A Matter Of Degree

Visual Display of Information Meets Web 2.0

20080817 - I feel honored to be included, originally uploaded by sadalit.

I got an email this week from one of the folks at We Feel Fine, asking permission to use one of my photos in a book project. Because of this email I discovered their incredible website. The application is beautiful, engaging, and really moving. This screen capture hardly shows the experience - it's so much better in action.

In the words of the website's creators:

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been studying human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.

Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20’s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life."

No Site Columns, Workflows on SharePoint (MOSS 2007) Surveys

One of my clients wanted to use a SharePoint survey for a data entry form because the branching logic makes the end-user experience much better.  Two problems:

1. The form requires a project code, for which this client has a site column, but you can't add a site column to a survey.  We could do a lookup to a separately-maintained list of project codes - but that is terrible from a maintenance perspective.

2. There is simple workflow associated with the form, but surveys don't support workflows, even though the functionality appears to be there.  I tested this with the built-in approval workflow and sure enough, "Failed on start."

Back to the drawing board.

20080801 - LinkedIn for Superheroes

20080801 - LinkedIn for Superheroes, originally uploaded by sadalit.

When are we mere mortals going to have access to a graphical display of commonly-used social networks like LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc.?

File downloaded from sharepoint document library replaces spaces in file name with underscores

I have been noticing for some time now, in several MOSS implementations, that spaces in filenames are replaced with underscores on file download/upload from SharePoint.  I was blaming this on SharePoint SP1, since I started to notice it around the time of that release, however this discussion on MSDN indicates Internet Explorer 7 is the reason.

To see the behavior, find any document in a SharePoint document library with spaces in the filename, or upload one.  Then download the document to your desktop - you can see that the underscores are added in the "Save As" window.

If you are working quickly and not expecting this filename change to happen, you would save the document to your desktop, make edits, and then re-upload it later.  Since you didn't actively change the filename, you would expect the document to save over the original in the document library.  This is the way SharePoint has traditionally worked.  But what you end up with is two copies of the document in the document library. 

 

Disclaimer - I'm sure we can all agree that the best practice in general is to check out / check in your document rather than downloading it to your desktop.  (The underscores are not added during checkin/checkout.)  But what if someone else has the document checked out, and you can't reach them to ask them to check it back in, and you're under pressure to make edits right away?  Or what if you thought you were just taking a copy, but the edits you make on your desktop turn out to be the preferred version?    Or what if you haven't fully tested the offline sync capabilities of MOSS 2007, and you want to be absolutely sure the document is accessible when you're offline?  These and many other real-world situations could lead to this downloaded-file scenario, which could lead to multiple copies of the same or similar documents in your SharePoint environment, which is exactly what most of us are trying to avoid. 

The MSDN thread proposes a workaround, although I will argue that the adding of underscores is not necessarily a bad thing, expecially since SharePoint can cause problems when working with filenames that include spaces.  I think it's important to be aware of this download behavior and to work toward minimizing the multiple-copies effect - emphasize checkin/checkout vs. download in end-user training sessions, for example.

SharePoint this week - three problems, three solutions

Peep Kabobs, originally uploaded by Little Rosy Runabout.

Recently I have run into three issues with SharePoint that were solved quickly thanks to articles and blog posts on the Web. I'm summarizing them here for quick reference:

How to insert a list field into a custom list form?

Once you create a custom list form and populate it with your list fields, the form is decoupled from any changes you make to the list (bummer!). If you need to add a field, you could hunt around in the menus for quite some time (like I did) before you figure it out:

http://www.imginc.com/blogs/erics/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=e931a6e7-bad3-481a-85b0-bbb244f58c19&ID=14


Workflow doesn’t kick off automatically

A custom workflow you create in SharePoint Designer, which seems to have no issues, won't start automatically. Did you create it with the administrator account and then try to kick it off logged in as the administrator? Before Service Pack 1 you could do this, but after...

http://kbalertz.com/947284/declarative-workflow-start-automatically-after-install-Windows-SharePoint-Services-Service.aspx


Picture library functionality breaks when you apply a custom workflow

This happened to me at two client sites – I added a SharePoint designer workflow to a picture library, and the library “broke,” i.e. the workflow no longer kicked off automatically and the drop-down menu on each item no longer worked. The status bar at the bottom of the IE window indicated a Javascript error - and it was! The solution is quick and easy if you can access the core.js file on the web front end server:

http://www.sharepointu.com/forums/p/197/432.aspx

Presentation to the Boston Knowledge Management Forum

Tonight I'm giving a talk at the Boston Knowledge Management Forum - "Dispatches from the Front Lines of SharePoint Collaboration."
Slide deck is here:

Have you met Susan Hanley?

Susan Hanley introduced herself to me last week, and I'm so glad she did.  I knew her as a co-author of the excellent Essential SharePoint 2007, but I was unaware of the SharePoint blog she writes for NetworkWorld, as well as the great resources available on her website.  She's got a focus on SharePoint usability, knowledge management, and user adoption that often is lacking in many of the posts and publications about this technology.  I hope you'll visit her blog and website; it's essential stuff for anyone trying to build a knowledge management system in SharePoint.

Wall-E and Knowledge Management

Wall-E Rubik's, originally uploaded by The Wall-E Builders.

Inspired by the Clutter Diet Blog's post about Wall-E as a great organizer, I wanted to post my take on Wall-E's knowledge management practices. If we look at Wall-E's on-the-job skills, as well as his collection of objects, as his "knowledge," he:

- Readily shares his methodology for doing his job
- Shares his filing system and what is filed there
- Lets his taxonomy grow organically (the spork!) rather than constraining it to a predefined set of categories
- Takes time to learn about new things rather than opting for the safety of his work routine.

For me, the movie raised these questions:
If you're the only one who knows how to do what you do, whether at home or at work, is your filing system intuitive enough for someone to find what they need if something should happen to you? Could they find it by browsing, keyword searching, or by both means? Could what you keep (versus what you discard), and how you keep it, actually save your life or your career?

xobni - five minutes and I was hooked

I learned about xobni from a colleague last week, and downloaded it today.  Xobni ('inbox" backwards) bills itself as "the Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments" and / or "a more socially aware email environment."  I would prefer to describe it as "the free Outlook tool with addictive metrics."  Once it started analyzing, showing me, for example, who among my contacts is quickest to respond to me, I was fascinated.  Then when it gave me the option to send said contacts their stats, I was hooked. 

The design is bright and appealing (maybe a little too appealing - compared to the bland light-blue-and-white Outlook color scheme its orange, black and purple tones make it difficult to look away or ignore the pane) and I found it user-friendly and intuitive.  After eight hours I'm thinking of my correspondents in terms of their xobni rank ("Yeah, he's my number three") and trying to figure out imbalances ("Why am I sending her two emails for every one she sends me?").  It interfaces with LinkedIn.  It bubbles-up attachments.  It threads conversations.  It hasn't broken anything on my pc, although the comments on this post about xobni's business model indicate that it may cause problems with FireFox.  For my setup, there is no downside and a tremendous upside.

I would rave more, but I've got to go reply to an email from my #1.

Tag as you search?

Today I attended a seminar hosted by the Boston KM Forum on categorization and tagging.  One of the speakers, David Hobbie, brought up a great point - that tagging / categorizing in the enterprise happens when a document is saved into the content management system, when a better way would be to have people tagging documents as they find them in search results.  The first scenario – tag on upload – involves questions such as Which version do you tag?  How can other users tag and rate?  The second scenario – tag on search – accounts for these issues and will lead to richer search results in the future.  I’m not advocating doing away with tag-on-upload, but I’d like to see Hobbie’s idea implemented in the enterprise applications used by my clients.

 

Last night I attended a talk on Enterprise Search from Microsoft by Tara Seppa at the New England SharePoint User Group.   Microsoft emphasizes the value of SharePoint’s “actionable search results” (by which they mean “preview helpful summary information and clear graphical representations of files; move, delete, copy, and drag & drop files; send, forward and reply to messages directly from search results, and open and run applications from the results”). The tag-as-you-search concept would be great functionality to add to future releases of SharePoint Search.

David’s blog:

http://caselines.blogspot.com/

New England SharePoint User Group:

http://www.clearwaypartners.com/SUGHome.htm

KM forum topic:

http://kmforum.org/blog/?p=70

Actionable search results definition from the whitepaper Microsoft’s Approach to Enterprise Search:  Bridging the Gap between Information Management and Enterprise Search