Learning the Ropes

First Steps into Workplace by Facebook

2017-04-19T13:36:00.002-04:00

"Imagine a world where people wake up every day inspired to go to work, feel safe while they are there, and return home at the end of the day feeling fulfilled by the work they do, feeling that they have contributed to something greater than themselves." That is the goal behind Simon Sinek's program to help organizations discover their Why Story - their purpose, cause, belief, and very reason they exist.

Several months ago we began an organization-wide journey to define our why, to help clarify our direction and inspire our constituents. To involve our staff in this initiative we devised a #MyBestDay employee engagement campaign where staff would be asked to share videos telling the story of the work day that they remember most fondly.

To pull off the engagement campaign we needed to find the right technology match. After evaluating some public tools and content management systems we came to the conclusion that a private enterprise social networking platform (#ESN) would be the best fit for our needs. To narrow things down a bit further, while there are lots of tools out there that will allow users to easily share photos and micro-blog (posts), its a lot harder to find a tool that provides functionality to create and upload videos (live and pre-recorded) which was central to our concept.

The final requirements? there was no budget, we needed a tool that could be launched within a few weeks, it needed to have a mobile app (not just responsive), and it had to be incredibly intuitive for non-techie users to be able to utilize. There are a few strong candidates that could have done the job for us, but after a day of testing Workplace (by Facebook) we knew we had a winner, and they were in our budget - free for non-profits!

Pre Launch
Our project team had a few calls with a Workplace implementation team who answered all of our functional and technical questions. In addition to providing instructions to configure the technical components such as user provisioning (we use SAML), security roles, and integration capabilities, they also provided communication templates to help with the launch. Getting our environment up and running took a day at most and configuring the SAML was another day.

With an environment in place we held a five day pilot for around 30 early-adopters who had been identified based on engagement on specific content posted to our intranet. These folks were provided some training by our Workplace partners, and tasked with pre-loading their #MyBestDay videos, and sharing their personal #MyWhy stories.

Launch
Our launch date was selected to coincide with a monthly "Open Door Session", which is essentially a staff town hall style meeting. At the end of the meeting our president announced the launch of our Workplace environment and asked staff to login for a special live video announcement. The live video was a motivational kickoff by our Chief Transformation & Strategy Officer who introduced the #MyBestDay campaign and how it tied into the organization's why story journey and other transformational projects underway.

Adoption
The launch invites were sent to all 1,000 staff members on April 17th.

Term	Accounts claimed	Groups	Posts	Comments
Day 1	41%	27	279	40
Week 1	70%	91	751	516

We are coming into our annual March for Babies fundraising season in which we hold hundreds of events to support our mission. During this period we will encourage staff to utilize the Workplace platform to share videos and photos of events and activities from their mobile devices - which will be both fun and inspiring for colleagues at the same time.

Coexistence with Intranet
Over the years I've seen several conference presentations by companies that utilize separate ESN and intranet platforms and I've always been struck by the disconnect between social and content. Most of those presentations were about the struggle with having separate platforms and sounded more like warnings than encouragement. I still hold those concerns with most ESN platforms where there is a constant struggle to grow adoption and engagement, but Workplace is different because of how easy it is to use and how comfortable most people are with the technology, the app, and the idea that everything "Facebook" is leading edge.

At this time we are keeping our intranet and plan to have it coexist with our Workplace environment. When our employees open a web browser on our domain, or in our remote desktop environment, their default homepage is our intranet. On our homepage we've added a shortcut to launch the Workplace site for those that have forgotten the URL. Adding an embedded widget to our intranet homepage to display a Workplace feed is high on my list of things to develop. Unfortunately Workplace doesn't offer this, and was slightly discouraging about the concept of building such an interface as they advocate using Workplace as the center of the ecosystem. For custom development like this there is an API available. Development vendors that specialize in the Facebook API provided me unusually high estimates for the development of such a feed. With my background as a programmer I'm on the fence about whether to just write this myself or see if I can find an intern to help to spend a few days on it.

Conclusion
Workplace began their beta program over a year ago which we investigated but chose not to participate in. The public launch happened in October of 2016. The Workplace user experience is nearly identical to the public experience with a few small twists. A few things of note:

Like the public social network it has a core app and a secondary messenger app
There is no communication between public Facebook and Workplace with the exception of being able to tag locations and businesses. There is no user to user connection.
Users can't post on each others walls, however they can post to their own wall
With the exception of posting on your own wall, in order to post you must first identify, or be on a particular "group"
Groups have 3 levels of permission: open, closed, secret.

This has led to a bit of confusion among our staff

A multi-company group can be setup for circumstances when two or more Workplace customers want to collaborate together. FWIW - I'm in a Workplace sponsored non-profit group that has 183 organizations participating
Analytics are on the lean side, with seemingly no way at this time to integrate Google Analytics, nor to do point in time reporting, and analytic data export is also fairly limited
At the April 18th F8 conference a slew of new capabilities were announced which included a few content integrations. At this stage the content integration focus seems to be on "rich previews" which look interesting. The interface seems to capture each page of a file (Word, PPT, PDF) as an image and give users the capability to review and comment just like any other image.

I'm a bug magnet and am happy to say that after a few weeks on the system I've only found 3 bugs which are all pretty trivial - so far so good:)

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

Resizing and Positioning iframe Content

2016-08-08T13:01:00.006-04:00

For years I mistakenly assumed that iframes were unsophisticated tags which didn't provide much room for customization. Recently I learned about how to use CSS3 2D Transforms to scale and position content within an iframe.

For the sake of illustration, in the steps below I will scale and position the March of Dimes homepage to isolate the banner graphic showing #ZapZika into a 100x100 box.

Step 1: Nothing to see here, just the ordinary page

.wrap {
width: 1280px; height: 1024px;
padding: 0;
overflow: hidden;
}
.frame {
width: 1280px; height: 1024px;
border: 0;
}

Step 2: Scale the target page to 25%

.wrap {
width: 1280px; height: 1024px;
padding: 0;
overflow: hidden;
}
.frame {
width: 1280px; height: 1024px;
border: 0;

-ms-transform: scale(0.25);
-moz-transform: scale(0.25);
-o-transform: scale(0.25);
-webkit-transform: scale(0.25);
transform: scale(0.25);
}

Step 3: Crop the outer container to the final dimensions: 100x100

.wrap {
width: 100px; height: 100px;
padding: 0;
overflow: hidden;
}
.frame {
width: 1280px; height: 1024px;
border: 0;

-ms-transform: scale(0.25);
-moz-transform: scale(0.25);
-o-transform: scale(0.25);
-webkit-transform: scale(0.25);
transform: scale(0.25);

-ms-transform-origin: 0 0;
-moz-transform-origin: 0 0;
-o-transform-origin: 0 0;
-webkit-transform-origin: 0 0;
transform-origin: 0 0;
}

Step 4: Position the target page

.wrap {
width: 100px; height: 100px;
padding: 0;
overflow: hidden;
}
.frame {
width: 1280px; height: 1024px;
border: 0;

-ms-transform: scale(0.25);
-moz-transform: scale(0.25);
-o-transform: scale(0.25);
-webkit-transform: scale(0.25);
transform: scale(0.25);

-ms-transform-origin: 0 0;
-moz-transform-origin: 0 0;
-o-transform-origin: 0 0;
-webkit-transform-origin: 0 0;
transform-origin: -260px -90px;
}

Voila!

A great place to practice this transform capability is: http://jsfiddle.net/yy8yb/609/.
Below is an example of the full technique to implement the frame using CSS classes.

.wrap {
    width: 253px; /* used to crop the outer container */
    height: 192px;
    padding: 0; /* pad the outer container */
    overflow: hidden;
}

.frame {
    width: 1024px; /* resolution of iframe target page */
    height: 768px;
    border: 0;

    /* Use the scale elements to scale target page */
    -ms-transform: scale(0.25); /* IE */
    -moz-transform: scale(0.25); /* Firefox */
    -o-transform: scale(0.25); /* Opera */
    -webkit-transform: scale(0.25); /* Chrome, Safari, Opera */
    transform: scale(0.25);

    /* Use the origin elements to position the target page */
    -ms-transform-origin: 0 0;
    -moz-transform-origin: 0 0;
    -o-transform-origin: 0 0;
    -webkit-transform-origin: 0 0;
    transform-origin: 0 0;
}

<div class="wrap">
    <iframe class="frame" src=http://marchofdimes.org></iframe>
</div>

Intranet Satisfaction Survey

2015-11-05T15:22:00.000-05:00

In August of 2015 March of Dimes formed an intranet champions group to identify areas for improvement. The group consisted of 3 staff members from our HQ and 8 from our "field" (staff NOT in the HQ). After several brainstorming sessions it was decided that a user survey would be helpful in validating identified changes, and to bolster the business case for budget to design & implement those changes (apart from Interact support costs and staff salary, our standard operating budget for the intranet is $0). Our communication plan began in October with a blog post to staff which included:

a poll for them to help select a mission statement for the intranet
an introduction of the champion team
the announcement of a November satisfaction survey

In November we launched the satisfaction survey on our intranet, which included a homepage announcement and a banner (built in 5 minutes on canva.com!). The banner will remain active on the site until Dec 1st, although the announcement would likely only stay on the homepage for 2-3 days before being pushed off by newer content. Because our intranet is our primary vehicle for communication, no emails will be distributed to alert staff of the survey.

My goal is to update this post at the conclusion of the survey and share our results - good, bad and ugly!

Announcement

Title: dimension Needs Your Feedback

As part of our continued path of improvement, we invite you to participate in a Foundation-wide dimension intranet satisfaction survey.

All staff are invited to participate in our anonymous survey to let us know what you like, and where we can improve. The survey will be available until December 1st, and will take approximately 5 minutes to complete.

After analyzing the results, we will communicate both the findings and our action plan. It is only through transparent accountability that we will realize our organizational potential and build a great place for us all to work.

The goal of dimension is to effectively communicate and engage staff with current resources and information in a collaborative environment while supporting a foundation-wide culture change to bridge the distance between departments, offices and employees.

Survey Questions

The homepage has relevant information to help me be more effective in my job
I can easily determine when new content is added or updated
I am aware of what information and resources are available
The intranet is well organized to provide quick answers to my questions
When using the intranet, how easy is it to find the information you need?
Navigating the intranet is simple and intuitive from an end user perspective
I can easily find the information I am looking for using navigation at the top of the site, and the links on the left side of the page
I can easily find the information I am looking for using the search feature
I typically use the search function before I try to manually navigate to content
Content is up-to-date and relevant for my needs
When I have an idea for new content, it is clear who manages each section of dimension and who to submit the request to
Help Desk tickets related to the intranet are responded to in a timely manner
Questions posted on pages of the site, and forums, are answered in a timely manner
Which of the following items describes your use of the discussion forums

I feel comfortable posting a question
I am confident my questions will be answered promptly
I enjoy reading the forums
I use the forums to search for answers to questions others have asked
I am not comfortable posting a question
I would rather email, call or Jabber someone

If offered, I would attend training to better understand how to use functions of the site such as search, forums, blogs, page comments, etc.
If offered, I would attend training on the organization of the site, and where to go to find the information I need.
My preferred style of training would be

Self-paced course
Video tutorial
Live webinar
In-person

How could we improve dimension

Make it easier to find information by improving the site navigation
Allow more personal information to be added
Increase participation by senior management in social tools (forums, comments, Kudos, blogs, etc)
Make it easier to upload documents
Make it easier to share documents with others
Develop more training
Improve readability and overall quality of content
Use more images and videos to make the site less text heavy
Offer engaging activities
Develop mobile access capabilities
Provide an off-topic (water-cooler) discussion forum, for conversation that are less business focused
Develop a subscription tool to send peronalized emails of what has changed on dimension
Make the site more fun

List the top 3 things you would like to see changed and how you would change them
What type of information do you find the most valuable on the homepage?

Announcements
Application shortcuts
Staff highlights (promotions, new hires, etc)
Forums
Blogs
Upcoming events
Kudos (employee recognition tool)
Timeline (aka Activity Feed)
Recently added/updated content
Quote of the day/week
Poll of the day/week

What is your overall level of satisfaction with the intranet
How often do you typically visit the intranet?

How to Make a YouTube Video Responsive

2015-09-23T09:45:00.001-04:00

This work comes from a great blog post by John of AvexOline who identified the solution. The only reason I'm blogging about it is in fear that I might lose the link or something might happen to their post - I needed to document this for myself, which is the reason I blog in the first place!

FWIW - the video below is actually terrific and worth watching!

<style type="text/css">
.video-container{position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; padding-top: 30px; height: 0; overflow: hidden;}
.video-container iframe, .video-container object, .video-container embed {position: absolute;top: 0;left: 0;width: 100%;height: 100%;}
</style>

<div class="video-container">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="100%" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qgP7SGhiHCg?rel=0&showinfo=0" width="100%"></iframe>
</div>

Responsive video in action:

Lessons Learned from a Conference Scavenger Hunt

2015-07-23T14:19:00.000-04:00

GooseChase is a mobile platform that makes running scavenger hunts incredibly easy and exciting. Participants complete missions, receive points, and track progress on real-time leaderboards and photo feeds. GooseChase apps are available for download on iPhone and Android, but not Windows phone. A very similar competitor is The Go Game.

The organizers of the March of Dimes 2015 staff conference decided to use GooseChase for all attendees as a fun way to help staff get to know each other, and to engage with the mission. I volunteered to assist from the administration side of the game, and below are some of my observations.

Lessons Learned

Mission setup

GooseChase recommends 30+ missions for a successful game. When creating a mission a title, description and identifying the number of award points are the only required fields, although you can also add a photo and link to website.

Regardless of the duration of your event, you can continue to add and edit missions. Our game was setup for 3 days, and we added 7 events each day. There is NOT a way to pre-program when new missions begin (nor am I suggesting there should be), so we added new missions nightly.

While adding new missions certainly keeps the game motivation/excitement alive for a multiple day game, I think that starting with 7 missions was limiting. My recommendation would be to take the GooseChase advice and start with 30+ missions from the start, and if you want to add more later, go for it!

One bit of advice I picked up from a YouTube video was that when you have >30 missions it can become difficult to scroll through the list. One tip they offered was that if you do offer a lot of missions, to consider printing out a list of them, and numbering them so teams can quickly find them in the app's mission list.

Teams versus individuals

The pro's of this approach are that it makes the app registration process less confusing, and allows the organizers to identify individual contributions.
The con's are that you lose a lot of the team building benefits that could otherwise be achieved, and more importantly you have to pay for significantly more licenses.

We opted for individual registration.

Who is winning?

The leaderboard section of both the app and the desktop site allow you to see who has earned the most points. The catch is that the only thing that displays is the team/individual name. As an admin it would be helpful if you could see a full list of user information such as their email address, but I couldn't find that capability.

While doing a corporate event we assumed folks would use their names, instead we ended up with completely random gibberish which prevented us from being able to identify who was playing. In hindsight, it would be well advised that you ask your users to adhere to a certain naming convention so that you can easily identify who is who (this goes for both team and individual games!).

Examples usernames from our challenge that proved unidentifiable:

GFN1906
ChicagoBabe3
GloryDaze
TrackyRed

Inclusion of those not in attendance

As mentioned, our implementation of GooseChase was for an invite-only staff conference, which is typically attended by around 35% of our organization. Since the conference is not streamed and doesn't offer any remote participation, there was a suggestion that the game be modified to provide opportunities to include staff that weren't invited to the conference. Ultimately it was decided that the GooseChase be focused on on-site participants to keep it as interactive as possible, but it might be worth considering how to include off-site participants in the future.

Screenshots

The GooseChase app only allows you to utilize the camera from your mobile device, NOT your photo gallery.

Communication, promotion, participation

The March of Dimes staff conference attendees received a binder of conference materials upon registering. Since I didn't attend the event, and wasn't involved in the promotion of our GooseChase event, I can't say what they received that informed them about the game, instructions on how to participate, or how much it was promoted in other ways (general sessions, posters, management, etc).

Out of 350 conference attendees (and an enterprise/unlimited license), only 40 attendees download the app, and 18 of those completed at least one mission.

Missions

Below are the missions we used and the number of participants in each. Why am I providing this? When constructing our GooseChase we struggled to find ideas for what would be fun - so consider this us paying it forward!

Mission	Participants
Adaptable: Is your glass half full or half empty? Take a picture of both,	8
Bold: Embracing change takes courage, get bold. Visit the tech bar before 3pm and write on the courage wall.	6
Circle of Champions: Download the Circle of Champions logo, print and wear it proudly.	3
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!: Put a dollar in the March for Babies bucket.	8
Enable breakouts: ABT getting you down? During your morning breakout session, share a picture of your success during your beach task.	4
Entrepreneurial: Create a new breakfast food or beverage idea and encourage others to try it too.	4
Externally aware: Did you embrace the 30 day challenge and meet someone new? Share!	4
Feeling Floridian?: Ask the hotel waiter for the Tipsy Turtle Cocktail or key lime pie dessert at dinner tonight, share a picture of your treat!	8
Find a friend: Make a new friend on your dine around tonight.	10
Going, going, gone: Get ready to win big! Find out about Mobile bidding for auctions and download the link to our 2015, 24 hour silent auction at the tech bar. Once you've received it send a picture of your screen.	9
Home improvement: On your water taxi ride to dinner, take a picture of the house with the best story.	6
I <3 technology: Technology getting you down? Take a picture of yourself having a drink and telling us about it the tech bar at 6pm.	9
I like turtles: It is sea turtle nesting season here at the Marriott Harbor Beach. Find the 2 different nesting areas on the beach and take a picture of yourself in awe.	9
I spy with my little eye: Where's FRED? Find him and take a picture sharing a cup of coffee at the tech bar.	11
Long term focused: reflect on your time at the conference	4
Look at me now: Search yourself in CRM	8
Macro planner: Visit the tech bar and search within FRED to find out about the macro planning program.	8
Mobile giving: (no description was provided)	4
Nimble: team pyramid? leap frog? take a picture being in the right position for change.	3
Paparazzi: Find in your program and document the NICU Family Support photo of the year.	9
Publix: Find someone wearing an I Love Publix button	4
Research: Look in your programs and take a picture of the 2014 National Ambassador, Aidan Lamonth.	12
Say hello: Introduce yourself to a new volunteer and show it by photographing your two badges (should definitely be from different states)	4
Spread the word: 1 in 10 US babies is born prematurely each year, pass a note to a hotel guest or employee and take a picture.	8
Surgeon general warning: Find a picture of a smoke free zone/no smoking and take a picture.	7
Whip it good: from 4:30-5:30 get inspired for your next Signature Chef auction and see what the hotel is cooking in the lobby. Take a picture of yourself and the chef.	6
You gotta be in it to win it: Use the tech bar and donate $1 to marchforbabies.org. Then take a picture of the screen. Note: You will NOT be able to donate from your mobile device and submit a screenshot that way.	9

How March of Dimes Conducted a 30 Day Challenge for Culture Change

2015-07-22T11:39:00.001-04:00

For the past year March of Dimes has been undertaking a major strategic realignment to improve our operational efficiency.

Part of the communication plan around the realignment project involved using a 30 day challenge to engage employees in “micro-actions” each day for thirty days. The goal of the challenge was to focus on helping the Foundation establish a more open environment for communication and problem-solving.

Setup

To help drive traffic we posted a widget in the upper right corner for the duration of the challenge which linked to an area of the site with a deeper explanation.

Intranet homepage

30 Day Challenge area

We chose to use a discussion forum to post each challenge in order to keep responses organized and to make it easier to track engagement.

Results

Forum...	May	June (month of challenge)
Hits	299	2,848
Visits	199	1,857
# Threads	16	37
# Posts	23	779
# Likes	5	1958

Lessons Learned

30 Days: Calendar or Business?

Our first struggle with the task was the literal interpretation of "30 day challenge".

30 business days

then should it just be called a 6 week challenge?

30 calendar days, including weekends

would staff really participate on a weekend?

Having already decided to kickoff the project in June, and call it a 30 day challenge, we went right down the middle and posted challenges on the 22 business days in the month (4 1/2 weeks). In hindsight, this is something you probably want to put quite a bit of thought into well before your launch date and be extremely clear in your communications, because it was a source of confusion for our staff.

Tagging & Email Notifications

Our intranet software includes tagging capabilities where you can tag individuals or groups of users, and they are then notified via an email and system message on our site.

Using the challenge to promote this feature was a rare opportunity to educate staff on what had been an under-utilized tool. By the end of the challenge nearly every forum post included a tag to a users, department, or physical office location.

Email notifications, generated from tagging, helped keep daily challenges on everyone's mind and fostered a herd mentality where those tagged quickly joined the thread.

Example of one of our forum threads with a few tags, click to expand

Email Overload

Our intranet allows users to subscribe to entire forums, or to individual threads, and a thread reply triggers an automatic thread subscription. I love these subscription features, but in heavily utilized threads, the quantity of emails can cause some staff to get frustrated.

From the start it would be recommended to provide clear instructions about any email subscriptions your system has and ways to handle overload. We took this as an opportunity to educate our staff on how to utilize Outlook email rules to maintain an organized inbox - an invaluable lesson that many staff were unaware of. We also provided opt-out instructions.

Gamification: Leaderboards & Badges

Let's face it, competition is fun. So why not post a leaderboard of your most engaged employees, departments, offices - or award badges to users upon passing certain milestone!

We didn't implement leaderboards because of concern about quality of engagement over quantity, and to be sensitive to those users that were taking part off-line. In hindsight, I feel that a leaderboard would have been helpful and that its value trumps other concerns.

Load Testing

We weren't sure how many users would participate in our challenge, but assumed it would be a manageable enough number that our intranet platform would be able to keep up. We were wrong.

On the second day of the challenge we noticed that we had the same number of posts as the first day - which seemed very unusual and soon after were informed that some users were unable to post. It turned out that our software had an IE specific bug which was preventing the display of >72 posts.

How to get around this? When a thread reached 50 replies, we edited the thread and marked it closed. This locked the thread, preventing additional replies. Then, we created a new thread, using similar title, and the same thread copy to capture additional responses. Problem solved!

Challenges

Below is a brief description of the challenges we posted, and the amount of engagement they triggered. Why am I providing this? When constructing our 30 day challenge we struggled to find ideas for what would make a good challenge - so consider this us paying it forward!

Day	Challenge	Responses
1	say hello to one person you do not normally interact with	72
2	share with a colleague what you value about them	72
3	volunteer to do something that is out of your comfort zone, or normal scope of work	28
4	encourage those around you to think of themselves as part of a team	51
5	post one word that describes the team that you work with	72
8	complete an employee satisfaction survey	42
9	seek out a perspective different than your own by inviting a colleague, volunteer or partner to participate in a conversation or meeting, and seek out this person’s input and ideas on the topic being discussed	20
10	congratulate a colleague, volunteer or partner on a success	26
11	keep an open mind all day long	16
12	post one word that you feel best describes <the company you work for>	60
15	ask a colleague, volunteer, or partner, for their input on a problem or challenge you are facing	19
16	consider your team members involvement before making a statement that begins with “I”	13
17	redirect any conversation that becomes exclusive or siloed	13
18	share the title of a song that you think of when you think of your work team and the work you do together	55
19	share the Olympic sport, or event, that you think of when you think about <the company you work for>	29
22	contribute to a culture of “yes” by maintain a positive attitude in all conversations or meetings	19
23	take 5 minutes and offer to help a colleague with whatever they need	20
24	provide encouragement to someone around you	21
25	describe your favorite “team” moment	20
26	share the tool (from a toolbox), that you think of when you think about your team of colleagues, volunteers and partners at <the company you work for>	29
29	have lunch with someone who you don’t interact with on a daily basis	19
30	what are you coming away from after 30 Days focused on open environment? do you and your team have plans to continue on the path towards a more open environment for communication and problem solving?	22

Here are additional challenges which we considered:

Fill in the blank (Mad Libs style)

Example: The company I work for reminds me of _____ and inspires me to ______.

Share something you are looking forward to happening this year
Share something about yourself that most people don’t know
Share something funny (joke, picture, etc)
Share your favorite inspirational quote
Repeat one of the challenges that you especially enjoyed
Share your thought on the 30 day challenge – what worked well, what could have been better?
Take your 15 minute breaks and unplug on at least one of them – walk, stretch, meditate

Automating the scheduled extraction of db data and FTP of it using SQL Reporting Services 2012

2015-02-05T10:46:00.001-05:00

Our intranet team manages our relationship with Next Jump, an e-commerce company that manages employee savings programs for companies worldwide including 70% of the Fortune 500.

To login to their site, employee data must first be sent to Next Jump. We could log into our intranet db server, open SQL, run a script, copy the data to Excel, then go to the vendor site to upload it...but I get bored by repetitive things so we've automated the process.

The following steps were necessary:

Start SQL Reporting Service 2012
Create a report project
Subscribe to the report
Implement a scheduled SFTP task

Start SQL Reporting Service 2012

From the server you have SQL installed on, open SQL 2012 Reporting Services Configuration Manager and essentially clicking "Next" through each step. You'll want to take note of the web service virtual directory, and the report manager site identification. The default for them is:

http://<your server name>/Reports
http://<your server name>/ReportServer

At this point both of those URLs should resolve and give an indication that your Report Service is up and running. If you are running into difficulties, this is a great article which helped me get it up and running: How To Configure SQL Server Reporting Services In Order To Deploy Reporting Services Reports In GP

Creating a Report Project
Getting this setup was relatively easy as I had done it previously, albeit on an older version of SQL (Creating a report from Oracle WebCenter Analytics db using SQL Reporting Services).

From your Start button, open SQL Server Data Tools. If this is your first time going through it'll ask you to select a format - choose Business Intelligence if you are just making reports.
Select File > New > Project > Report Server Project, be sure to name the project at the bottom of the page.
In the Solution Explorer right click Reports then choose Add > New Item > Report, be sure to name the report at the bottom of the page.
Specify a data connection from the Report Pane by clicking New > Data Source. Name and configure your source.
Define your data set from the Report Pane by clicking New > Data Set. Name the data set and enter your query.
Add a table to your report by going to the toolbox, selecting Table and dragging it onto the Design area of your report.
Add your data to the report table by expanding your data set in the Report Data pane and dragging/dropping your data elements into the table column headers.
Toggle the report preview button to ensure your data connection is working and the table is displaying nicely
Deploy your report to the web server by selecting Build > Deploy

I've greatly simplified the steps above. For a more comprehensive explanation with pictures please refer to Create a Basic Table Report (SSRS Tutorial) on the Microsoft Developer Network.

Subscribe to the Report
Assuming a successful deployment, verify it by going to the virtual directory at http://<your server name>/Reports.
To subscribe to the report:

From the home page select the report folder, then select the down arrow next to the report and select Subscribe. This dropdown didn't appear for me in Firefox so I had to use IE.
Select the Windows File Share delivery method and configure the report as necessary
From the My Subscriptions link (top right of page) you can verify the subscription, when it was last run, and it's status.

Yay! The easy part is done!

Implement a scheduled SFTP task
From the brief research I did I came to the conclusion that FileZilla wouldn't work and that I would need to install http://winscp.net which has a command line option that would allow for scheduled SFTP.

The install is straight forward and there is plenty of documentation on how to use the tool from a command line or through other forms of programming. What I found most useful was their page Schedule file transfers (or synchronization) to FTP/SFTP server.

Start by installing WinSCP
Open the client application and connect to your SFTP site. You might want to save the connection for later testing.
I'm on Windows 7, so I went to Admin Tools > Schedule Tasks then created a Basic Task
For the action choose start a program ("C:\Program Files (x86)\WinSCP\WinSCP.exe")
You'll need to point to a script file (.txt) which will open the FTP application, connect to the site, and transfer the file. For the arguments area you'll need to point at this script using a command like: /script="\\<your share file path>\WinSCP_script.txt". For testing you might want to prefix that with /console which will open a window to show you that it is working as intended.
Next go and create the script file in the location you specified. This is what mine looks like:
# Automatically abort script on errors
option batch abort

# Disable overwrite confirmations that conflict with the previous
option confirm off

# Connect to SFTP server using a password
open sftp://username:password@connectionSite.com/

# File to upload
put \\HQ\GeoffGarcia\Project\NextJumpExport\NextJump.xls

# Closes all sessions and terminates the program
close
Run it all a few times to make sure it works without a hitch...and you're done!!!
This might seem a little tricky if you haven't tried to create a SQL Report, use an FTP client, or write a script, but I hope this mini-guide will help you accomplish your goal!

Troubleshooting:
The second time I tried to implement this I couldn't get the console window to open or any other programs that I tried it with. I deleted the task I had created and then recreated it and everything worked.

Ning Widget Padding

2014-02-24T16:00:00.001-05:00

I'm playing around with Ning a little and am trying to take control of my padding and margins.
To help isolate styles I've set some basic background colors. This helped me get a better handling on where all the empty-space was coming from and hopefully it'll help someone else out there.

Kentico CMS 7 Installation

2014-01-10T18:10:00.001-05:00

Getting started materials:
Forums: http://devnet.kentico.com/Forums.aspx
Online documentation: http://devnet.kentico.com/Documentation.aspx
Support: https://www.kentico.com/Support
Client portal: https://client.kentico.com
Download: https://client.kentico.com/Download

Step 1: Download the installer

When I went to this area I was prompted with 2 options:
* Kentico CMS 7 & EMS
* Kentico CMS 7.0 classic installer for .NET 3.5

Use the Kentico CMS 7 & EMS option. Even if you don't have the EMS license, it won't matter. All the DLLs, code and modules are included with all licenses. The license key enables/disables features automatically.

Step 2: Run the installer

The install process is fast and intuitive. I've done a lot of software and installs and this is one of the best I've ever used. The documentation is very clear and should answer any questions you have. I'd encourage you to use the discussion forums if anything is unclear.
After the installer completes a sample site will open. At the top of the page will be links to:
CMS Desk - the tool to edit your website: http://localhost/KenticoCMS7/cmsdesk/default.aspx
CMS Site Manager - the admin interface to your installation: http://localhost/KenticoCMS7/cmssitemanager/default.aspx
The default authentication to both sites is administrator/<blank>

Step 3: Register your license

Assuming you've already purchased Kentico, you'll need to visit the client portal to register your license. Copy/paste your code into the serial number field and choose a site name.
Next you'll need to provide your domain name to generate a license key (on the same page).
Copy the license key and open CMS Site Manager. Choose the licenses tab, click the "New Licenses" button and follow the simple instructions.

Step 4: Change the admin password

From CMS Site Manager select the Administration tab and Users from the side navigation. Open the administrator account, then select the password tab and change the password. While you are in the account you might want to change the admin email address also.

Interact-Interact v7 Widget Sizes

2013-11-11T15:46:00.004-05:00

-- this is obsolete after the 7.2 launch which includes an increase amount of widget size options --

I'm just getting my feet wet with the responsive framework of Interact-Intranet v7 and the widget design challenges that go along with that.

When our v7 instance loads, for a heart-beat we see a light-grey widget outline which quickly fills in with content. It looks as though the canvas accommodates 4 vertical columns on the landing homepage and 3 on subsequent area homepages due to the side navigation consuming a column.

Click the image for a larger view

When I added the Twitter widget I noticed that while it looks good on my 1280x1024 monitor it doesn't fully display on my 1024x768 monitor (employee standard). I could have guessed a few times and probably come up with a good size, but knowing the widget sizes and understanding how they work is pretty important so I thought I'd put in some due diligence.

To help me figure out common widget sizes, specifically for the smaller widgets, I typically create free text widgets that include a simple 100% x 100% table with a colored background. Then I take a screenshot of what I'm looking at and use Paint to figure out the dimensions. With v7 I've run into an issue embedding a table into the free text widget so I did the next best thing - inserted a square red image! I initially used a 1278x990 image, but later scaled it down to 280x280 because of issues I was running into with spacing issues caused by the image being rectangle.

Click the image for a larger view

Note: These test were done in IE10.0. I found that using Firefox altered the widget sizes slightly (2px difference at both sizes w/o a title).

The next test I ran was to determine the impact of resizing on the content of an image. For this I used a 1k x 1k image of horizontal and vertical lines. The result is that the image appears to automatically resize based upon width. Because the widget sizes are fixed and images are aligned to the top, the bottom of the image is cut off.

Click the image for a larger view

What does this all mean?

If you are going to use an image in a free-text widget you would be advised
to not include a title since the title seems to have priority and the image is secondary. Additionally, titles can wrap depending upon the resolution the page is viewed at which can cause a fairly significant difference in the amount of image height that displays.

What happened to the Twitter widget?

In the end I settled on a Twitter defined widget size of 275px (height) which displays the full widget at 1280x1024 and enough of it at 1024x768.

Click the image for a larger view

Interact Intranet: Diagnosing problems with AD sync

2013-07-19T16:19:00.001-04:00

From time to time you might notice issues with accounts in your intranet not properly synchronizing with your AD system. If this is the case the first step is to contact support which will give you the fastest resolution to your problem.

If you are handy with SQL and AD you can try to identify the issue yourself by examining the AD sync logs which are stored in a table called UMI_audit.

This query will return any errors from the last two weeks:
select * from UMI_audit where errormsg is not null
This query will identify any users that aren't configured to sync:
select * from umi_person where sync = 0

The most common issues we encounter with AD sync are accounts that have been orphaned as a result of incorrect expiration.

If your IT department isn't willing to give you AD access and you aren't sure how to verify data on the AD side, I'd recommend installing Softerra LDAP browser. With a minute or two of configuration you'll have a READ only view into your organizations AD system.

Softerra LDAP Browser is a lightweight version of Softerra LDAP Administrator. It supports read-only operations that do not modify LDAP directory data, e.g. browsing, search, export, etc. For complete, fully functional management of LDAP directories you need Softerra LDAP Administrator.

Softerra LDAP Browser is the industry-leading software for browsing and analyzing LDAP directories. It provides a wide variety of features for handy viewing of directory contents, getting information about directory infrastructure and objects.

Right after the very first release Softerra LDAP Browser has become a real breakthrough in IT market thanks to its simplicity and power in equal measures. The software holds highest positions for 10 years already. Some of its features are unique - to date there is anything to match their efficiency in the existing LDAP software packages.

Intranet, Portal, Social Network, Community vendor list

2013-07-19T10:56:00.002-04:00

In my opinion, the days when intranets were distinct from social networks is behind us. Most intranet vendors these days include every social feature that social network vendors offer, and vice versa. Similar to the transition half a dozen years ago when the term intranet consumed the notion of portals.

Below is a list of a few vendors that brand themselves as social, intranet, portal and community providers. Feel free to email me or comment below if I'm missing anyone.

Acquia

Anahita

Atlassian - Confluence

Interact Intranet v5 Search Index Rebuild

2013-07-17T10:03:00.004-04:00

Each time we apply an update to our Interact v5 environment our search index jams and fails to index new content. After 5-6 of these occurrences I've discovered the trick to rectify this issue which allows the search index to begin functioning in a normal manner again - it also indexes content that it had previously missed.

While I don't recommend any customers use this process without first discussing with Interact, I'm posting the steps because of the frequency in which I need to refer to them:

Login to SQL and open the Interact db
Expand Storage
Expand Full Text Catalogs
Right click on Catalog1
Click Rebuild

The repair will take a few minutes depending upon the size of your index (we have roughly 10k items in our search index and the rebuild takes about 10 minutes). While the index is being rebuilt nothing will be returned in your search results.

Interact-Intranet: Using Google Analytics to Capture More Data

2013-06-04T10:59:00.001-04:00

Widget tracking isn't accounted for in the v5 Interact-Intranet Analytics module. If you don't have that module you can implement your own custom code file logging or if you have the module and want to track custom widget (or free text widget iframes) you might want to consider going the Google Analytics route. In addition to tracking your custom widgets you can also use Google Analytics to track your site as a whole and see just how many people are using features and functions that you otherwise wouldn't be able to track.

This is a guide of my efforts to track our entire site and our custom widgets.

Update: Recently found there are a lot of additional 3rd party analytics tools!
Checkout this great list http://www.onextrapixel.com/2013/07/16/ten-best-alternatives-to-google-analytics

Step 1: Login to Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Step 2: Create an Account

From the home window start by clicking the "New Account" button. You can have multiple accounts and I would recommend creating one for your entire intranet. The only important piece of information when doing this step is correctly entering your Web Site URL. Intranets can be tracked assuming they meet the following requirements:

your corporate network must be able to reach the ga.js JavaScript file at http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js or https://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
your intranet must be accessible through a fully qualified domain name such as http://intranet.example.com. The ga.js JavaScript will not work if your intranet can only be accessed using a domain name that is not fully qualified, such as http://intranet.

Step 3: Create a Profile

The profile for an Analytics Account is the gateway to the website reports: it determines which data from your site appears in the reports. more info on accounts, users properties, and profiles

Step 4: Add Tracking Info

Copy the tracking code snippet to your clipboard. Next go to your intranet's analytics: Administration: Third Party Analytics area and paste the code into the text-box. Click the save button and your tracking will begin immediately.

Step 5: Verify Your Tracking

Click the Reporting tab at the top of the page, then on the side navigation select the Real-Time Standard Report: Overview. You should immediately begin seeing your site's usage metrics come through. Only the Real-Time reports are live, all other reports will populate around midnight PST with the previous day's data.

Step 6: Track Custom Widgets

In the previous steps we implemented tracking on your entire site. To track non-intranet or widget views you'll need to additionally add the same tracking code to those specific files. While JavaScript isn't allowed in free text widgets, if you embed an iframe within that widget you can add the JavaScript to a custom page that is called within the iframe.

Notes

We haven't noticed any performance issues as a result of using Google Analytics.

Interact-Intranet: Content Administration Guide

2013-06-03T12:50:00.004-04:00

Below is a brief guide to the permissions required for various levels of content administration in Interact-Intranet v5. This is a work in progress so please comment or email me with any additions or changes that I can make to this guide.

	Author	Approved Author	Admin
Can add documents	Yes, but submission requires approval	Yes	Yes
Can edit other peoples documents	Yes, but submission requires approval	Yes	Yes
Can add calendar entries	Yes	Yes	Yes
Can delete and set other peoples documents to inactive	No	Yes	Yes
Can approve content submitted by others	No	Yes	Yes
Can add images to a gallery	No	No?	Yes
Can modify area homepage widgets	No	No	Yes
Can modify content area structure	No	No	Yes

When an author begins the process of creating a document the file immediately becomes locked to them and can only be submitted for approval by themselves - not even an admin. Often times authors change their mind after beginning the process and will abandon these files which leaves many orphaned documents in the system. These files can be identified by their orange status within the Manage Documents section.

$5 and 5 minutes: Help support the March of Dimes and celebrate, honor and remember babies who touched your life

2013-03-15T10:19:00.000-04:00

Dear readers...

I am excited to share with you that I am participating in the Hunterdon County, March for Babies event on April 28, 2013 and all of you are welcome to come!

It's been over 8 years since I began working at the March of Dimes and learning about the consequences resulting from babies born too soon, and sadly how common it is. The mission of the March of Dimes is extremely important to me because I've had so many friends impacted by premature birth. I am supporting the cause by attending their event AND raising funds that will go toward advocacy efforts, cutting edge research, and programs and services to help give every child a healthy start.

In honor of the 75th anniversary of the March of Dimes I'm significantly increasing my fundraising goal this year to $1,000 and I know I will reach it with your help!
You can make a donation at marchforbabies.org/geoffgarcia in less than 5 minutes!

Thank you for supporting something so important to me.
Geoff

Employee Engagement — Power your Bottom Line

2013-01-23T10:43:00.002-05:00

The impact of a disengaged workforce can be staggering when it comes to productivity and profitability. In fact, new research shows that as many as 67% of your employees may be less than fully engaged — and the average company loses $2,246 per disengaged employee every year. Engaged employees are not only 57% more effective; they’re also 87% less likely to leave your company.

Copied from: http://www.adp.com/solutions/employer-services/solutions-for-multinationals/insights/mnc-insight-detail.aspx?id={CEE81AEF-450C-4651-A9BF-4D7982CC89D1}

Interact Intranet: Custom Location Directory

2013-01-17T19:09:00.003-05:00

One of the most widely used applications on our intranet has been a custom developed location finder to help our employees find addresses of our 250 locations. We recently migrated to Interact Intranet and developed a new custom location finder which queries against location and personnel information from within the database.

The out of the box people directory can displays location information if you configure it, but it takes a few extra steps to get to the data. We plan to offer both the People Director and Location Directory to our users through homepage widgets and the Applications menu from our top navigation.

If you have a location finder on your intranet I'd love to know what features you've built into it, and any suggestions you might have so we can make ours even better thanks!

Screenshot 1: The dropdown contains a list of our chapters (aka States) and regional offices. By selecting from the list the lower panel does an inline refresh to show the appropriate content.

Screenshot 2: Click on the "View Staff" link from the first screenshot displays a list of everyone that works in the office you selected.

Interact Intranet: Active Directory account synchronization

2013-01-02T14:19:00.003-05:00

Synchronization of Active Directory accounts can be a bit tricky so hopefully this chart comes in handy for some customers. This relates to version 5.1.5 and might not apply to future releases.

Domain Checkbox "Deactivate Non-Group Members?"	If you do this to an AD account...	This is what happens to your Interact account...
Unchecked	Disable	Deactivated
	Delete	Remains active
	Remove from sync group	Remains active
Checked	Disable	Remains active
	Delete	Deactivated
	Remove from sync group	Deactivated

NOTE: Interact cannot be configured to automatically delete users. If you want to delete a user from Interact you must do it manually through Site Admin.

Interact Intranet: Automate the Extraction of Binary Profile Pictures for use in Active Directory

2012-12-13T16:18:00.000-05:00

Active Directory can be used as a central repository for the storage of profile pictures. This source can then feed email, CRM, intranets, messaging and other enterprise software.

Unfortunately, there isn't an out of the box way for users to add these photos directly to Active Directory (as far as I'm aware!) so some trickery needs to happen to get this all to work.

This blog post will explain how we extract user profile pictures from our Interact Intranet environment and then upload them to Active Directory.

Step 1: SQL query to identify users and their pictures

Microsoft recommends square profile pictures with dimensions of 96x96. Interact conveniently already thumbnails pictures into preset sizes. After testing, we found that their 4th size, 75px width, has sufficient clarity when used in Active Directory, which allows us to export pictures without the need for programatic image manipulation. Note: If you do want to investigate image manipulation you might start with a library like ImageMagick.

select PERSON.NTUsername, ASSET_INSTANCE.BinaryData
from PERSON
INNER JOIN ASSET_INSTANCE
on PERSON.AssetID=ASSET_INSTANCE.AssetID
Where PERSON.NTUsername != 'ARCHIVED'
and PERSON.AssetID is not NULL
and AssetSize='4'

Step 2: Export pictures to a file path

Below is the code that is triggered though a nightly job to extract the binary data from the database and convert it into files at the designed path.
Credit for this code, and pulling this project together, comes from coding ninja extraordinaire Matt Chiste from Integryst who was able to complete the development in less time than it took me to write the requirements!

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.Data;
using System.IO;
namespace PicExporter
{
    class Program
    {
        static string connString = "Data Source=<redacted>;Initial Catalog=<redacted>;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=<redacted>;Password=<redacted>";
        static string cmdString = "select PERSON.NTUsername, ASSET_INSTANCE.BinaryData from PERSON INNER JOIN ASSET_INSTANCE on PERSON.AssetID=ASSET_INSTANCE.AssetID Where PERSON.NTUsername != 'ARCHIVED' and PERSON.AssetID is not NULL and AssetSize='4'";
        static string folder = "pics/";
        static string FILENAME_EXTENSION = ".jpg";
        static int FILENAME_INDEX = 0;
        static int BINARY_INDEX = 1;
        static string PROP_FILE = "picexporter.properties";
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.Out.WriteLine("START: " + DateTime.Now.ToString());
            // vars
            string filename;
            loadVars();
            // set up the connection
            SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(connString);
            SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand();
            SqlDataReader rdr=null;
            try
            {
                // run the command
                conn.Open();
                cmd.Connection = conn;
                cmd.Parameters.Clear();
                cmd.CommandType = CommandType.Text;
                cmd.CommandText = cmdString;
                rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();
                // iterate the users
                while (rdr.Read())
                {
                    // write to the log
                    Console.Out.Write("Extracting user: " + rdr[FILENAME_INDEX].ToString());
                    // get the byte array for the image
                    Byte[] b = new Byte[(rdr.GetBytes(BINARY_INDEX, 0, null, 0, int.MaxValue))];
                    rdr.GetBytes(BINARY_INDEX, 0, b, 0, b.Length);
                    // write rest of line to the log
                    Console.Out.Write(" (" + b.Length + "bytes)");
                    // check existing file
                    filename = folder + rdr[FILENAME_INDEX].ToString() + FILENAME_EXTENSION;
                    if (File.Exists(filename))
                        Console.Out.Write(" [UPDATE]" + Environment.NewLine);
                    else
                        Console.Out.Write(" [NEW]" + Environment.NewLine);
                    // user names prefixed with the domain will have a \ in them. Need to make sure the full folder path is created
                    if (!Directory.Exists(Path.GetDirectoryName(filename)))
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine("Creating Folder: " + Path.GetDirectoryName(filename));
                        Directory.CreateDirectory(Path.GetDirectoryName(filename));
                    }
                    // write the file
                    FileStream fs = new FileStream(filename, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write);
                    fs.Write(b, 0, b.Length);
                    fs.Close();
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Console.Out.WriteLine("EXCEPTION: " + ex.Message);
                Console.Error.WriteLine("EXCEPTION: " + ex.Message);
            }
            finally {
                // close the connections
                if (rdr != null)
                    rdr.Close();
                if (conn != null)
                    conn.Close();
            }
            Console.Out.WriteLine("FINISH: " + DateTime.Now.ToString());
        }
        static void loadVars()
        {
            string propFile = Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + "\\" + PROP_FILE;
            string line, name, value;
            StreamReader file = null;
            // Read the file line by line
            try
            {
                file = new System.IO.StreamReader(propFile);
                while ((line = file.ReadLine()) != null)
                {
                    try
                    {
                        name = (line.Substring(0, line.IndexOf('=')));
                        value = (line.Substring(line.IndexOf('=')+1));
                        if (name == "connString")
                            connString = value;
                        else if (name == "cmdString")
                            cmdString = value;
                        else if (name == "folder")
                        {
                            folder = value;
                            if (!Directory.Exists(folder))
                            {
                                Console.WriteLine("Creating Folder: " + folder);
                                Directory.CreateDirectory(folder);
                            }
                        }
//                        else
//                            Console.WriteLine("ignoring property: name: " + name + ", val: " + value);
                    }
                    catch (Exception)
                    {
                        // ignore line without "="
//                        Console.WriteLine("ignoring line: " + line);
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Console.Out.WriteLine("ERROR READING " + propFile + ": " + ex.Message);
                Console.Error.WriteLine("ERROR READING " + propFile + ": " + ex.Message);
            }
            finally
            {
                if (file != null)
                    file.Close();
            }
        }
    }
}

Reference: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317016

Step 3: Import pictures to Active Directory

The following powershell script runs through a scheduled job. The job searches the folder we have extracted photos to for newly modified photos and then calls the script, which matches the filename of the photo to the network User Name and then uses native Active Directory APIs to add the image to the user’s profile.

param($Identity,$Path);
# Import a .jpg into Active Directory for use as the Exchange/Outlook GAL Photo
# For best resultsL <10kb files, 96x96 dimensions
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Admin
if (!$Identity)
{
    throw "Identity Missing";
}
if (!$Path)
{
    throw "Path Missing";
}
if (!(Get-Command Get-User))
{
    throw "Exchange Management Shell not loaded";
}
$User = Get-User $Identity -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
if (!$User)
{
    throw "User $($Identity) not found";
}
if (!(Test-Path -Path $Path))
{
    throw "File $($Path) not found";
}
$FileData = [Byte[]]$(Get-Content -Path $Path -Encoding Byte -ReadCount 0);
if($FileData.Count -gt 10240)
{
    throw "File size must be less than 10K";
}
$adsiUser = [ADSI]"LDAP://$($User.OriginatingServer)/$($User.DistinguishedName)";
$adsiUser.Put("thumbnailPhoto",$FileData);
$adsiUser.SetInfo()

Hide Content Based Upon Iframe Parent

2012-12-04T15:06:00.000-05:00

Some web sites use iframes to display information from other web servers. This is a practice that is generally frowned upon yet is a necessary evil sometimes.

I work on an employee intranet where we need to display content from another internal server. The problem is that sometimes our employees access the site from off of our domain where they don't have access to the internal server. To get around this issue I've created an extremely simple javascript snippet which can be added to the page to hide the content and display a message to the user explaining why they can't see the content.

I'm posting it here as a reference for myself and in case someone out there needs something like this!

<div id="whatever">Your content</div>

<STYLE type=text/css>
.hidden { display: none; }
</STYLE>

<script type="text/javascript">

   function referrerCheck()
   {
      var mapReferrer = document.referrer;
      var mapDiv = document.getElementById('content');

      if(mapReferrer=="http://this is the URL calling the iframe")
      {
         mapDiv.className='unhidden';
      }else{
         mapDiv.className='hidden';

      }
   }

   referrerCheck();

</script>

How it works:

All of this code goes onto the page which calls the iframe.
The div at the top is where your iframe goes - what you want to hide if folks are off the domain.
The style section sets the stage for what you want to happen if folks are off the domain. In this case we want to not display the entire div.
The javascript runs the referrerCheck() function which grabs the document.referrer which is the page that calls the iframe.
The getElementById functions gets the div object so that its class can be manipulated.
The If condition then determines whether or not the referrer is on or off domain and sets the class accordingly.

Interact Intranet: Alerts

2012-11-28T12:46:00.003-05:00

Interact Intranet uses a system of alerts to notify users of certain activities.
Some activities additionally trigger emails (covered in my previous post: Interact Intranet: System emails).

The purpose of this post is my own documentation on what I've learned about the alert system on version 5.1.5.

Manage Alerts

From time to time someone might trigger an alert that administrators would like to remove.
We've removed system emails several times and the process is very straight forward.

Within Site Admin: Control Panel: Manage Alerts you can find and delete alerts.

Be aware that alerts in this area are a combination of future and past alerts. Meaning some have been sent and others are in the queue to send at a later date. It would be helpful if there were an indicator for this! I haven't been able to determine the sort order but they don't appear to display chronologically nor alphabetically.

Advanced Alert Management

Alerts (future and past) are stored in the ALERT table of the Interact database.
Key fields in the table include:

DateAdded - date the alert was created
DateFor - when the alert is due to be sent
Date Actioned - when the Alert has been read by a user (aka actioned)
ActionedBy - which user the alert has been actioned by

Alert SubType IDs

Alert subtype ID's are used to help organize alerts by activity in the database.
After over 10k alerts being sent by our system (1 month of production use) these are the IDs that have triggered alerts for us and their titles:

1 New Blog Post
2 Keyword Suggestion
2 You have received a comment on one of your blog postings
3 Is This Up To Date?
7 Document Version Approved
8 Comment Reported
8 Post Notification
8 Thread Notification
8 Thread/Post Content Reported
9 <Title of document pending approval>
10 Document Review Reminder
12 Document Expiry Warning
13 Document Watch
14 Document Comment Received
17 An update has been scheduled
18 Interest Suggestion
19 Feed Notification
20 <Username> has invite you to join <team name>
22 Share Notification
23 A comment has been made about your image.
200 You have been tagged

A number of alerts have null as their SubTypeID. Those include:

{TEAMNAME} Notification.
Accepted Interest Suggestion
<Username> has requested to join <team name>.
Approval Request Deleted
Comment Request Deleted
<team Name> Membership (upon being granted access to a team)
Rejected Interest Suggestion
Team Creation
Team Request

Note

AFAIK alerts (and emails) are triggered by actions of others and can't be self-triggered.
This needs more testing on my end to validate this behavior.

Interact Intranet: Customizing your login page

2012-11-27T10:49:00.002-05:00

Modifying your Interact login page is easy to do, although probably not upgrade proof. If you are going to make any customizations, be smart and make a backup of your customizations (in addition to the originals)!

The source files for the login page are stored at \Interact\WEB\Interact\Login. From there you can modify the default.aspx and default.aspx.vb files per your design. The CSS is quite complex so if you aren't strong at manipulating floats properties in DIVs then you might just want to start from scratch (or delete everything between the BODY tags).

With some graphic help from our creative department I was able to whip this up in about an hour.

Good luck!

Interact Intranet release version 5.2 with enhanced analytics and more

2012-11-08T11:16:00.001-05:00

This morning (US time) Interact Intranet hosted a webinar covering the release of version 5.2 of their intranet software. The webinar was recorded and is available here. Below are some comments and screenshots of the features.

Comments Interface

Anyone that has the ability edit a document can now delete comments.
Profile pictures display alongside comments.

Change Author

In bulk - reassign a document to someone else.

Influence Score

Displays profile score and influence score on user profile
Measures how each user causes others to take action on the Intranet

Analytics

Statistics

Warnings

Real Time Benchmarking

If you don't opt in you don't see the scores for other companies.
All benchmarked against entire Interact user population

Email Report

Daily emails. Content and frequency cannot be customized.

Document Quality

Score out of 10
Based on things like: keywords, title, images, review date, links, summary, content, etc
Updates on creation and edit of a document.

3rd Party Analytics Integration

Using this interface you can apply a 3rd party analytics tool.

How do I get 5.2

You need to request it from support area via the Interact Extranet area. Raise a new ticket
5.2 is available immediately.

Interact Intranet: Administrative Queries

2012-10-16T14:54:00.002-04:00

We are getting close to our go-live date with Interact Intranet and it is time for us to do final cleanup to ensure our site is as consistent as possible. To supplement the out of the box metrics I created a post of document queries, and this post of queries is going to focus on content structure and organization.

Absolute vs Relative Links

If you have a tendency to link to content (documents, teams, areas, categories, etc) within your intranet you might find that some of your links are absolute and others are relative. This becomes an issue if you use different URLs for intranet, extranet or outside users. Use this query to verify that all of your links are relative:

SELECT SECTION.Title, SECTION2.Title as Parent, SMI.URL from SECTION_PROPERTIES_SIDEMENUITEM as SMI
INNER JOIN SECTION
on SECTION.SectionID=SMI.SectionID
INNER JOIN SECTION as SECTION2
on SECTION.ParentID=SECTION2.SectionID
WHERE SMI.URL like 'http://%'

Links Specify Page Format

If you create links within your intranet to other areas you might find that some of your links were created using a URL which specifies formatting. All links which aim at Section/Main should use the default.aspx as opposed to using a defined .aspx page such as MainTwoColumnsLeft MainOneColumnLeft, etc. You can verify that your site is clean by using this query:

SELECT SECTION.Title, SECTION2.Title as Parent, SMI.URL FROM SECTION_PROPERTIES_SIDEMENUITEM as SMI
INNER JOIN SECTION
on SECTION.SectionID=SMI.SectionID
INNER JOIN SECTION as SECTION2
on SECTION.ParentID=SECTION2.SectionID
WHERE SMI.URL like '/Interact/Pages/Section/Main%'
ORDER BY Parent

Inconsistent Links

If you create links on multiple areas pointing to the same piece of content you might find that some of your links aren't consistent. You can verify that your links are consistent using this query and swapping out Expense and Award for your commonly used link titles:

SELECT SECTION.Title, SECTION2.Title as Parent, SMI.URL from SECTION
INNER JOIN SECTION_PROPERTIES_SIDEMENUITEM as SMI
on SECTION.SectionID=SMI.SectionID
INNER JOIN SECTION as SECTION2
on SECTION.ParentID=SECTION2.SectionID
WHERE SECTION.TypeID='3' and (SECTION.Title like 'Expense%' OR SECTION.Title like 'Award%')
ORDER BY SECTION.Title

Inconsistent Category Options

Within a category there are a series of options which can be set including things like sort order. If you have a large intranet and you deviate from the defaults you might want to verify that your categories are somewhat consistent. You can access the consistency of your categories using this query and swapping out the red text with however you've set your default options:

SELECT SECTION2.Title as Parent, SECTION.Title, SMI.ShowAuthor, SMI.DefaultOrdering, SMI.ShowPerPage, SMI.TemplateID FROM SECTION
INNER JOIN SECTION_PROPERTIES_SIDEMENUITEM as SMI
on SECTION.SectionID = SMI.SectionID
INNER JOIN SECTION as SECTION2
on SECTION.ParentID=SECTION2.SectionID
WHERE SECTION.TypeID='3' and SMI.TypeID='1' and (SMI.ShowAuthor!=1 or SMI.DefaultOrdering!=1 or SMI.ShowPerPage!=1 or SMI.TemplateID!=1)

What Categories Are Empty

Curious what categories on your site don't have any documents?
Sections >1790 (on my site) are admin and modules areas which is why I eliminated them.

SELECT SECTION.sectionID, Section2.Title as Parent, SECTION.Title FROM SECTION
INNER JOIN SECTION as section2
on SECTION.ParentID=section2.SectionID
WHERE SECTION.SectionID>'1790' and SECTION.Title not like ('%Home') and SECTION.TypeID='3'
and NOT EXISTS
(SELECT * FROM CONTENT_SECTION WHERE SECTION.SectionID=CONTENT_SECTION.SectionID)
ORDER BY Parent asc

User Last Login

Curious which users haven't logged into your site in the last few days, weeks months? This query will show the last time all users in your system logged in.

SELECT Surname, Firstname, DateLastAccessed from PERSON
ORDER BY DateLastAccessed desc

I'll continue to add to this list as I generate additional queries. Feel free to lob out any suggestions for queries and I'll see if I can add them to the list.