In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
I Won!
Delighted to win the SharePoint Magazine’s Aspiring Authors 2011 competition with an article I wrote entitled “Leaving Lotus and Moving to Microsoft” or rather, how the editors preferred to title it as “A Guide to Leaving Lotus Notes and Moving to Microsoft SharePoint”.
A lot of work went into writing and shaping the article (and a potential wrestling match with copyright advisors was swiftly avoided thanks to a “facsimile” diversion), and I am pleased to say that the prize is…, er, more work.
Still, it gives me an opportunity to write and learn more. I even might write more than 100 words on this here blog. Mind that tumbleweed. Sharp thorns, those.
Thanks to all who voted!
RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms
At the heart of trust is truth.
In my toolbox - Ditto
I spoke to a colleague who was doing some SharePoint development and he, poor sod, had lost content that he had created in the UI.
Whether he accidentally hit the alt left cursor key (to nav back a page), or the product just timed out on him, he lost content. Rich content. If it was I who had done the cursing and changing the air blue at that stage, I might just have had Ditto at hand.
This wonderful little clipboard utility has changed my working life. A simple, fast, SQL-lite-based clipboard history manager with configurable hotkeys, many behavioural configurations, the ability to cache bitmaps and to preserve histories across login sessions. The list is long. But it’s freeware.
I now regularly “control C” after every “significant” keyboard action. It’s not an intrusive practice; it’s a common and comfortable action. Yet every single time I hit “control C” I feel I have saved my bacon a little. Until the next time. And the next expletive. But it’s likely to be fixed either by using and hoping for a successful “control Z”, or by finding that what I typed was copied to my clipboard history.
It’s fast. The sign of good utility free software is that it is unobtrusive - you know it’s there but it’s there to help you, not get in your way.
I use it to grab past user IDs I use for login credentials, or a phrase I typed in an email that needed to be reproduced in another one. Irrespective of how many clipboard entries you store (and I am up to 5903 copied actions), Ditto has an instant search feature allowing you to find that term.
I have a number of other products (some free, some shareware) which fall into this category that I would like to share. For now, Ditto comes highly recommended. I hope you try it and feel, well, “Ditto”.
I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.
Fun with InfoPath Dialog Boxes
Following this tutorial (learning InfoPath 2010), I apply a filter to data retrieved from SharePoint 2010’s user profile service. Look at this arrangement of popups, with which the tutorial states “Click OK until all dialog boxes have been closed.” - that’s a lot of clicking:
When laid out in a more ordered fashion, we have this:
Good golly. What a blinking mess. It’s 2010 and we have IDE UI design like this. What is going on?
Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.
We’ve all been there.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Chinese Proverb
I’ll get my rod.
