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October 28, 2009 at 3:42 pm · Filed under news
I was lucky enough to attend the SharePoint 2009 conference in Las Vegas last week. I met some great people and was thoroughly impressed with the innovation from Microsoft and from their clients alike.
On the plus side
- Great new functionality in SharePoint 2010 which I’m going to enjoy bringing to the company. Especially the social computing aspects
- Top innovation from companies, particular Electronic Arts (EA) and Accenture.
- Great people
- Organisation at the Mandalay. I think that team had it really organised. Whilst some would have seen the mealtimes as chaotic (and on day 1 it certainly was), I think they did a sterling job
- Kirk Patrick, Mandalay Bay staff. Despite Pepsi being everywhere, he was unphased by my request for a range of Coke products to be delivered within the hour to our conference room. There in 10. Brilliant.
Downsides
- Las Vegas. If you’re not a gambling person like me, it’s a thoroughly depressing town and if you are a gambler, there’s a chance you were more depressed about it than me. One colleague lost over $1000 – it’s hard to be happy for him
- Coffee. Some are addicted to caffeine. Some, like me, were 8 hours out of their timezone and needed the fix to get ‘em through. There were water stations galore, more food than needed so the lack of coffee stations seemed an oversight. (Edit – I think they noticed by Thursday judging by the coffee points near registration)
- SharePoint accessibility coding. I recognise the advances they’ve made but this is a very complex area. The recognition of standards is a genuinely positive step, but when each country appears to have their own, it seems unlikely that a single MS standard will work for all geographies. You know, great for the US, but probably not so good for the rest of the world.
I really hope that anyone who came to see me speak last Wednesday enjoyed the session and has been generous in their feedback. I’d be more than happy to answer any questions about our deployment if you have them.
I also hope that next year, SPC10 is not in Las Vegas. Seattle maybe, New York even. Either way, look forward to it.
April 28, 2009 at 10:09 am · Filed under digital life, news
Yesterday was another auspicious day for our work intranet as at 06:00 EDT, we launched the new HR portal section bringing self-service tools to our employees.
Culturally, it’s a major change. We’ve shifted from a traditional HR model (providing local HR experts aligned to functional teams) to a centralised support model with aligned self-service intranet facilities.
The intranet aspect of this launch has been an major undertaking. It has seen us switch from a simple simple SharePoint iteration to a multi-variation model to manage the various language options across our geographies (US English, US Spanish, Canadian French, Canadian English, UK English, French, Belgian French, Belgian Dutch and Dutch).
A few facts to share:
- Switch from 1 to 9 SharePoint variations
- New menus to accommodate HR content
- 2000+ pages of multi-lingual content
- 12 Integrated SAP HR transactions
- New “MyLinks” section to enable web bookmarking
- Integrated employee benefits functions
- Integrated job search functions
- New “workbench” page
- Enhanced employee profile page
This new launch is a major piece of work and a huge step change for our intranet which, up until now, has largely been a communication and collaboration vehicle. As good as that content was, our employees had no “compulsion to visit”, meaning the site was mostly for browsing rather than for action.
Bringing transactions to the portal adds that employee “compulsion to visit” which will have knock on value for the news articles and executive communications. In the long run, I hope that our employees will that the ease of information access and flexibility of use will outweigh the negatives of not having an HR expert immediately to hand — but only time will tell.
Tomorrow I’ll share some of the initial feedback 
February 15, 2009 at 4:37 pm · Filed under news
Twitter, Twitterfeed, last.fm mash
I’ve been using Twitter for over a year, but only actively for the last month or so. One thing I did recently was to have iTunes twitter my listening habits to my account which appears to have piqued some collective interest judging by the number of messages I get about it. Let me show you how.
To do this you will need: iTunes, a last.fm account with scrobbling, a Twitter account (obviously!) and an OpenID account such as Google Mail.
- Go to last.fm and set up a new account if you don’t have one. This is all free and brilliant — frankly, you need one anyway! Download the last.fm software — this will ‘listen’ to whatever you play on iTunes and scrobble it to the last.fm website.
- Next up, log in to twitterfeed.com using your OpenID. It’s likely that you already have a suitable ID for this site (complete list here). Once logged in, choose Go to my feeds or create a new one. Choose to create a new feed.
- Final Step! On the form, choose ‘twitter’ from the first dropdown list and enter your twitter details — then ask it to authenticate it. In the RSS feed URL field, enter
feed://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/XXXX/recenttracks.rss
where XXXX is your last.fm username. You can change how often you want the feed to appear on twitter on this page too. Don’t do it too often or you’ll upset your followers — once every 2 hours or so seems ok. In the ‘prefix each tweet with’, you might like to enter ‘is listening to ‘ to give your new tweet some context. Then hit the create button.
That’s it, you’re done. Your iTunes listening habits will now appear on twitter and your followers can see what you’re listening too. Great way to get more followers too — it’s remarkable how often I get comments and new followers based on this feed.
Once you’re comfortable with this process, try adding a flickr feed or a feed from your blog.
February 8, 2009 at 9:53 am · Filed under Featured, news
Watermark Project projection on Bristol building
Stumbled across this excellent project which serves to bring the subject of climate change to life.
(Note too my choice of words: Global Warming it might be for some, but others may see temperatures fall and here in Britain, it’s somewhat of an unknown which way it could fall).
So what if the ice melts eh? A few penguins cannot reproduce due to the lack of sea ice, hardly the end of the world. The reality for many of our cities is somewhat more striking in truth.
For millennia, we have been settling near seas and rivers due to the fertility of the soils, the wide availability of food and, in more recent centuries, due to the trading opportunities afforded. As a result, 1 in 10 of the world’s population lives within 30feet of sea level, two-thirds of us live within 100km of the coast.
Consider then these images of projections on buildings in my home town. Parochial certainly, but never the less striking.
Read more at watermarksproject.org
September 27, 2008 at 8:31 am · Filed under digital life, news
In hindsight, all the clues were there but I wonder how many of us would have seen the investment opportunity suggested in this early review of the Google search engine. All said, it’s hard to imagine that even Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin could imagine how their project might develop.
The article makes note of the fact that even then, Google had ambition. In 1998, they already had indexed 25million pages and were soon to up that to a massive 100million — compared to today’s 8-10 billion.
The interface came in for some criticism noting that it was in need of a facelift. Again, hindsight tells us that the simple, clean, white-focused homepage set the benchmark in usability. It’s said that the interface was so simple because Page and Brin never got round to working on it and the beta design just stuck. Tempting to believe that.
“Will Google go commercial” the founders were asked, “we’ve no objections” the future multi-billionaires responded. $1000 invested in the fledgling company back in 1998 would now be worth $250million.
Missed opportunity.
September 25, 2008 at 6:44 pm · Filed under news
After 10 years of planning, 3 years of building and countless months of expectation, they opened the Apple store today in my home town, just for me.
Surrounding my new Apple Store at Cabot Circus, the developers have helpfully built over a 100 new stores to keep other people entertained, such as Harvey Nichols, House of Fraser and other usual suspects. Honestly, they’ve done a wonderful job — it actually feels like a place I would tolerate shopping in.
But the new Church of Saint Steve Jobs is a lovely addition to my city and one that I and my bank balance may regret. Despite my not needing anything, I lust over small shiny Appley objects and I fear that shop is going to see a good few of my hard earned pounds over the next few years.
Oh dear.
[The image is of one of the 1000 t-shirts that the store gave away today. I didn't try and get there since it was during work hours and the crowds would have been stupid. When I go, I need peaceful solitude to saviour the shiney]
September 24, 2008 at 9:01 pm · Filed under news
It’s funny how memes spring up. My brother and I were chewing the cud on lightheaded frippery when he sent me a link to a website called graphjam.com. And then, just hours later, I stumbled (or was pushed towards) a facebook called entitled “Pop songs are best represented by graphs”. A picture tells a thousand words but a graph does seem to capture the essence of many a song — some truly brilliant work in here, wonderful creativity and humour.
I’ve added a couple of my own graphs too – sorry internet.
September 13, 2008 at 10:39 pm · Filed under news
We’ve just arrived on the Isle of Mull for a week of Hebridean rest, but given where we are on the project at work, I’ll not be able to wind down completely and avoid the beck and call of conference calls and emails.
It’s very lovely to be back again — I lose count of the number of weeks I’ve spent here and I’m reminded just how beautiful this country really is. I’m sure that beauty is is due to the quality of light here. From where I sit, with the island’s largest town a mile away, there is very little light pollution and the stars are incredibly bright. The moonrise tonight was spectacular.
Two small projecst to complete this week : Become Patrick Bossert and learn how to complete the Rubik’s Cube (I’ve had 23 years to learn and I feel somewhat lazy). The other is to practice some long exposure photos of running water to see if I can’t get that smooth, silky look. Watch out for examples soon!
Impossibly, it’s also 5 years today since my Mum died. She’s greatly missed.
September 9, 2008 at 11:39 am · Filed under news
I used to have a boss who’s voicemail message read “If you’ve got a problem, or indeed an opportunity, please leave your details after the tone”. I guess it goes without saying that he really wasn’t too interested in the problems, but that’s what comes with sales roles.
What I do find though is that there are people who’d rather focus on what the problem is rather than look for the solution. Some seem to revel in it and it just pains me to see valuable time and energy put into exhaustive postmortems. We’d all like to figure out what went wrong — but how’s about we do that once we’ve solved the immediate issue eh?
It comes down to personal responsibility. Some people are happy to point the finger and make accusations of failed communications and broken processes. Take responsibility. Fix it. Life is much less stressful.
September 7, 2008 at 6:01 pm · Filed under news
If you regularly upload photos to Flickr like I do (and you have a pro account), take a look at your photo stats. It’s fascinating!
Predictably, the most popular of my photos are of my daughter as friends and family rushed to take a look at the wee bundle of joy. However, the most popular non-Clara picture is this one of ‘Nipper’, the HMV/RCA dog statue in Bristol, viewed over 100 times this year.
However, in breaking news, I’m delighted to say that one of my photos has been chosen for a calendar of Bristol which means that I’m a professional photographer! And yes, you betcha, ‘course it’s going to be added to my CV!
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