All Things Dork

May. 28, 2010 | Category Misc

The title says it all. I can’t believe it took me so long to find this site, but today I was doing a little Internet search on some creative smiley faces I could use in a text message. While the standard :-) is by far the most popular I was looking for a little more creativity. In my quest for new emoticons I found this fabulous site with the tag line Musings on all things life, gaming, movies, and being a nerd. While I have prided myself on being a geek, and and expressly denounced my nerd factor, sometimes you just have to accept things as they truly are and embrace your inner nerd (yes I know for some of you the inner nerd is more outer nerd). I hope you find some enjoyment from the community.

For my own personal reference:

emoticons.jpg

So Much SharePoint, So Little Time

May. 20, 2010 | Category SharePoint

With the vast amount of information available on the Internet these days, it can be head spinning to try and find useful information in a timely fashion. One of my challenges is having a problem right now and needing a solution - but having to sift through the Internet like a gold miner in the 1800’s trying to find gold and coming up empty handed. There was a great poll on one of the SharePoint forums this week asking people which SharePoint Web sites they liked the most for finding solutions to problems. Here’s what they came up with.

  1. SharePoint Products and Technologies on MSDN (TechNet)
  2. SharePoint Overflow
  3. Experts Exchange
  4. SharePoint Web Services Forum on Codeplex
  5. SharePoint Products and Technologies on Yahoo
  6. SharePoint Experts on LinkedIn
  7. SPoint Forums

You Were Right, but It Didn’t Matter

May. 19, 2010 | Category Misc

It is not very often that I am compelled to pass on information that is not of a technical nature. As most of you are aware, techie-stuff is just more fun from my perspective. But on occasion there is an article that comes across my email that I not only enjoy and learn from, but have the desire to share with the masses. It is my small contribution that perhaps we can all learn something and better ourselves in some way. People skills, just like computer skills, get better with practice.

I’ve provided a link to the article with the synopsis here. Just the title of this article alone was enough to grab my attention, “You Were Right, but it Didn’t Matter: 12 Ideas for Arguing your point effectively“. Enjoy.

  1. Realize that a dialogue should not be about you, the opponent, the turf, or the superiority but about making the right decision. Accept the fact that you just might be wrong and treat the opposition with respect.
  2. There are two parts to every argument: A position and a bunch of points that support it. Always separate them and be clear on them both. “I support solution A. The reasons for my recommendation are as follows.” On the flip side, learn to identify and separate these two parts in your opponent’s argument. If you can’t do so reliably, ask for clarification.
  3. Never accept an argument that you don’t understand. Ask for clarification.

Read the full article here.

SharePoint Setup and Administration Basics - Online Learning

May. 11, 2010 | Category Misc

After many months of recording, living through weeks of laryngitis, squeezing in 20 minutes at a time, we’ve finally published the SharePoint Administration training video series.

SharePoint is a very large technology that is really broken down into two separate administrators, the Server Administrator and the Site Collection Administrator. This video series covers the planning, installation, and configuration of SharePoint. Sharee will walk you through the installation choices and provide best practices on how to install SharePoint in various environments. She will show you how configure your farm for basic needs and dive into the Central Administration application in full detail. Finally she will wrap up with configuration of the Shared Services Provider. You will be able to get a “sandbox” SharePoint server environment up and running after completing this video series. Note: this series does not cover the installation of the SharePoint prerequisites such as SQL Server or the .NET environment.

You can check it out at LearningSpot.com.

Upcoming Blogs

Mar. 14, 2010 | Category SharePoint

So, thanks to a good friend, and subscriber of my blog, I received a late night text asking why my blog had no cotent. If you happened to see the blog on March 12 on SharePoint Popups, that blog was not intended to publish.

This past week I taught an awesome class in Seattle and had a very diverse group of students. I have to say it was one of the best classes I’ve taught in a long time, simply due to this student diversity. I had several students who had used SharePoint for 2+ years, some who were relatively new to SharePoint, and a few who had never seen the technology what-so-ever. What I enjoyed about the class were the types of questions and the way in which the students were looking to solve real world problems.

Due to all of the questions I came up with about a dozen blogs I cannot wait to get to. So what I had done was create the blog titles and not add any content. Hence a blog accidentally published with no content. But, not to worry. As soon as I have a few minutes I am writing the following blogs.

SharePoint Popups
SharePoint Cheat Sheet

What Can Excel Services Do (and Not Do)
Connecting SharePoint to Word
Top 10 SharePoint List Tweaks
The Publishing Feature of SharePoint
Serious SharePoint Implementation Mistakes
Help Desk Case Study
Content Query Web Part
SharePoint Productivity Hub
InfoPath Training Labs
Sharee’s Favorite Links