Disqus - Latest Comments for furuknap

Re: Do the SharePoint Dance! - SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land

furuknap — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:44:16 -0000

Joel,

You likely know already, but I'd just like to point out that Part 4 of the series sort of explains the whole 'SharePoint Sucks' claims:
http://furuknap.blogspot.com/2009/10/sharepoint...

Oh, and of course, I'm not a SharePoint hater. That would just be ridiculous.

.b

Re: SharePoint Partners are Part of a Symbiotic Ecosystem NOT Leeches or Mice - SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land

resing — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:22:35 -0000

Bjorn, way to stick up for yourself! Controlling your image in this Social Networking jungle is just as tough as being a Rhino in the wild, I bet.
I agree. Microsoft may be the biggest company in the world, but there's still the rest of the world out there. And that is a good thing.

Re: SharePoint Partners are Part of a Symbiotic Ecosystem NOT Leeches or Mice - SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land

furuknap — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:42:18 -0000

Joel,

I don't subscribe to the idea that Microsoft is just selective about which features they add; if that were the case, the partners would indeed just be picking up crumbs from the table that Microsoft thought wouldn't be a success.

Evidence of this is abundant, in all the great add-ons made by third-party developers. Think of WSPBuilder - it is not by choice that Microsoft's competitor VSeWSS is the least favored (SPDevWiki survey, 2009) development tool.

I refuse to believe that Microsoft just didn't bother to make a better development experience because they didn't have time or space. Mr. Keutmann simply had better ideas, and, more or less single-handedly, created a much better solution.

This applies to other areas as well. Microsoft provides the platform and the partners and independent developers improve that platform. It's still a win-win, as the platform benefits from the full range of partner innovation.

I do believe we are saying the same thing, and I am not for a second doubting that the SharePoint team is performing to the best of their abilities, but as for any business, perhaps especially for SharePoint, there is undoubtedly a fair share of "Doh! Why didn't we think of that" in the halls of Redmond.

And that's a good thing.

.b

Re: The art of SharePoint, how to make a graphical design work for SharePoint, part 1

furuknap — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:17:52 -0000

Excellent start, congratulations on a great article.

Re: Getting started with SharePoint programming: Simplifying SharePoint debugging by creating the troubleshooting toolbox

mechatronix — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:41:23 -0000

Thanks Bjorn, I'm a fan of your articles .. extremely helpful .. waiting for your book :)

Re: Customizing the User Experience of SharePoint: Fast track to Feature Generation (Part 6 of 6)

furuknap — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:30:42 -0000

Hello,

Deploying lookup columns is a tricky business, but once you know why and how all it takes is a couple of lines of code. In short I ususally have a feature activated handler and hook up the columns on activation-time.

.b

Re: Getting started with SharePoint programming: Simplifying SharePoint debugging by creating the troubleshooting toolbox

furuknap — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:26:48 -0000

Great tips, Ayman!

I would also like to point out that when attaching to the debugger you can select all the w3wp processes in case your code runs in different application pools or you don't know which pool is correct.
.b

Re: SharePoint Magazine User Experience Week: Using DelegateControls to Customize the User Experience

furuknap — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:58:55 -0000

I think you have your work cut out for you, yes :-)

Re: SharePoint Magazine User Experience Week: Using DelegateControls to Customize the User Experience

cpoteet — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:16:15 -0000

I did some interesting stuff making the search control more usable with delegate controls.

I always wanted to do a project where the delegate controls were all modified to reduce the horrible markup making MOSS more standards compliant. I bet that would be a huge task.

Re: SharePoint Magazine User Experience Week: Using DelegateControls to Customize the User Experience

furuknap — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:13:21 -0000

I tend not to create what you call tangible examples at all. I'd rather people be creative on their own by telling people how a certain feature works and then leave it up to them to explore the full potential.

I do evaluate your feedback, though :-) Why don't you pick up where I left and write another article with more tangible examples?

Re: SharePoint Magazine User Experience Week: Using DelegateControls to Customize the User Experience

cpoteet — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:02:11 -0000

You indeed can use Delegate controls to modify the UX, but it just confounds me because in the article you don't actually give any examples of improving the UX of a SharePoint site. I doubt removing the search control and adding a yellow background improves the UX.

I guess I was just hoping for a more tangible example of improving the UX with delegate controls not just what they are.

Re: SharePoint Magazine User Experience Week: Using DelegateControls to Customize the User Experience

furuknap — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:51:42 -0000

Are you saying that having a method to alter the CSS of a page is not part of user experience?

DelegateControls is very much a part of the user experience, yes. Both the top navigation and quicklaunch data sources are DelegateControls, as is the search box, the My site links, the visual interface... All of these things affect the user experience.

Add your own DelegateControls to your own master or content pages and you can modify the entire interface and behavior of a site by adding or removing Features from a site.

So how you can say that DelegateControls are not part of UX is a mystery to me. But I am very open to your further thoughts.

Re: Customizing the User Experience of SharePoint: Content Type User Interface (Part 4 of 6)

furuknap — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:07:33 -0000

I'm not sure I fully understand your question. Do you want just a random document to be added when you hit new? I'm not certain where such a scenario would be appropriate, but you can certainly override the 'New' button, and menu, to do mostly whatever you like. I'll encourage you to look at part 3 of this series to get an intro to CAML and then look at how the New item on the toolbar gets contructed. You might also be able to do this using a CustomAction, briefly described in part 2 of this series.

.b

Re: Customizing the User Experience of SharePoint: Fast track to Feature Generation (Part 6 of 6)

furuknap — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:47:29 -0000

I certainly agree, there are plenty of tools with similar capabilities. I prefer WSPBuilder for its VS integration, but each person's style and task is different.

However, for this article I wanted to explain a certain technique, not discuss the various tools available. As the technique used SPM and WSPBuilder I elaborated on the use of WSPBuilder.

On that note, I have yet to see any single tool capable of performing the same CAML dump->Feature combo that WSPBuilder plus SPM can do. Most other tools, like VSeWSS, when it releases, perform a single task very well.

Re: Customizing the user experience of SharePoint: Overview of the default SharePoint interface from a technical point of view (Part 1 of 6)

furuknap — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:02:22 -0000

Hello,

I am very glad you enjoyed it. I wanted to make it deeper and cover more ground, but for the sake of the time you will have to spend reading I found it better to shorten it a bit, and rather focus on getting an overview here.

The next articles in the series will go into far more detail on each of the topics covered here, so if you are particularly interested in one area you should have a field day :-)

This article is also spanning two full chapters in The Book so you can imagine the depth that I will be able to explore there.

.b

Re: Customizing the user experience of SharePoint: Overview of the default SharePoint interface from a technical point of view (Part 1 of 6)

furuknap — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:49:22 -0000

Thanks a lot, feedback such as this makes it all worthwhile :-)

For finding time, well, Arno was kind enough to let me write this stuff so the least I could do to thank him is to find time to do a good job.

Re: Customizing the user experience of SharePoint: Overview of the default SharePoint interface from a technical point of view (Part 1 of 6)

furuknap — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:22:43 -0000

Hello,

Thanks, how nice of you to say that, I am glad you liked it. I was afraid that it would be too deep for online reading, or that the attempts at humor would distract from the reading experience.

Look forward to the next article as well, and of course, The Book.

.b

Re: Writing CAML Queries For Retrieving List Items from a SharePoint List

furuknap — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:05:37 -0000

Great article!

I would like to point out a great tool by John Holliday called CAML.net which helps write the CAML code for you and prevents quite a lot of typo errors. It is available on CodePlex at http://codeplex.com/camldotnet/

.b

Re: “The Dog Ate My Task” - Use SharePoint Designer to Email Daily Task Reminders

arnonel — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:19:39 -0000

I see an article in that comment :P

Paul?

Re: “The Dog Ate My Task” - Use SharePoint Designer to Email Daily Task Reminders

furuknap — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:57:47 -0000

Hello,

While it is fully possible to use SPD for this purpose I hesitate to do so. Not just because I am a developer, but because I prefer the right tool for the right job. I don't use a hammer to get a wingnut in place, even if it would be possible.

However, I really love your way of inspiring creativity. People seriously underestimate what is possible with SPD. I've previously used SPD to mimic a ticket handler functionality using simple intelligence to determine if an incoming email to support@example.com should be routed to helpdesk, how important it is, and to handle automatic escalation. I wouldn't put it into production, it was used primarily to demonstrate what you are doing here, that SPD can be very flexible if you need it to be.

What I really miss is more focus on combining 'regular' development with SPD, specifically creating custom activities. Quite often semi-power users need to do more advanced tasks or end up creating the same, repeating set of tasks multiple times. Being creative may solve the problem of creating advanced tasks, but if ten people want to accomplish more or less they same they tend to end up creating ten different solutions, taking ten times as long and frustrating IT ten times as much. These power users should learn when it is not efficient to create new solutions and either create or have someone create a more versatile custom activity.

Again, SPD out-of-the-box is not always the best or even a good solution, but combine it with some custom development and it can become truly amazing in a lot more cases.

.b