Hi all.

I've recently had a crack at using the Microsoft tool SharedView - It's a competitor to The Citrix "GoTo" web apps and it's free (nice).

It has some good points (It's super easy to just share a single application, rather than an entire desktop, viewers can click on the presenters desktop to highlight areas to the presenter - good for support, it's free) and some bad points (still not as easy as gotomeeting, with it's 9 digit meeting ID and it's a bit choppy... but hey, it's free... it's also in beta).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bbdbd839-9597-4133-9b86-6d440fe9522b&DisplayLang=en

They seem to have "hidden" the app at the moment - it's supposed to be a part of the "Live" suite of products, but there's no mention of the software on Live (even in the beta section of live apps). I say, grab it while you can.

Okay, firstly - does anyone use PowerShell? If you did, what did you use before PowerShell? What's it good for? What do you not use it for? I hear and see a lot about it, but I just can't find a need to learn a new language when the old (vbScript and Batch files) does everything I need it to. However, I'm lucky to be working at a company that has the best admin power tool for SharePoint (echo for SharePoint) so this may skew my opinion.

If you do use PowerShell to manage SharePoint, this blog post from Zach Rosenfield has some really good script snippets on getting a llist of Sites and Site collections in a Farm.

I'm very interested to hear from people who have used PS scripts - I would like to hear some success stories (writing script X saved me n hours of time). If I see any on the web, I'll link to them from here. If I see enough, I might put some effort into learning how to use it :)

Cheers!

There's a set of very informative articles about ways to use workflows built in SP Designer on the Microsoft Office website. Useful for guys like me who manage all workflow from Designer :)

• Collect data from a user in a workflow
• Assign a form to a group in a workflow
• Assign a to-do item in a workflow
• Create a secondary workflow

One thing I noticed recently is that if you have a workflow that is triggered by a change to a list item, and the workflow changes the list item you can create a recursive loop. I know, "no shit sherlock" - I'm surprised that it's not built into the SP Designer workflow functionality to have some sort of switch along the lines of [ignore the "Changed item" trigger if the workflow itself changed the item]. In the end, another column and a bit flag was the answer (although the workflow still ran twice, and it's a bit of a cludge).

Ah well, that's what's nice about demos.

Jon's blog on how to do Conditional Formatting in Designer with the DataGrid view contains some excellent instructions and suggestions on how to add some usability enhancements to the data being presented from the DataGrid.

• Showing / Hiding text based on column values (Eg "Sale" next to items that have a value greater than 0 in the discount data field)
• Displaying KPI or Dashboard-style traffic lights based on how you are tracking (sales vs budget for example)

These kinds of tips are very useful when creating demos or mock-ups for clients. As I do not touch VS.NET, it's important for me to do as much as possible before calling in the dev "big guns" to customise a page (It's also better from a maintenance perspective if I'm just doing Out of the Box mods to a site).

One of the challenges when consulting on SharePoint deployments is getting a consensus or a majority decision on the Navigation and logical portal structure. Suzanne from MS has a really good blog post on a few different ways to come to an agreement for Navigation and structure that the business will adopt. I've seen the sticky notes used effectively - it seems to be the slowest, but sometimes ends up being the best because everyone is in the same room making the decision together.

I think the WebSort idea is a better one for large organisations as getting a group of in-demand people to a room at the same time of day for an hour can be challenging (especially if they do not see the value).

Microsoft has brought the connected devices world a bit closer with their Microsoft Sync Framework. The CTP was released in November and after reading through this article it does look like it will offer a lot of benefits in the future with a standardised way of synchronising data between devices (including RSS feeds, Digital Cameras and Mobiles for example). I would love it if my camera could uniquely name all of the images it downloads to the PC (eg timestamp the file name). I've just done a cleanup of my stored information and half the time I had to spend on it was renaming files so they were unique (One thing a Media Center drives home is how much of a mess your photo library really is).

I've just seen an interesting posting on Chandima's blog describing some basic maintenance tasks that need to be performed - a good "Task List" for MOSS Health checks. It covers such topics as:

• Deployment and configuration documentation
• Patch Maintenance
• Administration and the Farm Admin account
• Update Preparation & Deployment
• Backups and DR Testing
• Ongoing Maintenance process (Who's job is it to clean out the dead information?)
• Maintenance and Change windows
• Deployment Processes and Guidelines for Devs

Worth checking out especially if your organisation either uses a MOSS solution or is a MOSS Consultancy.

Deploy SharePoint and chances are you will get asked to set up icons for PDF files every time. Do it twice and you build a batch file, add it to your "Deployment Kit" and call it a day.

I had an issue at a client site where on one development server there were no icons showing up in the Search results. Not for Word, Excel or PDF. Nothing. It turned out that a second (duplicate) entry had been made in the DocIcon.xml file for PDF's - so while this was not affecting the icons associated with files in Document Libraries, the search results screen didn't like the duplicate information - and so stopped showing icons for all results (in the HTML, it showed an image tag with an empty src attribute).

Removing the duplicate tag solved the problem, but it took a little while to work out what it was so hopefully this will be useful to someone. There's a bit more about Search Results PDF Icons not appearing in this KB Article as well (although it does not mention this specific problem) - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832809/en-us?spid=11373&sid=global

Well, it's been nearly 3 months since my last post. What's happened?

• I got a Nintento Wii
• I finally got a Plasma (Ooooh, I've been living in a Standard definition, Analogue world for too long)
• I did up and sold my house, then moved closer to work (reclaiming 2 hours per day of my life back)
• I found out the small people running around the house are not midget boarders, but are my kids (now I can get to know them with all my spare time)
• I spent 2 weeks (Christmas) in Melbourne with my family and
• I set up a Media Center PC (Vista Ultimate)

Family & Technology. Spare time Leeches! But I'm back blogging and I have heaps of stuff to write up :)

First one is tonight - Docicon.xml.