Dry Spell

I took a long break from blogging. Looking Back it has been 7 months! I felt like I was on a role at the beginning of the year. No resolution, just had the time to put down what I was thinking.

I also can't help but notice it has been raining here in New England off and on for over a week. I believe I heard some weather man announce that the drought is officially over. So what better reason to end my blogging drought. They lasted almost the same length of time.

Then everything changed. On the personal side I proposed to a great woman and her two girls. Blink - instant family. Trying to sell a house. Get someone off to college. Plan a wedding. Buy a house. Oh yeah, then the other half of my life changed - work.

At work I suddenly found myself taking on the roles of at least three people. I had my old responsibilities as the Lead Application Architect. Then suddenly I owned every server in the organization. More on that later. Lastly we let the person go who as going to build out our SharePoint environment and move the organization to better collaboration (whatever that means). Yes you guessed it...I inherited that as well. At least SharePoint is not a far cry from the application space. But I not only owned the implementation but also the infrastructure. I don't know if anyone has peeked under the covers at SharePoint 2007, but it's huge.

As near as I can tell this product is made up of at least 3 other products that were glued together to make a single product. Which means they loosely fit together; they are unified but not really. Wow, what a pain to keep this thing running. I am sure that part of the complexity of our configuration is that they guy who put it together knew SharePoint really well and I don't. So he build out something that will fully support the organization for many years and growth; but only if he was here to keep in running. This is not a job for someone who does this part time!

Today it was announced that the CTO/CIO of our organization "is leaving to pursue other interests". This always sounds to me like it was clear that he was not longer welcome at the party. Whatever the reason, it won't mean more blogging. Guess that means that the one or two of you that actually read this will have to continue to live with disappointment.

;-)

Step Away From the Keyboard

My career has been undergoing a sea change lately. I am doing much less programming and more SharePoint. Not just SharePoint as a technology but applications/solutions built on SharePoint. Sure I may need a little code to pull something together, but not as much as I once was writing. Not to mention that I am being asked to take on more management responsibilities. On one hand this feels like a bit of a “promotion” on the other hand I feel myself slipping further away from the truly technical side of things. Which is kinda scary.

Up until the last year or so; I have been pretty technical. But now I find those MSDN magazines piling up on the nightstand. I just read some of my favorite programmer blogs and just scan the code. Sure I understand what and why these guys are doing, but I am not doing it myself. I used to be coming up with patterns like this myself and now I just read about them.

Being technical is a great security blanket; don’t like what your doing or where you are doing it? Just leave and go someplace better.

It does not feel like that now; things are starting to pass me by. Ouch. It’s chilly without my binky.

Since I have a lot to learn in this new role, whatever you want to call it; I will probably have to be with my current position for some time while I figure out the patterns for doing this job. Doh! What do you mean I can’t leave? I have to stay and learn this stuff no matter what? Doh! Doh!

Finally finished an entry from 2008...

Is Yukon Cornelius an Architect?

Is Google the New Microsoft?

I just got an email from Google on a new "feature" that is integrated into the gmail client; called Buzz. At first glance this looks and feels a lot like Facebook. So it got me thinking…

Is Google starting to feel like the next Microsoft? Is this path something Google is consciously trying to do or is it just a path that is inevitable?

First, a full disclosure. [I like both these company's technologies. I used to work for Microsoft and I still have a Microsoft technology bias (but I do own a MacBook). And my primary email account is my Google account and I own an Android phone. Phew, so now that I got that off my chest here is what I mean.]

There are at least four ways I have seen recently that made me want to write this blog entry...

1. Leapfrog Innovation
   


2. Purchase Innovation.
   


3. ABG (anything but Google).
   


4. All these lead to one thing...can you say Antitrust.
   

Leapfrog Innovation. I consider taking a good idea and making better - innovation. I am all for companies that can make something better than their competition; whether they came up with original idea is just an excuse the losers use. Of course if you use your size and power as a way of strong arming your friends and enemies – that's a whole other story. Certainly Microsoft had some questionable practices back in the day. My whole take on that was stop the "packaging" and just make your software kick ass.

Purchase Innovation. This is a perfectly legitimate way of larger companies using their size and power (aka capital) to buy an innovator or a market leader. One of the companies I started had as a hidden part of the business plan to get bought out. I used to talk to a number of other people who were doing similar things who would admit the same goal to me. Google is just the new guy with all the money.

ABG. This reminds me of the Anything But Microsoft movement 10 years (maybe more now). I think this just comes down to people not liking really big companies; probably because they don't trust them as much or just don't identify with them. In both cases of these company's respective histories they have been underdogs and people heralded their greatness. Then at some inflection point all that changes. There is probably more written on this than I care to read.

Antitrust. Obama's antitrust czar and the EU are looking into this. Watch out. It was the combination of the Internet bubble and the antitrust rulings against Microsoft that caused the stock to tumble where it has been for the past 8 years (or so). As fortune would have it that is also right around the time that I looked like a financial genius and cashed in my options. The truth is that I had to cash them in and resemblance of genius was actually pure coincidence.

Exchange Can Learn Something From TiVo

I am trying to book a reoccurring meeting in Exchange. This meeting happens every two weeks and needs to be in a room with a screen/projector with enough room to hold 15+ people. There are very few rooms we have access to that fit this requirement (3). And to book a meeting so far out into the future, I am bound to bump up against some collisions.

When I book the room for the next year and there is one day where there is a collision, Exchange fails the entire booking. So now what do I do? To make it worse there are 3 days that collide spread across the year. So now I have to book the room up to the first collision (because I don't want to do them one at a time) and then skip that day. Continue doing this around all the collisions and then go back and find a different room for the exceptions. Ugh. Lots of work.

Now heaven forbid that I actually invited all the attendees while doing this. I used to and their heads would be spinning by the end of this since they would see all these changes and exceptions arriving. Oh and by the way, if you want to add someone new to this whole mess - it's nearly impossible.

Enter TiVo. When I schedule a Season Pass (reoccurring recording) it tells me all the collisions and what it's going to do. But it will keep the Season Pass and just not record some showings. In fact it will go one step further to try and find a time when an episode that lost in the collision may be showing later in the week. But at least I only need to do something around the collisions/exceptions - much more friendly!

I can only hope that this has already been "fixed" in a more recent version of Exchange; I would not know since we are at least one version behind.

PowerPoint Linking to Excel Issue

When updating a link (right click Update Link) or editing a linked object (double click on the object) in PowerPoint the user receives a dialog box (shown below) stating “The linked file was unavailable and can’t be updated" . Here is a document I wrote that describes how to fix this issue. We encountered this issue in Excel 2007 sp2.

New OLEDB Provider for Reading Excel 2007

I work for a financial company that uses alot of Excel. Many of the the business users here practically live in it. So we are constantly trying to figure out how to leverage Excel in our applications.

Do we just export data to Excel? If so, then is it a snapshot/copy of the data or do we build a connection to the backend data? What about importing data? Where is the boundry between using VBA and VSTO? Then if we pile SharePoint and Excel Services on this heap it starts to get really interesting.

One of our technical frustrations has been the OLEDB driver for reading Excel on the server was fairly lame. It made alot of assumptions about the data that made it nearly unusable except in the simpliest cases. Last week I found this updated Provider for Excel 2007 and I am looking forward to giving it a deeper look. What I can say is, that it did read in all my data rather easily. I just have not had time to play around the fringes much.

Download details: 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components
href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7554F536-8C28-4598-9B72-EF94E038C891&displaylang=en