My techy life 4 u all

My experience with VMware vCenter Converter

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:07:00 +0000

The situation is easy. I need to move from one country to another and I have a few computers full of information but also software installed. Some software is really old and important.
The question was: How to travel with all those computers? the overweight would cost more than the computers themselves so I had to find a solution.
I just tested VMware vCenetr Converter and it works perfectly!
It is a free software that converts your computer into a virtual machine. That means that all what you have in your computer including the operating system and your custom configurations are stored. After you have the virtual machine you can use it from any other computer that runs:

VMware Workstation,
VMware GSX Server,
VMware Player,
VMware Server,
VMware Fusion,
VMware ESX (Managed by VMware VirtualCenter 2.x)

In my case my main system will be a Mac and it runs VMware Fusion. How I did it?

I bought a 2TB USB external hard disk. The price was around 130EUR
I downloaded vCenter Converter and installed it on each machine I needed to transform into virtual machines.
I used the software to convert each machine and saved the virtual machines on that external hard disk. I have 6 virtual machines there.
I upgraded my VMware Fusion on my Mac
I could run each virtual machine without problems. Exact like the original.

A few comments you should think about:

Microsoft Office asked me for activation again. That means that if you wish to keep your old computers working plus your virtual machines you will need licenses for Office and Windows. I'm sure that for any other software that requires licenses as well.
The external disk was formatted for Mac. If not the virtual machines would not work well if they use a lot of space.

This thing is so powerful and is helping me to save so much money that I'm thinking to:

Install some free OS to those real machines (Ubuntu for example)
Donate them to someone that could really use them for good.
Buy a big secondary screen for my mac and buy more RAM for it in order to work comfortably with more than one virtual machine at the same time.
Save a lot of energy by using only one system instead of six.

Magic Mouse or trackpad App for iPad and iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 21:15:00 +0000

Well, this one is an idea I would like to share right now with all of you. The intention is that if you can develop it please do... but must be for free to download.

Wouldn't be great to run the app from your iPhone and using Bluetooth to use its screen as the surface of the Magic Mouse or even better the Magic Trackpad?

In my case I always have my iPhone connected while I'm on the office. And I always have it beside my keyboard.

It should work like that:

You load the app using your iPhone or iPad
The app checks if bluetooth is enabled.
When a connection is established the screen can behave as a trackpad.
If possible the backlight of the screen should not be on.

Would be good to have it uh?

App development idea for using touch based screens as trackpads by http://tips4uall.blogspot.com/2010/07/magic-mouse-or-trackpad-app-for-ipad.html is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at tips4uall.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://tips4uall.blogspot.com/2010/07/magic-mouse-or-trackpad-app-for-ipad.html.

iCal can’t refresh the account

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:59:00 +0000

There are many persons having problems with iCal when it is connected to Exchange.
I experienced the same issue and now I solved it. But first it is important for you to know my configuration:

I use a Mac with OSX 10.6.4
I use Exchange Server in a hosted service, that means that I connect to my exchange accounts using Internet.

When setting the email account with Mail I got automatically the address www.outlook.com for the Internal and External server. But after a while I discovered that changed to some other address something like pod243100.outlook.com and when that happened all sort of problems happened with Mail, iCal and Contacts.

I have noticed that when using OWA the URL address was different, I just needed to go to https://www.outlook.com, login and the URL was changed to https://pod51000.outlook.com/... so I replaced the address on Mail:

It works perfect. But the issue with iCal wasn't solved. I edited the account preferences using the same address I used for the servers in Mail and now it works perfectly.

Apple TV and the future

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:58:00 +0000

So far Apple TV is a great product that is under used.
Actually I use it each day for podcasts, buying TV shows and movies from iTunes. I have no cable TV and that is the reason why my family selects what to see.

But I saw an interesting step on the new Mac Mini. now it includes a HDMI port and that means that you could connect it to a TV set. That might be saying something about the future of the Apple TV. Compare its ports:

Mac Mini lacks the Optical audio, component and audio ports, but in my case I don't use them.

So here is my suggestion:

Apple can create an application called Apple TV. So you could transform your Mac Mini into an Apple TV and switch back to a computer whenever you wish.
Start the business of Apps for Apple TV, where you could use your iPhones, IPod Touch and even iPad as controls..

Why that makes sense?

Having a wireless keyboard: would be great to check my FaceBook account, tweetdeck in a huge screen.
Would be cool to have a multiscreen (iPod, iPhones, iPads) for gaming and a common view of the game on the TV. Just imagine some War game.
Apple TV runs a version of Mac OSX, why not use that as a computer as well?
The USB ports could help to add storage capacity.
Selling Mac Mini as an entertainment or home based computer would be easier than selling Apple TV + Mac Mini.

What do you think? Maybe Steve Jobs will read this post ;)

My take on the iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:51:00 +0000

I bought an iPad just a few days ago and I had the chance to play with it for more than a few hours. To be honest it wasn't easy to get an opinion at first.
It is obvious that the machine is well designed, looks great and is easy to use. There are 2 things that jump out as soon as you turn the iPad on:

Opening and closing applications is very fast.
The battery lasts more than 10 hours of intense use.

Some of the applications that come with the iPad are really great. The improved Calendar and Contacts are worth of envy. I hope the same Mac OSX will include them in the near future. Of course others as YouTube, video and Maps use very well the bigger screen, but there is nothing in that space that would make a huge difference.

In contrast with many others I see that iBooks is not necessarily a Kindle killer. Of course looks great and the colors are important for some kind of publications. But the great amount of good books in "black and white" makes my Kindle a very light and effective reader. I would rename it and change a bit the business model: iMagazine, for digital versions of the most important magazine subscriptions.

But something that is truly amazing to me is the way some newspapers are using the new iPad. Some good samples: The New York Times Editor's Choice, The Wall Street Journal and specially The Financial Times mobile edition.

Even most of the iPhone apps can work with the iPad, I wouldn't advise to download them. Why? because you see low resolution images. yes you can zoom in but that is not the real iPad thing. Better to wait for the new apps to be available. At this point I miss: Skype, FaceBook, The Scoop, Monopoly.

Is the iPad a PC or maybe a huge iPod touch?

No. It is for sure other kind of device. I see it as a powerful PC or notebook companion; For example now I'm typing in front of my iMac typing this post, and my iPad is beside showing the Tweetdeck iPad app. That means that my iMac doesn't have to load that app.

That is very cool, because if I move from my desk I can take the iPad with me.

Is the iPad a replacement for a Netbook?

The short experience I have with Netbooks is that they are cool small machines that runs Windows or some kind of Linux OS. Very similar than the normal PCs but probably optimized for Internet usage.

The iPad is not the same paradigm than a traditional PC OS. It is much simpler, asks less from the user and works perfect on the Web.

I would never buy a Netbook instead of an iPad. In that case I would buy a Notebook.

Where is the revolution?

Well I thing that the revolution lies in the following:

The OS is a complete new paradigm where there is no file manager, complex settings and technical knowledge required.
The integration of the OS and the online stores is just a great thing: Apple managed to get millions of users, developers and content providers. Now everybody tries to have the same but the results are not as successful.
The Apps. This is something that we know developers like to do. Even in the times of the Palm we were able to get inexpensive applications that more than complex where useful. The same thing happens here. The mix of a powerful machine as the iPad and the value offered by the previous too points is the key: the potential to have easy to use, useful and great looking applications for almost everything.

I do think it is a revolution, all the industry will have to adapt as they did with the iPhone. I don't think huge changes will happen fast.

One of the first things I got in mind: Use iPads on airplanes instead of the terrible screens onboard. Looks like the idea is not new and somewhere in AUstralia they are thinking to implement it.

Is the iPad a Nintendo killer?

I don't think so, they are just different and for different use. But I would love to have The Legend of Zelda for iPad :)

The bad:

Looks like not all USB ports are capable of charging the iPad battery.
The screen tends to be dirty
The Wifi version does not include full GPS capabilities.

The future of the Web announced

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:04:00 +0000

Watch live streaming video from f8conference at livestream.com

New SharePoint 2010 books

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:40:00 +0000

I would like to share with you a set of books I find interesting. You will see that no development books are in this list. Actually this list is a reminder for me... I want them all!

Not so techy...

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:35:00 +0000

One of the things I love to make is to work in my garden. I have been out of the town for a couple of weeks because of a SharePoint Conference in Peru. But my garden was guarded by a new automatic system in charge of providing my plants with water while I was away.
The problem is that some bugs, like slugs... took control of the new and predictable wet lands!
The book Trowel and Error helped me to find a solution to that. I made some traps for slugs with beer inside. Now the traps are full of drunk and slimy slugs.
I also removed plants and leaves that were to close to the surface letting air to dry the area.
The main victims where my lettuces.

Mac wireless keyboard and 2 macs

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:22:00 +0000

Ok, I made the mistake of pairing my keyboard with 2 Macs. One of them a MacBook.

Once the MacBook was close to the iMac the problem started, I was typing watching the iMac but the text appearing in the MacBook... dangerous because I could be deleting info on other computer!

The solution is to remove the device from one of the computers to avoid the automatic connection.

You need to go to the Mac Preferences, click on the BlueTooth icon and remove the wireless keyboard from one of the computers. If necessary you can pair it again later.

Error code -36 when using a USB flash memory or hard disk (Mac OSX Leopard)

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:38:00 +0000

I have been experiencing problems when copying files from an iMac with Leopard 10.6.2.

Each time I tried to move a folder from the local drive to the flash drive or an external hard drive I received the "Error code -36".

It is a bug.

And I found a blog post with the solution. Just click here. Or follow the instructions as explained on that Blog:

Launch Terminal (Applications > Utilities) and type the following command, making sure to include a space at the end:
dot_clean
Select the folder on your Mac that is giving you trouble and drag it right to the Terminal window. A green cursor with a + symbol should appear before you release the mouse.
The path to that folder should have automatically appeared at the end of the Terminal command. For example, it might look like:
dot_clean /Users/UserName/Desktop/Test_Folder
Press Enter/Return to run the command. It will appear as if nothing happened, but try copying that folder to a MS-DOS volume now. Finder should magically allow it to be moved with no problem!
Repeat the entire process as needed for other folders that won’t copy. "

SharePoint: Review 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:56:00 +0000

2009 was a good year for the SharePoint community! with many interesting things happening. Here my overview:

SharePoint Conferences and events. From the cool SharePint to the SharePoint conferences, I think this focused and specialized events are the result of a vibrant community of open minded experts. 2009 opened the door to a new set of opportunities for better events. I have participated organizing the SharePoint Conference in Slovenia and I have in plans to participate in as many conferences and events during the 2010! The experience here was great!
SharePoint Community. Somehow SharePoint became a sample of a global community. Sharepoint professionals from all different kind of backgrounds (Enterprise or SME) and with a wide range of expertise (Web design.... development) came together to transform their careers in a super interesting opportunity for expanding their knowledge and experience by sharing information. Something I can't remember happening with such energy in the past.
SharePoint as an opportunity for all. During 2009 I have heard all kind of cases related to SharePoint. From big organizations using SharePoint as a way to publish information to the Web as small schools or organizations using SharePoint for sharing documents and information privately. From 500$ projects to millions! SharePoint and the huge base of partners are preparing themselves for offering solutions to many different segments of the market.
Global SharePoint. I just came from a trip to Peru and I discovered that the community of SharePoint partners is growing fast! Most Banks are already working with SharePoint and some Ministries as well. South America is present in the community and hungry for expertise.

I believe the 2010 will come with a consolidation of the community and some kind of coordinated set of events. At least that is my wish.

What I'm thinking to do:

Transform the "SharePoint Days" event in an open source model for all the community to use for their events. Do you want to make an event? well SharePoint Days should provide you with all what you need.
Coordinate with all possible SharePoint experts and Sponsors to build a group available for global events. For example: Someone in Asia would like to organize a conference, then he would contact the group and from there easily would get in touch with interested sponsors and speakers.

Of course, feel free to contact me and send me your ideas and comments!

My Facebook profile: http://www.facebook.com/b4contact

Follow me in Twitter: http://twitter.com/joseamorales

JQuery library for SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:41:00 +0000

yesterday was a marathon for SharePoint. It was the opening day of the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. Twitter was busy busy and one of the interesting posts was about an open source project that makes JQuery friendly with SharePoint, that is great news!

Here the link: http://spservices.codeplex.com/

New SharePoint Simple CMS partner: Vortalities

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:54:00 +0000

I'm very glad to announce that The SharePoint Simple CMS is welcoming Vortalities, from Belgium as a new partner.

They represent our first partner from Belgium. Click here to see a Map of SharePoint Simple CMS partners.

Next videos about SEO and increasing visits to your Blog.

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:29:00 +0000

I wanted to make today a new video but I got immersed in the research. But I found good topics for the next few videos:

Google trends
Google insights for Search
Google trends for Web sites

I hope you'll like them. If you have any suggestion feel free to make a comment here.

How to get money from my Blog using Google Adsense?

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:46:00 +0000

I'm in the way to discover the trick and I would like to share with you my first clue.
Analysing the data from my Adsense account (from the past 2 years) I found out that in order to get 70 EUR or 100$ you need to get around 100000 visits. Yap... that's a lot of visits. You can decrease that number if your Blog or Web site talks about something where advertisers pay more per click and if you decrease the number of visitors that come to your site by mistake.
Therefore it is important to understand a couple of things:

Your Blog or Web site should speak about 1 topic. That will make it easier for visitors to find useful your contents and better for Google Adsense to publish relevant Ads. As focused your topic as better.
If you would like to talk about other topics then create as many Blogs or Web sites as topics you have. That will attract more focused audiences, increase the amount of clicks and even if you get 10$ per site if you have 10 sites then you get 100$.
Learn which are the topics that are the most interesting for people around the world. This one is very important and I found a free tool that will help you:

Linking your Blog to your Facebook profile

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:52:00 +0000

I think that Facebook is a great way to promote your Blog and that is specially true with the "Notes" functionality. If you don't have a Blog that is a good way to start and let all your contacts know when you write something. If you have already a Blog the Facebook Notes will automatically get all your Blog posts!

If you want to se how please check the following videos: (remember that you can see the videos in full screen mode)

Not so techy... but important: Peter Drucker Global Forum in Vienna

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:21:00 +0000

The first global Peter Drucker Forum will be in Vienna. This is important for all of you interested in management and leadership.
Elizabeth Edersheim, the author of The Definitive Drucker, will have a speech and here is an abstract about it: click here.

Partner Program for SharePoint Simple CMS

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:58:00 +0000

I just finished making a short video about what the SharePoint Simple CMS provides to partners. I hope it is easy to understand.. my English is far from perfect :)

SharePoint Simple CMS Partnership Program from Jose Antonio Morales on Vimeo.

Steve Smith : Scalling out a SharePoint farm and configuring network load balancing on the web servers

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:28:00 +0000

Steve Smith full video session during the SharePoint Conference in Slovenia (2008).
A great session every SharePoint Pro needs to see!

Scalling out a SharePoint farm and configuring network load balancing on the web servers from Matjaz Korenjak on Vimeo.

Visit Steve's Web site at: http://www.combined-knowledge.com/

How to create users in Windows 2003, the easy way

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:58:00 +0000

If you use Windows Server 2008 and you need to create users in your Active Directory there is a good way to do it.

You will need to use MS Excel for creating the command line to create your users.
You will need to have administrative rights for the server where you wish to create the users on.

The normal is to get the name of the user and the email. It is ideal to get all the rest automatically.

Your Excel file should start like that:

How to separate a name from a lastname in Excel and divide them in 2 columns?

The first problem is that you might want to separate the Name from the Lastname in order to have a better DB or just to make a mail merge for a future email notifying with the new username and password. The formula (Office 2007) should be like that:

To retrieve the lastname the formula would be like that:

Then you can use any other formula or algorithm to generate the passwords. After you have that information you need the column that will generate the command line:

Of course the formula considers the names of the columns as I created them but you can modify that. The formula is not so visible on the image so here you have it: ="net user"&" "&Table1[[#This Row];[Username]]&" "&Table1[[#This Row];[Password]]&" /add /domain"

Then you will see how Excel magically transforms the information you have (emails and names) in the full command line you need for creating your users using the command prompt.

The last advise is to copy and pasthe the all the column, excluding the name of the column, in a TXT file to avoid problems of formatting. Now you can rename the the TXT file into a BAT file. The file should be moved to the server and executed, all the users would get instantly created.

Professional Web site templates

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:58:00 +0000

I normally use Google reader for receiving RSS updates of what is interesting on the Web. Yesterday I found a Web site that offers many kinds of templates for Web sites. They aren't free but they are very affordable, in most of the cases the PSD file is included in the price and that gives the chance to make modifications on the template directly from PhotoShop.

I personally like very much the WordPress themes. (Click on the image to visit the site)

If you are looking for a hosting provider feel free to contact me.

How to Share backups of SharePoint SItes with your customers?

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:59:00 +0000

We are runing periodical backups using STSADM.exe. To do it we use a batch file that incldues all the instructions we need to: run the backup and specify the storage location.
The backups we use are "name.dat" and that extension is not supported by default by IIS. That means that a user would not be able to download it.

Why would I need a user to download the .dat file? Because that user is a customer and providing them with a copy of her/his site backup is a good way to decrease risk in case of emergency.

The first idea would be to share within his own SharePoint site a folder where to store the backups. But that is not a good idea because otherwise the next backup will make a backup of the site plus all the backup files inside... and end with a huge file size. It would also overcrowd the SQL Server unnecessarily.

My second idea is I think better, I made an IIS Web site, without SharePoint, and created all the folders (virtual directories from IIS) needed for each one of my customers to have a URL, something like backup.xxx.com/customer/ I made the right permissions of course so only their administrator could access that. Wel having tens of customers is a problem for permissions... (maybe there is a good way to automate the process).

The customer folders are set to let "browse" and "read". That makes the files within the folder visible and downloadable. Now the problem is that IIS does not support ".dat" files by default for security reasons. What you need to do to solve the problem is to create a MIME type:

Associated Extension: .dat
Content Type(MIME): application/octet-stream
Check the instructions.

Now we have a new service to include in our hosting service!

SharePoint Simple CMS Partners in the World

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:09:00 +0000

View B4Contact and SharePoint Simple CMS Partners in a larger map

First list of speakers for SharePoint Conference in Slovenia

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:15:00 +0000

I'm happy to share with you the first list of SharePoint experts that will speak on the Slovenian SharePoint Conference that will take place on November 27:

Claudio Brotto, MVP, Italy
Zlatan Džinič, MVP, South Africa
Toni Frankola, Croatia
Michael Gannotti, US
Daniel McPherson, Netherlands
Agnes Molnar, MVP, Hungary
Sarju Raja, US
Steve Smith, MVP, UK
Andrew Woodward, MVP, UK

Feel free to join the FaceBook group of the conference by clicking here.

Or visit the conference's Web site: www.sharepointconference.si

MS Word and problems formatting merged data

noreply@blogger.com (Jose Antonio) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:29:00 +0000

I have developed a simple template in Word 2007 that reads information for invoices from a MS Acess Data Base. It is very cool because using Word's mail merge functionality I can print invoices easily.

The system has 3 parts:

A Windows SharePoint Services intranet. There we include all the new orders from customers into a list called "invoices", that list is related to another one named "Accounts" that provides the name and details about customers.

A MS Access DB merges both SharePoint lists and filters all what has been invoiced in the past.

A MS Office Word document template that receives the processed information from Access and create the invoices.

The problem is that Word does not formatt the information correctly. For example the amounts that are formatted as "currency" doesn't display the currency symbol; or the dates are displayed in american formatting (month/day/year). So how to change it?

There is something called "switches". Click here to find all of them.

So, once you know which kind of switch you need to use, yo will need to do the following:

Select the merged field

on your keyboard press "Shift+F9" and you will see that the field changes

Add the switch

"Shift+F9" again

Right click on the merged field and select "Update field"