Site policies in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint sites rarely seem to be deleted even when they are not used anymore. This makes that the number of sites (and also the required space) can increase very quickly in a SharePoint environment. Site policies in SharePoint 2013 are designed to keep the number of sites in your SharePoint environment under control. It allows you to define through a policy when a site can be closed (and afterwards possibly deleted).

 You can define site policies for a site collection in the root site; these site policies are then available to all sites in the site collection. Go to Site Collection Administration and underneath the Site Settings section you will find the Site Policies page.  Although the documentation on MSDN - Overview of site policies in SharePoint 2013 -  states that there are 4 site policy options – the fourth one – run a workflow - is not available any more as this option has been removed in the final release – this leaves us with 3 options:

1. Do not close or delete site automatically. This policy option specifies that the site owner must manually delete the site.
2. Delete sites automatically. This policy option specifies that a site owner can close the site manually, but the site will be deleted automatically based on the deletion event settings specified.
3. Close and delete sites automatically. This policy option has the same choices as the preceding setting, for deleting sites automatically, but it also enables you to specify how long after a site’s creation date the site will be closed.

Since site policies are defined at site collection, SharePoint provides a mechanism to push out site policies across site collections using the content type hub. For more details on this check out this excellent blog post  – Site policy in SharePoint 2013

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint+2013,sp2013,microsoft,governance,site+policies,ECM,ITPro,administration

SharePoint Server 2013 licensing and external users

 

Microsoft has introduced an important change in their licensing model for SharePoint 2013 by removing the need to acquire client access licenses (CAL) for external users in extranet and internet sites scenario. Yes, that’s correct no CALs are required for external users in SharePoint 2013. For some more info about licensing check out the links below:

• SharePoint 2013 licensing overview page
• SharePoint feature availability across on-premises solutions (Technet) – which compares Standard edition vs Enterprise edition is part of the SharePoint Online Service Description, also provides a clue about what Microsoft is currently focusing on.
• Licensing Brief – Licensing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 – explains common usage scenarios such as intranet, extranet and internet

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SharePoint+2013,SP2013,Microsoft,licensing

Create a mapping to the SharePoint 2013 master page gallery on Windows Server 2012

SharePoint Server 2013 allows you to use your design tool of choice (Microsoft Expression, NotePad++, Dreamweaver, etc…) to create a new look and feel for your SharePoint 2013 environment (Check out this excellent post from Steve Peschka – Using Dreamweaver and Design Manager with SharePoint 2013 )

The look and feel of a SharePoint site is defined by a number of different artifacts and most of these are stored in the SharePoint master page gallery. One of the changes that Microsoft has introduced  to allow for this choice of design tools is to provide WebDAV support for the SharePoint Master Page Gallery (See Master pages, the Master Page Gallery and page layouts in SharePoint 2013 on MSDN for more background info)

If you are a SharePoint developer – you are probably working on the SharePoint Server itself (either Windows 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012) and to make this integration available you will first need to activate the Desktop Experience feature on the server. On Windows Server 2012 this feature is visible underneath User Interface and infrastructure

After installing the Desktop Experience (this will require a reboot) you can simply open the SharePoint 2013 master page gallery in Windows Explorer.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,sp2013,sharepoint+2013,development,windows+server+2012,microsoft,visual+studio,design+manager,customization

Managing SharePoint Online with Powershell

With the release of SharePoint 2013 as part of Office 365, Microsoft has also introduced the ability to manipulate SharePoint site collections in the cloud using PowerShell. Before you can start with the SharePoint Online cmdlets you have to install them separately from this link - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35588 . This downloads allows you to run SharePoint Online PowerShell from any host machine. It only requires PowerShell v3 or v4. SharePoint does not need to be installed locally. To use  the SharePoint Online cmdlets, you must must be a global administrator in Office 365.
Once installed you can open the SharePoint Online Management Shell,  it is implemented as  a PowerShell module which also allows you to use it in another PowerShell editor by manually loading the required module Import-Module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell.
To establish a connection to your SharePoint Online tenant you will need to use the Connect-SPOService cmdlet (Remember that you must use the tenant admin site url as a parameter). This will fill up a static internal variable which will be used afterwards. You should clear this internal variable using the Disconnect-SPOService cmdlet.

    Connect-SPOService –Url https://yoursite-admin.sharepoint.com –credential ray.charles@yoursite.onmicrosoft.com

Once you are connected you can manipulate your SharePoint Online environment. There are only 30 cmdlets available in for SharePoint Online – to get a full list type the following command.

Get-Command –Module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell

All cmdlets start with SPO. Most cmdlets are related to site collection management, user and app management. All returned object are simple data objects and most of them are limited in functionality. 

Cmdlet name	Description
Add-SPOUser	Adds an existing Office 365 user or an Office 365 security group to a SharePoint group.
Connect-SPOService	Connects a SharePoint Online global administrator to a SharePoint Online connection (the SharePoint Online Administration Center). This cmdlet must be run before any other SharePoint Online cmdlets can run.
Disconnect-SPOService	Disconnects from a SharePoint Online service.
Get-SPOAppErrors	Returns application errors.
Get-SPOAppInfo	Returns all installed applications.
Get-SPODeletedSite	Returns all deleted site collections that are in the Recycle Bin.
Get-SPOSite	Returns one or more site collections.
Get-SPOSiteGroup	Returns all the groups on the specified site collection.
Get-SPOTenantLogEntry	Retrieves SharePoint Online company logs.
Get-SPOTenantLogLastAvailableTimeInUtc	Returns the time when the SharePoint Online organization logs are collected.
Get-SPOUser	Returns the SharePoint Online user or security group accounts that match given search criteria.
Get-SPOWebTemplate	Shows all site templates that match the given identity.
New-SPOSite	Creates a new SharePoint Online site collection for the current company.
New-SPOSiteGroup	Creates a new group in a SharePoint Online site collection.
Remove-SPODeletedSite	Removes a SharePoint Online deleted site collection from the Recycle Bin.
Remove-SPOSite	Sends a SharePoint Online site collection to the SharePoint Online Recycle Bin.
Remove-SPOSiteGroup	Removes a SharePoint Online group from a site collection.
Remove-SPOUser	Removes a user or a security group from a site collection or a group.
Repair-SPOSite	Checks and repairs the specified site collection and its contents.
Request-SPOUpgradeEvaluationSite	Requests to create a copy of an existing site collection for the purposes of validating the effects of upgrade without affecting the original site.
Restore-SPODeletedSite	Restores a SharePoint Online deleted site collection from the Recycle Bin.
Set-SPOSite	Sets or updates the values of one or more properties for a site collection.
Set-SPOSiteGroup	Updates the SharePoint Online owner and permission level on a group inside a site collection.
Set-SPOTenant	Sets properties on the SharePoint Online organization.
Set-SPOUser	Configures properties on an existing user.
Test-SPOSite	Tests a SharePoint Online site collection.
Upgrade-SPOSite	Starts the upgrade process on a site collection.

There are no cmdlets available for managing SharePoint objects at a lower scope than the site collection. The following examples show you some examples of the more common cmdlets. To see a list of site collections associated with a subscription or to see the details for a specific site collection use the Get-SPOSite cmdlet. Use the following command to retrieve the details about a specific SharePoint Online site collection. You need to specify the –Detailed option to retrieve information about CompatibilityLevel,ResourceUsageCurrent,ResourceUsageAverage, StorageUsageCurrent,Webcount and the Title.

Get-SPOSite https://yoursite.sharepoint.com –Detailed | select *

A slight variation on the script above allows you to get usage data about all of your different SharePoint Online site collections. The use of –limit all allows you to get all of the SP Online site collection, standard it will only return 200.

Get-SPOSite –limit all –detailed | Export-CSV –path MyReport.csv

There is however a workaround for manipulating objects in SharePoint Online at a lower level using the SharePoint Server 2013 Client Components SDK which enables remote development against SharePoint Server 2013. The Client Side Object Model (CSOM) is an API which allows you to do remote development against SharePoint in a fashion quite similar to the way that you would program on the server (but it is a subset and therefore does not expose all of the same classes).  There are 3 implementations of this API  - one for .NET, one for Silverlight and one for Javascript and they are meant to replace the SharePoint web services. The .Net managed model installs a number of dlls (all using the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.* namespace) underneath

C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\ISAPI.
The next sample code shows how you can use these assemblies from Powershell which allow you to do a lot more with PowerShell and SharePoint Online.

$loc = "C:\Powershell" # Location of DLL's

$siteUrl = "https://yoursite.sharepoint.com"

$loginname = "ray.charles@yoursite.onmicrosoft.com"

Set-Location $loc

Add-Type -Path (Resolve-Path "Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll")

Add-Type -Path (Resolve-Path "Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll")

Write-Host "Please enter password for $($siteUrl):"

$pwd = Read-Host -AsSecureString

$ctx = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext($siteUrl)

# Authenticate against SharePoint Online

$ctx.Credentials = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SharePointOnlineCredentials($loginname, $pwd)

$web = $ctx.Web 

$ctx.Load($web) 

$ctx.ExecuteQuery() 

Write-Host " Current web title is '

$($web.Title)', $($web.Url)"

 

In the next blogpost I will show some additional examples of how you can use PowerShell in combination with the SharePoint CSOM.

 

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SharePoint+2013,sp2013,Powershell,Office365,SharePoint+Online,SPO,administration,Microsoft

Multilingual User Interface and Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2013

The Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2013 are now also publicly available for download (and not only from MSDN as in the previous months) – go to Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2013 [English] and select the appropriate language in dropdown. Also take a look at Install or uninstall language packs for SharePoint Server 2013 before performing the installation. Remember that you are no longer required to first do an installation of the SharePoint Foundation language packs.

From an end-user perspective there is a big change with regards to the multilingual interface. In SharePoint 2010 an end user could quite easily switch his language using the language picker in the top right of the page (See Multilingual User Interface in SharePoint 2010 for more details).
Unfortunately this is not the case anymore for SharePoint 2013. By default a SharePoint site for which alternate languages are defined will be shown in the language which is defined in the browsers language settings. A user can however change this by editing  his SharePoint user profile – Select About Me (in the top right corner), Edit Profile and next expand the tab menu by clicking the 3 dots and select Language and Region. In the next screen a user is able to select his preferred display language.

Once a user has selected a specific language – the following elements in the user interface will be translated (as shown with the French display language below)

• The standard SharePoint menus e.g. the ribbon are translated
• Navigation menu’s also support multilingual scenario’s with the MUI – if you switch your language and translate specific menu nodes in your navigation – these changes are language specific.
• The headings for list and site columns
• The managed metadata field type also supports multilingual scenario’s.

In my opinion this is making things way to complicated for end users and we will probably need some other workarounds for automatically setting the display language of a user since the majority will not find these menu options.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sp2013,MUI,multilingual,sps2013,sharepoint+2013,microsoft

Big Data – reading and video material

Mental note to myself to take a look at this in the coming weeks :-) …

• Understand your customers with Hadoop – tutorial – analyzing sentiment data
• Hortonworks Sandbox – a full HDP environment on a virtual machine with a dozen interactive hadoop tutorials to get you started
• Where does Hadoop fit in a modern data architecture
• The next big thing in Big Data: People Analytics
• Analyzing Big Data with Twitter (UC Berkeley course lectures)
• Big Data analytics e-book (IBM)
• Big Data Analytics – Facts & feelings
• Big Data can bring patients to water but it can’t make them think – how Aetna uses Big Data to predict cardiovascular diseases
• The not so distant future of  Big Data
• Meeting the Challenge of Big Data (Oracle)
• Measuring return on Knowledge in a Big Data world
• 5 ways Big Data is going to blow your mind and change your world
• Microsoft’s vision of our future is big screens and big data
• SQL Server Blog – Busting Big Data Adoption Myths – Part  1, Part 2 and Part 3
• 3 presentations on R: Mining, Web Development and Data Visualization

Technorati Tags: Bigdata,mining,analytics

Using Information Rights Management in SharePoint Online

With the new Office 365, Microsoft has introduced a new functionality to secure documents using Information Rights Management (IRM) services. It is a persistent file-level technology that stops sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, downloaded or copied by unauthorized users. In Office 365 IRM is available as part of the Enterprise E3 and E4 plan or the Academic Plan 3 and Plan 4. The functionality is similar to Windows Right Management Server (RMS)  – see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771234(v=ws.10).aspx for more details about RMS in an on premise deployment. When documents are downloaded from an IRM protected SharePoint document library, the supported file types carry the restrictions (in the form of an IRM license) along with the document as part of its content. Supported file types also include PDF next  to the standard Office file types in SharePoint 2013. The IRM protected files are encrypted and rights are restricted to the authenticated user who downloaded the document. IRM protection of PDF files is an extension to the existing ISO 32000 standard (See Microsoft IRM protection for PDF specification for more details) and needs to be implemented by the PDF readers – for the moment it is supported by FoxIT PDF line of products. To be able to use Information Rights Management (IRM) or Windows Azure Rights Management Services (the commercial name for IRM) in SharePoint Online there are 3 major steps required:

1. First enable Windows Azure RMS on Office 365 level – see Office 365 – Use Right Management Services. RMS is a shared service which can be used by Exchange Online and SharePoint Online and needs to be enabled at tenant level. It is not default enabled.
2. Next Set up Information Rights Management (IRM) in SharePoint admin center (Office 365). If you get an error here saying “Error: RMS Online is not enabled for this tenant, please contact Office 365 to enable.” – you probably forgot step 1.
3. Finally configure Rights Management on specific Document Libraries in SharePoint Online.

The IRM permissions map to SharePoint permissions on the document library as outlined in the following table

SharePoint Permissions	IRM Permissions
Manage Permissions Manage Web	Full control of the documents. This allows the user to read, edit, copy, save and modify permission of the document
Edit List Items Manage List Add and customize pages	Edit, copy and save permissions. The user can print the document only if the document library IRM settings are configured to allow document printing
View List Item	Read permissions. The user can read the document but not copy or edit its content. The user can  print the document only if the document library IRM settings are configured to allow document printing
All other permissions	Not applicable, no corresponding IRM permissions

In the IRM permissions can define additional options such as specifying whether documents that do not support IRM protection can be uploaded to the library and whether or not the document can be viewed in the browser. You can also configure additional document access rights which includes rights to print, run scripts to enable screen reader or enable writing to a copy of the downloaded document. The group protection and credential intervals determines the caching policy of the license that applications will use to open the documents. You can also enable sharing of the downloaded documents with users in a specified group.

Before you start implementing IRM in SharePoint Online you should carefully plan for it and define specific usage scenario’s for it since it is not meant to be activated on all information in discriminatory – ask yourself some of the following questions:

• Which business areas use sensitive information which is frequently exchanged?
• What needs to be protected (Office documents, e-mails, CAD design drawings, etc ..)
• How will security policies by applied and how will enforce and control that procedures are being followed.
• …

The introduction of IRM should be part of an overall information architecture and should be viewed upon at as part of a risk management strategy – ask yourself what would be the impact and consequence of information ending up in the wrong hands…
References:

• What’s new with Information Rights Management in SharePoint and SharePoint Online
• Apply Information Rights Management to a list or library (SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online)

Host-named site collections in SharePoint 2013

 

One of the recommendations in SharePoint 2013 is the usage of Host Named Site Collections (HNSCs) over using multiple web applications when you want to use vanity urls for specific SharePoint sites. Host-named site collections each have a unique DNS host name and therefore its own top-level URL.  SharePoint 2013 allows you to add multiple URLs by using the Set-SPSiteURL Powershell command. An interesting quote around this is found in a new article Host-named site collection architecture and deployment (SharePoint 2013) :

Because the Office 365 environment uses host-named site collections, new features are optimized for these site collections and they are expected to be more reliable. Learn how to plan for and implement host-named site collections, design URLs, and manage URLs.

The same information is found in SharePoint 2013 design samples – corporate portals and extranet sites :

The recommended configuration for deploying sites is using host-named site collections with all sites located within a single web application. This configuration is recommended to deploy sites because it is the same architecture that the Office 365 environment uses. Consequently this is the most heavily tested configuration. New features, including the App model and Request Management, are optimized for this configuration, and it is the most reliable configuration going forward.

Some of the reasons why host-named site collections are also considered to be the better solution because:

Create less overhead on web servers, because no additional IIS web site is required

Provide more flexibility because you provide alternative access to individual site collections instead of entire web applications. There is a limit of 20 web applications per farm (with 5 predefined zones), but you can create thousands of site collections (each with their own vanity url)

Reduced resource consumption since there are less web applications required (ant thus also less application pools)

Mitigates cross-site scripting risks

Other references:

• Your friendly guide to host-named site collections
• What every SharePoint Admin needs to know about Host Named Site Collections
• Host-named site collections (HNSC) for SharePoint  architects

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,administration,sp2013,microsoft,ITPro,architecture

SharePoint Server 2013, Active Directory Groups and the access denied problem caused by token lifetime.

A while ago we experienced some issues when using Active Directory groups and SharePoint Server 2013. We added users to Active Directory groups which were added to SharePoint groups, but the users who got access using this method, still got access denied. After some investigation we found the problem.

In SharePoint 2013 all authentication is being handled through claims which are managed by the Security Token Service (STS). The STS is responsible for issuing security tokens to users. A user which has logged on to SharePoint will be authenticated and granted a token with his group membership. These tokens have a certain lifetime and will not be updated until they expire. The property which controls this is the WindowsTokenLifetime property – according to the documentation is it normally set to 1380 minutes or 23 hours -  see Set-SPSecurityTokenServiceConfig for more details. (On one of my SharePoint 2013 it seemed to be 10 hours).

Therefore users who had already logged on to the SharePoint Server did not get the required tokens for their new AD group membership until the token expired. You can however change the token expiration in the following way:

$sts = Get-SPSecurityTokenServiceConfig
$sts.WindowsTokenLifetime = (New-TimeSpan -Minutes 15)
$sts.LogonTokenCacheExpirationWindow = (New-TimeSpan -Minutes 15)
$sts.Update()

Changing the WindowsTokenLifeTime will probably have a performance impact since there will be a lot more requests going from the STS to your Active Directory domain controllers. I haven’t found clear guidance or best practices about this, so feel free to leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint2013,sp2013,SharePoint,administration,Active+Directory,claims+authentication

Community Day 2013: Building search-driven Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps for SharePoint Server 2013

Building search-driven Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps for SharePoint Server 2013 from Joris Poelmans

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SP2013,WP8,Windows8,Search

Quick tip - copying files from your host to Hyper-V guest

I have been working with VMWare for quite a while but recently switched to Hyper-V on my Windows 8 portable. One thing I’m still struggling with is the ability to easily copy files from my host OS (Windows 8) to my guest OS which is running in Hyper-V. Currently I’m using Folder2Iso to quickly create ISO files which I then mount in my Hyper-V environment. If anyone knows of a better way of doing this – please leave a comment.

SharePoint Service Applications: SharePoint 2013 versus 2010

Service Applications	Description	SPS 2010 Std	SPS 2010 Ent	SPS 2013 Std	SPS 2013 Ent
Access Services	Let’s user view, edit and interact with Access 2010 databases which are published to SharePoint in a web browser		X		X
App Management service	Provides administrators the ability to manage new SharePoint apps. Apps can be purchased from an external vendor or developed internally. It checks user access permissions and licensing for app usage.			X	X
Application Discovery and Load Balancer service	A.k.a. Topology web service. SharePoint has a built in basic load balancer  that provides administrator with fault-tolerant out of the box SharePoint service applications. See SharePoint 2010 Service Application Load Balancer for more details.	X	X	X	X
Business Data Connectivity service	Gives access to line-of-business data systems – also check out the Business Connectivity Services code samples for SharePoint 2013	X	X	X	X
Excel Services Application	Let’s users view and interact with Excel files in a web browser		X		X
Machine Translation service	Provides automatic translation of sites and files (See Machine Translation Services in SharePoint 2013 for more details)			X	X
Managed Metadata service	Manages taxonomy hierarchies,keywords and social tagging infrastructure, and publish content types across site collections	X	X	X	X
Office Web Apps Service	Office Web Apps is now a separate product, rather than a SharePoint Service Application. See Use Office Web Apps with SharePoint Server 2013 for more details.
PerformancePoint Service Application	Let’s users create dashboards and balanced scorecards		X		X
PowerPoint Automation service	Performs automated bulk PowerPoint conversions to other formats (pptx,pdf,xps,jpg,png) (See PowerPoint Automation Services in SharePoint  2013 for more details)			X	X
Search service	Crawls content, produces index partitions and serves search queries	X	X	X	X
Secure Store service	Provides single sign on authentication to access multiple applications or services	X	X	X	X
State service	Provide temporary storage of user session data for SharePoint Server components	X	X	X	X
Usage and Health Data Collection service	Collects farm wide usage and health data and provides the ability to view various usage and health reports	X	X	X	X
User Profile service	Adds support for My Site sites, profile pages, social tagging and other social computing features	X	X	X	X
Visio Graphics service	Let’s users view and refresh published Visio diagrams in a web browser		X		X
Web Analytics service	Collect, reports, and analyzes the usage of SharePoint Server sites. The functionality of the Web Analytics service has been incorporated into the Search service	X	X
Work Management service	Enables users to synchronize and aggregate tasks between different Microsoft products such as Exchange, SharePoint and Project Server. See Configure Exchange task synchronization in SharePoint Server 2013 for practical details or the My Tasks aggregation in SharePoint Server and Exchange Task integration white paper			X	X
Word Automation service	Performs automated bulk document conversions.	X	X	X	X
Subscription Settings Service	Provides multi-tenant functionality for service applications. Tracks subscription IDs and settings for services that are deployed in partitioned mode. Deployed through Powershell only.	X	X	X	X

For more information about the SharePoint 2013 service applications check out the Services in SharePoint Server 2013 Visio diagram on Technical diagrams for SharePoint 2013 (Technet)

Technorati Tags: SharePoint+2013,SharePoint+2010,SharePoint,administration,Microsoft,SP2013,SP2010

Resolving XMind can’t open after updating to JRE7

 

I recently noticed that XMind stopped working after updating to Java Runtime Environment (JRE). It gave an error stating

A Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) must be available in order to run XMind. No Java virtual machine was found after searching the following locations: C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\javaw.exe

I solved it by simply making a copy of the JRE7 folder (default installed underneath C:\Program Files (x86)\Java ) and renaming that copy to JRE6.  Worked like a charm.

 

Technorati Tags: XMind,JRE,Java

Some quotes from actual performance appraisals

"Since my last report, this employee has reached rock bottom and has started to dig."
"His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity"
"I would not allow this employee to breed"
"This employee is really not so much of a has-been, but more of a definite won't be"
"Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap"
"When she opens her mouth, it seems that it is only to change feet"
"He would be out of his depth in a parking lot puddle"
"This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot"
"This employee should go far, and the sooner the better"
"Got a full 6-pack, but lacks the plastic thing to hold it all together"
"A gross ignoramus - 144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus"
"He certainly takes a long time to make his pointless"
"He doesn't have ulcers, but he's a carrier"
"I would like to go hunting with him sometime"
"He's been working with glue too much"
"He would argue with a signpost"
"He has a knack for making strangers immediately"
"He brings a lot of joy whenever he leaves the room"
"When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell"
"If you see 2 people talking and one looks bored, he's the other one"
"A photographic memory but with the lens over the cap"
"A prime candidate for natural deselection"
"Donated his brain to science before he was done using it"
"Gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming"
"Has 2 brains, one is lost, the other is out looking for it"
"If he were any more stupid, he'd have to be watered twice a week"
"If you give him a penny for his thoughts, you'd get change"
"If you stand close enough to him, you can hear the ocean"
"It's hard to believe that he beat out 1,000 other sperm"
"One neuron short of a synapse"
"Some drink from the fountain of knowledge, he only gargled"
"Takes him 1 1/2 hours to watch 60 Minutes"
"The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead"

Technorati Tags: Fun,HR,Employee+reviews

Belgian Windows 8 contest : App race

 

Only 31 days left for the Belgian Windows 8 contest: App race. For more info check out



http://aka.ms/race

 

Mental note: Windows Phone 7 backup location

By default, Zune makes a backup of your Windows Phone 7, prior to the update procedure. This is so that, in case of failures, it can revert back the phone to its previous state. The backups are automatically stored on the rive where Windows is installed, in the folder Users\Your User Name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Phone Update.

Technorati Tags: WP7,backup,zune

Functional stupidity and the corporate rebel

The prestigious Journal of Management published an article in November 2012 called “A stupidity-based theory of organizations” which defined a new interesting term: functional stupidity. Functional stupidity can be defined as follows:

Functional stupidity is organizationally-supported lack of reflexivity, substantive reasoning and justification by hierarchically structured organizations to avoid disintegration (or at least avoid internal friction) and it refers to an absence of reflection and refusal to justify certain decisions, forms of stupidity management repress or marginalize doubt and block communicative action. Members of these organizations are only allowed to work within well defined boundaries and are encouraged only to focus on specific tasks without questioning why.

This seems to be quite contradictory with the contemporary view upon organizations which claims that modern organizations are knowledge intensive and that organizations can only survive when they get the best out of their key asset, their employees.

“Short-term use of intellectual resources, consensus and an absence of disquieting questions about decisions and structures may oil the organizational machinery and contribute to harmony and increased productivity in a company,” Mats Alvesson, professor of organization studies, and one of the co-authors, writes. “However, it may also be its downfall.” One of the consequences of functional stupidity is killing innovation and evolution through learning.

The articles also outlines a number of behaviors which are typical of functional stupidity. It also seems that larger organizations are more prone to it. I think this has to do with the fact that they typically boil down their objectives into specific targets which should be attained without question. These objectives and they way of working is often backed by hierarchies, bureaucratic rules and a extremely well documented processes.

I think that at times it is a good thing to question the obvious, be a corporate rebel (Check out www.rebelsatwork.com for some interesting insights and thoughts or read the Rebels at work: motivated to make a difference e-book) and stir up new ideas that often are uncomfortable for the powers that be. Rebel for the ideas that you believe will make a difference because it is all to easy to find a reason not to change.

To finish of, a quote from Marc Buelens, professor at Vlerick Business School, which he added to his article in Trends magazine (Functioneel onwetend, de aantrekkingskracht van veilige paden, 21 maart 2013):

Functional stupidity provides a lot of comfort to management, but together these useful idiots can do quite a lot of stupid things.

Technorati Tags: functional+stupidity,organizational+theory,management,corporate+rebels,change+agents

Community Day 2013 – Building search driven Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps with SharePoint Server 2013

I will be delivering a session at Community Day Belgium – registrations will open up next week – there is a great lineup of sessions – so don’t hesitate.

Session abstract: Combine the power of Windows 8 with the flexibility and interoperability of SharePoint 2013 search. This session will walk through building Windows 8 applications using SharePoint 2013's REST-based search API to build rich, compelling user experiences. We will leverage the new people and social search capabilities in SharePoint 2013 to build both a Windows 8 client and Windows Phone 8 client.

If you have a specific scenario that you want to see in this session, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,windows8,development,search,rest+api,sharepoint2013,sps2013,vs2012,wp8,comdaybe,community

SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2013 slidedeck– Building the SharePoint hot or not app

SharePoint 2013 : the Big Five

SharePoint Server 2013 : The big five from Joris Poelmans