A Matter Of Degree

I'd like to thank the Academy - the Microsoft Academy, that is

With respect to everyone around the world who is suffering right now, and at the risk of tone-deaf blogging, I have to share that I feel like a million bucks today, because last night I passed the final project in the Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science.  It's been a nine-month journey through nine courses plus that capstone project, and it's made a huge impact on how I approach data projects, from small "hobby" data analysis to multi-year enterprise data initiatives.  It's also made a huge difference in my confidence level generally. 

When Microsoft launched the program internally back in April 2016, with the ambitious goal of addressing the US technology gap in computer sciences while bringing more diversity into the available pool of candidates, I was fortunate to get into the pilot program.  This meant that the low cost of each course (about $50 per course at the time I went through them) was covered by Microsoft, and I had my manager's and team's support for the time commitment.  Several of my team-mates joined the pilot at the same time, and we were also able to nominate the technical and data-focused folks at our partners to go through it with us.

The public launch happened July 2016.  You can find the full description of the program here and the course schedule here.  The track diverges at several points, allowing you to choose, for example, whether to learn R or Python (although you could certainly take all the courses).  I highly recommend it for anyone who loves data and wants to learn more about how to wrangle it.  Here's why:

What I loved about the program:

• excellent, engaging teachers and well-thought-out content.
• active discussion forums and community support, quick responses from the program coordinators.
• getting hands-on in a way I certainly wouldn't have if I'd only explored these concepts on my own through tutorials and demo videos.
• the flexibility to learn at my own pace, and to choose where to dig in and where to skim.
• being part of a diverse cohort of data lovers from around the world

What I learned:

• an appreciation for the complexity of data science. These courses provide a great foundation, but they also make it clear that non-technical factors like experience, dedication to the truth, resistance to easy answers and correlations, creativity in problem-solving, and patience and perseverance are what separate a good data scientist from a great one.
• how to use the tools.  Microsoft makes software like Power BI and Azure Machine Learning Studio that is so easy to use, you might feel like you can pick them up in a few minutes.  The hands-on labs in this course showed the real power in these programs, and how the pieces of the stack fit together. 
• about myself:  I learned that it's possible to take on a degree program with an already-full life, and that it's actually fun to learn intimidating new skills. For example, the final project, which I vaguely dreaded through the nine preceding courses, turned out to be an addictive daily pursuit that felt more like a puzzle than a science project.

What you should know if you're considering this program:

• If you already have a database or developer background, that will help with some of the courses, but you probably won't sail through them all!
• if you do NOT have lots of database or programming experience, you can still do this!  But the courses will probably take you more like 20 hours each than 8 hours. 
• you can audit the courses for free, but if you want the certificate, you need to purchase the "verified certificate" for each course (and pass them)
• If Data Science isn't your thing, more MPPs are coming - expect future tracks to open in 2017 including topics like Big Data Engineering and Front End Web Development.

Who helped me:

I hit snags and lost my nerve many times along the way.  I wouldn't have made it through without a village.  So let me take this opportunity to very publicly thank the folks who talked me down, pumped me up, let me phone-a-friend, and otherwise were There For Me:

Allan Da Costa Pinto

Sri Ganapathy

Chris Kahrs

John Pelak

Diana Phillips

Bill Sherry

Julie Turner

 

& all the folks on the Yammer and edX discussion threads who asked the questions I wanted to ask, raised issues and got them resolved before I encountered them, and provided suggestions and encouragement.

 

Finally, thank you Graeme Malcolm & the entire team (I'm guessing more of an army than a village in this case) who made this program possible. 

 

I am employed by Microsoft, and the opinions expressed herein are my own.

 

 

 

 

The day Cortana saved my bacon

Last Friday it happened - Cortana helped me succeed (without my having to ask).

I was working at home in the morning, waiting out the worst of the rush hour.  I had a 10 am meeting about an hour away, so I was focused on work and planning to leave a little before 9.  Just before 8 am, my phone, sitting next to me, lit up with an alert - time to leave!  Turns out my meeting was scheduled for 9 am, not 10.  My first-order-of-business glance at my calendar had not imprinted the right time in my mind, and I definitely would have worked right through my commute time if Cortana had not reminded me.  I ended up being four minutes late to the meeting and eternally grateful that it was no worse than that.

Upshot:

1. Thank you Cortana.  Respect.  This didn't just make my life easier, it saved me.

2. This happened in part because the meeting organizer had included a full street address in the Location field.  This experience highlights the importance of making this a best practice for your meeting attendees. 

It makes me wonder how I could better equip Cortana to help me.  Would love to hear others' favorite AI / personal assistant tips.

To The Mothership! Starting a new role at Microsoft.

Albuquerque, NM, April 2011 - at the site of Microsoft's founding

Today I start a new role as a Partner Technology Strategist at Microsoft!  After nine years in the Microsoft partner ecosystem, I'll be seeing this business from the other side, in a position dedicated to helping partners build their technology practices and monetize the Cloud. 

Some folks have asked me: why Microsoft, why now?  This is the part where I get to state publicly, in the face of all the joking "mothership" and "dark side" comments I've received in the past two weeks, that I have always wanted to work for Microsoft.  As I mentioned, I've been a partner for nine years, and have worked with Microsoft technologies most of my adult life, so I have a lot of passion around the partner community and the product stack.  Many of the smartest, most talented people I know either work at Microsoft now or have worked there in the past.  The company is a true leader at this time of business transformation - their innovations around Cloud and Mobility will keep them competitive, as their high stock price and "Strong Buy" analyst recommendations indicate.  And it's clear that Satya Nadella's leadership is ushering in a new era of openness and integration, as the company partners with competitors like Dropbox and SalesForce and makes their products available on competitor platforms like iOS.

I'm unbelievably excited to take on this role.  And what I've found through this process is that it takes a village to advance your career - so let me take a moment to acknowledge the folks who helped me get here:

My longtime colleague from the SharePoint community, Richard Harbridge, held the role before me, and according to his team was considered the "best PTS ever," so I'll have some very big shoes to fill.  Richard was instrumental in helping me get the job, for which I am extremely grateful!  (Shameless plug: Richard and I (and many others) are co-authors of a book that just came out on May 1 - Improve It!: A collection of essays on using analytics to accomplish more with SharePoint, from the amazing folks at WebTrends.)

Mike Gilronan, who called me in March to say, "Hey, did you know Rich Harbridge is leaving Microsoft?"

Tara Seppa, for recommending me up, down and sideways along the chain of command.

Barrie Mirman, for so many years of support, encouragement, and insider knowledge.

Carin Kuehl, for heaps of Human Resources and Recruiting wisdom and advice.

JT and SVB, for continual support, morale boosting, and encouragement.

Finally, the team at BlueMetal, the most talented group of technologists and designers I've ever had the honor to work with.  I learned so much from you.  Thanks for a great four years.

 

First Look at Data from the SharePoint Maturity Model

A big thank you to all the folks who came out yesterday to the first ever SharePoint Saturday in Hartford!  The event was sold out and many of the sessions were standing room only.  The folks from New Horizons, Third M, and CTDOTNET did a great job organizing and running the event.

I presented the SharePoint Maturity Model (an updated version of the one I released on End User SharePoint back in November), and I want to extend a very special thank you to the attendees from my audience who turned in their SMM self-evaluations.  Your results are the seed of a data model that I plan to expand and build out in the coming months and years, to be a resource for those who are looking for answers to questions like:

• "For my industry and company size, how far along are similar organizations with their SharePoint implementations?"
• "After n years of SharePoint use, where do companies typically fall in the maturity model?" 
• "Is maturity correlated with number of years of SharePoint use, with SharePoint version year, or with investment in Enterprise vs. Standard?"

Although the data set is small and limited in the industries covered, I'd like to share yesterday's results here to give a sense of the potential of this assessment:

 

 

 

 
 
 
That last graph is making me smile - the insurance companies (which reported tens of thousands of users) are further along with their business process maturity, whereas the IT Consulting firms are big on the customizations - shocker!

My presentation from yesterday can be found on SlideShare. 

An Excel spreadsheet that you can use to graph your own maturity levels (with the format of the spiderweb graphs above) is available for download at http://bit.ly/SMMExcelTemplate.

Thank you again to everyone, it was a great day!

 

Thanks, Microsoft, for providing More White Guy

Thanks, Microsoft, for providing More White Guy, originally uploaded by sadalit.

Microsoft just launched the SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek site - where the target audience seems apparent from the images they chose to represent the different roles.

When I think of all the women I know who use, configure, and develop for this software product, I feel this new homepage is a misrepresentation. It reminds me of reading an an article or textbook from the 1960s where every pronoun is "he" or "him." Why not mix it up a little?

See the full home page here: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx

How to make "This Site" the default SharePoint search scope

A client recently asked how to make "This Site" the default SharePoint search scope from the simple search box on all pages.  "This site" does not appear as an option when you try to manage this via the GUI (Site Actions | Site Settings | Site Collection Administration section / Search Scopes), so you can't set it as the default there.

I found the answer on this thread on SharePoint Blogs / SharePoint University:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/forums/t/16293.aspx?PageIndex=2

and I wanted to reproduce it here with a few additions.  User Monty Myers (monty.myers) posted the following; my additions are in red:

Add or Modify the following line in the OSearchEnhancedFeature.xml file located in 12\Template\Features\ : (The full path is C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\OSearchEnhancedFeature, then open the SearchArea.xml file in NotePad)

This is the line of code you will add:

<Property Name="DropDownMode">ShowDD_DefaultContextual</Property>

The bold line below shows where the line of code needs to be added: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
    <Control
        Id="SmallSearchInputBox"
        Sequence="15"
        ControlClass="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.SearchBoxEx" ControlAssembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c">
 <Property Name="GoImageUrl">/_layouts/images/gosearch.gif</Property>
 <Property Name="GoImageUrlRTL">/_layouts/images/goRTL.gif</Property>
 <Property Name="GoImageActiveUrl">/_layouts/images/gosearch.gif</Property>
 <Property Name="GoImageActiveUrlRTL">/_layouts/images/goRTL.gif</Property>
        <Property Name="UseSiteDefaults">true</Property>
 <Property Name="FrameType">None</Property>
        <Property Name="ShowAdvancedSearch">true</Property>
 <Property Name="DropDownMode">ShowDD_DefaultContextual</Property>
    </Control>   
</Elements>

After making the change, save the file and do an IISreset. 

Important:  when you customize the SearchArea.xml file, it is unghosted, meaning that future patches and upgrades could overwrite your changes.  As a best practice, you should create a feature to install this unghosted file to current site collections and deploy the change in this manner.

SharePoint lookup to document library can't see all documents, or only sees documents of a certain file type (Word, Powerpoint, etc.)

This question from a client this week - why is it that when I lookup from a list to a document library, I only see Word documents even though there are Excel and PDF files in the document library too?

The client was using a multi-select lookup field, but the same thing happened with a single-select field. 

I recreated the scenario with a document library like this:

 

And in my case, the lookup returned only three choices:

 

It's not a content type or file type issue, it's simply that the Title field was not filled out for all the documents.  When the Title field is blank, the lookup acts as if those documents don't exist. 

I have often wondered why you're not allowed to look up to the Name field of a document library.  To my mind, you should be able to, since Name is the primary key field for the document library, just as Title is the primary key for other kinds of SharePoint lists.  But since it's not possible in this version, it's another example of why it's a best practice to fill out the Title field of documents, either on upload or after the fact.

Issues with Manage Content and Structure Move / Copy functions in MOSS 2007

I like the convenience of using Manage Content and Structure to move batches of files from one document library to another, while maintaining their metadata (custom fields as well as metadata like "modified by" are brought over from the source library to the target library).

However, I have been seeing some strange and concerning results, mostly having to do with content types.  In a recent example, I had a library of documents with a yes/no checkbox to allow for displaying certain of the documents in a view on the home page.  Another library needed to be merged in with this one, which had the same yes/no checkbox (same column name).  I recommended that my client move the files from one library to another using Manage Content and Structure.  After she did this, she reported that the documents from the merged library were not apperaing on the home page view even though she had checked "Yes."

When I looked more closely at the document library, I saw that there were now two identical fields for the yes/no choice in the same document library.  SharePoint had copied one over and kept the original - and the values were different in each field.  (In the field properties, I saw that the system had appended "0" to one of the column names on the back-end.)

In this case, it was a simple matter of making sure all the data matched from one column to another, and then deleting the duplicate column.  But in some cases (e.g., when the Move function added the "Publishing Start Date" and "Publishing End Date" fields to a document library) I've had to switch on "Allow management of content types" and hide the extra fields that were added during the move process so that my end-users wouldn't be confused by the newly-added fields.

Consider this a word of warning - Manage Content and Structure may beat Explorer View in terms of convenience and speed when moving batches of files, but it can cause unintended outcomes that could take you more time to troubleshoot and fix in the long run.

Not possible to use customized view with a KPI List

I'm trying to get a very simple KPI list working for a client's home page, and am finding that I am unable to customize the list view in any way.  Lots of questions about this out there, but no answers I could find. 

One forum respondent suggests using the "Display multiple indicators columns" section, but these options are grayed-out for me, as they are for others.

What I want to do is remove the "Goal" and "Value" numbers and add the "Detail Link" to the view so that it displays title, traffic light indicator, and link. 

I can get halfway there - the "Goal" and "Value" columns can't be hidden in a standard way (i.e. by removing them from the view) but can be suppressed by checking the "Show only status icon" checkbox in the Modify Web Part tool pane.  Not intuitive,  but OK.

But for the "detail" link - When I customize the views in the original KPI list I get some very buggy behavior - i.e. the view does not reflect my modifications even though my custom settings are saved when I return to "modify this view" mode. 

It's not possible to convert the Key Performance Indicators web part to a data view in SP Designer, as you can with most other list and library web parts.  The same is true for the KPI Details web part.

Extremely frustrating.  I could create my own conditional formatting using custom code, however my goal is to deliver an easily-maintainable solution to my client, using as much out-of-box functionality as possible.

If anyone has found a workaround for this, please let me know!

Opinions about the Quick Launch bar in SharePoint / MOSS 2007 / WSS 3.0

Note:  the opinions expressed in the list below are not necessarily those of the author, but rather those of a selection of the author's clients.

Regarding the items on the Quick Launch bar navigation on most sites:

1. The People and Groups link is confusing and needs to be deleted.
2. The headings don't fit my organization.  (e.g. We call our locations "sites," so the heading for sub-sites can't be called "Sites.") 
3. The headings are confusing.  I don't understand the difference between Documents and Lists.  I really don't care what the difference is.  And why is there a Discussions heading if there is no content under it?
4. I can't find what I need.  (Translation:  The Quick Launch bar and its contents are invisible.)

As I envision the 2009 release of SharePoint, I'm wondering how these common complaints will be addressed.  In MOSS 2007 it is easy to change the navigation headings on a site-by-site basis (not so for WSS), more complicated and risky to change them globally (i.e., your edits to the onet.xml file that governs these headings could be overwritten by an upgrade or patch).  Are headings needed at all?  Should MS do away with the Documents / Lists / Pictures / Discussions model and let the site owner structure the quick launch bar as content is created?  Or define the headings at the outset, the way the Site Map's categories can be defined and then accessed every time a site is created?

Or, given #4, is the quick launch bar a flawed concept?  I have witnessed end-users look for content on a site and never glance at that section of the window, and I have heard the same story from my content-owner clients - "I told him exactly where the link was but he still came back and said he couldn't find it."  I've worked with SharePoint long enough that I strongly support the local content / global content model, but many clients seem to want static content (e.g., a "hot list") in the left nav as well as across the top of the page. 

The Quick Launch Bar and its headings - useful or not?  What do you think?