| As a Freelance SharePoint Consultant I have worked in many different “Management Styles” over the year, with some requiring me to be on-site 9am-5pm, some allowing me to work at my employers offices with their team and going into client site as required, some completely off-site connecting in as required and the most recent having me work from home 90% of the time and travelling into the office when required for face-to-face meetings.
Bringing all this experience together I am certainly a huge fan of virtual and remote working. I find myself to be so much more productive when I can establish the correct place to work each day.
In this blog post I want to give an overview of some of the benefits that I have found and maybe some of the potential risks of opening up your business to this kind of model. I am not going to offer any hard research evidence on these views, but will follow up in some later posts giving more details of each point. Please reply with your comments on your experiences of remote / home working.
Benefits to the employee
- I can work at times that most suite me
- I work more hours
- I don’t sit in traffic wasting time
- I save a lot of money on fuel
- I am helping the environment by not driving as much
- I am home to take deliveries
- I save money on lunches
- I can fit work around my other priorities, such as children
- Fewer interruptions from other team members
Areas of concern to the employee
- A full week at home can lead to cabin fever
- Not as easy to build strong relationships
- Proving I am working and not slacking off
Benefits to the employer
- Employees tend to work more hours
- Employees can do their best work at the time of day that they are more productive
- Savings on office space, desks and other facilities
- Wider support for mothers and disabled employees
- Staff can positioned closer to end clients
- Increased staff motivation with reduces stress and sickness levels
Areas of concern to the employer
- How do I know my employees are working?
- Who will answer the phones?
- Where will people hold meetings?
- How can I tell if a employee is not happy if I cannot “see “ them
- Am I insured if my employees work away from the office?
- How much will it cost to implement a remote working infrastructure?
- What technology is available to help my remote employees collaborate?
- Is my information secure when employees are working outside the office?
- How do we foster team spirit and communities when the staff are not onsite?
- How do I decide what jobs are suitable to be operated off-site?
In the future I will offer more information on the benefits and drawbacks of remote / home working. |
| Welcome everybody to the last SUGUK North West Meeting of 2011.
This one is going to be very special. We have arranged for 6 REAL WORLD SharePoint users to come in and give their experiences of SharePoint in their respective workplaces, followed by a 30 minute Q&A session with those users and other industry experts.
This is your opportunity to cut through the hype and realise how companies are REALLY using SharePoint, how they are using it to drive business productivity and also some of the pains they have been through to get there and how you can avoid them in your own company.
This meeting will be back in the Palace Hotel, Manchester again.
We have some speakers coming from some truly great companies including:
- Bentley Motors
- Kelloggs
- Unilever
- John West (MW Brands)
- TSG
- Little Harrowden Primary School
This is definitely one NOT to be missed. As usual we will meet at 6pm, and finish at 9pm where there will be an opportunity for socialising / networking over a SharePint.
Make sure register your place(s) on the SUGUK site (http://bit.ly/nIMTm6). This is important as it lets me arrange the correct number of seats and pizzas! |
| I am just in the process of writing some PowerShell Scripts to import Managed Metadata Properties and Crawled properties from an XML configuration file and came across a small point that I felt needed recording.
I will probably write a fuller post with the XML Config, XSD schema and Powershell components later, when I have finished and tested it, but wanted to provide this bit straight away.
I won't go into the details of the PowerShell here as Corey Roth has already given the basics here:
http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2010/05/26/creating-enterprise-search-metadata-property-mappings-with-powershell.aspx
One bit that he is missing is the -Type value that you pass into the following cmdlet 'New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataManagedProperty'
According to Technet (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608089.aspx) it should be one of the following 'Int32' values
- Text
- Integer
- Decimal
- DateTime
- YesNo
- Binary
I think you see the problem?
So, What we need to pass into the -Type parameter for that cmdlet is the Int32 value for those types. Corey didn't gt round to working them out, so I have got them here:
| Text |
1 |
| Integer |
2 |
| Decimal |
3 |
| DateTime |
4 |
| YesNo |
5 |
| Binary Data |
6 |
Hope this help.
Mark |
| I was just playing around over the weekend with a Content Source and Search Scope to index a few of my favourite SharePoint blogs and sites.
I set the start URLS to a few blog sites, but then when I added the following start URL in:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint
I got a bit of a shock. I had about 23,000 items indexed from that little beauty. I realised very quickly that the Content Source was set to "Only crawl within the server of each start address" and that server is http://technet.microsoft.com/
So, so try and limit the result set to just the SharePoint secion I created 2 Crawl Rules to:
Include: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/*
Exclude: http://technet.microsoft.com/*
When I run a test of the crawl rule for http://technet.microsoft.com/default.aspx I get told that the url will not be included in the index as it matches the exclusion rule and a test on the url http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx will be included as it matches the inclusion rule.
After performing a Full Index I found out that, as hoped, I just got pages below the http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint URL path.
Unfortunatelly, the pages I actually wanted were the technet library which doesn't sit under this URL path, but that doesn't change the fact that the aboc Crawl Rules work if you just want to index under a specific URL segment. |
| As part of my on-going series of moving as much of my IT / Life into the cloud I have spent the last few weeks trying to get a Cisco 7960 IP phone working with Sipgate.
Since I work at home I wanted a better solution for my many conference calls that I have each day.
I started off with Skype and a USB headset, but that doesn't really work for me. I tend to have VPN / Citrix sessions open at the same time as sharing with Live Meetings, etc so I often end up sounding like I am in an underwater tunnel, and doesn't give a very professional experience to my clients.
I decided to purchase a Cisco IP Phone because, well, because they are pretty cool and I have used many in offices and just like them.
They are not initially designed to work with SIP providers, so the first task is upgrading the Firmware to the latest SIP version. I am not going to go into great detail on this process as it is already well documented here:
http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2008/07/configuring-a-cisco-ip-phone-for-voip-using-sip.htm
It took quite a bit of time getting my configuration files right, but once I did get my head around the settings, everything was looking good. I could make calls out of my home network and the call quality was far better.
Unfortunately I consistently had a little "x" symbol on the line identifier on the screen indicating that the line wasn't registered with Sipgate, even though I could make outgoing calls. I soon realised that I was unable to receive incoming calls either. Telnetting to the phone tells me that it is constantly sitting in a "REGISTERING" state.
A lot more playing around with settings, port forwarding on my BT Home Hub 2 router, disabling BT Broadband Talk, etc didn't help at all... and after a few days I even lost the ability to make outgoing calls! Great. Now I have a large grey doorstop... one that makes the CTU tone on demand though!!
I think I have finally tracked the problem down to the BT Home Hub 2 and the way it handles SIP connections. Because they build in a SIP gateway for the Broadband Talk features it messes up the port forwarding. As such I have just purchased a "Draytek Vigor 2710n" modem and router which offers much more configurable options and will even let me register multiple SIP gateways, so I can have multiple lines from different providers.
Once I have the new router in a few days, I will post a follow up to let everyone know if it is working or not.
[UPDATE: 24/08/2011: The new router has made almost all the problems go away. The phone now registers with sipgate and I can make calls out again. The only remaining issue is that when I receive calls, it looks like the other party can't hear me speaking. Hopefully just a minor config issue.]
|
| A few weeks ago I moved my Email and website up to Office 365.
Unfortunately un doing so I made a bad decision. I went for the small business plan (P1) as I am an individual user and not an enterprise.
Everything on that plan works just fine for me; Email, Team sites, etc but the one thing that REALLY doesn't work well for me is the external Website feature.
Because I work with SharePoint, I wanted to get my site (this one you are reading) hosted on SharePoint 2010. I used to host it off my own 2010 server sitting at home using my BizSpark license.
However, I thought it would be prudent to use Office365 to take the burden off my home server and my internet connection and as part of my "Moving to the Cloud" series it made sense.
Unfortuantely I find the external website feature to be extremely limited. I have worked around a number of issues, created subsites, made them (mostly) annonymous, etc but I am struggling to really get to grips with making any major edits to the site. It is very locked down. Enabling the Wiki Home Page Feature gave me some benefits over the horrible Web Pages library that you get by default, but I want to do more with my external website and using SharePoint Designer to customise master pages and individual pages is a bit of a must really.
So, where does that leave me?
Well, initially I was hoping I could "upgrade" my subscription from Plan P1 to Plan E??. Nope. You can't do that!
So, I have to go through a FULL migration from one Office 365 Acocunt to another. Joy!
I will try to document my experience here, but thing may go a bit haywire for a bit.
These things tend to take me some time to get around to, so please bear with me if the site goes AWOL for a couple of weeks!
Mark |
| Ok.. I just had a play with 2 Site Collections in the same web app.
http://teamsites/teams/Site1
http://teamsites/teams/Site2
I set both to have the Document ID Prefix: "TEST"
I Uploaded a file to a Document Library in the root web of each site Collection. Both got a "friendly" Document ID: "TEST-1-1"
The URL associated with these Document IDs are under the Site Name:
http://teamsites/teams/Site1/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=TEST-1-1
http://teamsites/teams/Site2/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=TEST-1-1
So DocumentIDs are completely contained within the Site Collection, however, you can link to another document by it's ID by putting in the correct full URL.
This doesn't help so much then when teams have multiple site collections and want to track documents across those site collections, but useful when all teams sites and subsites are in the same site collection.
For completeness I created a sub site to the Site2 Site Collection:
http://teamsites/teams/Site2/SubSite/
Then I uploaded a new file to the document library and it was given the ID "TEST-3-1"
The URL to this document is:
http://teamsites/teams/Site2/SubSite/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=TEST-3-1
This URL also works (lack of SubSite in URL):
http://teamsites/teams/Site2/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=TEST-3-1
This URL does not work (because DocumentID feature is not enabled):
http://teamsites/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=TEST-3-1
Enabling the "DocumentID Service" Feature on the "http://teamsites" Site collection and retrying the URL "http://teamsites/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=TEST-3-1" give the error message "No documents with the ID TEST-3-1 were found in this site collection."
Hope this helps
|
| In this section I want to get a rough idea of my current IT costs. Now, as Part 1 suggested I already have some services in the cloud, so I am not starting completely from scratch.
I am also adding some new capabilities (online backup, etc) to the mix, so the final costs may en up being higher, but I'll have a better service for it. These are just for a guide only.
- DevRig
- Initial Cost - £2500
- Yearly Upgrade Cost - £500
- Power Cost - ~£150/year
- Windows Home Server
- Initial Cost - ~£350
- Yearly Upgrade Cost - £50
- Power Cost ~£75/year
- Broadband
- Initial Cost - £0
- Yearly cost - £307.20
- Software licences
- MSDN - Initial Cost - Free (BizSpark)
- Evernote - £28/year
- MobileMe - £30/year
- DropBox - £62/year
- FreeAgentCentral - £300/year
- Email
- 123-reg mail boxes ~£11/year each
- GMail - Free
- Skype
- Initial Cost - Free
- Yearly cost ~ £120
- Domains
- Renewals: Yearly Cost - £30
- DynDNS: Yearly Cost - £10
So, counting everything up, my yearly costs for IT equate to about: £1673.20
I am a bit surprise at that. I didn't realise it would be so much. I will keep updating this list as I remember more services I use, and also I will create more posts in this series to take account of changes.
Feel Free to comment on any of this. |
| I am just about to upgrade my development sandbox to represent a multi-farm environment (Shared Services, Intranet, Collab, Extranet) and came up with an interesting question regarding the AD service accounts.
Am I going to need seperate service accounts for each farm or can I reuse them (this is only a devrig after all)?
My main areas of concerns and where I think I need seperate accounts per farm are from a Managed Account point of view.
If I re-used those accounts then will they get really messed up when one of the farms is set to manage the account and change the password? I am assuming that wouldn't be reflected in the other farms and I'll end up with failing services and locked out accounts, or is it smart enough to pass those changes around the farms?
I guess I could re-use the farm account as that isn't typicall set to have it's password changed, but the others would.
Any background info would be greatly received.
Please comment your answer here, tweet me @MarkStokes or email me mark [dot] stokes [at] sharepointstudio [dot] com
Thanks |
| Over the last year or so I have started to move some of my core personal IT functions to the cloud. I have had many reasons to start moving some of them and have been doing on it a sort of ad-hoc basis without much thought or direction. If a service looks good, I'd give it a whirl.
Recently I have been reading more and more about the Cloud and can't help but think that it has to be the future of IT. The more I read about the cloud, the more wastage I see in our everyday IT infrastructures. Most companies scale to support peaks in their IT requirements (if you don't, then you should!) so at any time there is probably a good 80% (my figure based on no scientific research) of IT resources that are not being utilised. Just think of the cost of wastage here! Power/Utility bills, datacenter / hosting, air conditioning, unused licenses, hardware depreciation, etc.
This is where The Cloud is aiming to disrupt the way we work. By providing a scalable and distributed environment where organisations can PAYG (Pay As You Go) for the services they require when they need it. The close we can run systems to capacity (without going over) the more cost effective them become. Why run a 40Mbit internet connection at home for £50/month and download 10MB worth of internet pages and emails, when you could run a 1Mb connection at capacity for £5 a month and get the same level of real-world service. Which do you think gives you better value for money?
Anyway, this post is not meant to be a review of The Could in general, but an introduction to my personal goal of moving as much of my personal IT to The Cloud as possible or as appropriate. Some functions might not be ready to go up.
I do currently have some Cloud Services in place, but I will be reviewing these and making any changes that seem appropriate along the way.
At the moment I use:
- Dropbox for file storage / cross device content access
- FreeAgent Central for accounting / finance
- Gmail for personal mail
- 123-reg mailbox for work email
- Exchange servers for client-based email accounts
- Google Calendar for personal calenders
- Exchange / Outlook for Mac for work calendar
- MobileMe for contact / calendar synchronisation
- Evernote for cross device note taking
- Flickr for photo sharing
- Facebook / Twitter for social networking
- Skype for IP phones
- LastPass - Passwor management
I also have some semi-cloud services, or private cloud services
- iTunes for music distribution around my house
- Windows Home Server for home file storage (such as a big Lightroom 3 photo library that I decided was too big to go on Dropbox)
- #devrig - My workhorse. This is a fat HyperV server running: AD, TFS, SQLx64, ForeFront TMG, SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010
So, I actually have more cloud based services that I realise but they are all pretty much disconnected, I have different logon accounts for each one. There must be a better way.
Over the next few months I will be tackling different areas of my IT profile and trying to build a personal IT Infrastructure that is scalable, interconnected, highly available and accessible and hopefully cost effective.
I want to run this series in a reasonably agile maner, picking on topics as I approach them and highlighting my experiences good and bad.
Since this is a voyage of discovery I am VERY keen to hear other peoples experiences, so either leave comments here, tweet me @markstokes or drop me an email: mark [dot] stokes [at] sharepointstudio [dot] com
My next post might be about evaluating how much I currently spend on IT, both hardware / software costs, services licenses (MobileMe, FreeAgent, Evernote, etc), Internet Connection, power consumption (of my 24/7 devrig and home server). I am sure that will make surprising reading! Hopefully I'll be able to keep a running tab on my operating costs and see if moving to the cloud improves, not only my monetary cost, but my value for money. It might end up costing more, but if that brings added functionality (security, reliability, accessability, performance etc) then it might be money worth spending. |
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| Welcome to my SharePoint Blog. I will use this space to discuss SharePoint, Cloud Computing, Community work and anything else technology wise that I feel like sharing. |
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