Weekly Roundup – June 29 2014

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I read a ton of stuff over the course of the week (one of the happy side effects of commuting into New York).  Some of the bits and pieces I pick up strike me as particularly interesting and I thought I’d start sharing them.

Last week’s roundup is up at the Big Apple site.

This week I highlighted articles including customizing search, doing clever things with jQuery tables, visualizing algorithms for an alternative way of understanding them, a trip down memory lane, a learning opportunity for women in the industry and lastly, news on immigration that affects many of us, directly or indirectly.

Hope you enjoy it!

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And Now For Something Completely Different, With Pictures!

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My colleague, Anil Ferris, took a break from his endless lab building, breaking and rebuilding to write a gem of a blog post on Likability – and I’m not just calling it a gem because he fit in a great motorcycle reference.  He certainly gets lots of points for that, however.

This is a really interesting topic for the consulting class, so to speak.  Being liked is so, so very important to success generally.  At the same time, it’s very difficult for me, personally to turn my analytical eye inward and assess my habits and interactions with peers and customers and try to measure how “likable” I am.  I think it’s a challenge for most of us. 

I’ve been doing a lot of experiments lately – trying new food, wearing ear plugs to see if I sleep better, driving 55mph to see if it *really* saves gas … I’m going to take a stab at spending a week just focused entirely on likability and see what I notice about myself.  It might be worth trying out for yourself.

(The pictures are in Anil’s post, not here 🙂 )

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“We Don’t Want SharePoint To Look Like SharePoint”

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I’ve always been a function-over-form kind of person.  I’ll take a challenging user interface over something pretty any day – provided the payout is worth it.  Consider Dwarf Fortress :).  This is pretty difficult UI sitting on top of a complex simulation engine.  Yet, I spent a bunch of hours (more than anyone would publicly admit to) learning that UI and playing the game.

So historically, when I heard customers say “We don’t want SharePoint to look like SharePoint,” I always thought to myself, “when they see in action, they’ll be perfectly happy with it.”  I have almost always – virtually every time – been wrong about that on some level.

My colleague Lauren Jones speaks to this topic here (http://www.bigapplesharepoint.com/pages/View-An-Insight.aspx?BlogID=28&stitle=splooks&rsource=pgblog).

I’m really interested in thoughts around this topic and the tension between how we “know” that SP is a good fit while overcoming look and feel issues (what I have always called “fluff” 🙂 ).

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“We Don’t Want SharePoint To Look Like SharePoint”

Leave a reply

I’ve always been a function-over-form kind of person.  I’ll take a challenging user interface over something pretty any day – provided the payout is worth it.  Consider Dwarf Fortress :).  This is pretty difficult UI sitting on top of a complex simulation engine.  Yet, I spent a bunch of hours (more than anyone would publicly admit tool learning that UI and playing the game.

So historically, when I heard customers say “We don’t want SharePoint to look like SharePoint,” I always thought to myself, “when they see in action, they’ll be perfectly happy with it.”  I have almost always – virtually every time – been wrong about that on some level.

My colleague Lauren Jones speaks to this topic here (http://www.bigapplesharepoint.com/pages/View-An-Insight.aspx?BlogID=28&stitle=splooks&rsource=pgblog).

I’m really interested in thoughts around this topic and the tension between how we “know” that SP is a good fit while overcoming look and feel issues (what I have always called “fluff” 🙂 ).

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Growing Awareness / Adoption of JavaScript Frameworks

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My colleague, Javed Ansari (http://www.bigapplesharepoint.com/team?showExpertName=Javed%20Ansari&rsource=pgblog), wrote a short summary blog post on frameworks he likes or at least has been using with with SharePoint: http://www.bigapplesharepoint.com/pages/View-An-Insight.aspx?BlogID=53&rsource=PGBlog).

jQuery seems to have been the victor on the field, so to speak, for years now, but the others are more new and stills sort of battling it, like Angular. (SPServices, of course, has been a life saver for years and will continue to be so I think).

What are people using? Are they focused more on Microsoft’s tooling (CSOM / JSOM) or moving more toward Angular, Knockout, Ember, etc?

I have a growing bias toward these non-Microsoft frameworks. I think the MSFT stuff is harder and harder to work with, requiring almost as much of learning curve as old-style server-side dev.

Post a comment here or over at Big Apple SharePoint if you want to discuss (Big Apple will have more likelihood of a good discussion).

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Spinning SharePoint Timer Jobs from Site Collection Configuration

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My colleague, Ashish Patel, wrote a blog post describing a flexible timer job architecture that affords some nice flexibility to support long-running tasks and/or reports.  In his words:

1. Analyzing Checked out files and sending reminders to the individuals if the number of days (since the file was checked out) exceed certain threshold limits

2. Removing links from other content when a particular content is removed or archived from the system

3. User wants to see all the alerts that he subscribed in all webs in the site collection

4. Sending a reminders to authors to review the content when a review time was specified in the content and that date is approaching

Well, the list goes on…

– See more at: http://www.bigapplesharepoint.com/pages/View-An-Insight.aspx?BlogID=40#sthash.7cKuiwly.dpuf

There are times in my past when having something like this would have been very helpful.

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Weekly Roundup – SharePoint, RWD, Meta Stuff & Harley

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I wrote up a quick summary of some interesting SharePoint and related news and information relevant to us in the SharePoint community. Or at least mostly relevant :).

The four articles cover SharePoint, Responsive Web Design, a meta conversation about the proliferation of programming languages and, of course – the electric motorcycle from Harley!!!

I posted it over at Big Apple SharePoint. Check it out!

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Blog Series on Continuous Integration with SharePoint

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My colleague, Robert Hiskey, has started a general purpose blog series on continuous integration with specific references to SharePoint.  If the topic interests you, you can read about it here (http://www.bigapplesharepoint.com/pages/insights.aspx?showCategory=Continuous%20Integration&rsoure=PGBlog).

The series is going to be at least 5 posts long, maybe longer :).  As of the date of publishing this entry, there are three posts.

Happy reading!

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Wicked Exciting Announcement

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Making announcements isn’t really my thing, but this time, I’m really and truly excited about the just-launched Slalom Big Apple SharePoint site. 

I work at Slalom consulting and manage the Portals & Collaboration practice.  The Big Apple site is “my” site for my practice here in New York.  I’ve long wanted one of these. I’m sure that many SP pro’s have wished for something similar.  How many times have we looked at our own company’s public site, or one of customers and seen them building it out and just knowing and wishing that they’d build it on SP?  We all know that SP is pretty good at this kind of thing, but it’s not very common. 

Well, the worlds finally aligned just right for me – SP Online is really inexpensive, I had the right team and enough time to actually do it.

It was an amazing journey to get to launch and and some of that is shared up there on the site.

Read all about it here and if you’re interested in the details behind it, I’m more than happy to talk about it.

Here is the official announcement link: http://www.bigapplesharepoint.com/pages/View-An-Insight.aspx?BlogID=82 #O365

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