New Blog Site! This will be my last entry on this one.

Great news! I will now be blogging at http://www.rharbridge.com which is my new blog site. This is a major move for myself as I intend to try and focus on blogging on other topics besides just SharePoint in the future, so I didn’t want to clutter this one.

I will be leaving this site intact with all of it’s entries (so it doesn’t break anyone linking to it), but I would love for anyone and everyone to come to my new site and let me know what they think. How can it be improved? What errors or issues do you see?

Looking forward to sharing and learning with you in the future,
Richard Harbridge

SharePoint Camp in Toronto on March 20th

If you live in the Toronto area and like learning, technology, SharePoint, or wonderful people you NEED to come to SharePoint camp on March 20th.

http://www.torontosharepointcamp.com/Pages/Default.aspx

Go ahead, register at the link above. I’ll wait here patiently.

I attended it last year and gave the event a 5 star review: https://sharepointkb.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/toronto-sharepoint-camp-review-5-stars/

For me personally this was really my first ‘community conference’ and is what got me interested and involved with the SharePoint community. Up until this time I had been answering questions on the forums, blogging tidbits, attended the odd user group session, and was working away on my own (with contact with various experts) but had never really embraced the community. Seeing that there were so many other passionate people out there with their own experiences, skills, and opinions really had a powerful impact on me both professionally and personally.

1. I wanted to hear the challenges other SharePoint professionals had experienced and how they overcame them.
2. Technology is one thing, but I loved that topics on things like mind mapping introduced me to new ways of working and thinking I had not used before.
3. Meeting people became a passion of mine. I was always reserved and fairly quiet at Conferences, but knowing this was a community event, and that I wasn’t representing my company or their interests, and instead was representing my own allowed me to connect and meet with people in a very different way. I have found this to be far more enjoyable, beneficial, and powerful than ‘corporate’, or even pay conference/events personally.
4. It made me want to share many of the experiences and things that I had learned with everyone else. I had presented at internal conferences, or other industry events, but never in a free, personal, and community driven environment. Seeing the great presenters, activity, and energy at the event it was hard to contain my excitement at becoming a part of it.
5. I brought up the idea of a Mississauga SharePoint User Group at the event and found that other people were also interested (or had similar thoughts). We all went away and now a bit over a year later we have a Mississauga SharePoint User Group that allows us to see/share/and learn more without that difficult Toronto commute.

Trying to explain how much the community and people I have met have enriched my career and my personal life is very difficult. I just thought I would share a little bit with you and really hope to see many of you out there on the 20th. Even if you aren’t interested in SharePoint 🙂

Take care,
Richard Harbridge

SharePoint Tips from Indiana Jones?

I just commented on Michael Gannotti’s latest post “The Adventure Begins… Productivity Adventures” about how Indiana Jones had a lot of good business lessons. I decided I could probably expand that into a short blog post in case someone out there finds this stuff interesting.

So what sort of lessons, or tips can Indiana Jones teach us that are related to achieving a successful SharePoint?

1. You have to have the courage to take on something challenging.
   Indiana Jones never ran away from a Challenge (well not the ones that mattered). It’s important to first be ready and dedicated to accomplishing a goal. SharePoint is a very challenging thing to implement successfully, and the business problems it helps solve are even more daunting. Courage always helps.
2. Know your limits and what your good at.
   Remember that scene when Indiana Jones is being chased by that giant unstoppable boulder? While courage is important you still need to know your limits and when it makes sense to ‘run away’. Or in a business sense cut your losses. Sometimes things are unstoppable and we have to be ready to admit it to ourselves to help us survive (hopefully with lots of lessons learned so we don’t do it again). Not every idea you come up with is going to work. SharePoint certainly has limits of it’s own and you also need to understand these.
3. Simplicity is often the best option. (Gun vs Sword)
   There is a scene, Gun vs Sword, where a scary bad guy is waving his sword around and there is a build up where you expect a big fight. Instead Indy pulls out his gun and just shoots the guy. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzcOCyHDqc) Sometimes the solution to something is simple and there is no need to make it more complicated. This is especially important for SharePoint as complexity often leads to bad choices being made, especially when it’s unnecessary.
4. You need to know your stuff and be ready to learn.
   Indy is a super subject matter expert and professor in his field with plenty of knowledge about history, archeology and foreign lands. If you are diving into something like SharePoint you should hit the books first, and will need to learn a ton. Not only about the technical aspects but also about the business, and business processes you will be effecting by your SharePoint implementation.
5. You don’t have to be a superhero.
   Indiana Jones was more or less an ordinary guy who did extraordinary things. We can all be just as extraordinary as Indy. Anyone can implement SharePoint successfully. I mean that.
6. Some things never change.
   Indy uses pretty old fashioned methods, and techniques often and they work. There is no need to reinvent the wheel if something works. Think about even the traps he faces, most of these are extremely ancient, but still serve their purpose (albeit they aren’t up to the daunting task of taking out Indy). In SharePoint the challenges we face aren’t new. They aren’t unique either.
7. Know what your are afraid of, or bad at and let other people help.
   Indy was afraid of snakes. He knew it, and we all knew it (because he shared that openly). As a result it is much easier to work around the fears.
8. You can’t do it alone.
   He also wasn’t the best at everything, and without the help of other people could never have achieved all that he did. Implementing SharePoint successfully is absolutely a team effort and involves many people working hard and effectively together.
9. You have to believe in yourself and it doesn’t hurt to be unique or have your own image.
   Indiana Jones has a very unique outfit and look. When you see it, it tells you a lot about him and his style, personality and attitude. Your own portal should also have a brand, it’s own attitude even. You also have to believe in it, and get other people to as well. If you don’t think SharePoint is a good  thing, then why should anyone else?
10. You have to see things through and stay focused.
    Indiana Jones always stayed focused on the treasure or end goal. Constantly moving towards it regardless of significant obstacles. It’s a long difficult journey or adventure to that treasure of an effective SharePoint implementation, but when you get there it is absolutely worth it.

This was fun and I hope you enjoyed it or got something out of it,
Richard Harbridge

Indiana Jones teaches us a lot about important business things. As an example I will go through a couple here.

1. You have to have the courage to take on something challenging. Indiana Jones never ran away from a Challenge (well not the ones that mattered). It’s important to first be ready and dedicated to accomplishing a goal.

2. You need to know your stuff and be ready to learn. He is a super subject matter expert and professor in his field with plenty of knowledge about history, archeology and foreign lands. If you are diving into something like SharePoint you should hit the books first, and will need to learn a ton.

3. You don’t have to be a superhero. Indiana Jones was more or less an ordinary guy who did extraordinary things. We can all be just as extraordinary as Indy.

4. Know what your are afraid of, and work around it. Indy was afraid of snakes. He knew it, and we all knew it (because he shared that openly). As a result it is much easier to work around the fears.

5. You have to believe in yourself and it doesn’t hurt to be unique or have your own image. Indiana Jones has a very unique outfit and look. When you see it, it tells you a lot about him and his style, personality and attitude.

6. You have to see things through and stay focused. Indiana Jones always stayed focused on the treasure or end goal. Constantly moving towards it regardless of significant obstacles.

So I think the photo-shopped picture is perfect Mike! Looking forward to seeing more from your adventures soon,
Richard Harbridge

SharePoint Saturdays

One other small update. I will be presenting at both SharePoint Saturday DC on December 5th and at SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach on January 9th. Closer to the dates or when I have something worth sharing from my slides I will post it here as well.

If anyone from the Toronto area wants to come I will be driving down both times I think, and so I have open spots in my car if you want to come :). Just email me harbrich <{at}> hotmail.com and we can work it out.

Take care,
Richard Harbridge

Canadian SharePoint User Groups Galore

There are more than a bazillion posts now out there about SharePoint and Office 2010. Yes I counted them. So I will just reference this address and tell you to visit it and get the beta’s and have fun: http://www.microsoft.com/2010/en/.

A whole slew of things are going on that are also exciting. In Canada we have two new user groups for SharePoint.

There is the Mississauga SharePoint User Group (http://www.mspug.ca) and the Calgary SharePoint User Group (http://www.calspug.com).

Let’s not forget the other great SharePoint User Groups in Canada in fact here is a list of all of them!

1. Toronto SharePoint User Group – http://www.tspug.com/
2. Mississauga SharePoint User Group – http://www.mspug.ca/
3. Calgary SharePoint User Group – http://www.calspug.com/
4. Quebec SharePoint User Group – http://www.sharepointquebec.org/
5. Ottawa SharePoint User Group – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/worldwide/ca/ottawa/
6. Vancouver SharePoint User Group – http://www.vanspug.com/
7. Victoria SharePoint User Group – http://www.vsharepoint.com/
8. Winnipeg SharePoint User Group – http://www.sharepointgroups.org/wsug/

P.S – Microsoft please update your website here: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepointcanada/Community/Pages/default.aspx

Hope this helps someone and GET INVOLVED the SharePoint community is awesome!
Richard Harbridge

SPC09 and The Mississauga SharePoint User Group

Well the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas is over. I will be watching the many recorded sessions I didn’t get to see (which was quite a few of them) and really enjoyed the opportunity of talking with so many familiar faces in the SharePoint community as well as a bunch of ones I had not met before. I even got to be on camera a couple times thanks to Dux’s great “what would you do if SharePoint never existed” videos (http://duxquax.com/what-rharbridge-would-do-if-sharepoint-never and http://duxquax.com/what-wonderlaura-would-do-if-sharepoint-never) and photo happy SharePointers.

I also have to admit that this was the first large conference where I relied on twitter for my updates and direction and it didn’t fail me once. Knowing where everyone was, what they were up to, their opinions on content, as well as reading some of the live blogs really made the entire conference experience much more enjoyable and engaging for me personally.

On Live Blogging

Among many others I did some live blogging with EndUserSharePoint to help share the experience and if your interested I can be found in group two here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/SPC09-AllStreams.htm

Some simple lessons learned on live blogging:

1. Get to the session early so you can score an electrical outlet. There aren’t many of these and they go pretty fast.
2. It’s probably easier to record everything and add thoughts to points after the session is over than it is to articulate those thoughts while still maintaining concentration on the presentation.
3. Don’t transcribe everything. Just grab the important points (if everything seems important only the most important or the points that stand out to you personally).

Do you have any thoughts on how I can improve?

I was a little sad that all the sessions I have seen so far were so high level, but considering 2010 was new to almost everyone there it did make sense. For me personally my favorite parts were the discussion group sessions (especially the social computing one) with the Microsoft teams as well as the IT Analyst session where I got an opportunity to talk a bit more in depth with Tom Rizzo and many industry analysts about SharePoint, the economy, partnerships, and Microsoft’s direction.

Be sure to check out things like Joel’s thoughts on the conference/2010, the videos at http://www.mssharepointconference.com and the many blogs that covered the event and are now talking about SharePoint 2010 features and changes.

User Groups and SharePoint Camp!

Upon returning to a much colder Canadian climate I could see the excitement was still very much alive. In fact just last night (Monday October 26th) the Mississauga SharePoint User Group had it’s first meeting at Microsoft! A huge congratulations to Ray Outair for his passion in getting this going as well as Eli, Bill and everyone else who has supported this and came out to the first meeting. For me personally this is really important as it offers many people who are unable to get downtown Toronto for the Toronto SharePoint User Group sessions a chance to still talk, share, and support one another.

As a reminder there will be another SharePoint 2010 session hosted by the Toronto SharePoint User Group this wednesday (October 28, 2009) which will also be shared via live meeting. I will post the linkage onto twitter as soon as the live meeting address is confirmed.

Here is the session abstract:

Presented by Savash Alic (Microsoft Canada) Principal Specialist, Ent Sales – SharePoint (MOSS, WSS, MCDBA, MCSE certified, MBA)

Join TSPUG for a special meeting on the last Wednesday of October where Microsoft’s Savash Alic will present Canada’s first look at SharePoint Server 2010. Savash is a SharePoint loyalist who is dedicated to the product since its’ very early days in 2001 implementing solutions.  He has been selling SharePoint in a technical capacity for the last 4 years at Microsoft Canada however he is a technologist at heart who started his professional career in ’94 and worked at several Microsoft Gold Partners delivering and managing projects.

Don’t forget that SharePoint Camp is coming early next year as well at the end of January or start of February (which is a free and incredible SharePoint mini conference) so the SharePoint community should be very exciting for the next while.

See you around the SharePoint community,
Richard

SharePoint Conference 2009

For anyone interested I am posting my schedule (and will try and update it) with where I will be/what I will be doing at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas next week in terms of Sessions. It was a very difficult selection process since so many sessions looked good, but I have decided upon these ones for a number of reasons and will watch the many hours of recorded sessions for other ones. If you are also going to any of these sessions let me know so we can exchange notes and thoughts in follow up. 🙂

Monday, October 19th, 2009

9:00 AM

Keynote: Unveiling Microsoft SharePoint 2010
Mandalay Bay BallroomSpeaker: Steve Ballmer

10:30 AM

Keynote: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Drilldown
Mandalay Bay BallroomSpeaker: Jeff Teper

1:15 PM

Microsoft Business Intelligence Vision & Strategy
Islander ISpeaker: Amir Netz, Ariel Netz, Tom Casey

2:45 PM

ECM for the Masses – How SharePoint 2010 delivers on the promise
Lagoon HSpeaker: Ryan Duguid

4:30 PM

Mobile SharePoint: Driving More Productivity & Collaboration with…
ReefSpeaker: Chip Vollers, Sean Pirtle

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

9:00 AM

Part 1: Business Case for Social Computing
ReefSpeaker: Daniel Rasmus

10:30 AM

Part 2: Adoption Strategies for Social Computing
ReefSpeaker: Alina Fu

 

1:15 PM

Developing SharePoint 2010 Applications with the Client Object Model
Mandalay Bay FSpeaker: Paul Stubbs

2:45 PM

Deep Dive into SharePoint 2010 My Sites and Social Networking…
Islander GSpeaker: Gaurav Doshi, Venky Veeraraghavan

4:30 PM

IT Analyst Panel: AMR Research, Forrester, IDC and Gartner Analysts…
ReefSpeaker: James Murphy, Leslie Owens, Rita Sallam, Stephen Powers, Susan Feldman

Wednesday, October 21th, 2009

9:00 AM

The Art of the SharePoint Story: Connecting With Decision Makers &…
South Seas DSpeaker: Robert McDowell

10:30 AM

Building A Great Intranet: Proven Principles & Best Practices
Lagoon HSpeaker: Amanda Murphy, Jonathon Wynn

1:15 PM

Building an enterprise knowledge management solution on SharePoint…
Mandalay Bay HSpeaker: John Demaris, Sean Squires

2:45 PM

Developing Social Applications with SharePoint 2010
South Seas DSpeaker: Matthew McDermott

4:30 PM

Creating Data-Centric Composite Applications using SharePoint…
Mandalay Bay KSpeaker: Dustin Miller

Thursday, October 22th, 2009

9:00 AM

Deloitte: The Why and How of Social Networking and Collaboration at…
Breakers ESpeaker: Patricia Romeo, Rob Foster

10:30 AM

If You Build It, They Will Come: Driving End User Adoption
Lagoon HSpeaker: Scott Jamison

12:00 PM

Building Rich, Dynamic Websites with SharePoint 2010
Mandalay Bay GSpeaker: Tony Jones

I will also be at many of the #Share events and Microsoft sponsored events around the Conference so feel free to message me on twitter, comment on my blog, or email me so we have an opportunity to meet.

Looking forward to networking with many of you,
Richard Harbridge

Get the Productivity Hub for SharePoint

So over the past while I have been raving about how happy Microsoft has made me with their announcement for continued support/updates to the productivity hub. Well I realized I hadn’t even mentioned it on my blog here.

So now I am.

This is a bit of old news, but in case you haven’t heard about it…

The Productivity Hub is a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 site collection that offers training materials for end-users. It has blogs, discussion groups, a coach ‘program’ (listing of coaches you can define and extend), change management (to reduce load on IT staff) and tons of great starting content for a powerful SharePoint and Office help center.

Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=277fefca-d62f-41bc-943d-79002254cfee&displaylang=en

Why is this so good?

1. The obvious one is that this reduces cost and overhead related to training. It acts as a tool for training departments and IT.
2. Not just one way to learn. Since the content can be video, documents, coached training, forums, blogs and more it means you have many learning paths available for individuals.
3. Drives adoption. The coach concept and if you properly highlight the productivity hub with featured material, or roll up a tip/trick each week on your intranet homepage with a reference to the productivity hub you can begin to imagine how it can help improve shared understanding and overall user adoption of SharePoint.
4. The content updates for the hub (more released on a schedule like this: Aug 2009, November 2009, February 2010, May 2010 etc) will add more and more great documents, videos and help for end users without you having to do any discovery on your own. You simple download and run the content updates. You can review the content each time to ensure it falls in line with your solution, customizations, and objectives but it can save you tons of time.
5. It provides a framework/starting point for a great knowledge sharing/community solution. If you have never played with/experimented with PKS, or built knowledge sharing areas this is a good example of some important features/techniques. There is a built in feature listing/functionality where certain material can be featured. It has a rating system to help ensure the community moderates and promotes the best content, it runs in SharePoint so you can control and customize the permissions to your hearts content, and so on and so forth.

Ian over at at wssdemo.com has done a wonderful thing and installed/made this available here: http://templates.wssdemo.com/sites/productivity/Pages/Default.aspx

Brief note here for Administrators: It is intensive on the SQL side on install so make sure to do this in off hours or plan accordingly.

I was a bit excited in writing this, but I really am excited and hope you are as well,
Richard Harbridge

P.S – As a social media aside: http://www.slideshare.net/sachac/smarter-work-why-social-networks-matter is a slide show on “Smarter Work and Why Social Networks Matter” from Sacha that is a fantastic, short, and simple explanation of why things like this matter. In our case this is a community building toolset (productivity hub) and will help boost adoption. 🙂

SharePoint Keyboard Shortcuts

One of those things I often see people surprised by, or forgetting about is the usefulness of keyboard shortcuts when working with applications. It can save you time by removing the need to navigate menu’s, and scroll the mouse all around the page. Often the only way you can cause certain behavior is by using key combination’s on your keyboard. So it’s always good to know what keyboard shortcuts exist and how they can be used with the application you are using.

SharePoint has lots of GREAT key combination’s you can use to save you time and energy and Microsoft has done a great job of listing them all.

Keyboard Shortcuts for WSS: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA101756491033.aspx

Keyboard Shortcuts for MOSS: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101733621033.aspx

Be sure to review the Rich Text Editor and Rich Text Editor of the Content Editor Web Part as many people don’t realize the difference between hitting Enter and Shift + Enter.

It’s also a good idea to remember your browser has it’s own shortcuts that you can use for navigating pages, content, magnification, printing, and more.

Here are some simple examples:

1. You can enlarge the text on any Web page by pressing Ctrl and the plus or minus keys (for bigger or smaller fonts).
2. You can also enlarge the entire Web page by pressing the Ctrl key as you turn the wheel on top of your mouse.
3. You can tap the Space bar to scroll down on a Web page one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up.
4. If you hit the Ctrl and Home key on your keyboard you will immediately be taken to the top of the web page, document, or email.
5. Hitting the Ctrl and End key on your keyboard at the same time will take you immediately to the bottom or end of a web page, document, or email.

Hope this helps someone save time,
Richard Harbridge

jQuery Hover for Multiple Buttons/Images

It’s been awhile since I have posted something with code up here. I figured a small post on a simple jQuery exercise that might help someone out.

The goal of this exercise is simple:
We want to have a hover effect to make ‘grey’ images become ‘colored’ when the mouse hovers over them.

The tools we will need:
jQuery library (http://jquery.com/), a webpage and some -grey and -clr (color) images.
Here are a few we will use in this exercise.

Here are some fun additional challenges I am going to toss in:
We will be doing this on a SharePoint welcome page which has the content (images etc) in a rich text field control. That means you can’t add any JavaScript where the images are being shown.

Solution Steps:
Here’s where I will go through how you can do this (pretty darned easily) and some simple recommendations.

1. First you need to have a welcome page in SharePoint (or a generic html page). Then you are going to add image references. Each image should be named CONSISTENTLY. That way our code can be really simple and generic (which all developers love). As an example the ‘greyed out’ images will be named “Whatever -grey.gif” where the “-grey” is consistent. I added the hyphen in the off chance that when we replace the -grey later on, there might be a -grey somewhere else in the URL (unlikely, but should make it unique; if you really want to go the extra mile you could even use a GUID).As for the ‘coloured’ images we will name these “Whatever -clr.gif” where again -clr is consistent.What we get then is basically a bunch of <img> tags pointing to -grey to start us off. In this case we will add the following code to our normal rich text field control on the welcome page.
   <DIV>TIPS AND TRICKS</DIV>
   <DIV>
   <IMG class=“ColourChange” alt=“Word 2007” src=“https://webaddress/IconImages/MS-Word-grey.gif&#8221;>
   <IMG class=“ColourChange” alt=“Outlook 2007” src=“https://webaddress/IconImages/MS-Outlk-grey.gif&#8221;>
   <IMG class=“ColourChange” alt=“Excel 2007” src=“https://webaddress/IconImages/MS-Excel-grey.gif&#8221;>
   <IMG class=“ColourChange” alt=“OneNote 2007” src=“https://webaddress/IconImages/MS-Note-grey.gif&#8221;>
   </DIV>
2. You need to add the jQuery library reference to the page. You can do this via inserting it into the masterpage, page layout, or into something like a content editor webpart. For this example I will just toss it, as well as the script I will be using into a Content Editor WebPart (CEWP).
   <script type=‘text/javascript’ src=‘https://webaddress/_layouts/ThirdParty/JavaScript/jquery.js&#8217;></script>
   (Can be anywhere, just giving example).
3. Add this code to either a CEWP, Master Page, or Page Layout (as defined earlier). So that when the objects with a class assignment of ColourChange are hovered over they change their source image.
   <script>
   $(document).ready(function(){
   $(“.ColourChange”).hover(function()
   {
   $(this).attr(“src”,$(this).attr(“src”).replace(‘-grey’,‘-clr’));
   }, function()
   {
   $(this).attr(“src”,$(this).attr(“src”).replace(‘-clr’,‘-grey’));
   });
   });
   </script>
4. All done. Even if new images are added as long as we assign the appropriate class and ensure the script is running our hover effects should all be consistent.

This was a pretty specific example but the important things to note here were that we wanted consistent naming conventions so that we could write a fairly generic script to change the src attribute of any object with the ColourChange class. In our example we used a replace to accomplish this. You could have just as easily changed the position, size, or other things as well.

We also have HTML code that is flat and simple without any need for onmouseover events, or (IMO) bad things like that. So the code was clean and simple (as well as accepted by picky controls like the Rich Text Field control in SharePoint) and the script was pretty simple and clean.

Hope this helps someone,
Richard Harbridge