Consejo Blog: Making Information Technology Work

SharePoint Report 2008 Released on CMS Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:29:44 -0500

After months of work, the new SharePoint Report 2008 has been released. I collaborated with CMS Watch to develop a full 190 page research report that exposes what SharePoint does well, its limitations and what businesses of all sizes need to do to be successful when implementing the tool. I encourage you to review the sample content and review the TOC. If you have feedback on the report, I'd

Customized My Sites Exposed

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:46:57 -0500

We recently undertook a project to develop a global intranet for a relatively large organization. As part of the requirements of that implementation, the client wanted to create a highly customized My Site experience. As anyone who has delved deep into My Site customization knows, it's not straightforward, easy and may create maintenance issues long term. Ultimately, after working through

Portals: Build it and they may come, but they won't know what to do when they arrive...

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:03:08 -0500

Many of our customers ask how they can spur adoption of new portal technology. In cases where the IT department is leading the charge, we see a lot of "build it and they will come" approaches. In much the same way Kevin Costner's character in Field of Dreams built a baseball field on his farm to encourage ghosts of baseball players to visit and play the game, IT groups hope that by simply

SharePoint Conference 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:15:27 -0600

I just finished my time at the 2008 SharePoint conference in Seattle (admittedly a little early). By all accounts, this conference was well attended with over 3800 participants. Keynotes at the conference were given by Bill Gates, Kurt DelBene and three-time Tour de France winner (and first non-European winner) Greg LeMond. In addition there were a whole slew of sessions on everything from

Simple SharePoint Backup Routine

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:19:10 -0600

Like many of our clients, Consejo uses SharePoint to collaborate -- both with our clients and amongst our employees. As a result, it has become a critical service to maintain -- thereby making it critical from a business continuity planning perspective as well. Recently a number of clients have all asked the same question: how can we easily create backups of our SharePoint sites so that we

REVIEW: Insignia Bluetooth Stereo Headphones

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:24:03 -0600

While I typically don't like to post consumer product reviews on our corporate blog, this one is different... really. As a developer, I have fallen prey to what appears to be a stereotypical developer behavior -- listening to music while coding. Whether it's a behavior picked up through "peer pressure" or my own personal inability to focus without some sort of constant noise to block out my

SharePoint 2007 Service Pack Update

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:15:23 -0600

Microsoft has finally released the new service pack for SharePoint 2007. The individual downloads for WSS and MOSS can be found here: WSS v3.0: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4191A531-A2E9-45E4-B71E-5B0B17108BD2&displaylang=en MOSS 2007: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ad59175c-ad6a-4027-8c2f-db25322f791b&DisplayLang=en

SharePoint Service Pack (SP) 1

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:06:49 -0600

If you haven't seen it, Microsoft recently released some information on the upcoming service pack 1 for SharePoint (both WSS and MOSS). This new service pack not only includes a number of hot fixes for both platforms, but introduces some new functionality. In addition to Server 2008 support, Microsoft is now officially supporting AJAX-enabled web parts. They've also included some new STSADM

Using SharePoint Search as a Research Content Source

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 13:22:23 -0600

Back in Office 2003, Microsoft introduced the concept of the "task pane." The task pane was a panel that appeared on the right side of the Office interface (at least for the "first class" Office products). The task pane represented a few different functions -- from showing the status of a document in SharePoint, to allowing you to manage permissions on a document. Included with these

IIR/SharedInsights Portals, Collaboration and Content Management Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:55:07 -0600

[UPDATED: 25 November 2007 - Slight flow changes to the content] I've just returned from the IIR/SharedInsights Portals, Collaboration and Content Management conference. While I've been speaking at this conference for a few years, this year's conference was a bit unique. Unlike past conferences, where the vast majority of the attendees were more business oriented and "non-denominational" when

More on Remote Access

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:12:16 -0500

As a follow-on to my post on the remote access tool GoToMyPC, I recently discovered another service called LogMeIn. This service provides similar functionality, but has a free subscription option (a price most people can live with). The free subscription does not allow file transfers, remote sound or other bells and whistles found in the premium subscriptions, but does provide basic remote

Interesting Excel 2007 Bug

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:28:58 -0500

I came across a blog entry from from Lori Pearce's "All Things SDK" blog regarding an Excel calculation bug. Turns out there is what appears to be a serious flaw in certain calculations in Excel. The actual calculation is irrelevant, it's the result that matters. Calculations with results that should be 65,535 and 65,536, in addition to about 10 other results produce very strange and highly

SharePoint 2003 SP 3 Released

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:20:52 -0500

A new service pack has been released for both SharePoint Portal and Windows SharePoint Services (2003/v2). The KB article on the update can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923643. Thank you to Ian Morrish at WSSDemo for posting a link to the KB article.

Recycle Equipment to Save Capital

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:34:32 -0500

Many small businesses are increasingly pressured to upgrade their systems -- spending money on both hardware and software -- to keep their technological systems running smoothly. Unfortunately, there is also pressure to conserve funding and manage cash. Consejo, like many of our customers, faces this challenge as well. However, we've found one small way to do both -- upgrade our hardware

REVIEW: Remote Access with GoToMyPC

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:00:04 -0500

Often being involved in or running a small business requires you to be in many places at once. You need to take a meeting with a customer, but you're meeting at their location, not yours. However, you still have to access data that may not be portable, simply not loaded on the laptop you have with you or you don't have your own machine immediately accessible. Alternatively, what if you're home

Access Denied when trying to Schedule a Crawl in SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:15:08 -0500

While I'm not a huge fan of simply re-posting content originating on other individual's blog, this particular re-post is warranted, if for no other reason that it was a bear to find the solution. My hope is that more references to the posting will increase the likelyhood that someone else will spend less time finding the answer in the future. Now, effectively the problem I encountered was an "

Effective Project Management in Small Organizations

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 02:27:39 -0500

I've had the good fortune to work in a number of different organization sizes, in addition to working with a wide array of individuals, project types and technologies. In large part due to this broad experience, I've seen my share of successful, mostly successful (in spite of team member actions to the contrary) and failed projects. In all cases, I've learned a good deal about what makes project

Is SharePoint the "Right" Solution - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 16:09:22 -0500

In a previous post, I described a panel that I participated in where each of three consultants presented what they liked an didn't like about SharePoint. In that post, I gave you my "likes;" in this post, I'll continue the discussion with what I think are SharePoint's disadvantages or shortcomings. While the product is quite good, there are definitely areas where it could improve -- some of those

Is SharePoint the "Right" Solution?

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 16:08:30 -0500

Since this is the first post on Consejo's blog, I thought I'd start by digging into a topic we often discuss with our customers -- does SharePoint fit their organization or should they look at other technologies. The "easiest" and most consultant-like answer is: it depends. Now, after you've stopped rolling your eyes, you'll (hopefully) realize that this answer is the only one possible with a