groupon Reports Surprise Q4 Loss, Google Close To Launching Google Drive, Foxconn Servers Hacked
9 Feb 2012 | 4:27 amBreaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.Flipkart Acquires LetsBuy. Two of India's biggest web retailers have joined forces. Flipkart, India's biggest ecommerce brand, has acquired LetsBuy.com, a company that's taken the lead in sales of electronics. The deal comes just a week after Amazon.com launched their aggregator site Junglee.com in the subcontinent. --NS--Updated 7:30 a.m. ESTGroupon Reports Surprise Q4 Loss. Groupon reported a net loss for its first Q4 earnings report, blaming it largely on high starter international taxes ($34 million) on the new… -
3 Ways To Deal With A No-Win Situation
8 Feb 2012 | 12:41 pmIf you're a Star Trek aficionado, then not only have you heard of the "Kobayashi Maru Scenario" but you can recount it easily to others. For those of you who may not be familiar with it, the Kobayashi Maru Scenario is a no-win situation cadets encounter at the series' Starfleet Academy. In it, the cadet is in command of the Federation ship, responsible for rescuing another Federation vessel (the Kobayashi Maru) from attacking Klingon Warbirds. If the cadet chooses not to save the ship in distress, it will be destroyed with all hands. However, if he goes to the ship's aid, he will precipitate… -
Amazon Inks Deal With Viacom, Sprint Announces iPhone-led Q4 Highs And Lows, Japan Targets 30% Cut In Rare Earth Use
8 Feb 2012 | 12:41 pmBreaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.Amazon Inks Deal With Viacom For Video Streaming. Amazon has plumped up its Prime Instant video streaming catalog with a pile new TV shows, courtesy of its new agreement with entertainment hub Viacom. The deal brings up its video count to over 15,000, putting it in a stronger position to compete against the recently formed Redbox/Verizon double act and traditional TV destroyer Netflix. --NS --Updated 9:50 a.m. ESTSprint's Q4 Sees iPhone Led Highs And Lows. Sprint is announcing results coming off its first… -
How To Find Your Next $140 Million
8 Feb 2012 | 11:26 amI recently spent the day with author Andrea Kates, who was challenged to connect the relevance of the working philosophy found in her best-selling book, Find Your Next, with real solutions that can help move businesses forward. Working with the executive team of a national restaurant chain on this particular day, Kates asked herself, "Which single metric could they focus on to yield the most growth for the company?" Her conclusion was that of all the metrics and contributing factors, it all boiled down to a dogged pursuit of increasing guest frequency. She learned that an increase of one… -
New Details On Redbox-Verizon Streaming Service, Netflix Competitor
8 Feb 2012 | 8:33 amYesterday Coinstar, the parent company of Redbox, the 35,400-kiosk-strong movie-rental service, announced a joint venture with Verizon to provide a subscription-based streaming video service, thus positioning the companies in direct competition with Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. Coinstar also announced that it would acquire NCR's entertainment business, which includes its former rival Blockbuster Express, adding more than 9,000 kiosks to Redbox's roster around the country. Now new details about the combined companies' plans have emerged. First, it's clear the companies are adamant about bringing…
