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Ron Charity

~ Enterprise Collaboration, Office 365, Business Intelligence, Mobility, Social and Document Management

Ron Charity

Monthly Archives: October 2006

Common Vocabularies or Communities of Practice – Artifacts and Meta Data

25 Wednesday Oct 2006

Posted by Ron Charity in Concepts

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For a recent client presentation, we discussed at length issues the client had with their search engine and poor performance reported by their users. Essentially, users were not able to find the information they required quickly – within the first 3 page results.
 
The problem specifics are:
  • The search engine would respond with several pages – usually to many
  • Users are not able to spot the item they want – encryptic titles and subjects appear in the results
Sound familiar? To help me understand the sort of work they’ve performed to design and enforce the search functions, I asked a few questions such as:
  • Do you have a common vocabulary? Information Architecture? Sort of the same thing?
  • Do you enforce the common vocabulary through training, mandatory fields etc…?
  • Do you monitor search queries and work to improve Meta data tagging?
  • Do you use synonyms to address variations in vocabulary?

In most cases the answers were no. With clients such as this I generally walk them through a process whereby they learn why their search engine isn’t performing – from a user perspective.

Typically I define what a common vocabulary is – the organizations lingo. For example, every profession has a common vocabulary such as doctors, consultants which are profession based lingo and there are company based lingo – speech community or Jargon as WikiPedia defines it.

For example, what does Oncology refer to? Pediatrics? If you’re a physician you know exactly what that means.

Historically, common vocabularies have been addressed by using taxonomies and various tagging exercises. Experts in this space have argued that taxonomies are difficult to design and maintain. I equate taxonomies to boiling the ocean – something that is almost impossible to do. Case and point, a customer of mine was designing and deploying a portal. The portal was built and deployed…eight months later they still didn’t have a taxonomy. What they did have is what appeared to be communities of practice and the typical company marketing and communications. This leads to my next point on defining communities of practice.

Defining communities is a much easier approach to developing an information architecture. Typically communities centered around areas of practice, organizational functions and interests such as sports and hobbies. For example, a company might have communities such as SharePoint Technologies, Marketing and Mountain Biking.

Once communities are defined, you then determine what information is required such as links, artifacts (documents, images etc…), discussion topics etc… Once you have the artifacts defined you then use the Dublin Core Meta Data standard plus your own companies Jargon to label and tag the artifacts.

To round out the approach you develop test cases to determine how efficient your tagging system is by rating how quickly users can find data. Finnally, ongoing refinement using test cases, usage reports, user training and awareness and client feedback really helps to refine the search engines performance.

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Exchange Server documentation updates

23 Monday Oct 2006

Posted by Ron Charity in SharePoint

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The Exchange Teams Blog has posted its monthly updates to documentation. The list of updates can be found on their Blog site at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/10/04/429083.aspx.

Office 12 Roadshow Tampa – Day 2

23 Monday Oct 2006

Posted by Ron Charity in Stuff...

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Today we coverved SharePoint Portal Server 2007 (MOSS) – many topics were covered in varying degrees of depth.
 
The agenda for the day was as follows:
  • Morning:
    • SharePoint functional and architectural overview
    • Enterprise Content Management
    • Organizing and finding resources
      • Labs:
      • Using content types
      • Records management
      • Creating Web Sites
      • Creating Web pages
      • Using Content variabtions
      • Managing Portals
      • Audience targeting
      • Personal sites
      • Colleagues Web Part
      • Mabnaging Search
  • Afternoon:
    • Business solution
    • Exchnage server overview
    • Labs:
    • Business Data catalogue
    • Excel Server
    • Forms Server
    • Report Center

Overall a good course for beginners.

Office 12 Roadshop Tampa – Day 1

19 Thursday Oct 2006

Posted by Ron Charity in Stuff...

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Today I’m in Tampa for the Office 12 Roadshow being held at the Crowne Plaza in Tampa East.
 
The setup for the training was impressive, they shipped Sony laptops in crates pre-configured with VPCs – great idea for a portable classroom. Overall the content was good from an introduction perspective, I would recommend this for people that haven’t worked with the Beta products for vary long. 
 
My goals for the training were to get a sense of what questions clients had, go through a O12 training course and obtain sample material. These goals will help me with my own course development for my company though I plan on taking a different approach – the course will be pre-sales and build focused.
 
The agenda for the day was as follows:
  • Morning:
    • Overview of the 2007 Office Components
    • Key innovations in Word and Excel
    • Key innovations in PowerPoint and Outlook
    • Key innovations in Access and InfoPath
    • Labs for Outlook, Word, Access, Excel, InfoPath
  • Afternoon:
    • Key  innovations in WSS
    • Labs for creating and managing sites, document management, workflow, collaboration, Excel Services, Email Integration, Discussions and Surveys

What do rock stars do on the weekend?

15 Sunday Oct 2006

Posted by Ron Charity in Entertainment

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I often wonder what wound have happended if I pursued guitars as agressively as I did consulting. Would I be having parties like EVH? Or would I be working at a shoe store like Al Bundy!
 
Having visited the Van Halen news desk site recently I came across some interesting photos of Ed and his party back in September of 2006. Though his band seems to be on the back burner, he sure appears to be having fun…probably more fun than working with SharePoint.
 
  • Eds Party
  • Playing guitar
  • Playing pool
  • Eds house
  • Eds stuff

Since completing their tour in 2004, VH hasnt released an album, Sammy doesnt get along with Eddie, Dave is crazy according to Sammy. To bad…they should get together for one last tour – that would be worth seeing.

Moss 2007 Excel Service overview

12 Thursday Oct 2006

Posted by Ron Charity in Architecture

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What is Excel Services? It provides a server side Excel spreadsheet calculation and rendering service for spreadsheets stored within a Document Library. Using a browser, users can view Spreadsheets and manipulate data.
The following steps were taken from Ted Pattisons Webinar “Getting up and running with Excel Services” available from MSDN.
Create a site
Here you’ll create a basic site that will contain your document library.
  • Central Admin
  • Under application mgmt chose, Create Site Collection
  • Enter a site name
  • Enter your Admin ID as the site administrator
  • Choose a Blank team site
  • When done click the URL to the site
Create a document library
Here you’ll create your Document Library that will use an Excel template as a default.
  • Under site actions, select create
  • Create a new document library
  • Provide a name Spreadsheets
Service activation
Here you will activate the Excel Calculation Service – which I believe is enabled by default.
  • From Central Admin
  • Go to operations
  • Services on this server
  • Make sure Excel Services is started
Trusted File locations
Here you’ll set your Document Library as a trusted location for Excel Services – this is optional.
  • Under Site Admin
  • Add the URL to the Document Library you created.
  • Accept the remaining default settings.
Create and publish a spreadsheet
Here you’ll create and publish a spreadsheet that is Excel Services aware.
  • Open excel
  • Create spreadsheet
    Create the following workbooks; Calc, Sales, Secret
  • For Calc, create:
    • Loan (100,000) – format as $
    • Rate (.075) – format as %
    • Years (30)
    • Payment (formula =abs(pmt(rate/12,years*12,loan)))
  • Name the ranges Loan, Rate, Years
  • For Sales, create entries for sales, east, south, west and North
  • Enter values
  • Create a Pie Chart – accept defaults
  • For Secret, add some secret text you don’t want users to see
  • Select Publish to Excel Services
  • Select Excel Services options button
  • Select Show Sheets tab
  • Deselect Secret workbook
  • Select Parameters tab, select Add
  • Select Loan, Rate and Years (Name ranges)
  • Save to the Document library
View the spreadsheet
Here you’ll view your completed spreadsheet in a browser.
  • Open a browser
  • Browse to the site and the document library
  • Open the spreadsheet

Done!

How to listen to your customer

01 Sunday Oct 2006

Posted by Ron Charity in Concepts

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Here are four easy lessons to improve your listening abilities.

  • Lesson 1 – The two biggest impediments to listening are:
    • You often have an opinion before you begin listening.
    • You have often made up your mind before you begin listening.
  • Lesson 2 – The two most important rules of listening:
    • First, listen with the intent to understand.
    • Second, listen with the intent to respond.
  • Lesson 3 – Think about the way you listen right now:
    • Are you doing something else when someone is speaking?
    • Do you have your mind on something else when someone else someone is speaking?
    • Do you fake listening so that you can get in your comments?
    • Are you waiting for a pause to get in your response, because you already know the answer?
  • Lesson 4 – At some point you stop listening. When does this occur?
    • After you have formulated your response.
    • After you have been turned off by the speaker.
    • When you decide to interrupt someone to say something.
    • When the person speaking isnt saying anything you want to hear.
Some useful guidelines:
  • Don’t interrupt
  • Ask questions – then be quiet
  • Use eye contact
  • Listen without judging
  • Be a sponge – absorb!
  • Have someone else take notes while you ask the questions

Moss 2007 bloggers

01 Sunday Oct 2006

Posted by Ron Charity in Stuff...

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Here is a list of bloggers of this postings date (A work in progress):
 
  • http://www.sharepointblogs.com/tbaginski/
  • http://williamcornwill.blogspot.com/
  • http://www.whitworth.org/Blog/default.aspx
  • http://www.wssdemo.com/blog/default.aspx
  • http://gilbane.com/blog/
  • http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/default.aspx
  • http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/
  • http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/default.aspx
  • http://blog.funknstyle.com/
  • http://blogs.metrostarsystems.com/JorgeVasquez/default.aspx
  • http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/
  • http://integralpath.blogs.com/thinkingoutloud/moss/index.html
  • http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/default.aspx

Moss 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh Process

01 Sunday Oct 2006

Posted by Ron Charity in Stuff...

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This refresh process blog was written by Amanda Murphy – very well written and includes screen shots.
 
Did you follow the steps and get errors? So have many others http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=749571&SiteID=17. What complicates matters is MS VPC (Especially if you used NewSid – see Steve Clarkes WebBlog – Don’t Use NewSID!) and joining the server to a Domain.
 
The fix to date is to start from scratch (Tried SysPrep and didnt work)…put on a pot of coffee and rebuild your server. Use a straight forward PC running Windows 2003 SP1 running alone – not part of a domain. My end configuration is a DC with 250mb and a Moss 2007 server with 1gb or RAM (VPCs).

Interesting Things

  • Axis
  • Capital Grill
  • Cascade
  • CN Roundhouse Park
  • Coopers
  • Creemore
  • Databreach Today
  • Duesenberg Guitars
  • EVH Gear
  • Fender
  • Garden State Plaza
  • Gibson Les Paul
  • Hatha Yoga
  • Hofbraeu Haus
  • House of Blues West Hollywood
  • James Squire
  • London Pride
  • Marshall
  • MXR
  • Old Speckled Hen
  • Paulaner
  • Peavey
  • Pyramid Brewery
  • Rathaus-Glockenspiel
  • Rickenbacker
  • Saddle Ranch Chop House
  • Ship Inn Sydney
  • Steam whistle
  • Stratocaster
  • Superbird
  • TC Electronics
  • The Whiskey
  • Tim Tams
  • Trulucks
  • VOX
  • Warsteiner
  • Wolfgang
  • Yoga Montclair

Places I've Worked

  • Annapolis
  • Arlington
  • Atlanta
  • Bellevue
  • Boblingen
  • Boston
  • Bracknell
  • Bridgewater
  • Burbank
  • Calgary
  • Canberra
  • Cape May
  • Charlotte
  • Cincinnatti
  • Clearwater
  • Düsseldorf
  • Denton
  • Denver
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  • Detroit
  • Edmonton
  • Englischer Garten
  • Frankfurt
  • Fredericton
  • Harrisburg
  • Houston
  • Jersey City
  • Las Vegas
  • London Ontario
  • London UK
  • Los Angeles
  • Mandalay Bay
  • Manhattan
  • Manly Beach
  • Mechanicsburg
  • Memphis
  • Miami
  • Montreal
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  • Munich
  • Naples
  • New Brunswick NJ
  • Newburgh
  • Orlando
  • Ottawa
  • Phoenix
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  • Reston
  • Royal Botanic Gardens
  • Sacramento
  • San Francisco
  • San Jose
  • San Ramon
  • Sarasota
  • Scottsdale
  • Scranton
  • Seattle
  • Ship Inn Wokingham
  • Stuttgart
  • Sunset Strip
  • Sydney
  • Tampa
  • Tübingen
  • The Palazzo
  • The Riot House
  • The Rocks
  • Timmins
  • Universal Studios Hollywood
  • Vancouver
  • Washington DC
  • Weyburn Saskatchewan
  • Whistler
  • Windsor
  • Winnipeg
  • Wokingham

Stuff...

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