collaborativity |

Recovery.gov

Recovery.org  was very recently re-developed on SharePoint and is another good example of how different branding approaches, functionality and integration can be applied to SharePoint sites.

Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official website providing easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending and allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse.

The impetus for the move to MOSS was:
- Users were not able to follow the recovery funds from beginning to end as the Obama administration had envisioned — and promised.
- Nor could site administrators use the site to handle the approval process needed to collect, sort and display spending data being collected from recipients of the funds.
- As a result, the site became a target and verbal punching bag for watchdogs, open government advocates and lawmakers who were underwhelmed with the content and capability of Recovery.gov.

I don’t see this as any shortcomings with Drupal, as an enterprise technology MOSS is designed to peer into a multitude of databases and surface data to the web, Drupal is fantastic and in many cases Gartner regards it as a leader in social web technologies.

The following article details the reasons behind the movement away from the  open source platform Drupal to SharePoint:

Recovery.gov revamped with an unexpected helper - SharePoint
 
Word from the SharePoint 2010 conference in Vegas as that it took approximately 9 weeks to develop, which is a very good effort. Run through validation it brings up a number of errors, which means it’s having a bit of trouble meeting web standards compliancy, but good effort all round.

I am super stoked that SharePoint 2010 has related lists, I got to try this functionality out just before I left London in September with my previous company Content and Code Ltd, (if you’re in UK and EMEA and you need SharePoint work done, the team there are fantastic, tell them I sent you) I managed to build a SCRUM Backlog site with all the relevant lists looking up each other and displaying their related child items in less than a lunch hour, I can’t wait to see this in action in the real world and to see how this will transform information management within organisations.

There’s a big hole in SharePoint 2007 when it comes to Parent Child lists relationships, I won’t go into why this is and what it all means as there’s lots of articles about it online but I will plonk down a few links that I gathered together that walk through in very good detail how to get Parent Child relationships working in MOSS, hat’s off to the authors for taking the time to put these together.

Mark Rackley’s 3 posts on Endusersharepoint.com – well written and followed up by Mark, nice work mate.

Creating a SharePoint list parent child relationship out of the box

Setting SharePoint form fields using query string variables without using javascript

Passing multiple query string varibles using SharePoint Designer – follow up to the above article

Greg Chan, Program Manager in the SharePoint Designer team put together a very good post and has the big little workaround where the filter doesn’t quite work and you need to add ‘LookupId=’TRUE’ into the mix, tricky to fix, watch out for case sensitivity issues which is where I got caught out a couple of times:

Building a SharePoint Designer mashup

Hope these resources help those out there that won’t be seeing 2010 for a while yet.

Happy relationship building.

In the SCRUM approach to Agile development we use ‘User Stories’ to capture client requirements . A User Story is a simple statement about what a user wants to do with a feature of the system. Stories are  written from a user’s perspective avoiding technical jargon or specific design goals and are written in business language that is understandable to all.  Simple as it sounds there’s a lot of consideration that goes into user stories , including the exploration and identifcation of constraints.

What is a constraint?

A constraint is something that is usually to be obeyed rather than directly implemented when developing a solution and can relate to a specific user story or be system wide in scope. As a consultant who helps clients formulate their user stories I often find that the term constraint can be perceived as having negative connotations.  I’ve found that if a client doesn’t understand the term ‘constraint’ in the context of user stories then they can easily misinterpret constraint’s as an attempt to limit or reign in what is to be delivered.  On the contrary constraints are intended to set boundaries within which we are free, empowered and challenged to innovate.

Very early on I take the time to help clients understand what the term constraint is and how rather than negative they can be viewed as driving forces in innovation. I read an article in recent issue of WIRED magazine that I thought communicated the concept of constraints really well. While not specific to SharePoint the article was very helpful in communicating the constraint concept, the article was entitled:

Design Under Constraint: How Limits Boost Creativity, By Scott Dadich  , March Issue 2009 and can be found online at WIRED

It’s a great article and well worth a read, I recommend it for a lunchtime read or the daily commute.

The author gives examples of familiar products, feats of engineering and the constraints employed in their design, in definition of constraint he writes:

“Constraint offers an unparallelled opportunity for growth and innovation. Given fewer resources or options, we have to make better decisions. The imposition of limits doesn’t stifle creativity – it enables it.”

SharePoint, User Stories and Constraints

In terms of SharePoint and user stories, constraints are vital to shaping successful solutions, constraints maybe straight forward statements such as ‘Must be XHTML 1.0 Compliant’ to something more fundamental that points to how it should be developed what objects and code can be utilised , for example,  ‘Must be a reusable component’

Do take time in defining and validating constraints before everyone heads off in delivery of a solution as disregarding constraints, insufficient consideration or working around the outside of a boundary can be the difference between a truly innovative solution and one that barely gets there.

Anti monitor tan stylesheet for MOSS

One of my earlier posts was entitled  ‘If you are not prepared to be wrong then you’ll never come up with anything original.’ In this post I thought i’d revisit this idea and share a little personal project with you that didn’t turn out quite as I intended however depending on how you look at things with a bit of creative interpretation I think I may have come up with something somewhat original.

I am not programmer by trade but personally I like to get to grips with as many concepts as possible that my developer colleagues work with on a daily basis. A few months back I was exploring the  ‘Alternative CSS’ approach to styling portals that have the publishing infrastructure feature enabled.

I decided to dabble with my own Alternative style sheet as a way of gaining  an understanding  of CSS by working through all of the styles and seeing how far I could go with using a single solitary CSS file only. Perhaps biting off a bit more than I could chew I set out to create a stylesheet file that looked a bit like the  recent trend in design tools and various applications where with they are all black backgrounds, those of you who use Tweetdeck or Photoshop elements will understand what I mean.

The great thing with Portals that have the Publishing infrastructure enabled is that they allow you to slip into the site settings of a site and specify an ‘Alternative CSS’ reference that it will call last when the browser is loading the styles for the page. I had a lot of fun using Firebug, IE Developer Toolbars and SharePoint designer to locate the styles and make the tweaks using SharePoint Designer to edit the CSS file I placed directly in a document library.

It was a good learning experience however I never quite polished it off for a couple of reasons. What stopped me going much further was that all the images and icons that MOSS uses don’t look that great on very dark backgrounds. I was aiming to try and do as little as possible with images and keep as much as possible within the constraints of a single CSS file, things got a little busy with other projects and I put everything on hold, I may very well pick it up and give it some more time at some stage.

Rather than look at my exercise as a write off and see it from the perspective of  ‘If you are not prepared to be wrong then you’ll never come up with anything original’ , I thought this could be the worlds first ‘Climate change friendly Alternative CSS for MOSS’ however this proved inconclusive as Google themselves stated that black screens don’t really save any energy so instead i’ve come up with an alternative and new and totally original purpose, I hereby announce the worlds first ‘Monitor tan reducing Alternative CSS for MOSS’ download it now and keep your monitor tan in check today!

Download – CSS 71KB

Pre-requisites:

• Your Portal or site will need the publishing infrastructure feature enabled, else you won’t be able to get to the Look and Feel’s master page options:
• You’ll also need the appropriate permissions to get  you into site settings (such as site owner)

Configuration:

• Upload the CSS file to a document library on you site
• Navigate to Site Actions > Site settings
• Under the Look and Feel heading click ‘Master page’
• Scroll to the bottom of the screen and you’ll see the Alternative CSS options
• Select Specify a CSS file to be used by this publishing site and all sites that inherit from it and enter the location of your file.
• If you want to make all the subsites inherit the stylesheet check the ‘Specify a CSS file to be used by this publishing site and all sites that inherit from it.’

This method of styling is ‘light touch’ no features required, no files needed on the server and if you get told off you can click the radio button to set the site back to default quick as lightning. Have fun!

Other alternative uses for this alternative stylesheet from my esteemed colleagues:

• Working late at night so its not so glary – Dave (the green shirted full time front end dev, part time bassist)
• April fools day joke, tell everyone you’ve had to turn out the lights on the server for routine maintenance – Martin

Why don’t we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. People are frightened of being wrong, people are being educated out of their creative capacities. Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity.” Robinson says

In this TED video creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

Ken style of delivery is fantastic, has the whole theatre in laughs to the point where you’d be caught thinking he was a standup comedian however his message runs deep. Sir Ken believes that we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence as it won’t stand for the future, that Creativity is now just as important as literacy and it should be treated with the same status.

Sir Ken’s lecture is perfect for lunch break viewing, kick back with a sandwich and find out about why creativity, the process of having original ideas that have value, which come about through the interaction of disciplinary ways of seeing things is so important now and for the future.

Video

enjoy.

I’ve just set up this blog, it’s based on wordpress and I am suitably impressed. About four years ago I attempted to set up wordpress to no avail. I could not believe the simplicity in setting it up this time round, a very big shout out to the word press community and the people that put together fantastico, the one click deployment method via CPanel, I’ll say it again, suitably impressed.