The voice of recyclable electrons

Shameless Self-Promotion

2011-10-17T13:21:00.000+02:00

It is always a difficult exercise to get interviewed for a job. It becomes even more difficult if it concerns an internal interview aiming to promote your company. Anyway, who I am and what I do is now available on YouTube: My work at Aliaxis

Sure Step Template for SharePoint 2010

2011-03-22T19:31:00.003+01:00

Last year, I wrote an article explaining how to deploy the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step template in SharePoint 2007. This year, I had to figure out how to deploy the Sure Step template in a SharePoint 2010 environment. So here are a few tricks.

I used the Microsoft Sure Step client platform version 3.2.3.0, Content 3.2.5.0.

The first step is to retrieve the Sure Step Project Site Template.wsp file from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics\Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step\SharePoint Templates. Note that the .stp file is useless for SharePoint 2010. Once you have that .wsp file, upload it to the Solutions center of the site collection where you need your Sure Step template.

Once the file is uploaded, you need to activate it. In order to activate it, you must ensure that you have the necessary rights and also that the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service is started. If not, simply start it from the Central Administration -> System Settings -> Manage services on server page.

As soon as the Sure Step template solution is activated, you can create a sub-site using that template in your site collection.

Lego Digital Designer: An Amazing Tool

2011-02-12T17:31:00.002+01:00

Today in order to provide additional basic Lego building instructions to my son, I decided to download, install, and test the Lego Digital Designer. Within 30 minutes, I had everything set up and designed a first model (copied from Lego Box 5898).

I have been positively surprised by the ease of use of the LDD. Being a big fan of Lego, I foresee many hours to be spent with it.

64-Bit Connector from Linked-in Released Jan 6, 2011

2011-02-11T12:00:00.002+01:00

On January 6,2011 LinkedIn finally released the much awaited 64-Bit Connector for Outlook 2010 64-bit.

Download the 64-Bit Connector from Linked-in for Outlook 2010.

SharePoint or Google Apps, which is best for you?

2010-12-14T17:06:00.000+01:00

I have come accross this very intuitive post by Clare from Pentalogic Technology and had to forward it, particularly as SharePoint is a hot topic at the moment.

SharePoint or Google Apps, which is best for you?: "

With both Google and Microsoft offering collaboration solutions in the form of Apps and SharePoint it’s only natural that organisations should look at comparing the two. We think it’s worth looking at this debate for ourselves.

So which is better – Google Apps or SharePoint? As ever, the answer really depends on what your business needs to operate and evolve. The key point to remember is that while they offer some similar features, both solutions are very different beasts.

Google Apps has come a fair way over the past few years and one of the main advantages it has over SharePoint is its lower cost. The standard edition is free, but most organizations tend to upgrade to its premier edition option that includes intranet with Postini, a high-end email security solution. You could outsource your entire “Office” for $50 per user per year, which represents a huge cost saving over any in-house IT solution.

The main features that Google Apps has are its messaging facility, including Gmail, Google Calendar and Groups, and its collaboration offering, with Google Docs, Sites and Video. Being a cloud-based service, Google strongly emphasize their security, support and reliability features. On the face of it, Google Apps may be a perfect entry-level alternative to SharePoint if you have a small business or are a one-person operation.

Of course cost savings come at a price. Google Apps doesn’t come close to the range of collaboration features that you get with. With powerful workflows, reliable secondary functions like Information Rights Management and an application development platform. If you factor in how easily SharePoint integrates with an existing Office suite then it’s easy to see how Microsoft can waggle accusatory fingers at Google Apps for not being enterprise-ready.

For many organizations though the rich array of features offered by SharePoint will simply be overwhelming and what Google has to offer will be enough. Particularly for smaller organizations and those who are more “outward facing” – have more interaction with people outside, rather than inside, of the organization, the sheer intuitive simplicity of the Google Aps solution, plus the ease of collaboration with the “outside world” may give Apps the edge over SharePoint.

There are limits to some functionality if you opt for SharePoint Online (see our post on SharePoint In House Vs Cloud for more on this), but even if you choose Microsoft’s cloud offering, the range of features outweighs Google Apps and costs start at $120 per user per year for a minimum of five users. However, Google Apps does have open API’s for developers which allows for some customization if you need it.

Google Apps is a great solution for a small enterprise and it can easily work alongside other more powerful software. Sure cloud based solutions lack the power of SharePoint, but if you’re in a small company, you probably don’t need these advanced capabilities anyway. When it comes to collaboration, Google Apps can also compete in terms of cost, speed and the ability to engage users. However, with no integration with Microsoft Office applications, a limited development platform and limited collaboration features, Google Apps often struggles to be a comprehensive business solution when compared to SharePoint.

Are you using Google Apps and SharePoint? How do you think the two solutions measure up?

Further reading:

1. SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 web apps better than Google Apps?

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/document-management/sharepoint-2010-and-office-2010-web-apps-better-than-google-apps-007049.php

2. Google Vs SharePoint can be apples vs oranges

http://www.realstorygroup.com/Blog/1773-Google-vs.-SharePoint-can-be-Apples-vs.-Oranges

3. The Big Switch: From SharePoint to Google Apps

http://www.thevarguy.com/2010/01/29/the-big-switch-from-sharepoint-to-google-apps/

4. Review: Microsoft Office Web Apps vs Google Apps

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/reviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225200312

5. SharePoint and Office Web Apps

http://www.joiningdots.com/blog/2010/07/sharepoint-and-office-web-apps/

SharePoint in the Cloud – Pie in the Sky? This article looks at what SharePoint in the cloud has...

How Much Does SharePoint Cost? How much does SharePoint cost? It can be difficult to...

SharePoint Versions through the ages – Confused? This post gives a brief overview of the different versions...

Evolution of the Social Networking Map

2010-08-09T20:38:00.005+02:00

In February 2008, in my What is Web 2.0 blog post I showed the following map about Social Networks, which came from xkcd.

Today, I saw on Le Journal du Geek the 2010 version and it speaks by itself. Notice the rise of FaceBook, YouTube, and Google for example but also the decline of MySpace and some others.

Only two years and an half between the two pictures. Changes are fast on the internet.

Import Calendar data from Outlook to Lotus

2010-06-30T17:36:00.003+02:00

Importing calendar data from Outlook to Lotus is not the most usual operation. On the Internet, there are rather plenty of examples and instructions describing how to make the exact opposite. The easiest operation is maybe this one.

In Outlook (2007 or 2010), go to your calendar view and perform a save as ... and select the ICS format. Use the date range option to limit the scope to future events only because later on during the import process, Lotus will impose a limit to maximum 500 events.

Once you have your ICS file, go to Lotus Notes (8.5 in my case) and open the Calendar. Select then file -> import and choose the ICS file type. Click OK and that's it.

Easier than expected.

Install Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal Server

2010-06-08T15:35:00.010+02:00

Last week, I finally decided to look at the installation of the Enterprise Portal (based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0) for Dynamics AX 4.0. I therefore started to investigate about its installation and configuration. Microsoft provides a very complete document about it: Install and Configure a Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal Server.

The instructions are quite detailed and can be followed as is. However there is no guarantee that everything will happen by the book. This is why before configuring and deploying the Enterprise Portal itself, I decided to check if all previous settings change did not prevent WSS to run. I checked the WSS Central Administration and it was full of "SharePoint encountered an unknown error." preventing me to view any page.

I decided to run the SharePoint Configuration Manager but it did not solve the issue. A quick look at the Event Viewer revealed hordes of different nasty errors under both the Application tab and the System tab: error 10016, 5214, 18056, 3351, 2424, 6611, 2426, 110, and 8214.

The solution was to concentrate on the errors from the System tab by order of appearance starting with the first one (Error 10016). As you can see, the error consisted of a service account requiring additional security permission on a Component Service administrative tool. Ultimately the solution was to add the Network Service account as user authorized to start that Component Service component service. The additional trick here was to identify the right Component Service as error 10016 message only referred to the CLSID of the Component Service and not to its full and clear name. Happily Google quickly provided the right component service name: IIS_WAMREG. The operation had to be repeated as well for the Business Connector account (as described in the installation document).

Once both accounts' permissions were set up, all errors stopped occurring and WSS was running correctly. It was then time to start with the configuration and deployment of the Enterprise Portal itself. I launched the Dynamics AX client and went to the Enterprise Portal setup in the Administration panel.

The Enterprise Configuration wizard is pretty straightforward and I have no particular comment about it. Upon completion, it proposes to launch the "Manage deployments" wizard. That wizard is slightly different than what is described in the documentation but it serves the same purpose.

However when running it, we had a small error upon completion. That error was unhelpfully logged as event ID 1000 in the Event viewer. On top of that, the EP custom site template was not deployed in SharePoint and this alone completely prevented the creation of the EP site.

The solution came from the following article from Customer Source (Article ID 940365).

Before finding the solution I tried a few time to remove and redeploy the Enterprise Portal. During these try-and-fail tentatives, I discovered that:

Clicking on the Remove button (see below screenshot) while any site was selected would immediately and automatically crash the AX client.
To remove the Enterprise Portal, you need to first double click on all ticked boxes then click the remove button.

After applying the fix from Customer Source, I still had the AX error, still the crash-upon-remove behaviour but the EP custom templates were correctly deployed. I could finally create successfully my first Enterprise Portal site.

After its creation, the first step is to link the EP site to a company from Dynamics AX. And of course the first tentative failed miserably. This time the solution came from article ID 931939, still from Customer Source. Once the solution got applied, I could link a Dynamics AX company to the EP site and start checking all its nice features.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9): On the Road to Salvation ?

2010-05-29T12:56:00.004+02:00

Recent reviews of the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 report that Microsoft is definitively making a step in the right direction. Instead of diverting attention with new (useless ?) features, IE9 concentrates on the core business of a browser: the surf experience.

Several sources such as PCMag.com, TechWorld or PC Pro all stress the promising progresses made by Microsoft with IE9 into two main directions: speed and standards.

Regarding speed, it seems that IE will finally compete with the others and stop lagging behind. This is already good news but the best piece of news comes with the compliance to standards such as HTML5 and CSS 3. (Even if the test version does not support all tags yet)

For the first time since a while, I am really curious to see the release of that particular browser version.

Evolution of Star Wars Combine Development Process

2010-04-26T20:08:00.001+02:00

That's it! We just migrated the Star Wars Combine online game to our new servers. We perform such an upgrade of hardware every 3 years roughly to cope with growth of both users and resources. We also use these upgrades as an opportunity to improve our development processes. Or maybe it is the opposite: we decide to update our development processes and we upgrade our hardware at the same time.

To make it short when we we started the Combine back in 1998, all we had as environment was a few text flat files as database, some HTML files for the website and a downloadable client developed by a single person who uploaded the compiled software on the server so that our players could download it. Back then the server was in fact just a small account on a free hosting services whose name I have long forgotten. Do not forget that we are just a bunch of volunteers working on this project during their free time and for free (or least for the sake of code).

Over time, we switched from a client/server model to a pure web-based model. Our architecture became clearer in our mind and since 2006 we were using 2 servers: one as production environment and one as development environment. Since a couple of years, we even decided to release our new features and bugfixes as weekly patches, allowing us to fix most problems on the development environment before going live.

This was already an improvement but we still had several issues regarding code quality due to our developers working in parallel and most of them having very different programming levels and background.

Now, since our recent Development Meeting of last February in Berlin, a new process has been introduced along with new tools. First we have created a virtual machine our server so that developers can work locally on their repository. That VM includes the database and the web server. When they perform some changes, all they need is to save their file and refresh the concerned VM webpage. Once they are happy with their changes, they can commit them to the development server.

On the development server, we have testers performing functional tests and providing input to the developers. On top of the functional testing, we have some unit tests that ensure that new developments will not break existing code (and features). Then, once all our tests are passed, we can proceed with our weekly release. Database schema changes are pushed and the production code is updated.

Even if this new process require more efforts from the developers such as writing unit tests and spending more time in the testing phase, the middle-term and long-term benefits of this new process will be invaluable. We are creating today a way to decrease tomorrow's bugs.

At the same time, we introduced a powerful database dedicated server to cope of the increasing database demands generated by our natural growth and increasing game complexity. Our frond-end web server can now only take care of generating webpages and will so open us the gate for future load-balancing.

Hard drive manufacturers to stop supporting Windows XP and DOS by 2012

2010-03-10T19:16:00.000+01:00

Hard drive manufacturers to stop supporting Windows XP and DOS by 2012: "

Microsoft did something right with Windows XP. While hardly an exciting operating system by modern standards, Microsoft still managed to deliver a flawlessly realized OS at the time… so well executed that it has happily met the needs of computer users for over a decade, even as hardware has radically changed. It’s been so popular [...]

"

That will be a change. Most of us have been using XP since a decade and saying good things about it at least since Vista.

Google Latitude can Go Wrong !

2010-02-26T19:27:00.007+01:00

Yesterday, I was coming back from a business trip in France. During the travel back, the Thalys train shuttling me from Paris to Brussels suddenly came to a total stop. I wanted to know where we were so that I could estimate the remaining distance.

I looked at my Blackberry and could already see from the telecom operator name that we were in Belgium already. I then decided to use the Google Latitude application to get more information. Here is what I got:

And I got the address as well, confirming that Google really located me north of Vilvoorde and that it was not just a display error:
Where you know the Thalys, you know that you arrive to Brussels from the south and so you cannot be on the north. A few minutes later, I had the confirmation that we were well in the south as we crossed the Halle (Buizingen) train station. As you can see from the Google map below, there is quite around 40km between my reported position (B), and my actual position (A).

Moreover when refreshing my position, I noticed that while the train was driving north toward Brussels, my position was moving from north to south, also toward Brussels.

Who said that Google is always right ?
There is always one more bug I would say.

HRESULT: 0×80040E14 error when adding items to SharePoint

2010-01-15T16:51:00.003+01:00

When attempting to create a new folder in our SharePoint, I faced the following error message: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040E14 with an impressive stack filling in my entire screen.

Googling this error message will send you to the Microsoft KB 841216 as first result. However the 3rd result will display an alternative solution from Alex Pearce's SharePoint blog. Alex suggest that your the reason can be in fact totally trivial and due to:

Your SQL server data drive being full, or
Your data or log file reached there full allocated size, or
Your database size is full and not set to increase.

In my case, the log file was full and I simply needed to shrink it. Kind of stupid, no ?

Deploying Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Project SharePoint Site

2010-01-09T15:32:00.005+01:00

Because we run several Dynamics AX projects in parallel, with many more to come, we decided to start using more and more the Microsoft methodology: Sure Step. The 2010 version of the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step client allows you to create a local project repository or instead a SharePoint site on your SharePoint portal.

The portal deployment wizard is quite straightforward and if you are the primary administrator of your SharePoint site collection then there should not be any problem.

Except we ran into a rather strange issue. While the Sure Step wizard showed we have the right permissions to create a site, we ran immediately into an error which caused the SharePoint site creation to fail and simply stated that it could not be created.

After checking the Events and logs on the SharePoint site, the Events and firewall settings on the local computers (we tried from several computers), and even the network firewalls settings, we were still stuck with no clue. That error message remained cryptic and sadly, googling it did not bring any help as all words are far too generic.

We then decided to use fiddler to at least check if the problem was on the local computer or on the server by checking where it will stop. That helped a lot. Through Fiddler, we spotted a returned error message stating that the Sure Step Project Site.stp template could not be found. So we manually uploaded it in the Site Template Gallery and restarted the Sure Step Project Wizard. This time, the Sure Step Project site was perfectly deployed and the result can be seen below, using a Dynamics AX 4.0 project as example.

Performance Comparison of Major Web Browsers

2009-10-19T18:33:00.006+02:00

I just finished reading this article about performance comparison of major web browser by Jacob Gube and wondered if everything was said. Unsurprisingly, Internet Explorer is presented as the worst and slowest browser. By the way, I often consider that people tend to appreciate criticizing when talking about Microsoft products in general.

But in the case were the tests complete ? It talked about speed, CPU, and read access time. But nothing about memory consumption. I jumped on the gun, took a look at my dozen tabs opened on Firefox and opened them as well under Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and Chrome.

As you can see, Firefox momory consumption is bundled inside a single process while IE8 and Chrome creates several processes with different memory consumption.

But after summing all results, I was astonished to see that Internet Explorer 8 is the best browser concerning memory consumption. The fancy Excel graphic below perfectly illustrate that fact.

There is no doubt that IE 8 requires less memory than Chrome or Firefox.

For the sake of fairness, here are the types of websites I used for the test. All of them are common sites I use on a day-to-day basis:

iGoogle
Two bugtrackers: Mantis and Jira
Two tabs concerned games on Kongregate.com
A PHPMyAdmin and a MediaWiki pages
A page on my online game (MMOG): Star Wars Combine
A web page from the MySQL site, one from an online banking, one from a newspaper with forums, and that blog on sixrevisions.com

In my next post, I will maybe make performance and statistics reports about the number of crashes of each browser. ;)

Upgrading MS BI to SQL 2008: Do not underestimate the Power of the Dark Side

2009-08-31T16:00:00.005+02:00

For our BI setup running under Microsoft BI 2005, we have an environment that comes straights from scholar manual. We have a development environment (DEV), composed of 4 servers: two are SQL 2005 database servers (staging database and a data warehouse ), one server is a SharePoint 2007 server hosting also the SharePoint database (SQL 2005) and a Visual Studio server. Similarly, we have a testing environment (TEST) composed of 3 servers: a staging database, a data warehouse, and a SharePoint server hosting the SharePoint database as well. Both the DEV and the TEST environments are virtualized. Then we have our production environment (PROD) composed of 4 physical servers: a staging server, a data warehouse, a SharePoint server, and a SharePoint database server. The only difference being that in production, we have separated the SharePoint front layer from the database layer for performance reasons.

Developers develop in the DEV environment and technical approvals are done there. Testers test in the TEST environment, which is also used for the functional approvals. Production data run in the production environment. So far so good and nothing new. I just described an out-of-the-manual architectural setup. All databases are up-to-date SQL 2005 and the SharePoint version is 2007.

We had planned to upgrade this environment to Microsoft SQL 2008 and thought it was quite well planned. We had waited for SQL 2008 SP1 to be released. We had waited for our sub-contractor to accumulate some upgrade experience and finally decided to migrate progressively. During last July, we migrated our DEV environment. Everything went smoothly. Some of us then went on vacations. The migration of our TEST environment was planned for mid-August and took place as expected. All functional tests we had prepared were passed without any problem. As this point, and as all lights were green, I decided to authorize the migration of the PROD environment.

And guess what ? Everything went fine with only one unexplained manual reboot. We later even noticed a small but noticeable performance gain with SQL 2008.

On the next days, I got an alarming phone call from the IT operations department. They reported that since the SQL upgrade all production servers kept rebooting every 2 to 12 hours without apparent reasons.

We then immediately started our investigations but quickly discovered that there was no logged Windows event or error message. A closeup monitoring of SQL did not give us any clue. A couple of days were necessary to find out that the reboots were caused by the monitoring systems because the servers were freezing for more than 10 minutes. Still, we had no idea why they were freezing. It only happened on the physical PROD servers, not on the virtual DEV or TEST servers.

The main difference between virtual and physical machines concerns the underlying drivers. After a couple of days, we upgraded several drivers on one of the blade servers: HBA StorPot card, Ilo2 card firmware, blade power management control and various other minor drivers. It worked and fixed the problem.

Conclusion of the story ? You cannot foresee everything and even if you work by the book, shit may happen. The good news is that we only lost 3 days with a very limited impact on end-users.

Picturing SharePoint Lists

2009-08-05T16:48:00.006+02:00

For one of my recent SharePoint projects, I have been asked to create lists where an image could be included to illustrate the content of each list entry. As each entry will have a picture attached to it, the picture upload process had to be quite straightforward and user-friendly.

I had first pointed my thoughts toward a picture library but soon discovered that it did not correspond totally to my needs. After some more googling, I found the Enhanced picture custome type on CodePlex. Here then comes the necessary complete instructions to install and parametize this nice add-on.

1/ As prerequisite, you need to install ASP.NET AJAX on your SharePoint (MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0). This operation is made extremely easy thanks to the detailed instructions on Mike Ammerlaan's blog post regarding Installing ASP.NET AJAX on SharePoint. Ultimately, it all comes down to downloading an EXE file, running it, then copying/pasting XML from the blog post into the web.config file of your SharePoint and finishing with an iisreset command.

2/ Once AJAX has been installed, download the Enhanced picture custome type WSP file and install it using the following commands:
stsadm -o addsolution -filename .wsp
stsadm -o deploysolution -name .wsp -allowgacdeployment -url http://sitename -immediate -force
(The -force attribute is necessary if some elements are already installed on your SharePoint.)

3/ Go to your site settings and then under site collection features, activate the ImageEnhancer feature.

4/ Go to your custom list, and add another field of the newly available type Enhanced Image.

5/ On your site, create a picture library. It will be used to store the pictures but you do not need to manage it or create any specific fields for it.

6/ Go back to your list and under the general settings, click on Enhanced Image Picture Library. Select the picture library you created before and click ok.

7/ That's it, you're ready to upload picture inside your custom list with maximal effects and minimal efforts.

How to include SharePoint Document Version in your File ?

2009-06-23T10:33:00.004+02:00

Since I started using SharePoint (MOSS & WSS), I wondered how I could include the version number provider by a SharePoint document library into the document itself, to ensure some cohesion help people to easily identify the latest version, particularly in the case of printed documents.

I discovered the following easy tip, which works for SharePoint 2007 and Office 2007.

In your documents list, go to Settings then Information management policy settings.

Under Specify a policy, select Define a policy and click OK.

In the labels section, enable labels and in the format field, enter something like: Version: {Version}.

Click ok.

Now go back to any of the documents of that library. Open it and edit it then go to insert, quick parts, document property and select Labels. Save your document, close it, then reopen it (in read only) and voilà, the SharePoint version will be included. For example, it will look like: Version: 1.4.

Note that it only works for Office 2007 documents (docx format for example) and MOSS.

Ten ways to sink an IT project

2009-06-20T15:45:00.004+02:00

During the recent Project Management Institute (PMI) congress from last May, Andre Chrome made an interesting show about ten ways to sink your project. And of course it applies perfectly to any IT project and I modified them sightly for this purpose.

Be vague: Do not define any detailed scope that would force you to implement what you promised.

Begin the execution ASAP. Why make a planning when you already know lots of changes will happen.

Focus solely on your team. Clients will only interfere with your work.

Forgot about code documentation and instead prefer mutual trust with your client.

Go beyond your client expectations. As clients expect always more and fancy features, you will sign new contracts that will compensate for your losses and bugs.

Risk management ? By definition, risk is uncertain. Why bother planning for risk.

Quality is only important at the end of the project. The client will only look at the GUI anyway.

Avoid bureaucracy. Paperwork is a waste of (your) time.

Make sure your team works overtime. As IT project are overdue anyway, put pressure on your team from the start.

Throw away paper documents when the project is over. Paper files takes place in your office and none ever read them.

Here is the video of this presentation:

Server Fault: StackOverflow for Servers Issues

2009-06-04T21:56:00.004+02:00

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have released the public beta of Server Fault. Based on their StackOverflow platform, it contains all existing features that made you love (or hate) StackOverflow.

While StackOverflow is oriented toward programmers, Server Fault aims to bring solutions to System, servers, and network administrators. Let's hope it will work as well. I cannot wait to see my first question answered.

Office 2007 Service Pack 2

2009-04-30T16:41:00.003+02:00

After yesterday successful installation of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 2 I decided today to install the Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2). Note that I have a fully patched Office 2007 in my computer with almost all Office applications, including Visio and SharePoint Designer.

I downloaded that small service pack of 290MB and immediately started the installation. It was again quite straightforward with only a click to accept the Microsoft conditions. My principal occupation during the installation was to wait for over 20 minutes for the patch to install and then accept for my computer to reboot. Everything worked exactly as foreseen.

One of the best improvements of Office 2007 SP2 is probably the support for PDF (probably the most universal file format) and ODF (the openOffice suite file format). These two file formats are now directly integrated into the Office 2007 suite. As I wanted to test this new functionality, I opened a 4.3MB-large complex Word document full of pictures, diagrams, styles, and internal links and saved it as PDF from Word. The result was a 5MB-large very nice PDF document where all links were working. The pictures quality remained high. I then tested my old PDF converter method which is PDF995. It took much longer to convert the 150+ pages, did not contain links, and ended up with a file size of 9MB. A colleague of mine tested the same conversion using PDFCreator But after 25 minutes of wait, he finally killed the process. The Microsoft solution is therefore not too bad in this case.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 2

2009-04-29T16:16:00.003+02:00

Today I installed the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2) on my department Intranet prototype. It is configured as a Farm with a SQL 2005 database but everything is hosted on the same virtual Windows 2003 R2 server. Installation instructions for this WSS 3.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2)and documentation are quite smooth and clear.

In short, it all comes to downloading the file, then double-clicking on the exe to run it and then the usual Start, "click", Accept, "click", Next, "click", Next ... wait (Upgrading SharePoint Products and technologies through the Configuration Wizard) ..., Finish, "click", then open your Intranet, wait again, and see the result.

It worked. Simple and efficient.

Exporting Files from SharePoint Content Database

2009-03-27T14:08:00.004+01:00

Murphy's Law can apply anywhere anytime and my recent re-installation of SharePoint is certainly no exception to the rules.

Soon after I finished recreating our SharePoint intranet, I stared sharing it with my immediate colleagues. While I was not really expecting some "Oh!" and "Aaah!" cheerful comments, I was still hoping for some kind of "Cool, it's back, thanks for the tool.".

But no, even that was expecting too much. The very first comment I received was an assassin comment like: "And I suppose you managed to retrieve all files stored in the previous SharePoint database ?". That comment triggered a machine-gun like stare from me to my colleague. No, I did not manage so far to retrieve these files and yes I had tried already. SQL Management Studio did not really help me by the way.

I had been cornered and really had to find a solution this time. So I returned to the web, googling frantically, trying various unsuccessful solutions until finally my patience and stubbornness got rewarded. I found found a great article from Keith Richie describing how to export the site content from a SharePoint Database for recovery purpose.

His article include a small source code and instruction to compile and run the program. It worked almost like a charm from the first run. Yet, as some of the recovered files were quite large, I had to boost the buffer size (as I worked locally this was not a problem) and even tweak the SQL query to work on a per directory basis to limit the execution run time. Happily this time SQL Server Management Studio was of great help to test and fine-tune the queries. Within 30 minutes from the moment I read Keith's post I had recovered all files I needed.

Today all files are imported in the new SharePoint and I preciously kept the program source and instruction ... just in case one day I need to recover files from another SharePoint database.

The Revenge of SharePoint

2009-03-25T18:24:00.000+01:00

Remember my SharePoint article from 2 months ago ? Well, believe it or not, but I have crashed my SharePoint site beyond my repair skills capabilities. It happened after a domain migration and was due to some dark account permission problem on the SQL 2005 database.

After having wasted a few hours on the problem, I decided to re-install it from scratch on a new and better set up virtual machine. After all, it was only a prototype without too much production data in it.

The first thing I did was using my previous SharePoint installation article as guideline and i will say it was definitively worth writing it and I got my payback for it. While I was at it, I also wanted to bring in a couple of improvement to my initial setup.

As SQL Server 2005 was installed on the C:\ drive, I needed to move the SharePoint databases to the D:\ drive which was designed to contain the data. I proceeded as follow after having installed Sharepoint Services:

In order to move a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SharePoint database, I needed to:
- Stop the IIS SharePoint site.
- Stop all Windows SharePoint Services: Administration, Timer & Tracing.
- Backup the SharePoint content and configuration database.
- Detach these databases using SQL Server Management Studio.
- Move the database files (.ldf & .mdf) to the new location.
- Attach these files back to SQL Server 2005 still using the SQL Server Management Studio.
- Restart the SQL server.
- Restart all SharePoint services.
- Restart the iis SharePoint site.
And it worked like a charm.

I decided to add some better web parts to the portal and as such downloaded and installed What's New, Chart, AutoComplete, and Copy Paste web parts from the SmartTools suite on CodePlex. The What's New web part is probably the best of them. All these parts are ridiculously easy to install and deploy.

I also wanted to change my security strategy and to really use two Web Applications: one for the Central Administration on some exotoc port and the SharePoint content sites on port 80. As I had already recreated my content sites under the Central Administration, I needed to move them all to a different application in order to better manage their security. Therefore I had to first move the Central Administration from port 80 to another port (see my article for instructions), then create a new web application on port 80, export all created sites and re-import them into the newly created Web Application on port 80. The export/import operation was made simple thanks to the stsadm command line tool. Afterwards I simply had to uninstall and re-install the CodePlex SmartTools to have them active under the new Web Application.

And that's it, my SharePoint site is now back and ready to be used.

Twenty years of World Wild Web

2009-03-13T16:20:00.001+01:00

Happy birthday, Tim. ;)

The Web is indeed wide today ... but no less wild.

Sync Story

2009-02-13T11:17:00.005+01:00

Since over a decade I have been using Microsoft Outlook. I started with Outlook Express then used Outlook 2000, XP, 2003, and currently 2007. With time, I have learned to master the product and to truly enjoy it. As a result, I used it for both professional and private emails, contacts, and calendar. A few years ago, I even started synchronizing my contacts and calendar events with my previous Nokia mobile phone. I liked very much having a calendar with me without having to carry a paper version on top of all accessories that a modern man must carry: wallet, keys (home and car), mobile, sun glasses, pens ... this without even talking about the laptop. But what I appreciated the most was being notified by my mobile about my appointments. Even when away from my computer, I was sure not to forget anything (as long as I had encoded it).

Then I changed of job and got a new laptop with that so wonderful application named Lotus Notes along with a BlackBerry already synchronized with it. My opinion about Lotus did not change since last year. I still do not like it and rarely miss an opinion to criticize it for many good (and bad let's remain honest) reasons: not user-friendly, slow to answer, not compatible with most Web2.0 portals like Facebook, LinkedIn or Naymz and I could continue my list of rants. In parallel of using Notes for business mails, contacts, and calendar, I kept using my Outlook for personal emails, contacts, and events. However, while the separation of mails is good for productivity reasons, and while I could take care of contacts by synchronizing my BlackBerry with my Outlook using the BlackBerry Desktop Manager application. Since years, I am indeed using a contact sub-folder of Outlook to organize and backup my mobile contacts.

So there I was, sitting between two seats for the calendar part and not really happy about it. Then one day I woke up deciding to fix the inconvenience of having private events in Outlook and business events in Lotus and on my Blackberry. I was looking for a simple and free solution but obviously the words simple and Lotus do not exist in the same sentence, and it gets worse when talking about software. Useless to say that I could never manage to connect directly my Outlook to the Domino server and always ended with some error message.

Ultimately I found out that Google Calendar proposes a tool to synchronize your Outlook Calendar with your Google Calendar. Google also proposes another tool to synchronize your BlackBerry calendar with your Google Calendar.

By transitivity and because 1+1=2, I have my solution: my outlook is synchronized with Google, which synchronizes with my BlackBerry, which in turn synchronizes with Lotus. Yes, it works. Yes, it is easy to install and no, there is nothing complex to configure. I'm happy as I have all my events on my BlackBerry and in Outlook and I still do not plan to use the Google Calendar interface itself.

So what's next ?
I seriously consider definitively dropping Lotus now as I can download emails from the Domino server using POP.

Kongregate: Casual Meta-Game ?

2009-01-26T14:05:00.007+01:00

Since a few weeks now, I play some casual games and other flash games on Kongregate. Kongregate is a portal promoting new games and helping developers to develop better games by getting more feedback and to earn more money because it remains the main reason for work.

By playing Kongregate's games, it is possible to earn points, badges, and level up. Earned badges and total scores appear on the players' profiles; often motivating them to play earn more badges by playing more games.

This game-around-the-games mechanism - or Meta-game - is quite interesting as players are motivated to play more to games they like; until they earn all badges for example. It also pushes players to discover and play new games.

This mechanism is also enforced thanks to the existence of Kongai, an online battle-oriented card game. Kongai relies on similar (but less complex) concepts than older classical card games like Magic The Gathering or Decipher' Star Wars Customizable Cards Game. Cards can be of course purchased but also and preferably earned through playing any game hosted on Kongregate. This is called challenges). More cards can be earned by playing Kongai itself. As for any collectible cards game, these come with several editions and you can view them through an online card album.

This concept of Meta-games or games around games is quite thrilling. Once you start caring for your score, the race is up and you will quickly try to reach just another level. As Kongregate proposes thousands of games, you will always find some that you like or care enough to earn one more badge. The online card game attached around is also a good idea even if in this particular case the Kongai game itself could probably be a bit more sophisticated.

Now I wonder if a meta-game concept could be used with massively multiplayers online role-playing games (MMORPG) ?

Google is the Heir of Sun Tzu

2009-01-17T19:40:00.006+01:00

A few days ago I posted a pretty long article about my experience with setting up a SharePoint intranet. Less than twenty-four hours later, I received a LinkedIn invitation from someone working for the same company as I do but located at the other side of the world. That person kindly introduced himself to me, wrote a couple of nice words about my SharePoint article, and asked to be connected to each other. My first reflex was to immediately accept his network invitation - after all we are colleagues - and to thank him for his kind word.

I then started wondering how he had found my SharePoint blog article. My article was not the first one to be written about SharePoint. It is surely not the most detailed or the most complete article about that topic. Additionally my blog is not (yet ?) one of the most read and famous blogs of the world wide web. So how could he find me through that article so quickly ? Not even a day had passed since I had posted it on BlogSpot.

I then remembered that a few hours before getting the LinkedIn invitation, I had received my usual Google Alert digest. For those ignorant of Google Alerts mechanism, Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. In other words, you enter a keyword or two and Google will bring you the search results right into your mail and when something new it added on the Internet concerning that keyword then a it will appear in your next Google Alert. And on that day, my Google Alert digest tuned for my company name contained my SharePoint article. Needless to say that from there it became as clear as 1 + 1 = 2. All people using Google Alerts with the same keyword had received the link to my blog. This was the right explanation. It could not be otherwise and a few hours later I even received the written confirmation. It was a good guess.

So what is the true meaning of this story ?
Google knows it all. It knows everything available online about you, about your company, about your competitors. It knows what has changed or what is new, and it knows it before you do. As such, Google sets itself in straight line with Sun Tzu so famous principle:

Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.

Installing SharePoint Services 3.0 in a Snap

2009-01-14T17:54:00.003+01:00

Whenever you have to implement an Intranet project, there is always a time when someone asks something like "Could you come with a very cheap solution for an small Intranet proof-of-concept in the coming days ?"

So last week I decided to create a small Intranet prototype with limited features for a limited audience and using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Why WSS ? Simply because we started implementing SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) for another project and as such I tried to remain coherent in my implementation choices.

I started with a virtual machine running Windows Server 2003 R2 and checked it was fully patched before going further. I then installed the .Net Framework 3.0 on it.

The second step was to enable the Internet Information Services (IIS) role on that server. Once enabled I needed to check if ASP.NET 2.0 was indeed used by IIS. For that, go to IIS manager -> Websites -> Properties and check that ASP.NET 2.0 is used. If an older version is used then under command prompt type:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\[version]\aspnet_regiis.exe" -i

then

regsvr32 %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\[version]\aspnet_isapi.dll

Don not forget to replace [version] by your ASP.NET version. In my cas, it was v2.0.50727.

The next step is about installing Windows SharePoint Services and I strongly advice to read beforehand this Microsoft document about how to create the right accounts. Even if you think that Microsoft recommendations are way too complex, the minimum is to use a different account to install WSS and SQL. Use an administrator or generic installer account but do not use your own domain account to perform the installation on the server.

Once you have created the (right) accounts (including your installer account), you can download WSS. Simply follow the instruction and use the same installer account to configure your database.

Once done, under command prompt, type stsadm. If that command is unknown then add this file to the PATH environment variable: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN.

I then decided to immediately Install most of the SharePoint Fantastic 40 Applications Templates, starting with the ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp. The installation is quite simple still using command prompt:

stsadm -o addsolution -filename [path to file]\ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp

stsadm -o deploysolution -name ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm -o copyappbincontent

The complete installation instructions for the templates installation are available from Microsoft. In short, you only need to pull the solution file, template_name.wsp, from the extracted distribution. To add the solution file to the solution store, type the following commands:

stsadm -o addsolution -filename [file_path]\.wsp

stsadm -o deploysolution -name template_name.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

To check the deployment status, browse to the WSS Central Administration site. Click the Operations tab, and then click Solution management under global configuration.
Once all solutions are marked as "Globally Deployed", run iisreset from the command line.

I then realized that IIS had a default website running on port 80 and the WSS Centra Administration site was running on some exotic port. As I did not need the default IIS site, i decided to disable it (from the IIS Manager console) and to switch the WSS site to the port 80. Happily I found an excellent article on TechNet explaining how to change the Central Administration Web site port number (Windows SharePoint Services).

At this point, I had a small SharePoint site up and running and started creating some sites in order to test the templates and get familiar with the permissions and other settings of SharePoint. I was slowly getting to where I wanted to be.

The next step involved the upgrade of the standard SharePoint search engine to Search Server 2008 Express and this TechNet article about Search Server 2008 installation was of great help.

I got a small frustration when noticing that SharePoint and Search Server did not support PDF documents. After googling a bit, I found a solution for the missing PDF icon display and even a simple way to have Search Server crawling through and indexing PDF documents. The solution involves installing Adobe Reader 8.x or 9.x on your SharePoint server. While the above article was written for Adobe Reader 8, it worked just fine with Adobe Reader 9. While testing the search server, I noticed that no Adobe PDF documents were returned in the search results but i could quickly fix it thanks to a KB article. (Microsoft KB 927675)

As I felt confident now that everything worked as expected, I even spent some time to add a company theme which is a simple operation perfectly described this article about custom site theme for SharePoint 2007. Well to be honest, I merely threw out the foundation of the theme and still have to update the CSS file.

Finally I even cared about online presence using MSN accounts. Once you fill in the SIP address of your user account personal settings with your MSN or Windows Live email address then you have a cheap way to see if some of your colleagues are online, providing your company does not block all MSN traffics. The trick here is to have a recent Windows Live messenger client on your PC (and not an old v4.x like I still had) and to add your colleagues on your contact list.

For those wishing to consult their WSS / MOSS log files through the Central Administration, there is a cool Log Viewer project on CodePlex allowing so. Simply download the WPS file and install it like any other solution using your installer account. Then do not forget to perform an iisreset to be able to see the link in your Operations tab under Logging and Reporting.

And that's it.
Within 3 to 4 days you have (at least I have now) a very cheap and decent Intranet perfectly suited for small department or projects management. By cheap I mean it only costs one Windows 2003 R2 license and a few days of work. For that price you get an Intranet platform with simple workflows, pre-defined themes and templates, some simple document management features including approvals and versioning, a decent search engine crawling Office documents and PDFs, and even a simple online presence add-on. On top of that, you got familiar with the basics of that monster which is SharePoint. Those days were quite well spent if you ask me.

Never Release Software Before a Leave

2009-01-08T15:41:00.000+01:00

This is one of the first rule I learned and of course i learned it the hard way: Never ever release any piece of code into production before going to bed, vacations, leaving your computer or even before Christmas.

Even without taking Murphy's Law into consideration, it is only best practice to remain available immediately after any change to your IT production environment. And of course you only deploy changes after having carefully developing them in a dedicated environment and testing them in yet another environment (classic 3-tier environment).

This rule, we - at SW Combine - learned it the hard way several times, releasing some new game features right before going to bed only to find a crashed server only a few hours later when waking up. naturally we decided not to let that happen anymore and to never ever release anything before leaving.

However we had underestimated the dark side of temptation. Despite all our good resolutions and even also some pretty decent precautions, we released a very important game upgrade immediately before going to bed and while having the main developer also leaving for Japan for two weeks only hours later. And guess when it all happened ? Around midnight on the 23 of December 2008 when everyone was more thinking to partying, eating, and drinking than coding and when availability was a scarce resource.

So what was the result ? Well we got a crashed server. We got instabilities on our MySQL database leading to further random crashes and we got over 270 reported bugs during the following two weeks.

And do we regret it ?
Not a single minute. The release of this important patch has federated the team into a joined effort like we too rarely had before. All available developers put their hands into the mud (1). During the last fifteen days, we fixed over 170 of these bugs and released a patch every 2 or 3 days (5 patches in total) to solve the immediate problems. Aside of the new features fixes, a lot of minor improvements were released by the rest of the team contributing to the global effort and improvement of the game. Ultimately the entire team feels stronger and more motivated after these two weeks. We did the opposite of what every software development manual would say and yet we have no regret. This is probably one of those exceptions which confirms the rule.

I would not want to end this post without thanking those who worked hard and long on this upgrade: kudos and thanks go to Sin, Khan, BK for the main effort but also Mach, Mikel, Aurius, Git, Jeb, Syn, Jen and those I forgot. You helped, it counted, we progressed.

(1) I know some who will surely try to kill me for implicating that their code could be compared to mud. ;)

Microsoft Zune Dies on New Year

2009-01-02T17:27:00.003+01:00

Many Microsoft Zune music players went out of use during the New Year's night. It has been observed that these MP3 players were programmed to work for 365 days in 2008 instead of 366 as 2008 is a leap year. 2008 was a day too long for Zune. Complaints have been flooding on every Zune user's forums.

According to Microsoft, a bug linked to the date system is the root cause. The internal clock driver did not take into account the 2008 leap year and based itself on a normal 365-day long year. Still according to Microsoft, these start-up problems only concern the 30 Go Zune version launched during 2006.

Similar errors are more frequently observed during year changes. The most famous date-related software bug was of course the Y2K Bug which generated a lot of fear for very few damages.

Microsoft pointed that the Zune problem should disappear by itself. In order to fix the problem, Zune users have simply to completely discharge their Zune players before charging it again; a simple cold start for new year in fact.

Color Bulles Solitaire - Another Cool Casual Game

2008-12-29T17:56:00.003+01:00

Color Bulles Solitaire is another casual games that I particularly enjoy. It is simple, challenging, yet fun and not totally repetitive. Its main disadvantage comes from the difficulty at some upper levels. Indeed, starting with level 7, it becomes extremely difficult to win and most of your success (or failure) will depend solely on chance and on the order in which you receives the balls.

I'm also not too happy with the scoring system. Why having to deal with a score when the real purpose is to pass through levels ?

WoW Connect - Good Casual Game

2008-12-22T22:08:00.003+01:00

I consider a good casual game any game where I can play for only a few minutes without any time constraint and that I enjoy playing again a day or two after; and this for a few weeks.

WoW Connect (based on a World of Warcraft theme) is a typical casual game I really enjoy. Besides, it is good for your memory and observation mind.

Evaluate Your WebSite

2008-12-18T20:12:00.004+01:00

Would you like to know how much your website is worth ?

It is possible. Simply go to WebsiteOutlook and try with yours.

You can find below "my" own website value (Star Wars Combine at www.swcombine.com) but I can already tell you that it is out of the question to sell it for such a small price, especially when considering I live in Europe and the US dollar to Euro exchange rate is ridiculously low. Our 10 years of collective investments and efforts are definitively worth more.

My site is worth $33601.9.
How much is yours worth?

And I'm not even talking about the unveiled potential.

Ten years of Online Gaming Presence

2008-12-03T17:36:00.002+01:00

Historically, it was on the 3rd of December 1998 that Frederic "Fizzban" Waymann, Mario "PtJedi" Dominguez and myself (known online as Veynom) decided to start an online game on the ashes of a defunct one called Star Wars Simulation. Unlike any game editor, while we had a few hundreds players around us eager to play, we had absolutely no game to offer. We could only propose hope, dreams, and a perpetual answer that would quickly became famous: Soon™. Yet, on that day, we founded the Star Wars Combine.

Ten years after, hundreds of people have contributed to the growing success of the Star Wars Combine. Our membership has always grown (even if sometimes slowly) despite ups and downs in the game development. showing that one of our biggest successes is doubtlessly the community.

Now, like once every ten years, I will rather tell a small story instead of boring the world to death with a “we’re the best” type of speech. So here comes one of my Uncle Vey ’ stories which I will name "The Lost Days".

A long time ago in a not so far far away galaxy …
errr no. Wrong story.

Today is the 3rd of December. Today is the official tenth anniversary of the Star Wars Combine. Yet today is Year 10 Day 3 by standard Combine Galactic Time (CGT) - an in-game time reference. Where does the difference come from ?

Is the memory of that old Sim Master acting crazy and forcing him to believe the Combine was started on December 3 while it was in fact on December the first ?
Did some well-known thief manage to steal two days from the Combine ?
Did an Imperial historian make a mistake while re-copying the official Combine chronicles ?
Is this … a feature ?

Absolutely not. This is no feature, this is a bug !
This is simply a bug due to how CGT code converting calendar dates to our own system which does not stake leap years into account. As consequences, we lose a day every four years and one of those years we will need to fix these days. Enjoy,

Stress at Work

2008-10-29T16:42:00.012+01:00

First day at Work

You listen to Stevie Wonder. It is your first day, the sky is blue, girls are nice, and everything goes well.

After three months

You listen to HOUSE music because you are already overloaded.

After six months

You listen to Heavy Metal and start seeing everything double because you work from 8.00am till well over midnight.

After nine months

You listen to Hip Hop. You became fat because of stress and suffer from constipation !

After one year

You listen to Gansta Rap. You blink, all the time and for no reason. You are deeply addicted to caffeine.

After two years

You listen to Techno and your life is a perpetual rave party. Beat after beat you become crazy.

And ultimately...

In a pure and sincere desire to reduce mailbox sizes and help poor IT administrators, I decided to put online this joke instead of forwarding the mail. Credits go to its respective authors.

Something has changed ...

2008-10-27T17:07:00.005+01:00

Eight years ago, in a not so far away country ...

Today, something has changed.

Reality strikes back.
Wazaaa !!!

Between Theory & Practice

2008-09-24T17:48:00.004+02:00

Today I found back an old article I had written for a few friends of mine a few years ago while working as R&D software programmer and wanted to share the story again as it remains pretty much true and applies to other fields of IT as well.. Do not worry; you do not need to have a master in advanced telecom technologies to understand what is written below.

Back then my job consisted to design and implement a communication bus (SMBus); in other words think telephone line as it is easier to understand. This digital bus was composed of 2 wires: the clock wire and the data wire. The following devices were connected on the bus: a PC, a laptop battery (yes, you can talk to a battery, the very same battery you have inside your laptop and believe me it will answer you), and a power supply control card with a microcontroller (MCU) and a small memory chip on it. All these 4 devices had their own bus address (think phone number), and they were able to call each other in order to send and receive data (like talking on the phone or sending a fax). Last detail, all these components were grounded (linked to the ground) for electrical security reason. The theoretical schematic of the bus looked like this.

Didn't it look so nice on paper ?

In order to check the data transmissions and receptions (ie, monitor the communication), I had also connected an oscilloscope on the bus.

Now, the reality was slightly different and the result I obtained looked rather like this:

Tell me you got scared by reality.

But don't trust Murphy's Law on this one as it actually worked. This being said, I am confident you will feel reassured by knowing that similar busses are present inside your computers, your car, the trains or the planes you take, and so on.

CMS Watch SharePoint Report 2008

2008-09-19T14:16:00.006+02:00

We purchased it and I just finished reading it: The excellent SharePoint Report 2008 from CMS Watch.

Is it useful ?
Definitively yes.

If you have only played partially with SharePoint like only using some WSS features or only used it for a specific and limited task or for a limited number of users then CMS Watch's report will provide you with the insight to go (or not go) further with SharePoint.

The main advantage and strong aspect of this report is the detailed analysis provided on a "per feature" basis. Eight different Business Services in SharePoint are reviewed, discussed, and analyzed: collaboration, Enterprise Content Management, Web Content Management, Portal Services, Business Intelligence Platform, Forms Processing, Enterprise Search, and Application Platform.

For each of these services, pros and cons are reviewed and discussed into much detail while providing insight as to better use (or not) SharePoint in a small or large enterprise environment.

The report also contains a nice section about evaluating customization and additional development which provides excellent hints about what should be taken into consideration.

All in all, this 195-pages long report is a kind of a must-read that can spare you days of consultancy just to arrive to the same conclusions for a higher price. Of course this report will not decide for you but it will make you understand why you decide for or against SharePoint (MOSS).

Finally Office 2007

2008-09-18T09:02:00.004+02:00

Finally, I got it: the full version of Office 2007, including Visio, MS Project, OneNote ... The migration(or update) was needed in order to test some fortchoming software integration (Share Point, Exchange).

Some cool features I discovered and start using immediately:
- Under Outlook 2007, importing mail server certificates has become so much easier. As under Outlook 2003, you are first prompted to accept or decline the certificate but now you can also view them and copy them in order to easily install them.
- The task integration between Outlook and OneNote is cool.
- MS Project has a nicer look & feel.
- The dynamic toolbar from Office is simply great. As opposed to many people I liked it at first glance and from first use. It is nice, handy, and not too different. To me it is intuitive.

The main problem so far is speed. I work on a Lenovo T61 with 2GB RAM and Windows XP and most common operations seem to take more time: open, save, print ...

You can expect more reviews about Office 2007 in the coming weeks.

Google Chrome Review

2008-09-04T16:57:00.009+02:00

Like everyone these days I downloaded, installed, and started testing Google Chrome browser.

So first things first, my very first experience with the brand new Google Chrome browser has been ... a bug !

Funny, as this is the last thing as I expected as first experience with the new Google browser.

Now except this minor annoyance that vanished upon a simple click, the test was rather positive in the beginning. Google Chrome is fast upon displaying the pages, light to load but still eating quite some memory. So what are my first negative impressions ?

- Google Chrome does not support activeX meaning you cannot use it to connect to some corporate VPNs.
- Google Chrome uses Internet Explorer's proxy settings. No progress there.
- Google Chrome seems to load and process the web pages before displaying them all at once. This can result in disturbing waiting times where nothing seems to happen until your requested page suddenly appears.

I will check and test this browser further as it can impact the development of the Star Wars Combine.

This post has been written with 100% recyclable electrons under Google Chrome.

The Multiplication of little Bits

2008-08-18T12:23:00.002+02:00

The explosion of information data is no more a hypothesis but a fact now. Analysts keep predicting an exponential evolution of data growth for the coming years.

Each and every one of us surely heard such comment more than once. This is no news and does not really bring anything useful to the debate. As corollary, hard drives and other memory cards capacities also increase at a surprising path. This is still no news but this is rather cool for our mobile devices, digital cameras, GPS systems, MP3 players and other computers.

But where are all these data coming from ?
Of course, anyone who brags to know a bit about hi-tech will immediately accuse voice and video applications to be the main source of data explosion. Other people with a bit more experience will talk about automated sensor devices measuring and recording data about almost everything from environment (temperature, pollution level…) or car traffic (traffic jams) to security (alarms). But what most people forget about but which remains the nightmare of quite a few IT managers is email. Emails are the perfect example of useless data replication in frightening proportions. Here comes a couple of examples.

Let’s start with something simple. You just decided to invite 10 of your friends by mail for a barbecue. You send them a nice and small text email of only 1 kilobyte (1kb). You just hit the send button and – Miracle – your email has been decupled. Ten more copies have been created, each of them surfing on the world wild web network and hunting for their recipient mailbox. Now when each of your friends will reply, they will most likely include your original message in their email along with their response. If we suppose that such a reply will make 2kb in size, then there will be 31 created emails for a total of 51kb of data. How did we manage to create 51 more data ?
- 1 original email still stored in your “Sent Items” folder (1kb)
- 10 emails stored in the recipient mailboxes (10x 1kb)
- 10 received answers (10x 2kb)
- 10 original answers stored in the Sent items of your friends (10x 2kb)

Out of these 51kb, the only interesting information are your invitation (1kb) and the answers of your friends excluding the part of their mail which includes your original invitation, making it only 1kb of meaningful data per answer. If we sum it that way, we have 11kb of meaningful information and 40kb of uselessly duplicated data.

And sometimes it can goes even further and have more impressive consequences. Here is an example directly issued of my past experience. As member of a workgroup of 10 people, I received a document of one megabyte from the group leader. Each workgroup member had to fill a part of the document and send it back. Can you estimate the amount of data that such process flow will generate ? Well here is the result according to the previous method of calculation.
- 1x 1MB for the original document stored on the hard drive of the sender.
- 10x 1MB for the original document stored on the 9 recipient inboxes and in the sender sent items.
- 9x 1MB for the 9 local copies including the recipient updates.
- 18x 1MB for all 9 replies stored 9 times in the workgroup leader inbox and once per workgroup member sent items folder.
- 1x 1MB for the final document gathering all updates and stored on a shared folder.

We already have 39MB of data for only one megabyte of useful data and mostly because most members wanted to keep all of their email for as long as possible (ie, forever). And was it finished ? Not even. All members of this workgroup were equipped with laptops and each of these laptops had an automated backup system on it, copying all data onto network NAS. As a result, the total data volume is doubled to 78MB; seventy eight megabytes of data for only one megabyte of final useful information.

Is this a bad thing ?
Well it is certainly a bad habit to desire to keep all of his emails at all costs instead of concentrating on the final deliverable (when applicable). Therefore, it is probably more a problem of people than of technology and people are hard to change. As a side note, tt means also that IT managers need to plan for storage space and that CEOs must give them the budget for that.

The Port Side of Telecom Operators

2008-06-15T20:36:00.004+02:00

A few years ago in our little country named Belgium, the Mobile Number Portability was introduced. It enables mobile telephone users to retain their mobile telephone numbers when changing from one mobile network operator to another.

I now use a mobile since over 10 years with still the same Proximus number as of day one. When joining my first employer, I had no problem to keep the same mobile number when they started paying the bills for me as it became a work tool. Back then I had only to fill a simple form and a couple hours later, the mobile bills were no more part of my concern - and of my budget. So far so good as this step did not involve any port-out/port-in operation.

So last month, I joined Aliaxis and would still get a mobile from the company. Unfortunately -- for me but not for them they say -- they use another mobile telecom operator named Mobistar.

As I used my number since over 10 years, I asked my company if I could keep it and have it transferred from Proximus to Mobistar, knowing the portability rule would apply and that it was technically possible . My company accepted immediately, which was a real relief to me.

And this is where the crusade began. We contacted Mobistar and requested the transfer. On the next day, they also requested -- god knows why -- a copy of the last invoice concerning my mobile number. So I had to contact one of my former colleague, kindly ask him to dig into the Proximus monthly invoices, find the pages involving my number, scan them along with the cover page, and email me back the resulting PDF. I could then forward it, hoping it would be solved within 2-3 days. After all, I had already initiated port-in of private numbers to the Proximus account of my previous company and it always transferred within hours. Therefore 2 to 3 days did not seem utterly optimistic to me.

Two to three days -- and rather three than two -- were indeed necessary to get notified by Mobistar that we needed to provide them a signed letter from my previous company stating their agreement to the transfer. So I contacted the new Telecom Manager of my previous company, asked him for such a letter, received it (and it was a very nicely letter, very professional), forwarded it to Mobistar, and prepared my minds to wait again for an additional two to three days.

After three days, the push-email service on my Blackberry stopped working. This was anticipated because it used a temporary SIM card and I had received a new SIM card for my own number. I plugged the new SIM card and quickly discovered a very nice message on my Blackberry screen:

SIM card rejected

Of course, this had to happen on a Friday afternoon while coming back from a business trip and with none to call. The idea of spending the weekend without my Blackberry services was not as frightening as the realization that it would surely still not work for my business trip planned on the next Monday.

On Tuesday, when back to my office, I learned that the transfer was not authorized by Proximus because the signature on the letter was not the same that the one in their database. Of course it was not, I was the previous Telecom manager and I left. At that point, I was extremely tempted to modify the letter and use my own signature to have this solved. I resisted to the dark side and decided instead to call the Proximus account manager as I had still her contact info.

From there, it took still four working days, several phone calls and emails to have the situation settled. But on Friday 13 of June 2008 around 6.00pm, my mobile number was finally ported to Mobistar and I could start using my Blackberry 8320 as email and telephone device while dismissing my old Nokia phone.

Now, I "just" have to re-customize my mobile with my own screen background, specific ring tones, and so on. Some say it is the funny side of the job...

We're Hiring !!!

2008-06-13T16:06:00.003+02:00

We are urgently looking for a Software Development Engineer (junior or not) based in Brussels willing to become an AXAPTA guru. For more information, please visit the job description. If interested, please send your resume to Mr Elie Vulfs. Don't forget to mention the job description.

Great company, great opportunities.

A Small Bag for a Man

2008-06-12T11:59:00.003+02:00

With my new job, I’m much more on the road, spending a day here, a couple of days there or even a full week at yet another place. This is quite a welcome change from my previous comfortable position of ICT Director where travelling was rather the exception than the norm. During the last weeks, I have been quickly accustomed to trains, hotels, having lunch in a city and dinner in another.

Now, every married man would tell me that sooner or later I will have to be careful. Being away from home too often can potentially lead to disastrous family situations. Starting with an unhappy wife, it can quickly lead to hell.

However note that miracle do happen sometimes. Last weekend was father’s day here in Belgium and I got a nice surprise. My wife offered me one of these nice Samsonite boarding bags. The kind equipped with wheels, able to carry your laptop case, and authorized with you inside the plane without having to registering it. Needless to say that I was extremely and positively surprised while reinsured about my future business trips. I guess from now I can comfortably travel without worrying too much.

Isn’t life wonderful ?
At least mine is. :-)

Attack of the Mouses

2008-06-02T13:57:00.003+02:00

A new job is always full of little surprises and when you work in an IT environment, you also receive a lot of shiny toys. There is of course the laptop (an IBM/Lenovo T61 with Win XP and 2GB RAM) considered as the must-have work tool. At the same time, I also received a Blackberry so that I could be harassed by emails 24 hours a day. Then of course, I got the full environment necessary around these two devices: a docking station with an extra screen, an external keyboard from the latest generation, and a wireless rechargeable optic mouse. Wow, a wireless mouse, the typical gadget you don't find in offices because they are expensive and don't last as long as wired mouses.

So far nothing unusual except that until today, I was used to deliver similar environments to users but this time, I was on the other side of the line. Everything was installed by a charming assistant who went as far as unpacking, placing, and plugging in the keyboard herself before cleaning the office from all extra plastics and garbage - and still smiling all the time. Definitively something has changed in my life. But don't think I was granted any extra treatment here; my colleague got the same only a few days beforehand. it is only the norm where I work now.

However after having contemplated all these toys, work had to start. After minutes I started complaining about the mouse. Movements were not so accurate and the left click-button did not always respond timely. I was about to curse and migrate back to a reliable wired old-fashion mouse when I noticed that my colleague next to me also had problems with his mouse. Being IT professionals (at least this is the official reason why we got hired), it only took us minutes before discovering that the mouses were in fact interfering with each other. Worse, some quick small shaking movements with once mouse could completely jam the other one. After checking the manufacturer's website, we found out that the mouse bases should be distant from at least 3 meters. Of course we tried by 3.20 meters and changing the bases' orientations but without any success. There was a permanent invisible war between our two mouses just in our office. And then we knew that our office was planned to hold five IT people with five cordless mouses ...

My colleague was faster to react by plugging in his wired mouse to fix this little annoyance. As such he eliminated himself from the list of wireless users. There are situations where being the fastest is not always recommended.

Until next time...

Turn Off the Lights when Leaving

2008-05-22T18:08:00.002+02:00

Last Friday was my last day at work. I spend over 5 years at Cherokee Europe with over two of them as ICT Director. I enjoyed that period very much as it has been a wonderful experience.

Now, leaving a job should not really be worth a post on a blog as it has become common these days. But as responsible of all informatics and communication services for the plant, my last action has been quite uncommon for a day of work and is maybe worth mentioning. I spent my last hour at Cherokee to shut down all servers and systems because of a planned maintenance operation. While proceeding, one of my colleagues told around something like:

He is really a nice guy; he even turns off the lights behind him when leaving.

I thought it was indeed funny.

Bye Bye Cherokee !

2008-04-27T20:11:00.004+02:00

It is now official. I resigned from my extremely comfortable job of ICT Director at Cherokee Europe, the European business unit of Cherokee International. For over two years, I have been in charge of all information and communication matters for our entire European activities and it has been great. On top of that, I was also a member of the Management Team and as such could access to a lot of information and participate to strategic decisions. Within this position, I learned a lot and had the opportunity to work on several interesting projects ranging from Sarbanes-Oxley audit compliancy to IT security, ERP customizations, or even Business Intelligence.

During a little over two years, I could work at various company levels from the company strategy to day-to-day operational issues. I had the opportunity to both maintain existing systems and implement new ones, while working with a great team. But everything has an end and May 16, 2008 will be my last working day at Cherokee Europe.

So why did I decide to leave then ?
Well, I found something that looks even better. Or to be completely honest, they found me. The new company looks better (and everyone around me confirms that), the job description and responsibilities are awesome, I will have the occasion to travel a bit more, and the package is even more attractive.

The name of the new company and my new role ? Well, you will have to wait for one of my next posts. I will then tell you everything. Just let me make the switch. ;)

To be continued...

It's Good to be Praised

2008-04-06T18:20:00.004+02:00

Last week, I have been traveling to Paris to attend the QAD Users Conference. QAD is our ERP supplier here at Cherokee Europe and we use their product - MFG/Pro 8.6E - since ten years already.

Unlike similar events, this time I was not only there to passively attend some seminars and workshops but I was also there to present a 30-minute seminar about a Business Intelligence project I started implemented last year for my company. Two hours before it all started, I got the surprise to see Cherokee Europe awarded the QAD 2008 Performance Improvement Trophy. It happened during lunchtime and when you think "lunch" in France, you can be sure you will not be disappointed.

Soon after lunch and the trophy ceremony, I presented my seminar and was pleasantly surprised to have to talk in front of a crowded room - which is way better than an empty room. If I judge by the many compliments and nice words I got afterwards, I dare to say I did well.

But aside of my personal little success, I must see this day was really entertaining and pleasant to me. First, when you go to France, you can always rely on the legendary French hospitality: nice people, good food, and good wine. Then in this case there was the QAD team: Delphine, Louise, Dan Marie, David, Jean-Philippe, Gilles, Jean-Claude, Hans.... I would really like to thank them all for this great day. It was extremely interesting (QAD Finance 2008 is what I dream to have installed here), very well organized (Kudos to Delphine), and we all felt fantastically welcomed. My recyclable electrons will not forget this anytime soon.

I'm on the First Page of Google !

2008-03-30T11:30:00.006+02:00

This week I got the pleasant surprise to discover that when one searched under Google.com for ICT Director then I appeared on the first page of results. It works also under Google.be and quite a few other countries as well.

Wow, I feel proud. :)

Two months ago I had indeed decided to increase my visibility on the Internet. By this I wanted my profile (and mostly my professional profile) to be easy to find. In order to reach that target, I looked at some of the existing online tools but at the same time, I knew already I would not want to waste too much time into this and certainly not spend a dime for it.

Therefore, I started with what I had: LinkedIn (which I find quite useful to keep tracks of friends' and former colleagues' career). I made sure to complete my profile, added a few more connections, and joined a couple of pertinent mostly IT-related groups.

Afterwards, I considered the too-famous FaceBook and filled a profile soon discovering that I really hated it. To me, FaceBook seems the best way to waste time and I am still waiting for any return from it. I already decided not to invest more time in it but to loosely maintain it.

My third step was to start this blog - The Voice of Recyclable Electrons - where the title is based on a sentence I used at the end of all my emails since the mid-nineties. I had first wanted to share impressions about movies but since then, I discovered that I preferred talking about ICT topics or experience. You could have guessed so from the recent posts by the way.

The fourth steps was to join the newly created Naymz network. I can tell you already that Naymz is extremely powerful to promote your profile, especially once you reach their RepScore level 10. At this stage, I am not even sure that you can go down after you reached level 10. Naymz uses all tips and tricks to promote your name and a few associated keywords through Google. It works quite fine with minimal effort from your part. I reached the level 10 within two weeks and started harvesting the benefits.

But all these registrations would probably not have worked as effectively as hoped if I had not decided to cross-link them all. On my blog, you find links to my LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Naymz profiles. On my Naymz profile, you will find again links to this blog and my other profiles. And so on, and son. Thanks to this mini web, I increased my own pertinence according to Google ultimately benefiting from the power of each site. Quite an interesting experience.

Book Review: Wikinomics

2008-03-17T16:10:00.003+01:00

I just finished reading the book Wikinomics from Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams and wanted to share my feelings about it.

Wikinomics describes various examples of how mass collaboration already started changing the world-wide economy, in many sectors and levels. It is a book that clearly depicts Web 2.0 technologies and some of their impacts on how to conduct business. As such, you will find information about FaceBook business models, about Ideagoras, about the mashups culture and trends, about Wiki and peer-production. For all these parts, Wikinomics is a great book and probably a must-read for any CxO or manager. It opens your mind and update you on a few recent Web 2.0 concepts.

I would add however that some of the concepts or theories pushed by this book are to be taken with a grain of salt. It was obviously written by Evangelists of the concept and as such, they sometimes tend to create theories from examples instead of illustrating demonstrated theories with these examples. Similarly, it sometimes goes "too far" in some directions but maybe it does so hoping that half of the message will pass through.

In short, Wikinomics is a great book for managers interested in some consequences of Web 2.0 but as every new theory, it has to be pondered.

A Day at CeBIT

2008-03-11T13:52:00.011+01:00

Let's face it, CeBIT is huge. Compared to that location in Hanover, the Brussels Expo site (Heysel) is a confetti. As first consequence, my day at CeBIT was first and foremost a walking day. I walked a lot just to cross all 23 buildings tentatively trying to look at every stand. At least I did try. Happily, the weather was nice and shiny allowing me to walk outside all facilities while enjoying the architecture and design of the place. Well to be more precise, I should say I kept doing it while passing from one palace to the next one. For the rest, I spend most of my day in overcrowded facilities.

Now what can I say about the content ? For someone working in IT, an IT fair is not much surprising. All large IT companies are present but these are also present in your country when trying to push you from prospect to client inside their funnel. Some of these will have huge stands fully equipped with banners, gadgets, sexy hostesses to attract people and serious male managers to actually do the talk !

Among the funniest gadgets, I noticed a fully automated warehouse management system built using some toys I played with back when I was a kid (Fischertechnik). It was fully controlled by a program and I could watch the crate moving all along the supply chain path while different robots were detecting it and automatically performing the right operation with it (pick, move, store, lift...). A real pleasure for the eyes.

I won't hammer you with all Chinese copies of keyboards, video cards, computer fans, mobile whatever, USB sexy sticks and other electronic devices I saw. You can find them all at Wal-Mart or on the Internet. Most "consumers" devices exhibited there are well-known anyway. Instead, I will only list a couple of the most interesting innovations I could test. First, there is video on paper. Right, you print it like a picture, then when put in front of a special lamp, it starts moving. Think about an animated GIF picture but on a sheet of paper. Then there were computers you could command with your eyes. It is easy to use and quite relaxing for your right hand (no more mouse to use).

All in all, a day is just too short to get into everything, especially as there are so many technical sessions you cannot attend because you have not the time to spend there. However and on second thought, it did not really matter as 85% of all explanations or documentation was in German. That was the negative surprise of the day. it was a permanent fight to track and find English documentation !!! And I thought there were no IT outside English ...

Free Ride to CeBIT

2008-03-06T16:09:00.004+01:00

I just learned that I won a free ride to the CeBIT. From Brussels to Hanovre, all-in (place, food, entrance ticket, freebies...), this is a great opportunity that I got from IT - JobBank.

About CeBIT:

CeBIT is the world's largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work environments. The key target groups are users from industry, the wholesale/retail sector, skilled trades, banks, the services sector, government agencies, science and all users passionate about technology.

Don't miss my next posts, as you will tell you more about this one-day trip into the trands of the future of ICT.

Start Harnessing the Power of Web 2.0 !

2008-02-21T10:38:00.008+01:00

As of today, we all heard about Web 2.0. Many of us have an account in at least one of the well-known social networks like FaceBook, LinkedIn or actively use YouTube, MySpace, SecondLife, or any other similar N-Gen service.

However today, I want to insist on a simple yet effective way to really take advantage of all these brand new cool technologies. Something that everyone can use with minimal setup effort and benefit day after day without being one of these "nerds" spending more time as a virtual avatar that in the real world.

We all need and want to access news everyday. From radio newsflashes while in our car to TV news in the evening or newspapers while at home, we are all avid of news. The most active of us also consult some online news channels or blogs to get additional details or opinions about particular topics. And all these searches consume your time. Time being too precious to be wasted, let's see how to spare some.

As of today, I am confident at least 70% of you use Google as home page and therefore Google is the first page you see when opening your browser. Before going further, let me help those who use Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). If you use IE7, don't use Google as home page, and want to keep your current home page then simply go to "Tools ==> Internet Options" and add a new line after your home page. Type there http://www.google.com/ig. For everyone else, just replace www.google.com by http://www.google.com/ig.

Then go to http://www.google.com/ig. ig Stands for iGoogle and it will allow you to customize your own Google page with tons of things that interest you only. So first you need to create an account with Google. If you already have an account with Google because you use Gmail, Adsense, Google Analytics or whatever, then you do not need to create an account. Instead, simply use your existing login and password to log in.

Congratulations !
Now you can make the news come to you automatically. You can transform your iGoogle page into something similar to the below screenshot by adding RSS flows and/or widgets.

What can you add to that page ?
Well you can add widgets (think virtual gadgets) that provide a permanent link to an online translation service or to the Wikipedia search engine. You can display the time in any part of the world (useful if you work in an international company). You can watch some shares value ... There are countless widgets available, just click on the "Add stuff" link on the top right of your screen.

And what about news or blogs ?
This is where is comes easy and powerful. On all of your favorite news websites or blogs, you will find a RSS icon similar to this one. Then if this is the kind of site you frequently visit, just click that icon. Upon clicking, Google will ask you if you want to add this page to your iGoogle page or to your reader. Select the iGoogle page. Repeat the same procedure for all interesting blog or website (and I hope you will add this blog as well).

That's it ! From now, you can decide to remove some widget or RSS flow. You can change how they are organized on your page using the good old simple drag-and-drop system. You can have some RSS displaying 3 headlines or more. It is up to you to decide and your home page will always provide you with news you are interested in. If that's now harnessing Web 2.0, then what is ?

If you look at my own home page as example, you will see that I use it to get general national news (La Libre), world-wide news (CNN), economical news (L'Echo, Trends), political news (some blogs), news from my online game(Star Wars Combine), news about IT or Telecom stuff (Datanews, Joel on Software, video games news), and then some widgets like I described earlier..

And you know the best ? It works. It is easy for me to read what I want when I have time, to add a new RSS flow or to remove something I never check; all this using some Web 2.0 technologies and Google.

I hope this small article will be useful for you. In any case, do not hesitate to post a small comment, a suggestion, a critic, or whatever.

What is Web 2.0 ?

2008-02-18T13:07:00.004+01:00

This is a question many people ask themselves since the terminology was first introduced by Tim O'Reilly back in 2004. In 2005 he even started describing the concept quite extensively and I can only suggest people to read one of his excellent articles about "What is Web 2.0 ?".

However all this is quite technical and being a strong adept of the old saying "A small picture is better than a long speech.", I could not resist to share or re-share the following picture that got presented to my attention last week during a Star Wars Combine Developers Meeting. So here is a view of Web 2.0 (picture originally from http://xkcd.com/25 6).

As you can see, Web 2.0 is all around us already and this map makes it so much understandable. Simply brilliant !

Overloading Second Life

2008-02-11T21:12:00.001+01:00

Today, I learned something funny from Kristian Köhntopp, a Principal consultant from MySQL Berlin. Second Life, the famous online virtual world, uses a partitioning system based on the geographical location of its universe. In short, this means that each server supporting Second Life only supports a small area of the universe. If more than 200 players gathers in the same room or building or island, then you have a serious chance to see it crash.

Why would it be this funny ?
Simply because I wrote my Master thesis on Networked Virtual Environments back in 2001-2002 back when I was still studying at the Free University of Brussels. For it, I describe a model of partitioning which was also based on the geographical locations and I even wrote a small prototype with two servers using my own online game the Star Wars Combine.

We live in such a small world ...

Vista & Outlook XP

2008-02-09T22:57:00.000+01:00

Today I fell across the famous bug where Outlook XP does not remember your email account password when installed on Vista. This is extremely irritating and frustrating.

But the worst from the worst is that Micro$oft forces us to buy its products. As Office XP is no more supported, no new patch will ever be released so this problem will never be identified. As today all consumer computers are shipped with Windows Vista instead of XP, it leaves many people with only 3 choices:

Live with the bug, one way or another.
Buy the expensive upgrade. (150€ for the Home edition, 450€ for the Pro)
Switch to openOffice.

I like Office XP and 2003 and I think they are great products. Similarly, I am a strong supporter of Windows XP both as home and office operating system. But the current policy of Micro$oft does its very best to push me toward alternate solutions.

Vista, a vergence among the Windows

2008-02-07T22:26:00.000+01:00

As ICT manager, I have to deal with the arrival of Vista. So naturally I tested Vista like a manager can test it. I attended to several demo organized by IT suppliers, watched them showing me Vista, accidentally listened to them while they pushed for it, ate and drank what they could offer, chatted a lot about how everyone preferred staying on Windows XP, joked about Micro$oft and so on, and so on.

Afterwards, I started reading more reviews of Vista in various IT magazines, attended more demo, asked my team to test Vista in our virtual environment, and congratulated them for doing so. One year passed and I had still never installed my own Vista or used it for more than a few clicks. Of course, like (almost) anyone today, I could recognize it at first glance but how serious is that for an ICT manager ?

But it all changed yesterday.
Yesterday, I replaced my old computer (a Pentium II-300 with WinXP and 128MB RAM) that I had generously given to my wife with a brand new Dell Inspiron I just purchased with her. Needless to say that today’s consumers computers all come with a nice Windows Vista onboard. The Vista Family Premium they call it. Ain’t that sexy ?

I started unpacking the beast around 8.00pm, mentally ready to stay up until one or two o’clock in the morning. It took me half an hour to re-cable the room like I wanted, passing wires behind various pieces of furniture. I then booted it up and everything came on nicely … until I wanted to import the old data.

I had forgotten the network cable … so I could dig all under the desk once more, try a first cable, found out it was defect, plugged a second one to test if it was the cable or the router and finally plug the “final” one. By then the computer showed a lot of signs of activity. Hard drives don’t lie, do they ?

So I retried to import data … and the typical Micro$oft mess started all again. Control Panel freezing, import guide freezing, 30-days demo version of McAfee antivirus freezing upon registration, IE7 freezing when trying to connect to MSN live (default page) and so on, and so on. The good side is that it allowed me to see how responsive is the new “CTRL+ALT+DEL” of Vista. At last, Windows obeys promptly! Sadly, it is only to telling that is searching for a solution, not about finding one or even solving the problem. Well … bad habits seems to be resistant in Windows and therefore, I had to use the old trick: when in doubt, just reboot. At 9.30pm I rebooted Vista for the first time and it worked just fine. It told me it installed 14 Windows updates successfully and started running like … well like a common OS should run: just fine.

From that point, everything went faster and smoother. Importing the gigabytes of data took less than half an hour, including the large PST files and the favorites. Indeed, recognizing the old Pentium on my home network was immediate and the transfer could start within two clicks (but only after changing the group name of my Pentium to match the one from the Inspiron as I could not find that under Vista in a snap).

Ok, it was 10.00pm and I had still to install a network printer and Office XP Pro (the complete version). I started with office and – O Miracle – it went so smoothly I did not believe my eyes. It took only 5 minutes to install the first CD and no reboot was required. I then started the installation of all clip arts and stuff available on the second CD. It took more time but only because there were so many files to copy. Afterwards, the installation of the network printer was incredibly fast. Only 4 clicks to have it detected and installed. This is progress.

11.00pm, the end of the tunnel was in front of me as I only needed to create a second user account, import a few more data, login, set up a mail account or two, check that everything is perfect in my virtual world, then go to bed. On paper it sounded nice. In practice, I forgot about the automatic updates and the installation of Office XP Service Pack 3. I had to reboot right in the middle of my nice course of action and there, I had the bad surprise: a black screen after the Bios boot. Not one of these all too familiar blue screens of Microsoft with a frightening “FATAL ERROR” message, just a black screen indicating nothing happens.

I cursed.

I rebooted the computer and it agreed to start normally. I could log, see the SP3 installation failed from a pop-up event message, even if I had largely guessed it beforehand. Nevertheless, I tried reinstalling the SP3 and it worked like a charm. It asked to reboot afterwards and I complied – while hiding a heavy hammer behind my back, just in case. And believe me or not, Vista behaved like a good OS should. No more errors, no more unresponsive programs and not even midnight yet. I could go to bed.

What can I conclude from all this ?
Well that Vista is easier for home use; less clicks to perform to achieve the same results than before, less time to set it up (remember doing the same with Windows 98 or 2000 and Office 2K). Vista looks shiny and it is certainly for Home usage but I am not ready to roll it out at work yet. Microsoft progressed with Vista on some fronts but the war is far from finished.

Until next time...

To blog or not to blog

2008-02-06T15:17:00.000+01:00

Like thousands of people, I wondered if I should start my own blog or not. Finally, I decided I should at least try.

So here it is where is starts. I will blog about various ICT experiences, movies I watched, books I read, websites I visited, some Belgian politics possibly as well. This blog will evolve in small steps, at least as long the experience is worthy.

Here we go...