Intelligence Among Us

In researching an blog post regarding folksonomies vs taxonomies I started doing some research on the semantic web and players that are currently in that space right now.  I came across OpenCalais and their tagaroo plug in for WordPress.   In a nutshell, the plugin conects to the OpenCalais service in near real time and returns suggestions for relevant meta-data tags as well as providing the ability to search Flickr, based on those tags and insert them into your post.

See the screen capture below to see what suggestions were offered as a result of the content of the first paragraph.

Watch what is returned when I type the following: Jason MacKenzie was promoted to President of the United States:

OpenCalais not only recognized the tags for President, United States etc. but also recognized this is likely related to an employment change.

Simple to install and simple to use.  The only caveat is that you need to get an API key which you then add to the configuration screen for the plugin.  This process takes no more than a few minutes.

The corporate implications for this are staggering and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how this develops.

When creating a new Page Layout for a MOSS 2007 publishing site recently I stumbled across an interesting phenomenon that I thought I would share in with the intention of saving others some grief.

This thread will preface a more in depth analysis of the MOSS 2007 Publishing Infrastructure which will be coming in the near future.  Back to the issue at hand….

I created a new page layout in SharePoint Designer with the intention of using it as the Welcome page for my site.   As I was configuring the web parts on the page through the SharePoint UI, I made a slight modification to the page layout and saved it.  I refreshed the page in the browser and all the web parts that I had placed on the page had disappeared.   Perplexed (which is my typical state of mind), I took at look at the web part maintenance page (~URL/page.aspx?contents=1)  and discovered that all the web parts were present on the page but were not in use.  Placing the page in edit mode indicated that there were no web parts on the page.  I deleted the web parts from the web parts maintenance page.

When readding the web parts and publishing the page I asked the user to log in to verify the page was inline with her expectations and she reported the following error which I was not receiving. 

To make a long story longer it turned out the issue was in fact that I had not identified the id property of the web part zones in SP Designer.  SP Designer assigned an id to them as indicated in the image below. 

I believe what was happening is that the id’s were being recreated when saving the page thereby resulting in the web parts being assigned to zones that no longer “existed”.  The solution turned out to be as simple as creating a new page layout and assigning a distinct id’s for each.

I’m not sure why I find it so difficult to keep this up to date on a timely bases.

July 20 – Run 7k
July 21 – 15 minutes of interval training on the treadmill.  Started to feel a tightness in my right quad so I stopped.
July 22 – pushups 42, 30, 25

July 24 – 20 minutes of Hammer strength preacher curls with 2 45 lb plates for sets of 7.  20 minutes of dumbbell curls with the 45 lb dumbbells for sets of 7

July 26 – 100 pushups in 5 minutes.  This was mainly to assuage the guilt of not working out very hard last week.

July 27th – Work up at 4 am and did 100 pushups at about 4:30.  Went to the gym for 6:45 am. Workout consisted of: 

Hammer Strength dips: 4X45lb plates for sets of 8-9 reps
Overhead extensions for 10 minutes
100 pushups – these really sucked as my triceps were already pretty cooked.
I’m going for a 7k run at lunch.  I’ve really got to start running further in order to get ready for the half marathon in September.  Just not today

You are under the gun and need to get information published about your 40+ operational units before your SharePoint rebranding goes live. You need the same information about every unit, which in this case is their Expertise, Services and Equipment. You wipe the sweat off your brow, or elsewhere, but we won’t get into that. You consider the options and decide that you are going to either create a new page layout or simply create a site and save it as a template and recreate the rest from it. Since you have the content you need you decide that you are simply going to use the Content Editor Web Part to display it. It works and you are golden.

The portal is relaunched and people browse around the new content – once. Your boss asks you, “This information is great. What can we do with it?” Your response of, “Not a hell of a lot” is not well received.  You leave early and drink yourself to sleep.

Let me suggest an alternative approach. Since each operational unit has a site and those sites all reside in the same site collection, content types and the Content Query web part are an excellent solution that can acheive the same presentation requirements while providing the ability to centrally manage the information and use it more effectively.

In this case we can create 3 content types (Equipment, Expertise, Service) that correspond with the information we need to capture.  We’ll keep the default Title field and add another for Operational Unit Name.

At this point you can create a list and associate those content types to it.  Click here for a detailed explanation of content types.

 
We’ll add an entry for each content type for our fictitious Operational Unit 1.

We are now in a position to be able to create the site, page or whatever is required for our new Operational Unit.  Keep in mind that in order to use the Content Query web part the SharePoint publishing infrastructure must be enabled by activating the feature.

Once the site is created we can drag add 3 Content Query web parts to the page.  We need to use three in this case to achieve the standards set for the presentation/look and feel.  For the purposes of this blog I’ll add 1. 

You can see here that we are able specify the content type we want to display and we are able to filter the results to show only those items that are associated with Operational Unit 1.

The Content Query web part provides rich opportunities to customize the look and feel of the results by changing the XSL stylesheets in the style library.  That’s definitely a topic for another post but suffice it to say you have a lot of options to make it look purdy.

Workflows can be associated with the content types we have created and of course the regular SharePoint permissions apply to our Master Overview list so that we can delegate responsiblity for managing the Services, Expertise and Equipment to a key person at each operational unit if desired.

We also now have the ability to look at that master list and use it for our advantage.  If someone wants to see all divisions that are experts in a specific kind of stamping we can.  If we add more metadata such as Region we can obviously get more granular in how we look at the information.  We could then use this master list to start to associate specific people with areas of expertise to further enable people to find the people that can help them more quickly.

In conclusion, I have attempted to show you a different way of using some of the out of the box features of SharePoint to achieve your presentation requirements while giving you the ability to centrally manage key data and use it for a broader suite of business purposes.

We are currently looking at ways of optimizing the performance of our SharePoint implemention and I learned something very simple about Web Parts that I did not know.   We have had users that when removing Web Parts from our pages are placing the page in Edit mode and “removing” the unwanted web parts by the method shown below:

This has been going on for some time.  Navigating to the Web Parts maintenance page (easily accessible by appending “?contents=1″ at the end of URL of the page in question) shows the following!

The Web Parts are still considered as being on the page but you simply can’t view them.  These means that additional resources are being used render and download the page.  In fact this same situation will occur if you use the Close option as shown in the screen shot below.

The proper way to remove Web Parts from the page is to use the Delete option.  Simple. 

A more eloquently written post I stumbled across can be found here: http://gvaro.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B06529FD3FC75473!379.entry

As you may know I have 2 young girls.  5.5 years old and 4.  As a parent sharing custody of my kids I wanted to share what I have learned about being a dad to girls.

1. Never, under any circumstances, say a bad word about their mom in front of them.
2. Learn to do ponytails and braids (the braids things is a work in progress for me).
3. Let them paint your fingernails and paint theirs.  When they come and ask you to paint their nails as you’re leaving for work – take the 5 minutes and do it.  They’ll remember.
4. Play dress up
5. Be silly
6. If they are upset or tired and want their mommy, don’t ever take it personally.  It doesn’t mean they don’t want you.  They want both of you.
7. Don’t get upset and threaten them with things you will never follow through on.   Outline realistic consequences and stick to them.
8. When they do something wrong,  get down to their level and look them in the eyes when you are explaining why it was wrong
9. Mean what you say.
10. Be consistent and fair – this can be tough sometimes.
11. Don’t make a big deal if they want to wear ridiculous looking clothes to school.  It lets them express themselves and what difference does it really make in the big picture?
12. Praise them always when they try their best.
13. Explain to them that if they can’t do something as well as they want getting upset about it won’t help.  Practicing will.  Some people are better than others at things but the only way they can be the best they can be is too work hard.
14. If it’s not about something dangerous I don’t want to hear tattling.   Explaining to a 5 year old that she needs to influence her sister and create a win-win is a tough sell but it will make sense to them one day.
15. Build forts in the living room out of mattresses.
16. Encourage them to talk to you about anything and everything
17. If you don’t have a pool take them swimming at the community center
18. Tell them lots of stories where they are the superhero princesses and daddy is the goofball.
19. Dance with them a lot.
20. Take them to see their grandparents a lot.  It’s such an important relationship.
21. Let them sleep in your bed sometimes (only sometimes).  Despite the fact that they flop all over and drive you crazy.  Remember what it was like when you were a kid and got to do that.
22. Don’t yell at them.  If you do get upset and yell or overreact…cool down and acknowledge that you make mistakes too.
23. Be affectionate and tell them that you love them lots every day.

Consider the following situation that many people, teams and businesses find themselves in.   You have a large set of related documents in which critical business decisions are made.   You have no processes in place to deal with capture, approval, disposition etc.  You are using a windows file share to manage these documents with which results in issues with security, versioning, finding the one version of the truth, searching and all the associated problems that go along with this semi-structured approach.

SharePoint provides excellent functionality out of the box to deal with these types of situations.  The question you need to ask yourself is how can I deliver the value the most quickly in the context of the current situation. 

I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about Content Types in SharePoint as they are not germane to the specific scenario I will talking about in this article.  An overview of content types can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms472236.aspx.  Suffice it to say that a content types allow you to specifiy the metadata and behaviours of content in a reusable way across your site collection.  They also provide the power to truly bring your enterprise search alive.

The situation I was presented with last week was the following:  Our team that is responsible for global contracts and services currently manages the Global Contracts documents in SharePoint (in a list) and “manages” the supporting Service related documentation in a Windows file share.  There is a two way 1-n relationship between Global Contracts and Services.  So in other words, there may be one or many Services related to a Global Contract as well as one or many Global Contracts related to a service.   There are none of the processes I briefly covered in the first paragraph defined and there is also very little in the way of standards templates and standard document sets that are associated with a service.  There is also a fairly complex folder structure used to manage these documents which is resulting in a lack of clarity about where to put what which ends up with multiple versions of the same document being stored.

Querying the user about what they need indicated the following initial requirements:

1. We need to be able to simplify the storage of these documents so there are less chances to make mistakes
2. Organize documents by Service
3. Categorize and view documents by document type
4. Categorize and view documents by vendor
5. Be able to see what global contracts are related to a service that we are working on.
6. I need to be able to work on drafts and publish the final version

Clearly, this team is not at the point of even considering the more sophisticated options that SharePoint brings to the table. I thought back to a simple but effective technique demonstrated on a webcast by Dux Sy last month: http://sp.meetdux.com/archive/2009/05/15/how-to-emulate-network-shares-in-a-sharepoint-document-library.aspx

Here’s what we did:

1. Firstly we created a few lists that will be shared between the Global Contracts and Services libraries.  One was to store a central list of services and the other was to store a list of Vendors.   Keep in mind that this data could be exposed from an LOB through the BDC however they are not licensed for Enterprise and regardless there is no back end system that houses this data anyway.

2. We then created a document library called Services that had the following columns:   Service Name (lookup from the Service List), Vendor Name (lookup from the Vendor list with the option of selecting multiple options) and Document Type (choice which included Form, Proposal, Financial Analysis, Misc. etc.).

3. We then added a lookup column to the Global Contracts list that will allow selecting multiple values from the Service Name list.

4. We created a Web Part Page that will show both the Services and Global Contracts lists categorized by by Service to allow for easy reference between the two.

5. Turned Major and Minor versioning on for the Services list to allow for the publishing of Major versions.

That’s about it.  I’ll include some screen shots when I have the time but I want to summarize the immediate benefits that this brings to them. 

1. There is only one “folder” to drop documents into which eliminates the current confusion.
2. Using metadata instead of a folder structure to categorize content gives much more flexibility to view/filter/group sets of documents that you want.  Show me all the Forms where the vendor is SAP.  Show me all the services where IBM is a member etc.
3. The content is indexed by SharePoint so searching is much quicker.
4. Security is much easier to manage through the SharePoint UI
5. Allow for the management of versions.
6. Instead of getting too worked up about categorizing every type of document create an option for Miscellaneous or Uncategorized in the Document Type column.  This will allow the customer to easily see which documents need to be categorized over time and as they work through their processes in more detail.

This is step one of what will hopefully be a concerted effort of defining the appropriate business processes, building document templates  and further understanding what types of metadata are required.  But it helps them with their immediate problem and also keeps it very simple.  Since I am not a complex thinker, keeping it simple is what I do best

July 15

20 minutes of Hammer Strength dips with 4 45 pound plates for sets of 8.

20 minutes of overhead tricep extensions

5 sets of pushups

July 16

Today will be 30 minutes of biceps and then a 1 hour spin class.  I will post later about the specifics.

Overall I have been eating much cleaner this week and am down a few pounds.  I’m currently sitting at 180 pounds.  I’m not sure what my ideal weight is with the amount of muscle that I currently have but I’m thinking closer to 170 would be better.  I haven’t actually been below 175 in years so we’ll see how things go.  I don’t want to work towards a specific number.  I want to be as fit, strong and healthy as possible and not look like a slob.

Well I’m slacking off again.

July 11 – 584 pushups in 45minutes.  I use the perfect pushup handles.  This was an improvement of 30 over the last time.  I did 50 sets total.  And for all the haters out there these are full pushups

July 12 – saw a picture of myself at the beach and realized I am a fat slob.  While it was disappointing it was necessary.

July 13 – Ran 7k.  I didn’t time myself but the pace feels really good.

July 14 – 1 hour spin class at the gym.  Weights tomorrow.

I went for a 7km walk with my Dad yesterday which was nice.

Today I was at the gym for about 7:30.  I began to do some triceps but they are still killing me from all those pushups the other day.  Interestingly my lats are very sore too. 

I did 25 minutes of Hammer Preacher curls.  95-70-45 drop sets. 

Then about 5 minutes of dumbbell curls with the 45s. 

6 sets of pushups.

I just got back now from a 6k run.  It’s way too hot to be running.