Paul Culmsee in Dublin: Intellectual Capital is the key

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend Paul Culmsee's seminar called "Re-writing the rule book for managing knowledge", held at the Microsoft offices in Dublin.

I have been following Paul's blog for a couple of years now, Clever Workarounds, so I was looking forward to meet him in person and also talk a bit more about Dialogue Mapping...

I'm glad to say he fully delivered on the expectations!

Speaking at the SharePoint Evolutions Roadshow'14 (Dublin)

Last June, I was invited to speak at the SharePoint Evolutions Conference Roadshow, here in Dublin. It was a joint session promoted by Derek Finnerty, my practice director in Storm, with Gerry Moloney, from the NTMA.

The goal of the presentation was to show "a client story, a very real one, about the hoops and hurdles our client went through to create a SharePoint centric platform that delivered a full range of business solutions to make things work".

Problems with the Content Organizer: 10 shortcomings

The Content Organizer is one of the ECM features that got promoted to a global feature in SharePoint 2010, enabling it to be used in any site or context. It was already available in MOSS2007, but only within Record Centers.

I've used this feature in a couple of SharePoint 2010 projects and, unfortunately, it still had some problems. If you are building a new DMS, I would still definitely recommend looking at it, but not without first taking a look on the challenges I faced back then.
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March'14 in Shares

A new initiative in the blog: Month in Shares.

I usually read a lot about SharePoint and technology in my own time and I believe good content deserves to be shared. Every month I'll take a look at the retweets I've made and do some sort of curation work with the highlights.

Here's March'14.
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Changing to a UNC path in the command line

Ok, so this one's a quickie. I was invoking some PowerShell from the command line (a batch file) that would iterate a Web Application, gather some info and generate a CSV report into a local folder.

Suddenly, there was a requirement to save these reports to a network shared location. The current solution had a variable for the location of the reports, but it wouldn't support a network path.
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Word not saving to SharePoint by default

Recently, I had an intermittent issue with the Save button in Word 2010. It was a SharePoint 2010 project and I was creating a new document using the New > Content Type button in the ribbon of one of the document libraries.

The Content Types were custom and so were the document templates behind them. When I was saving for the first time, it would default to the local Document library and not the document library in SharePoint. Bugger!
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PowerShell Tip #1: Loading custom assemblies

PowerShell is a great trick to have in your bag, it allows easy and flexible scripting using SharePoint objects. Whether you're automating a certain one-off(ish) task, or just debugging a certain strange behaviour, it is always the tool I resort to.

This time, I was having an issue with an Event Receiver. PowerShell came to the rescue!
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Thoughts on Release & Deployment Management

A friend of mine, Carlos Nogueira, wrote a great article on some of the best practices that should be applied on release and deployment processes.

It was very interesting to read, especially considering he works with non-Microsoft technologies and tools, that the challenges on the "other side of the fence" are exactly the same, something we sometimes forget.

This has been one of my focal points (...)

Iterative upgrade to SharePoint 2013

Migrations and upgrades are not a new problem in the SharePoint world, nor the problems associated with such projects, especially on installations that have been highly customized.

But because it's not a new problem, the approach taken in these projects might not be the most modern one. I recently read the upgrade process strategy followed by Tobias Zimmergren and found it to be an interesting one.
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