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Pics From Tuesday’s GR8 SharePoint Conference Pittsburgh

Michael Gannotti — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:49:43 +0000

This Tuesday I was out in Pittsburgh for the GR8 SharePoint Conference there. Had a great time interacting with some fantastic folks. I uploaded the pics to my Facebook page . While there I delivered 4 talks in all (2 on social media, lunch keynote, and one on Access Services).

This next Tuesday I will be in Bethesda Maryland for the GR8 SharePoint Conference and will be delivering 5 talks in total. Hope to see you there!

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SharePoint 2013 Caching And Performance Improvements

Michael Gannotti — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:34:07 +0000

Today I am off to a client site in Philadelphia for the day and one of the topics of conversation they wanted to have was around the use of front end caching in SharePoint 2013 as well as general performance improvements that can be made. The use of front end blob caching can indeed improve the performance of SharePoint and in particular certain media elements like video within it as well. Last night to make sure I had a leave behind on this subject in addition to the notes we will be taking I pulled a couple of key pages from TechNet on the subject that I have used before in to OneNote and dropped them in to the external network private Yammer group I set up for the engagement. I thought I would pass along the links. Caching needs to be thought through so as to be properly used but when properly implemented is quick and easy to set up and can produce noticeable improvements.

Well time for me to finish my coffee and hit the road. Have a great day!

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Productivity Posts Weekly Roundup 04-19-2013

Michael Gannotti — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:22:53 +0000

Been a busy week and with my wife having a short break from helping with her mothers recovery I have been spending my free time hanging with her. She is heading back Sunday and I am heading in to a crazy week next week but one that should see some new content come out of it. In the meantime a lot happening in the world of Productivity and Collaboration so here are some posts from around the web. Enjoy!

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Rock Out Office 2013 With These Windows 8 And Windows Phone 8 Apps!!!

Michael Gannotti — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:29:21 +0000

So you want to get rocking with all the great new, productivity empowering, features in Office 2013 but are looking for a little help. Office Webinar provides great tutorials, tips & tricks, from experts in the various Microsoft Office products via easy to consume short videos. “But Mike, I am a pretty busy person always on the go. How can I get them?” Funny you should ask…or I should ask for you ;-) The Philadelphia MTC’s (Microsoft Technology Center) very own developer rock star Danilo Diaz has created two great apps so you can take Office Webinar with you. He has created both a Windows 8 app as well as one for your Windows Phone 8 and they are rocking!

Soooooo, if you are an Office user and want to take your game to the next level don’t wait. Download the Office Webinar apps today…. I did :-)

Office Webinar app for Windows Phone 8

Office Webinar app for Windows 8

Overview Details

Home screen

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Friday Mobile Aqua Video Fun With Fishing And….Sharks ;-)

Michael Gannotti — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:50:44 +0000

Well the weather is warming up and for those if us who like to take our social media video mobile it opens up a whole new world….the world of water. For your Friday enjoyment we have a couple of great examples as to why you might want to think twice before mixing social video with salt water fishing….but then again it may be why you want to. ;-)

Have a great Friday everyone!

We begin with why I only will kayak fish in fresh water

Now imagine it wasn’t the tiny shark going after the fish while in the kayak but instead one of these…

Lastly, one most have seen but just plain fun because “it’s a big a&# shark!” ;-)

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Update On Instagraph For Instagram – Service Seems Back On Track

Michael Gannotti — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:25:16 +0000

So yesterday I posted about the unfortunate out of the block stumbling by Instagraph with the launch of their new app. (see Instagraph Review – An App I Want To Work….But Not Ready For Primetime) Today, thought I would bring you a lunchtime update.

For those not familiar with the Windows Phone app what it does is facilitate Windows Phone users in uploading photos to the popular Instagram social network. It does not set up your Instagram account and limits the number of daily uploads but for those of us on Windows Phone who either want to participate on Instagram or have kids beating us up over it the app offers the promise of participating along with the rest of the mobile world. Well after the initial launch day hiccups I mentioned in Instagraph Review – An App I Want To Work….But Not Ready For Primetime it looks like they have smoothed things out at least for the time being. My images are now all uploading smoothly and without issue. All is right in Mikeyville. ;-) The app is not free but if you are on Windows Phone, and want to post to Instagram, well for less than the price of coffee at your local Starbucks you can give it a whirl. You can find Instagraph for Windows Phone 8 here.

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Instagraph Review – An App I Want To Work….But Not Ready For Primetime

Michael Gannotti — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:57:31 +0000

If you are like me, using a Windows Phone 8 device, and with family also on the platform then one thing you have probably gotten an earful of is “when is my phone going to get Instagram?” With no end in sight to the Instagram issue with my teen daughter I was pretty excited to see the new third party Instagraph application launch. The app had gotten a fair amount of press prior to its launch. It promised to allow Windows Phone user the ability to upload their photos to Instagram albeit with some restrictions. To start with the service was limiting its users to uploading 3 photos a day to keep their system from being overwhelmed initially. You also had to initially create your account on an iOS or Android device and couldn’t do it from the app. Finally, at least initially, it would only be able to publish to Instagram and not cross publish like the actual Instagram app itself. Despite all this my daughter was still pretty excited about it and a chance to jump in the Instagram waters with the rest of her friends so we grabbed the app and here is where it stands a day later.

The app itself is pretty straight forward. Either take a picture or select one, apply a filter if desired, and upload. It then gets queued up in the Instagraph cloud services then published to Instagram. We tested with 3 photos initially. The first photo took about ten minutes before it finally made its way to Instagram. The second photo queued up but keeps reporting it has about a minute more….since last night. The third photo? Well you can see from the photo below that it can’t even get to the queue stage.

I hope that the situation improves as I know the developers of this put in a lot of hard work but for now there is obviously some further work that needs to happen before this is a reliable service. It would be great if we could just get an authentic Instagram app and not have to look to workarounds like this. Until that time though I will keep an eye on how they progress, or don’t, with this app and let you know. Until we see an improvement though I would hold off.

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Optimize Video Playback Performance In SharePoint 2013

Michael Gannotti — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:29:45 +0000

So you want to stream video with your brand spanking new SharePoint 2013 site? With the updated asset libraries, new HTML 5 player, and more SharePoint 2013 can provide a great platform for multimedia delivery. “But Mike, I have uploaded a bunch of videos to my site and they are dog slow in playing! What’s up with that?” The issue is ensuring you have optimized your server environment for delivery.

To ensure smooth delivery of your audio and video content you need to configure the disk-based BLOB cache in IIS (Internet Information Server). This will reduce the need for the system to go back in to the SharePoint database and retrieve the multimedia files and the change in playback response will be dramatic. In the new environment I am setting up at work to deliver video on the public Internet video playback went from over 1 minute from clicking play to actually watching the content to around 1-2 seconds max. So how do we do we configure the cache settings. The method of doing so has remained the same as in SharePoint 2010. The following comes from Configure cache settings for a Web application (SharePoint Server 2010).

“To configure BLOB cache settings

1. Verify that you have the following administrative credentials: You must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer to configure the BLOB cache settings.

2. Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

3. In Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, in the Connections pane, click the plus sign (+) next to the server name that contains the Web application, and then click the plus sign next to Sites to view the Web application or applications that have been created.

4. Right-click the name of the Web application for which you want to configure the disk-based cache, and then click Explore. Windows Explorer opens, with the directories for the selected Web application listed.

5. Right-click web.config, and then click Open.

6. If the Windows dialog box appears, select Select a program from a list of installed programs, and then click OK.

7. In the Open With dialog box, click Notepad, and then click OK.

8. In the web.config Notepad file, find the following line:

9. In this line, change the location attribute to specify a directory that has enough space to accommodate the cache size.

10. To add or remove file types from the list of file types to be cached, for the path attribute, modify the regular expression to include or remove the appropriate file extension. If you add file extensions, make sure to separate each file type with a pipe (|), as shown in this line of code.

11. To change the size of the cache, type a new number for maxSize. The size is expressed in gigabytes (GB), and 10 GB is the default.

12. To enable the BLOB cache, change the enabled attribute, from “false” to “true”.

13. Save the Notepad file, and then close it.”

The TechNet article starts that when you save the webconfig file that IIS will autocycle but when I ran through it I went ahead and restarted my site in IIS. Once you have gone ahead and configured you will see, as I did, a dramatic increase in speed.

It goes without saying that if you are going to enable this you will want to plan accordingly in terms of where you are delivering optimized videos from and the size of the storage needed. However, if you want to deliver high impact contact to your end users that performs seamlessly for users then this is definitely something you will want to tackle.

Be sure to head over to the SharePoint 201 TechNet article covering this. It’s all still relevant and a quick setup. Configure cache settings for a Web application (SharePoint Server 2010). Also be sure to check out the TechNet article on Flush the Blob Cache (SharePoint Server 2010).

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Productivity Posts Weekly Roundup

Michael Gannotti — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 11:17:22 +0000

Roundup of productivity posts from around the web. I have also updated my Links page with Productivity links to all the Microsoft Productivity blogs as well. You can see those here.

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I will Be Speaking At The Philly Women In Tech April 20 – Join Me!

Michael Gannotti — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:56:28 +0000

I have the pleasure of speaking at the Philly Women In Tech event this April 20th. Philly Women In Tech kicks off Philly Tech Week and this event focused on women in technology and opportunities looks to be a great way for the weeklong Philadelphia event to kick off. Join me and a slew of great speakers that Saturday. I will be speaking on Anywhere, Anytime, Any Device Collaboration. Hope to see you there!! :-)

Link to my speaking topic.

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