A Seattle-area MCSE

Help Desk Support: Outsource or keep in house?

2011-10-21T18:03:00.000+09:00

Help Desk IT people are the front line people you call when you first come across a technology problem. When your computer blue screens, flakes out when you hook up a projector, or when Outlook seems to eat your e-mail. If you dig through research from Gartner, business magazines, and IT management magazines, you can find all sorts of statistics on the correct size of the IT staff for a particular type of business – and most of it is contradictory. I’ve come up with simple guide for the small business owner based on my experience:

If you have less than 10 people in a single office, you probably don’t need a help desk at all. Your network is probably not that complicated and the risk of major incident is relatively low.

Until you exceed 125 people in a single office or exceed more than 75 people in two offices, you don’t need an in house help desk. A business with multiple offices now has a serious network to maintain. They are going to need more support and that means more people and that means more situations where an in house help desk in needed.

For offices in between, an outsourced help desk is the best answer. Level One Help Desk Support is a pretty tough job. You get to deal with pissed off people, people who are in a hurry, and people who are ready to spread the pain. It seems like your IT person is bouncing from one crisis to another. Hiring for people skills is almost as important as technical skills and a small company doesn't offer enough challenge.

Also, a company can’t have a single Help Desk person. Since they are running around putting out fires, they are almost guaranteed to be in the wrong place for the next problem. With an outsourced help desk, they will take care of that but if you bring it in house, there has to be at least a person who has partial help desk responsibilities to reduce risk of “missing” a key incident and to avoid staff burn out.

E-mail: Outsource or keep in house?

2011-10-21T13:40:00.004+09:00

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, e-mail was just moving from techno-novelty to normal business tool but now everyone just expects to be able to read their e-mail 24x7, anywhere in the world, accessible from any device. It has become like getting dial tone when you pick up a phone – is just there. Even though social media appears to be displacing e-mail in general communication, all businesses will need to maintain e-mail access for their employees for the foreseeable future.

E-mail systems can be pretty messy to maintain, though. Sure, the big companies can afford to have specialists to setup and maintain e-mail systems but what should a smaller company do? How to pick a system for a company of 30 or 150 employees? Do they go open source? Gmail? In house Exchange? Hosted Exchange? Classic POP or IMAP?

I am a bit biased since my experience is with maintaining Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. Outlook’s shared calendar features, invitations, contact management, and all the productivity tricks have just become too standard – almost everyone uses Outlook and you get the best user experience when it is connected to a Microsoft Exchange server. Prior to the recent rise of hosted Exchange providers this was pretty expensive, but things have changed.

In fact, there are so many options that it can get frustrating to find the best option. Here are my guidelines:

Size

If you have less than 50 people in your company, you should use a hosted service.
If you have more than 250 people in your company, you should have in-house e-mail systems

If you are between 51 and 249 people then you need to look at these questions:

If you already have an in-house IT staff, servers at a high-quality data center, and are used to providing 24x7 services, you should probably bring the e-mail system in house
If you have custom applications on your network that send and receive e-mail, you should probably bring the e-mail system in house
If all your servers exist in your offices and those offices have only basic batter backup, basic access to the internet, and you do not have IT staff with e-mail experience, you should use a hosted service

Hosted Solutions

For those companies looking at hosted solutions, the character of your employees will likely determine which type of hosted solution you should use.

If you have employees that are not techies (meaning that they just want Outlook to work and don’t care about anything happening in the back) then you should get a Hosted Exchange service with spam filtering and ActiveSync access for smart phones.
If you have people who already use Google docs, like experimenting with new things, and are generally self sufficient when they have IT issues, then it generally doesn’t matter what e-mail system you use. However, Gmail seems to offer the best deal for this time of office culture.

Of all the hosting options available, please do everyone a big favor and don’t use POP e-mail. A service with IMAP is acceptable as long as it is the Secure IMAP that uses encryption but please, please, please, stop using POP. IMAP, Gmail, and Exchange all use the idea that there is only one mailbox and that mailbox can be read and copied to multiple locations while still acting as one mailbox. POP is a temporary parking spot for mail and the local software is not really “linked” to the POP server. If you connect to e-mail with multiple devices – which almost everyone does these days – you end up with partial copies of e-mail scattered all over the place. Mail sent from your phone is not visible on your computer, mail deleted on your computer might still exist on your phone, and so on. Better solutions exist, so stop using POP.

In House Solutions

I still strongly recommend Microsoft Exchange – the features are just too comprehensive and too useful.

Due to recent changes in how the software works, Microsoft Exchange 2007 and 2010 can run on much cheaper hardware than Exchange 2003 could. You still want to make sure you get good quality, redundant hardware with plenty of RAM and disk space but this will no longer break your budget quite as much as it used to. The exact details of what you need is impossible to describe in a single blog post but if you are in Seattle, Portland, or anywhere along the west coast of the US, my old company ISOutsource.com can give you practical advice and help you set it up. They've been working with Exchange since Exchange 5.5 and have consultants that have done more installations than you’ve done oil changes.

You will still want a hosted anti-spam service. By hosting it outside your network, none of that spam will travel down your internet connection and free up bandwidth for real business. Also, you won't have to worry about updating the system or maintaining the anti-spam definitions.

Things that you should insist that your programmers NEVER do

2011-10-18T21:00:00.001+09:00

I am not a real developer – I only play around the edges and keep up with the basics – but I think I’ve found a few “truths” that project managers should use when managing development projects. I pull a lot of advice from two authors: Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky who work together on a project called Stack Exchange. Their opinions are not universally loved but I’ve seen internal development projects that could have been much more successful if our developers had followed these rough guidelines:

Functional Specs are Useful: Quite a few developers hate specifications – hard to write, hard to read, hard to use, and rarely useful. For many technical specifications, these developers are extremely well justified. Joel Sploksy offers an alternate view of specifications that is far more useful. By creating a written description of what a program is supposed to do (a functional specification) instead of how a program is supposed to be built (a technical specification) you get the chance to provide useful information to your developers. Read Joel’s multi-part description how to do that, then read The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper, and start writing documents that actually help your development projects
Internationalization from the Beginning: Over the past two decades, every business article, magazine, web site, and book has been talking about how the world is flat and every business is competing on an international playing field. So why do I keep finding software that won’t install in a Japanese-language Windows PC? Why do websites turn 日本語 into ??????? Even though you don’t see need to support international languages now, you can make sure that your developers don’t shut the door early. I recommend that you start your development effort with a requirement to support multiple languages and force them to explain why they shouldn’t. I’m sure there are legitimate reasons for English only but make them justify it.
Real Testing Hurts: When developing on your own laptop and connecting to a server that is down the hall, you are sitting in an almost perfect environment. Don’t let your developers test in a perfect environment – you won’t learn anything. For example, if you want this new application to work over the internet, you had better test it over the worst connection you can find. As Jeff Atwood points out, performance of your application in the real world is a make-or-break moment. You should make sure your developers run things in high-latency, low-bandwidth, sub-optimal environment or you may be in for a big surprise later. The internet is not new and the internet is not an optimal network.
ASCII Text is NOT Enough: I think all developers need to read this article from 2003 about how to handle text. Even though the internet enabled, international business era is old news, it is surprising how many different systems mange non-ASCII text. Even my iPhone 4 occasionally takes a Japanese language website and renders it as some odd collection of wingding symbols. In addition to the point about internationalization of installation, make sure that your custom development doesn't manage non-English input. After all 田中一路様 is unlikely read mail addressed to ????????
Things Break – Handle It: When you are working with complex systems, you have many different points of failure. It is a given that during the life a particular system that some key part will fail and it is up to your developers to handle it. To quote the Netflix developers “Each system has to be able to succeed, no matter what, even all on its own. We’re designing each distributed system to expect and tolerate failure from other systems on which it depends.” That particular team took it to extremes but since they were designing a massively mission critical system, it was worth it. When starting your development project you need to explain to your developers how much robustness you need for this project. If you let the developers pick you may not be happy with the results since they are likely to look at it from the “how hard is that to program” level and not the “how important is that to the business” level.
Size Matters in Development: Test data is more dangerous than you might think. It is common for developers to use a very small set of test data in the database and run all tests against that smaller database. However, if your final system is going to massive, multi-server, multi-site, thousands of users then you had better make sure the pre-deployment testing is performed on a larger system. Jeff Atwood has a great explanation of the risks and how to avoid them that you can probably just hand directly to your development team.

Please post your own comments and feedback here. I'm interested if developers disagree with me on this.

Project Management Across Time Zones

2011-10-18T20:01:00.006+09:00

Even though I haven’t been working for a global company for all that long, I’ve noticed that a lot of people have difficulties with what seems like a trivial issue: time zones.

My company has offices in the majority of countries, with people in almost every time zone, and it has been that way for years. Even so, most people seem to have difficulty – at least occasionally – correctly accounting for how business is impacted by time zones. Sure, some teams may never care about differences in a work day, especially if the groups are only loosely coupled, but if you have a global team, your project coordination can really suffer if you don’t pay attention.

For me, the most common issue is the lag time for back-and-forth communications. If a group in Tokyo asks a question to a person in Paris and that person responds after lunch (Paris time), that is close to the end of typical work day in Tokyo. All it takes is one or two people coming in late or leaving early – dropping off children, stuck in a meeting, or a doctor’s appointment – and the communication loop will be delayed at least 24 hours. In this more connected world, blackberries, web mail, and iPhones help with after-hours communication but that is not a panacea.

Since time zone lag is unavoidable, clear and complete communication is essential. Wherever possible, you need to “close the loop” to avoid multiple back-and-forth exchanges since each loop might have a delay. What I try to do is:

Clarity in references: When assigning a task for “end of the day, Tuesday” make sure you explicitly say what end of who's day you mean. “Due to the telephone call with Atlanta, please send me that document before 8pm Tokyo time (1pm Paris time)” is more likely to be understood than “before lunch”. Referencing the other person’s time zone is probably best but if there are multiple locations, using UTC or GMT time is better. When using UTC / GMT time, I tend to use 24-hour / military time for additional clarity. That may just be me, though.
Clarity with schedule constraints: If there is something that needs be done before an Asia office opens for the day, it should be made clear to people in later time zones. Especially in the IT world, people think that midnight on Sunday is an excellent time for routine maintenance and may not realize that your Asia offices is already open for business on their Monday morning. Combining this with the previous tip, “Make sure that this patch installation is complete at all sites before 23:00 UTC on Sunday, October 23rd, to avoid conflicts with the Tokyo office” would be a good way to tell team members of a schedule constraint.
Clarity with dependencies: The time lag affects decisions as well. If an office needs to receive a decision from a manager the “early” office in order to work, the “late” office could waste a day, have people sitting idle, or miss deadlines if the manager didn’t know that people are waiting.

No matter how you manage risk, things happen. In a global team, after-hours contact procedures must be included somewhere in your risk response planning. This is even more important in those European countries where after-hours work is strictly controlled and after-hours contact information (phone numbers, pagers, etc.) is strictly controlled by employment law. The last thing you need is to have a major office down for several hours because no one had a phone number for a service provider in Stockholm.

Even the most routine activity - scheduling meetings - is made more difficult. Knowing that Tokyo is in UTC+9 and Seattle is in UTC-8 should just mean some simple math to pick a time, right? Unfortunately, over the past decade, there have been many changes in daylight savings time rules. It can be hard to tell when things change and how that affects your regular meetings. Your calendar scheduling application probably has the correct settings but I think that every global project manager should regularly check with www.timeanddate.com. They have an excellent meeting planner and pretty clear explanations of other time and date related topics.

Even with all the challenges, you can leverage the power of time zones for a project. Having other people working while you sleep can really speed things along and reduce total durations. The key to this, like many project related efforts, depends on communications and collaboration. As long as the work is broken down to easy to manage work packages, there should be a way to hand-off task between teams. If your WBS is really detailed, the hand-off can probably happen with just simple e-mails or status reports but it is likely that some sort of hand-off meeting will be necessary. The time commitment, attendees, and frequency of the hand off meetings will vary a lot but I find that IT related projects need meetings between project managers on a daily or three-per week basis for 15 minutes over the phone at a minimum.

Global project teams can really accomplish a lot if well coordinated. Multiple time zones add complexity but by paying attention to schedule details, you can come out ahead.

Dear Web Programmers: Not everyone has a ZIP code

2011-10-07T19:06:00.003+09:00

I've been living in Japan for almost four years now. As an American citizen, I still have to do business with companies in America (bank accounts, IRS forms, etc.). I'm pretty sure that I speak for every ex-pat living outside of the US when I say:

STOP MAKING ME SELECT A STATE AND TYPE A FIVE DIGIT ZIP CODE!

I don't have a state... I live in Chiba. My postal code is 261-0013. What can I possibly put in the ZIP field that passes your ZIP validation code. Should I put all zeros? Put in the address for the White House?

Look, I know that coding for international characters and international addresses is more difficult. But, it is 2011 and the internet is getting kind of old. You have had time to realize that companies can do business in Korea, Thailand, or Japan almost as easy as doing business across state lines. Please do us all a big favor and copy the user interface of companies like Amazon. They actually understand....

Probably going to shut this down

2010-06-11T07:57:00.002+09:00

Since I haven't put up a single blog post in 2010, I'm probably going to shut this down. I'm going to spend some time building my www.SBWorks.com website and moving some of the better content to there. I keep thinking I should create how-to-live-in-Japan type website since I've been here a couple years now.

SharePoint Breadcrumb Oddity

2009-12-15T12:13:00.002+09:00

I was setting up a new SharePoint master page and I was having a horrible time trying to figure out why my breadcrumb navigation was working for some pages and not for others. I finall found this blog post explaining what was going on: http://www.novolocus.com/2008/02/22/more-sharepoint-breadcrumb-wtf/

It turns out that some of the default publishing layouts "blank" the placeholder I was using to control the breadcrumb navigation. Once I inserted my own and moved the place holder somewhere esle, everything was fine.

Odd...

Creating a site banner with the Content Editor Web Part

2009-12-10T22:32:00.004+09:00

NOTE: This article is intended for people who are really, really, really picky about the look and feel of their SharePoint site (like me). I am going to show a level of detail that is unimportant to 95% of the population.

For those of you with web design experience, you have probably created splash pages and page banners for other websites and may want to add one to your SharePoint site. There are several ways to create a banner for your site - the simplest is to just create an image and then use the Image View Web Part. You can use Paint.NET, GIMP, or other image editing software to create a GIF, PNG, or JPG image that you then upload and display.

However, an image is a fixed-width image that may or may not line up with other things on the page. Also, if you need to change the text or change the width, you have to fire up the image editor (again), change the text (again), export the image to PNG (again), upload it (again), and then repeat for every little adjustment. This especially annoying for typos - but maybe that is just my problem.

There are probably some of you saying "If I was going my own page, I would just put a background image behind a table or something, and then put text in front" which means you can change the text as without using an image editor. But you can't do that with SharePoint - or can you?

Actually, you can - if you are a little bit careful.

You can use a Content Editor Web Part to display something close to raw HTML code. There are only a couple of things you need to keep in mind:

Close your tags PERFECTLY - if you open something, close it. Do not leave an un-closed row, table, SPAN, or DIV.

Match your tags PERFECTLY - don't close something you didn't open. SharePoint has a lot of nested tables so if your code has an extra </table> tag, things can get very interesting.

Now, I will show you an example. For this site, I knew that I, as a site collection administrator, had a large number of tags across the top of the screen and I knew that a regular visitor would not. So, what I saw would be different than a regular visitor. In order to accommodate that, I wanted a banner that "expanded" to the left and right to fill the space of the column.

First, I created an image and "faded" to one site to a solid color. I use Paint.NET for my image editor because it is open source and quite flexible. Paint.NET also gives me the hex code for the color I used on the image. I can simply copy and paste the color code into my CSS markup.

In this example, I created a image that is designed to displayed on the right and is tall enough to not need repeating vertically. Upload the image to a document library on your site and copy the full URL to this image - you will need it in your CSS markup, too.

Create a new text file and start out with a simple table layout:

This table layout gives you table with a single cell. If you are an HTML or CSS purist, you probably hate me right now since I am using tables to control page layout. However, SharePoint runs on nested tables so it simply easier to keep going with the existing system.

Next, you need to add inline CSS to the TD tag to add your background image. Here is the markup I used to push the image to the right:

In line CSS needs to be enclosed in a single string. Each specification needs to be terminated with a semi-colon.

background-image: url(PATH); - you need to enter the path to the image you uploaded.
background-repeat: no-repeat; - will show the image once. There are other options available if your image needs to be repeated to form a pattern
background-position: right; - should be self explanatory. There are other options available.
background-color: #E5E5E5; - this is the light grey that is my "fade" color. This is what allows the cell to change width but still look like a single item.

Then, I added text into the cell. I added inline formatting for my text as well, but that is completely optional.

<p style="font: small-caps bold 1.5em; padding: 10px; ">Redesign and Improve - 2009</p>
<p style="font: bold 2.0em; padding: 10px;">IT Portal v2.0</p>

Then, save the text file to a document library on the site just like you did for the image file and copy the full URL the text file, too. Edit your page and add a new Content Editor Web Part. Use the option to point to the text file that you just uploaded.

There are a couple of advantages of using the text file instead of just entering HTML straight into the Content Editor Web Part:

If you delete a text file, it goes to the site recycle bin. If you delete a Content Editor Web Part, it is permanently deleted.

You can enable versions in the document library, you can roll back changes

You can reuse the HTML code in a text file on many pages.

Found a great SharePoint CSS reference

2009-12-09T15:05:00.002+09:00

You guys may have found this one before but I only just found it. This site has full list of the various CSS classes used and how to modify them.

CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3)

She has a bunch of other articles about branding and CSS tricks on her blog as well. Definately going to bookmark that one.

Things have been busy

2009-12-02T10:32:00.001+09:00

Things have definately been busy around the office but it looks like I am going to be able to make it back to the states for Christmas. It will be a short trip but at least I can go this year. I missed Christmas last year.

Found a used book store in 白金台(Shirokanedai)

2009-11-16T07:17:00.004+09:00

A couple of weekends ago, we went to a museum near the 白金台(Shirokanedai) station and we visited one of the Book Off stores - they are a huge chain of used book stores with stores all over the place. But the Book Off in Shirokanedai has the largest selection of foreign language books I've ever seen at a used book store. I fact, I would say that this was bigger than the foreign language section of any regular book store that I have been to recently. They have a sign up that says that they have 40,000 book there. They even had five or six big shelves full of French books - something I've never seen in Japan. The prices were excellent, too. Most paperbacks with 350 yen with some at 200 yen and a handful at 500 yen.

The store even has a cafe with good coffee and snacks. The cafe is pretty crowded but still a good place to sit, read, or work. It is pretty easy to get to this store. Exit from the Shirokanedai station via Exit #2, take a left at the top the of stairs, and walk about 2-3 minutes. It will be on your left and you will probably see the cafe part first. If you are a foreigner living in Tokyo, this definitely worth a trip out there.

Tokyo Winter vs. Seattle Winter

2009-11-09T15:51:00.004+09:00

Tokyo's winter has been very, very, very mild so far. It has been "long sleeve-shirt and light jacket only the morning" kind of weather. We've only had a couple of days of chilly and windy though we are supposed to get a couple of more days, apparently. Today was sunny and the high was 20 degree Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) and the overnight low was at 14 C / 57 F.

Since Seattle is supposed to have a high of 11 C / 52 F, a low of 4 C / 39 F and rain... I think I like the Japanese version of winter a bit better. Of course, the real winter has moved in, yet.

Changing the link on the top of a web part

2009-08-25T10:12:00.002+09:00

Found a new SharePoint trick the other day and figured I should share.

When you insert a web part into your SharePoint site, the title of web part is formatted to be a hyperlink to the list, document library, or other SharePoint item that you used for the web part. Some web parts don't have links by default but all web parts can have it. You can also customize where that link points to.

For example, you have a confogired a filtered view of the list to use as a web part. By default, the title of the web part is linked to the default view of the underlying list, not the filtered view I used. If you want people the click the title bar to go you a different view than the default you can.

Select Modify Shared Web Part
Scroll down to the advanced section
Look for a field labeled Title URL.
It probably points to the default view such as AllItems.ASPX. If I want to point it to a different view, just copy and paste URL to the filtered view into that field and hit OK.

You can have the link point anywhere, actually. you can have your title be a hyperlink to anywher on your site or somewhere on the internet. Every web part in SharePoint has this property. So even things that don't have one by default, like the photo viewer web part or content editor web part, can have a link added.

Two earthquakes

2009-08-11T08:21:00.002+09:00

We had two earthquakes in Japan this week - a medium sized one on Sunday night (August 8th) and a slightly larger one Tuesday morning (Auguts 10th). The Sunday one was closer to us but a very deep earthquake, from what I heard. It lasted a long time but didn't do anything to our house other than make the lights sway and make the house creak. The Tuesday one was a quite a bit father away so we actually felt it less, even though it was a bigger earthquake.

Hopefully, there won't be any others any time soon. Since our building is only two years old, it should do okay in an earthquake, but I'm not interested in finding that out first hand.

Making SharePoint not look like SharePoint: An Odyssey - Part 1

2009-06-22T08:59:00.002+09:00

Like I posted earlier, I have been working with a SharePoint design/branding project. I have to say that the available documentation for this is pretty vague. There is a lot of “you could do A, or B, or C” high level talk but very little details of the technical implementation of each option. Maybe it is because there are too many variable to write a comprehensive book.

Regardless, I am going to walk you through the way I did it. I doubt this is the best for everyone but this is low-code/minimum complexity way to create custom master page. In this project, I attempted to mimic an existing, public facing website for an internal portal. I did this by adding one customized master page, one CSS file, and a handful of graphics. I made no custom JavaScript and never fired up Visual Studio – this was done entirely from SharePoint Designer 2007.

After reading a lot of books and how to articles, I decided on some general rules for anyone tackling this for the first time:

Do not modify the basic SharePoint objects. Open and save as but do not just directly edit the default CSS styles, master pages, or graphics. It is highly likely that service packs or other upgrades will overwrite your changes. Also, it is sometimes hard to go back.

Double check your backups before you start. You have a pretty good chance to really screw things up so make sure you are backed up and run a test restore before you get started.

Never delete a tag from the master page. The master page forms the ultra-flexible “skin” for the website and these place holder objects tell other pages where you want things parked. If you are missing a placeholder, you get error messages. You can move place holders around and apply formatting but you have to publish with all of them. I create a panel at the bottom of my web pages that is hidden and park all of the placeholders I do not want to have displayed down there.

Don’t start from scratch. There is Microsoft TechNet article that tells you how to create an empty master page and you can design to your heart’s content. If you are new to this, like I was, “green field” development is tempting but just say NO. Open an existing master page and save as. You get some junk you don’t want but you will start with something that works.

SharePoint likes nested tables - live with it. I know that current web design treats nested tables as the dark spawn of Satan that leads to ultimate damnation but, unfortunately, SharePoint behaves better with nested tables. I am not sure why that is the case, but much of the pre-installed web components appear to assume that you are in nested tables where their CSS formatting is going to be isolated from the rest of the page. When the different styles become intermixed, you get some very entertaining results.

Test the Edit Page functions often. When trying to get the branding to look right, create the look, tweak the CSS, adjust the graphics, and take a look at the final page. Do yourself a big, big favor and select “Modify Web Part”, “Edit Page”, or any other site administrator function on the page. You may have accidentally shrunk, hidden, or mangled the toolbars that people need to actually get work done.

SharePoint Customization and Branding

2009-06-01T11:36:00.003+09:00

I found a really good SharePoint related site from a consultant in called Clever Workarounds. I read through his four part series on SharePoint branding and made some additional experiments.

Whenever you want to change look and feel of a website, you normally want to adjust the CSS files that control it. Cascading Style Sheets are relatively straight forward and seem to behave logically. For example, you can have multiple definition of a paragraph and whichever style is applied last wins. It would seem that if you added your own CSS link, tweaked the settings you want, you wouldn’t make any changes to the preinstalled files. That way, patches and upgrades wouldn’t destroy your work - simple, right?

However, SharePoint has a big problem with this. The key problem with custom branding for SharePoint is that a large part of the functionality in SharePoint is defined by the CORE.CSS style sheet. No problem, right? You just need to add another CSS file below it in the header, and you’re done. Well, actually, it is not that simple. Unfortunately, the way that SharePoint builds the pages, the CORE.CSS file is always last - thus making it always be dominant.

Looking at the Clever Workarounds pages, it looked like getting around that would be very, very complicated. However, in reading the comments, there seemed like their might be a good way around it. Here is the comment (edited slightly for length):

Remember the Cascading part of cascading style sheets and the specificity of each rule. It doesn’t matter if your css rule appears before or after core.css If you want your rule to win you make it more specific. I have used this approach since SharePoint 2001 and have never had any problems. I place a unique, short ID attribute on my body element in the master page. Example Then when I find a rule that I want to override that core.css is currently rendering I create a duplicate rule in my stylesheet but place #dm in front of the rule. So for example .ms-WPHeader in core.css becomes #dm .ms-WPHeader in my stylesheet. Now that I have a more specific rule my style rule wins. Works every time … and it requires no custom code or major modifications to SharePoint.

So, I gave this a shot:

You create your own CSS page and link to it.
At the body level, inside a table tag, or whatever makes since, add the ID tag (the commenter used DM for his example but it can be anything)
View your pages and see what CORE.CSS styles need changing
The internet explorer Developer Toolbar is very useful for this
In your custom CSS page, create rule with the same name and add the #ID in front of the definition
Save and refresh – repeat as necessary.

Doing some development work

2009-06-01T09:10:00.002+09:00

Recently, I’ve doing some development work instead of my more normal systems administration work. I’ve always done VBScript scripting of administration tasks, started fooling with PowerShell, and have always been messing around with websites but I’ve been going past that, recently. I’ve had a couple of things I’ve been working on:

Creating custom “look and feel” to SharePoint sites
Creating web parts for SharePoint sites
Creating a C# web application for linking an outsourced CRM system to Groove
Creating a C# console application to read three different calendars and then create a survey questionnaire based on information inside the meeting

It has been a real challenge I’m going to try and write some posts based on what I learned. For those of you with real developer experience, you will probably laugh over some of the things I had trouble with. Hopefully, if there is any other sysadmin that needs to do some quick prototype code, they can benefit from my experiments.

Thoughts on Japan

2009-04-21T18:18:00.004+09:00

I have been here for over a year now, and I have come to appreciate a lot of the little things about Japan. Sure Tokyo is a noisy place, things are a bit crowded but there are so many things that make life easy:

Our condo has 24x7 automated lockers. When a delivery comes and we're not home, they put the box in this locker and code in our address. We can open it with this special card when we get home. You can use that locker to send boxed and dry cleaning, too, and they auto-bill our credit card.
Chiho found a company called Yoshikei ヨシケイ千葉 that does grocery delivery. The offer a menu of four meals per day and you order whichever one you like and they deliver the pre-measured ingredients to your day. There is almost no additional cost and there is no wastage.
We have a bread store at our train station and at a nearby grocery store that is way better than anything you'd find in Seattle. All of the French people in my office say that Japanese bakeries are as good as Paris bakeries - some are even better.
Most utility bills can be paid by direct bank deposit but you can pay all the others at any convenience store - with immediate credit for payment and no additional fee.

And that is just a short list. I will add some of the nice things in Japanese houses later.

Found an answer to my SharePoint question

2009-04-21T18:06:00.002+09:00

I posted earlier about the odd behavior of the Advanced Search web part and I think I found my answer. That webpart assumes that you have a Enterprise Search site that was deployed from the MS stock template. There is a results.aspx page that works correctly.

Now, for my next project is to figure out how to get that to work without the Enterprise Search site, since that template is not available.

Clever Workarounds

2009-04-09T20:43:00.003+09:00

I found a good SharePoint and IT Project Management website recently called Clever Workarounds http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/. Really a good read on the project management side. Some of his SharePoint tricks are slightly out of date but 90% of them are really good. His project management stuff seems to be pretty much dead-on to me.

It is spring in Tokyo now

2009-04-09T20:40:00.001+09:00

Things have been warming up and it is cherry blossom season here in Tokyo. We hit 19 degrees C so right around 70 degrees F yesterday and today. It is quite pleasant around here - almost time to pack up the sweaters and the heavy coats. I didn't take any pictures of the cherry trees and it is already past the best time for pictures - maybe next year.

Indexing PDF files with SharePoint

2009-04-06T14:30:00.003+09:00

By default, neither MOSS 2007 or SharePoint Service v3.0 will index the contents of PDF file. The setup process is pretty simple and is outlined on Steven Van de Craen's Blog on an old post of his. I'm made sure to keep of copy of that one around.

Bought a Netbook

2009-04-06T08:34:00.002+09:00

We just picked up a netbook for Chiho to use for studying. We picked up a ASUS 1000HE from BIC Camera and took advantage of a promotional from EMOBILE. They are a cellular data provider and if you sign up for a two year data contract, they discount the netbook - just like buying a cell phone, really. The list price of the laptop was just under $450 USD and by signing up for the data plan, the cost was about $30 instead.

EMOBILE's service is Tokyo is really pretty good and they offer 7.3mbs connections. I routinely speed test mine at over 5mbs which seems very good to me. The coverage area is cities only, not up on the mountains, but it covers all of the areas we are likely to travel.

Is Microsoft's technical documentation gettting worse?

2009-04-03T19:06:00.002+09:00

I've been assigned a new project, recently, trying to assess Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and I've been digging through the TechNet information. I'm just doing an inital pass, really, nothing in depth, and the documentation is kind of depressing. They have several reference topologies and these little case studies scattered about and they are just pitiful. The reference topolgy diagram is missing some important info - like the number of employees that the topology was designed for? Kind of important to know if the diagram is applicable to 5,000 users or 50,ooo users but that is not there.

I wanted to find out just a few things:

Is virtualization supported (hyper-v or vmware)
If so, which roles are good candidates for virtualization
As you move from simple to complex or small to big, which role can be combined onto one server and which should never be.

Isn't that fairly basic information? Or am I expecting too much for something that is new?

Finally got my Japanese drivers' license

2009-03-25T08:24:00.002+09:00

It felt like it took forever but I finally got Japanesed drivers' license on Monday. I finally passed on my third try - boy these guys are picky, picky, picky...

Nice step-by-step for Outlook passwords

2009-03-18T20:04:00.001+09:00

I found this one today and I was digging through Outlook 2007 password prompt issues for someone at work: http://www.petri.co.il/save-your-exchange-password-in-microsoft-outlook-2003-or-2007.htm

Odd ball error on SharePoint

2009-03-18T19:43:00.002+09:00

I've come across a very odd error with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) that I just can't figure out. On line searching is leading me around in circles.

With MOSS 2007, there is a default search page, _layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx and you just paste in that URL into the Simple Search web part or the Advanced Search web part. The first page of results will display just fine using either web part. However, the "next page" link fails for the Advanced Web Part.

When you use the Simple Search web part, you get a long URL:

/_layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx?k=test&cs=This%20Site&u=http....

K = the info you put into simple search
CS = scope for the search

When you hit next, the JavaScript appends more stuff to the URL and off you go - no problems at all.

/_layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx?k=test&cs=This%20Site&u=http....&start1=11

The advanced search does not format a long URL. When you hit Next, you get a blank page. I have been looking through everything I can find about this web part and I have gotten nothing out of it. It seems that 90% of developers out there roll their own search web parts instead of use Microsoft's. Even on the office.microsoft.com search, the top articles are how to make your own.

Come on... can't I just used the built in one?

Crackberry withdrawl...

2009-03-13T19:14:00.004+09:00

I didn't actually have a Blackbery, I had an HTC Windows Mobile phone, but I have to say good-bye to being connected to my work e-mail 24x7 for the first time in years. The phone is over two years old - almost three - so I guess it is time for some hardware issues to crop up. I can't figure out if it is related to the sliding keyboard or something internal to the phone but it turned off when bumped. Wedging the battery in place didn't work, either so it is off to the repair shop.

Though, it may not be. Our main office recently selected the iPhone as our default corporate phone - right before the global down turn frozen everyone's budget. So, there is a chance I will get something totally different, instead. In Japan, the iPhone is still restricted to a single carrier (SoftBank) and they are still charging a little extra for the iPhone data plan. That makes it a lot harder to justify it as a business expense.

You can buy 100% legal, unlocked iPhones from the Hong Kong Apple Store, as long as you have it shipped to a location in Hong Kong. We have sales guys traveling to Hong Kong all the time... very, very tempting...

Switched my commute around

2009-03-13T19:05:00.003+09:00

This week, I decided to change the way I get to work. Instead of taking the Yurikamome (ゆりかもめ) I am taking the regular subway, connecting through the Yurakucho/Hibiya (有楽町&日比谷) stations.

It made me realize how well-connected the Tokyo area actually is. I have three different ways to get to work that get me there about the same time plus a couple of alternates that are little slower. I have a half dozen different ways of getting to work that do not involve a single car. Coming from Seattle, that is kind of a shock. I suppose that Seattle is getting better, and I know that Seattle is smaller, but still...

Week numbers

2009-03-04T22:00:00.002+09:00

My current company has an interesting method for coordinating work: they assign week numbers as the targets and deadlines. Instead of saying "finish Phase X by April 15th" they will say "finish Phase X by week 15". I hadn't encountered that in an American company before so it struck me as odd.

We did have some fun this year, though. The ISO standard for week numbering did not match the USA formatting for week numbers so we had a little be of conflict this week.

Training in Nagoya

2009-03-03T13:54:00.004+09:00

I took a bullet train(shinkansen - 新幹線) trip this morning to Nagoya(名古屋)run an afternoon of training classes today. The trip was about 2 hours and my E-Mobile wireless network card kept the connection almost the whole way. It only dropped connection in the tunnels and smoothly reconnected on the other side. Very impressive, really. Even though I'm zipping along at 200mph, the cellular card handled everything.

Japanese Drivers License

2009-02-17T10:36:00.001+09:00

I took a half day off today and a half day off last week to take care of getting a Japanese drivers license. When you are a permanent resident, you can only use an International Permit for your first year. After that, you have to get a Japanese drivers license.

If you are from Europe, Australia, Hong Kong, or another half-dozen countries, this is a simple paperwork process. Those lucky people do not have to take any tests. Americans do have to take a written and practical driving test, though. Based on what I could research on the Internet, this is because drivers licenses are issued by the states and not the federal government so Japan cannot create a single, unified rule for all American drivers licenses. Americans still have a paperwork process to go through, though. You have to get your driver’s license translated at the Japan Automobile Federation (JAF) and then bring that, your foreigner registration card (外国人登録証明書 gaikokujin tōroku shōmeisho), a new photo, and passport to your local office. They will take the paperwork, give you a quick eye-test, give you the written test, and get you an appointment for the driving test.

The written test is ultra, ultra simple. It was a ten question, true or false test and you were allowed to miss two questions. The questions were so easy that you would have to be very tired not to get a perfect score.

The practical test is a lot tougher. Very few people who take the test pass on the first time because the inspectors are extremely picky. If you search on the expat sites about driver’s licenses, you will find a lot of people complaining about the practical test. You have to drive letter perfect and with exaggerated care in order to pass. There is a wiki site for the Ehime driver’s test that recommends that you actually vocalize your safety checks (Mirror OK! No one left, no one right, OK!, etc.) That might be a little overkill, I suppose, but it does get you past the test.

I took my test this morning but managed to fail it. The car needed a lot more brake than I was used to so I overshot a stop line early in the test and that was an automatic fail. Today was not really a fun morning… Oh well, I try again in two weeks.

A little humor for the morning

2009-02-16T07:54:00.002+09:00

This is funny for anyone who's traveled in Japan or China. Though, to be fair, the quality of English signs in Japan is a lot better than it was 10 or 15 years ago. I assume that Japanese marketers advertisers got tired of being teased about it and spent more time on translations. Quality of English signs in China is pretty bad, though. From talking to the people from China at the office, everyone thinks that since there are fewer English speakers in China, it is harder to get a proofreader.

One year - exact

2009-02-15T19:40:00.001+09:00

February 15th is my exact one year anniversary of arriving in Japan, according to the date stamped in my passport. This year has gone past pretty dang fast but I guess that isn't too surprising considering how many things have changed.

My next major challenge is filing my American taxes. I've decided not to do them myself after I started to read IRS Publication 54 which is 40+ pages long and insanely complicated. Just trying to figure out the "physical presence" rules was confusing. Maybe I can go back to doing them myself next year or the year after but not this year.

I found a tax accountant in Hawaii that specializes in providing tax services for people living in Japan. He was well recommended in expat community websites here in Japan. We'll see how it turns out.

Almost the one year mark

2009-02-03T18:56:00.000+09:00

In less than two weeks, I will hit the one year anniversary of my arrival in Japan. It seems to have been a very fast year. My first day in the office was the 25th of Febuary but I got to Japan about two weeks in advance. I think I'll arrange some sort of party, celebration, or something. Japan is a pretty good place for a fancy night out...

Microsoft finally made this a part of Exchange

2009-01-28T22:04:00.000+09:00

Exchange 2007 finally has the ability to add a custom footer or a disclaimer on all outgoing e-mails as a native part of Exchange. No more fumbling around with odd VBScripts, registry hacks, and third party tools. The Daniel Petri site at http://www.petri.co.il/transport-rules-adding-a-disclaimer.htm has a good explanation. I like the warnings at the bottom about that are basically "this will affect everyone, test it first"...

Winter hasn't been too bad

2009-01-27T18:44:00.000+09:00

We're on the "backside" of our first full winter in Tokyo and it hasn't been too bad. Tokyo is warmer than Seattle, overall, but you spend far more time outside in the cold so it feels much colder. The majority of December and January have had a high of roughly 10 degrees Celcius so in the high 40's or low 50's with low temperature dipping into the 3o's. We probably had less than six days of below-freezing low temperatures. But, since I actually walk 15 minutes in the morning to the train station vs. starting the car in the garage and driving to work, Tokyo seems cold.

We didn't get any snow in Tokyo itself and only had a handful of rainy days - probably the biggest difference between Tokyo and Seattle. The vast majority of the winter is sunny. Last week, we had four days of gray and drizzly weather and we had a couple of scattered rainy days but it seemed always sunny.

Still alive...

2009-01-21T19:11:00.000+09:00

I'm slipping on my new year's resolution to post more often. Things have gotten a little busy at work so I suppose I have an excuse, even if it is a lame excuse. I've been working on a whole bunch of training material for SharePoint and WebEx and I've started using the Camtasia Studio software to put together Flash demo clips. My company bought Version 5 in a bulk license deal of soome sort. There apears to be a newer version available but we haven't purchased that.

It has been a long time since I had to do a lot of video work but Camtasia is a lot better than any of the tools I used previously. You can drop in clips and different resolutions, glue them together, do a voice over, and then spit out the video in whatever format and size you want. For Flash video, you can have it create the clickable chapter headings on the left, build the web page, and output it straight to FTP if you want.

There might be better tools - and Camtasia is kind of expensive - but this makes it easy...

Happy New Year!

2009-01-07T21:12:00.000+09:00

明けましておめでとうございます。今年もよろしくお願い致します。

It’s been a while since I uploaded any new posts – almost two months. I will try to do a little better than that in the next couple of months.

New Years was relatively tame for us – no big trips or vacations. Chiho’s brother came up to visit us and Chiho’s parents and we sat around and ate a lot of food. Also, we watched a lot of television. The Japanese TV studios show a lot of once-a-year specials right before and right after New Years and they can be a lot of fun. Our cable service comes with a DVR so we can skip all the extra commercials they throw in there too...

Heading back to Japan

2008-11-21T04:25:00.000+09:00

I'm sitting at Vancouver airport in the Air Canada business class lounge waiting for my flight back to Tokyo. I really lucked out on weather this week, dry and mostly sunny the whole time. It's raining at a solid, seady downpour at the moment but I really don't have to care about that since I'm inside.

Noon must be a popular departure time for Air Canada because the lounge is packed. I know this isn't all for my plane since buisness class isn't that big. Since I wasn't sure about the traffic and the boarder, I got here quite early. It gave me a chance to catch up on work related stuff.

It was a fun break and I had a chance to meet everyone. Not sure when my next trip is but hopefully not too long from now.

PowerShell profiles

2008-11-16T03:52:00.000+09:00

Powershell has one oddity that is both useful but somewhat wierd. when you first launch PowerShell, it looks for "profile scripts" and if they are found, they are launched automatically. That's useful, but the location and filename of this setup script is hard-coded and fixed. The script located at [All Users]\[All Users Documents]\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_Profile.PS1 and [Current User]\[My Documents]\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_Profile.PS1 are run. This allows you to pre-load and preconfigure a variety of stuff, which is nice. Why they are in a hard coded place under My Documents with such a long name, I don't know.

As a side note, PowerShell will only run digitally signed scripts so you might need change that setting to create scripts of your own. You should probably just make an internal CA for signing scripts, though.

Another interesting thing is the transcript function. The transcript will record to text file all of the contents of the shell window. Whatever you type and whatever is reported to the screen will be recorded. I think that is very useful, so I've come up with a profile script that will start the transcript automatically. Of course, that's a lot of text files, so I have the script clean that up for me, too.

Here is my script, colored and highlighted by PowerGUI (an open source PowerShell tool). I may have to experiment with the formatting to get it work correctly in the blog screen.

[string]$TimeStamp= get-date -uformat "%Y-%m-%d at %H%M%S"
$MaxAge = New-TimeSpan -days 7
$LaunchTime = Get-Date
$MyDocsPath = Get-ItemProperty "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders"
$TranscriptFolder = $MyDocsPath.Personal + "\WindowsPowerShell"
[string]$TranscriptPath = $MyDocsPath.Personal + "\WindowsPowerShell\" + $TimeStamp + " Transcript.txt"
[string]$LaunchPath = $MyDocsPath.Personal + "\Script Experiments"
start-transcript $TranscriptPath
get-childitem -Path $TranscriptFolder -Filter *.txt | where { ($LaunchTime - $_.CreationTime ) -gt $MaxAge } | Remove-Item
cd $LaunchPath

The $TimeStamp variable is a date time formatted YYYYMMDD at HHDDSS so that the transcript that gets created has a unique, useful name.

The $MaxAge is how long I want to keep the transcripts. Date comparisions in PowerShell work completely differently than VBScript so you have to create a new date-time object for comparisons. It took a lot of experiments to get that working the way I wanted it to.

I read the location of My Documents from registry. I picked the registry so that I can be sure to grab the path of a relocated My Documents folder. I haven't tested this with a network-relocated My Documents folder, yet. One thing about reading the registry from PowerShell, you grab the key (the folder), then you retrive each value as a property. So, you'll notice that I grab the "Shell Folders" as $MyDocsPath and then get the value for the entry "Personal" by requesting the $MyDocsPath.Personal value. That is definately different than VBScript.

The $LaunchPath variable is just where I happen to keep my scripts, you would need to change this or delete this to match your preferences.

The script than purges any *Transcript.txt files that are older than the max age variable, starts the transcript for the current session, and changes the current directory to what I put into the $LaunchPath variable.

Let me know what you think...

Back in Seattle...

2008-11-16T03:00:00.000+09:00

...well, Anacortes at least.

Flew in from Las Vegas to Vancouver BC and then rented a car to drive down to Washington. Amazingly, there was only one car in front of me in line at the border. For all intents and purposes, I only waited one minute (maybe two) for a border crossing on a Friday. That's never happened before.

Airport wireless

2008-11-15T03:00:00.000+09:00

I'm sitting in Las Vegas airport and they offer free wireless throughout the terminal. The Vancouver BC airport offers free wireless, too, and it got me thinking - why do so many airports only have as a paid service? With DSL costs and equipment costs dropping all of the time, I have a hard time understanding why an airport can't provide it. If you were to take one of the satelite terminals at Sea-Tac as an example, I think you could cover that with two Cisco 1200 series access points with high gain antennas. Add a NetScreen or WatchGuard firewall and a DSL line, you could support 200+ users. Upfront costs would be about $3,000 (probably less), monthly costs for the connection would run less than a $100 per month, and warrantee support would cost less than $300 per year.

Isn't that a small investment for traveler convenience?

ILM from Microsft

2008-11-14T04:45:00.000+09:00

I attended a session on Identity Lifecycle Management(ILM) for SharePoint and we walked through the process of configuring ILM and it is a pretty complicated system. Unfortunately, this is a mission critical service for my current company that controls everything about Active Directory. I wonder if I should be trying to learn that system or if I should stick with Exchange and SharePoint...

Cirque du Soliel show

2008-11-13T01:21:00.000+09:00

Last night, I went to the Cirque du Soliel show at the MGM Grand called KA. It was really a good show but I was surprised at how short it was, however. I have been to several traveling shows and they were all two act, two-hour plus shows whereas KA was only 90 minutes long. It was still a $90 ticket, though.

Still, the show was worth the ticket price.

Presentation on how Microsoft deployed Exchange 2007

2008-11-13T01:10:00.001+09:00

Harold Wong presented a seminar on how Microsoft deployed Exchange 2007 internally and it was an interesting presentation. They have 150,000 users worldwide so the scale is quite large but they took the time to do some price/performance/benefit experiments that produced some surprising conclusions. The ones that seemed unusual to me are:

Exchange 2007 mailbox servers are typically 2 CPU / dual core servers, 24 gigs of RAM, and large Direct Attached SCSI arrays with 2.5 inch SFF, 10,000 RPM, 146 gigabyte disks.
They are not Window clustered servers. Each server is part of an Exchange 2007 CCR cluster but the server itself is not a “classic” cluster.
There is no SAN and no shared storage.
With 10 terabytes of raw disk space, they have one server support between 4,000 and 6,500 users with 1gig and 2 gig mailbox limits
Site to site replication via an SCR cluster is only partially implemented.
They have chosen not to split CCRs across a WAN because of the way CAS servers and hub servers load balance. Both parts of the CCR need sit on the same subnet and AD site and their associated hub servers need to do the same. Since the CAS servers load balance automatically, roughly half of your clients will always be crossing the WAN to get from the CAS server to the mailbox server.
Tests with 5400 RPM SATA arrays showed that Exchange could easily run on very slow hardware. They felt that they still kept the 10,000 rpm SCSI because of they could support a higher number of users at their preferred minimum response time for lower cost per user with the SCSI compared to the SATA. However, for environments with less than a thousand mailboxes, SATA would be perfectly acceptable for most organizations. These tests were run several years ago so newer SATA drives are probably even better values now.

I also attended a session on deploying large mailboxes in an economical way. This presentation referenced a lot of statistics produced by Microsoft and Dell about costs and impacts. Based on that data, the cost per user for 2 gigabyte mailboxes was only 25% higher than the cost per mailbox at 250 megabytes. The Microsoft design team is currently testing with 10 gigabyte mailbox limits to see what the impacts are to operations. They brought up some interesting points about large mailboxes that I hadn’t thought of:

If you give them a large mailbox, there is no archive, everything is live. If everything is “live”, then everything is reachable from every access medium (OWA, Outlook, OMA, etc.)
Server side data is backed up, local data is not
Server side data is discoverable in a lawsuit, local data is not
Server side data is access protected, local data is not.

I think I will propose a 10 gigabyte structure for my current company just to see what the cost impacts really are.

First impression of conference

2008-11-13T01:09:00.001+09:00

The Devconnections conference seems to be really well organized. It is also quite a bit larger than I thought it would be. I took one of the preconference sessions for PowerShell scripting. It was actually a two full-day classes with a lot of hands on labs. I use VBScript for a lot of administrative tasks but all of my experience is self taught – I really didn’t want to redo all of that plain for PowerShell. The instructor was Don Jones, a Microsoft MVP and author of several books, and he was a really good teacher.

The class used a Windows 2008 Active Directory domain controller in a virtual machine for the PowerShell lessons. One oddity with the current version of PowerShell is that there are no commandlets from Microsoft for manipulating Active Directory. However, Quest Software has developed a set that they distribute for free that are pretty good. They were also smart enough to use names at are unlikely to conflict with the versions that Microsoft are bound to release eventually.

One of the best things that I learned about PowerShell is that you can call any existing command line command, program, or other executable from inside PowerShell. You can use PowerShell to grab a whole bunch of information, shove that into PowerShell variables, and then pass those variables as arguments to other programs. That should make it a lot more flexible then I originally thought.

PowerShell is almost too flexible, however. Since you can do almost anything, you have a hard time getting it to do what you actually want it to do.

Heading to Las Vegas

2008-11-05T16:24:00.001+09:00

I will be heading out to Las Vegas for the www.Devconnections.com seminars on Friday, November 7th, at about 5pm (Tokyo time). The conference lasts for a full week since I added a two-day course in Power Shell scripting. Since Microsoft intends that to replace VBScript for day to day administration work, I figured I had better learn more about it. I learned about VBScript through simple experimentation - that was painful, so I wanted to get some class time for the replacement. If I learn anything good, I'll try to post it here or my www.SBWorks.com site.

I will be in Seattle from November 14th through the 20th and I hope to have lunch or dinner with as many people as possible. Let me know if want to meet.

SharePoint training next week

2008-10-28T19:13:00.000+09:00

My company HQ recently contracted with Microsoft to run a three day training course for a bunch of people on SharePoint. We're actually flying people in from India, China, and Korea for this. I haven't seen the full training syllabus, yet, so I hope this is worth it. They recently ran it in the US, though, and I heard from a few people that is was pretty good. If I learn any new tricks, I'll add them to my site.

Speaking of techno tricks, I've redesigned my www.sbworks.com site to list my posts in rough categories. It's a bit sparse right now but I'm going to try and add more things there, including script samples. Keep an eye on in the future as I'll try to add more.

Halloween

2008-10-27T19:05:00.000+09:00

Halloween is slowly, slowly trickling into Japan. It looks like some of the schools and stores in Makuhari decided to have a tick or treat time over the weekend. At the office, we're doing a "geeks night out" at a restaurant in Odaiba.

Found a couple of interesting blogs

2008-10-27T18:51:00.000+09:00

I'm sure everyone has thier own favorites but I think I found a couple of good IT related blogs that I've been reading. They seem to post pretty slow (almost as slow as me):

Bruce F. Webster - Seems to be a real long-term IT programmer and project manager and his posts seem to be pretty good for big picture management stuff. His posts on Baseline are pretty decent, even if you have wade through a bunch of ads to see the content.

Ken Sharpe - Another big-picture writer, mainly about the politics of IT management but still a good read.

Finally found a useful SharePoint book

2008-10-21T18:26:00.000+09:00

I've been buying a lot of books lately looking for good, solid advice on how to manage SharePoint and I've found a lot of fluff. There are a lot of books that talk about install and configure details, a good dozen books that talk about possible big-picture scenarios, but I hadn't found a single book giving advice about to really use SharePoint in a company. A book of what works and what doesn't not what you "could" do or "might" do.

I found one that is relatively small, well written, and packed with useful information: Real World SharePoint 2007: Indispensable Experiences From 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback). ISBN-10: 0470168358, ISBN-13: 978-0470168356.

The title says "programmer to programmer" but could really be labeled "techie to techie" because it does a good job of distilling information about the decisions you need to make and presenting them in a clear fashion. The chapter on branding a SharePoint site is a perfect example of this. It walks through the four or five options and tells you how much effort it takes for each option and what situations make sense to use each option. As a consultant or project manager, this will give you the information you need to really start planning and testing.

SharePoint - the Second Commandment

2008-10-15T18:16:00.000+09:00

II. Thou shalt learn the Publishing Feature

The Publishing Feature in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the best part of the whole damn package. Publishing is a the system that allows you create web pages on the fly instead of using SharePoint as a web based file system. If you combine it with Dynamic Content Web Parts, you can create site that shows links, a nice roll up icon, with a nice look and feel.

If you deploy a site collection with the Enterprise Publishing Portal template, you get all kinds of useful workflows, document libraries, and tools that really quite useful. You can still use document libraries and things to your hearts content but if you turn on publishing first, you will make your life a lot easier.

Oops - 2+ weeks

2008-10-15T17:50:00.000+09:00

So much for trying to keeping things up to date. I could claim that I was busy (which I was) but I should have taken the time anyway. I've finalized my trip to Las Vegas for the Devconnections training seminar. I will be leaving Japan on November 7th, I will be in Las Vegas through the morning of November 14th, and then be in Seattle from November 14th through the 20th. My connecting flight is Narita - Vancouver BC - Las Vegas so I am just adding a layover in BC and driving down to Seattle.

As a side note, I finally got around to recreating my SBWorks website. I'll try to build that up some more, too.

SharePoint - the First Commandment

2008-09-27T16:00:00.000+09:00

I - Thou shalt use SSL for all SharePoint sites

Like a I said a couple of posts ago, I've been spending a lot of time with SharePoint lately. One of the things that I have decided is important is that all SharePoint sites should start out at the very beginning with SSL encryption. SharePoint suffers from a couple of irritations and one of the big ones is that sites don't want to be renamed much. There are too many things that default to hard coded links so you need to pick the right URL to use from the start. And, since you are logging on with your network credentials, why pass them in plain text? At least make a malicious user work for it.

So, what is the best way to set this up? When you run the MOSS 2007 installer, you are really just installing the basic SharePoint infrastructure and you are not installing a specific site. Once you install the software, it sets up the Central Administration website (and no other site) and from there you configure things like e-mail settings, search settings, and so on. After all of that is done, you then create a Web Application that will actually host the site. The terminology in v3.0 and MOSS 2007 is different than previous versions but a web application was referred to as virtual server in previos versions. You create a new web application and the options are there to use SSL for and port 443.

You can create this web application before you install a certificate. Once IIS is restarted, you can go to the IIS console, select the new SharePoint website, and walk through the SSL certification steps to get the certificate installed.

There will be no site to see on the Web Application until after you create a Site Collection on the new web application. You can't test your site, certificate, or anything like that until after you create the site collection.

For once, the MOSS 2007 / SharePoint installer does not overwrite the Default Website so after you create a new web application, it will sit next to the Default Website instead of overwriting it. This will be really, really useful. From the IIS console, open the default website. Go to the Home Directory tab. Change the radio button to redirect traffic and enter in the full URL of the SSL site you created. If you do that, IIS will redirect all traffic from the default, port 80, non SSL site to the new SSL site you created so that when people forget to put in HTTPS, they still go to the right place.

which are the one thing that an attacker really wants, you should make them work for it.

For anyone who's lived in Japan...

2008-09-27T15:48:00.000+09:00

You have to see this site: http://www.engrish.com. It's a collection of odd signs, t-shirts, and more that have odd, not quite right, English slogans written on them. Normally by a marketing person and probably by someone without a lot of language skill.

DevConnection conference in November

2008-09-26T18:52:00.000+09:00

It look slike I'm going to be able to attend a Microsoft-centric seminar/trade show in Vegas in November. The DevConnection company is hosting a triple-combo seminar on Windows 2008, Exchange 2007, and SharePoint. When you register for one conference, you can attend sessions in any of the other conferences freely - kind of a mix and match thing. I'm going to try and tack on some vacation at the end of it, too, but not that many. I want to horde my vacation days a bit since I haven't racked up that many, yet.

I don't know the company much but there are reviews of past events floating around on the Internet that sound pretty positive. I'll try to blog about it while I'm there.

WebEx and SharePoint

2008-09-24T21:48:00.000+09:00

WebEx offers corporations a free Active Directory plug in that uses Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) to allow your active directory to talk to WebEx. When you look at the WebEx site, it looks pretty easy. Install the SharePoint system, add some web parts, configure ADAM, run the batch import, and all of your users are ready to go with WebEx accounts.

This is totally, completely, and utterly FALSE. The WebEx integration tools are UTTER CRAP.

The ADAM component will not read any user account that is not the in default "user" container. So, if you use any intelligent Active Directory design, then the WebEx components will not import users.

The ADAM component and built in batch import have different restrictions than the WebEx site. There are different user name requirements, password requirements, and e-mail address requirements are different from the WebEx site.

If WebEx tries to sell you this as solution, tell them to take a hike.

MOSS 2007 - You REALLY want the Enterprise version

2008-09-19T07:38:00.001+09:00

Like I mentioned before, I've started a project that is pretty SharePoint heavy. Since we have a very flexible license with Microsoft, I could pretty much run whatever version I thought was best, a luxury that a smaller company doesn't have. However, if you are a Microsoft partner, you do have access to both version of MOSS as part of your partner benefit.

There is no reason to purchase and install the standard version, in my opinion. The additional search features, site publishing features, InfoPath support, Business Intelligence (BI) web parts, and default site types in the Enterprise version are extremely useful. If you have access to both, pick the Enterprise version.

I would strongly recommend that you look long and hard at the Publishing feature that is included with MOSS 2007. Rather than using the SharePoint site as a web-enabled file share, the publishing features lets you create documents as webpages directly. Since web pages are smaller, load quicker, and can be displayed on a wide variety of devices (cell phones, Macs, etc.) without special plug ins, it really simplifies the long-term life of the documents you are creating.

And, you get a multi-lingual option called Variations that can be quite useful... and amazingly irritating at the same time...

Temperature is improving

2008-09-19T07:38:00.000+09:00

Tokyo is starting to move into fall and is finally starting to cool down. Unlike back in July, the temperature has moved below 30 C and is sitting at around 27C (77-78 F). The humidity is still up a bit (especially compared to Seattle) but it is pretty livable. Right now, there a typhoon sitting to the southeast that sending a fair amout of rain our way. It might be the source of the humidity, too.

So, other than the occasional rain, late September and early October seems to be the best time to come to Tokyo.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - the saga begins

2008-09-17T19:06:00.001+09:00

I've started working on project that is in a lot more of a rush the previous project. It's actually a worldwide deployment of WebEx to a 7500 person company but the real fun is the WebEx portions that tie into SharePoint. I've had to set up the SharePoint server in a very specific way to get the WebEx web parts to work correctly and I've actually learned a lot about MOSS 2007 in the process. As time permits I'm going to post as much as I can about it. Especially since the included Microsoft documentation stops at the initial point and skips so much stuff...

Cirque du Soleil in Tokyo - ZED

2008-09-16T13:41:00.000+09:00

On Monday, we went to see the new Cirque du Soleil show that is being staged at Tokyo Disneyland. The show, called ZED, was absolutely amazing. It is a little expensive, just like every other show, but it is completely worth it. This show is not one of the traveling shows but is permanently housed in a new theater. If you get a chance to go, you do not need to pay extra for the VIP seats. The regular seats in the second section are still excellent seats. I would go for the sections that are not on the absolute outside but one or two sections in from the edge. Any of of the seats there are going to be really good.

Boy, I am behind

2008-09-10T20:16:00.000+09:00

It's been a month and half since I posted an update. I have to be more organized than that. I'll see what I can do over the next couple of days.

The Gaijin Effect

2008-08-09T14:19:00.000+09:00

Now that I've been here for about 6 months, I've confirmed several "Gaijin Effects" - behaviors that I notice that occur around me just because I look like a foriegner. There are many that I've known before:

When I sit on a train in Japan, the seat next to me will almost always stay empty. I hope it's not my B.O.
When I try to speak Japanese, most people will assume I'm talking English. I wrote about that a while back.
Little kids (less than 3) will stare a lot - sort of "wow, he looks different..."

But I noticed a new one recently. When people line up for a train in Japan, it always a two lines side by side because the doors can let two people enter at the same time without bumping. However, when I am the first person to stand in the line, no one actually stands next to me. The double line starts right behind me. I still don:t understand that one...

InfoPath 2007 - odd piece of software

2008-08-09T13:55:00.001+09:00

We just installed Office 2007 Enterprise across the 7,000+ workstations at work and that included InfoPath 2007, Microsoft free-format, ultra-flexible, form based front end for entering structured data into a database. I've only just started messing around with the software (creating a daily checklist form) and I'm a bit confused, really. It kind of reminds me of Excel - it can do anything but trying to figure out how to do the one thing you really want is damn near impossible.

I find myself dipping into the help menus constantly for almost everything I'm doing. For example, let's say you create a table, setup a couple fields and radio buttons, and get all of the formatting the way you want it.

Now, you wan to duplicate a couple of the rows and make it 5 or 6 row table instead of three you just copy and paste. Since the fields are bound to a data source, the new rows are all tied to the original fields.

So, after you publish the form, when you type something in to the fourth row, that same information is then displayed in four differently fields. The process to associate these new fields with new data fields is by right-clicking, selected "Change Binding". each process of assigning a new field is about a 9-click process and it has to be repeated for every field. In this simple table, I actually have 5 fields per line - each radio button has to be modified individually. This three-row copy and past is going to be a 135 click process to create new fields that look like the fields I already created. Since there is no "format paint" button, I can't use the insert field tools to simplify the process.

There might be a faster way to do this but I can't find it in the InfoPath documentation. That's why it reminds me of Excel. It feels like a software that requires you take a class or read a big thing text book to understand it.

Summer vacation

2008-08-09T13:14:00.000+09:00

We have an office holiday coming up next week which is our company's scheduled Obon holiday. Unlike most national holidays, obon occurs "sometime in August" rather than on a specific day and each company picks its own window for time off. For us, it is Wednesday through Friday of next week. A lot of people are taking the full week off but I decided I'd stockpile my vacation instead so I'll be at work.

There are a variety of local holidays, festivals, and fireworks shows that are scattered throughout August because of variability of obon. You can actually plan on attending one almost every weekend in August if you wanted to. A lot of people use the August festivals as a good excuse to dress in traditional yukata. In the past, I remember only women wearing the traditional dress for summer festivals but this year, I've noticed a lot of 20-something and 30-something guys wearing traditional clothes, too. I guess the fashion cycle has come back around. It looks like colors and fabrics are bit different than the true traditional patterns, though. The ones in the stores are a bit more colorful or a bit more creative.

Chiho has a couple of yukata in the closet but she's not 100% sure that she knows how to wear one correctly. The couple of times she's worn them, she's had help putting it on and tying the obi. Overall, the yukata is relatively simple but you need to tie it correctly so that the yukata doesn't come loose or bunch funny as you walk around. Maybe I should talk her in to giving it a try this year and see if she can figure it out.

Of course, going outside in August in Japan is kind of difficult - it's so damn hot...

Build vs. Buy

2008-08-08T18:01:00.000+09:00

Since my current company is a software development company, we seem to have one big problem: they always want to build a custom system instead of buying something off of the shelf. That is one additional difference in my current position compared to all of my clients back in Seattle. Most of them would be completely uninterested in building something - they probably wouldn't even know where to start.

"So what?" you might say. After all, the same people who create such nice, incredibly expensive, and incredibly popular software should be able to make internal tools that work well. Seems logical, but that does not reflect reality. After all, an internal tool is "overhead" so the large teams of people and careful QA testing are not available. Instead, you get this mess of home-brewed parts that no one really understands and can't update well. Our IT ticketing system runs this way, unfortunately, and has been offline 5 or six times in July and August. Since it is only maintained at the HQ, we have to wait for their business hours to get it fixed. And, if the one or two people that understand the system is on vacation....

From my current standpoint, the build vs. buy call goes like this:

Payroll and Accounting Systems: Buy. Too many really good solutions available and making your own offers no advantage
HR systems: Buy. You'll have to do a lot of customization with a large company but start with a real package
Document Management: Buy.
CRM/ERM: 1/2 and 1/2. there is so much customization that you're really doing both
IT Management: Buy. Save yourself some pain and suffering

I think you should only build systems that actually give you competitive advantage. If you know that a SQL driven, distributed CRM system with offline synchronization will give you an advantage, then build one. If your 99.999% uptime is your main sales point, build a custom monitoring solution. Otherwise, buy it - you are buying someone else's QA, testing, and customer feedback experience instead of slogging through all the details yourself.

VMWare is the way to go

2008-08-07T18:57:00.000+09:00

At my current company, about 80% of the servers are virtualized into VMWare's ESX system which has a ton of flexibility. We have Dell 2850s and 2950s with fiber channel cards connected to SAN and they live as clusters in the VSX infrastructure. As long as the SAN storage is visible to each server that makes up the cluster, virtual servers can be moved around at will. The management software can do it automatically or you can do it manually. That means if you have a hardware problem on one machine in the cluster, you can move all of the virtual servers to the other hosts, take the host off line, fix it, and bring it back up without any of the servers going down.

The ESX system does need at least one physical server to act as the control and management server and you need an available SQL server. After that, you can add and cluster hardware to hearts content. We have a pricey EMC SAN but you can get the same cluster support with iSCSI devices. As long as each host can see the shared storage, you're good.

There are a couple of servers types that just don't virualize well. Maybe I'm not spending enough effort to find out how to do this, but I would recommend against virtualizing:

Active Directory domain controllers
SQL servers
Firewall / Routing devices (ISA or m0n0wall)
Any server product that needs IPSEC support
Servers that need really, really fast hard drive I/O

Almost all other servers are easy to virtualize. This way, you can actually have one dedicated web server per application, too.

Cost is a bit of a problem, I suppose. The VMWare pricing is fairly cheap compared to the feature set but the costs of the Windows licensing is not included. You have to do a lot of research and digging to make sure you are really buying what you need.

Ichikawa Citizens’ Fireworks Display

2008-08-04T16:39:00.000+09:00

Over the weekend, we went to see the fireworks near Ichikawa (市川) station. It was about an hour or so from our condo by train and it was really, really, good. I found a clip on YouTube from the 2007 display http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=_RoQOU0ksqk that is pretty similar to what we saw over the weekend. The show was about an hour long and launched thousands of fireworks. I have no idea how much it would cost.

The fireworks are shot from a park that is along a river so you can watch it from either side. The river has pretty tall flood-control levees so you get pretty good seats from a lot of places. We didn't plan our trip out there quite so well and really didn't bring enough snacks and drinks for the couple of hours we waited for the show. We also forgot our camera... We'll just have to plan better next time.

They announced that the crowd was about 500,000 right at the start of the show. If that was accurate, then it was actually quite a bit smaller than previous years. Most of the websites said that crowds topped 1 million.

Found a good one

2008-08-01T17:07:00.001+09:00

This blog: http://lovelylisting.blogspot.com/ posts "less than ideal" pictures from real estate listings. Some of the past history is pretty hilarious.

More Japanese Convenience

2008-07-27T11:48:00.000+09:00

A couple of weeks back, I had posted about how things in Japan are designed at a better level for people. I found another good example in the plain, humble, everyday egg. When you buy a dozen eggs in America, the date of expiration is printed on the box. However, if you use the handy egg-basket tray that comes with the fridge, you probably through the box away, right? So, how do you know when the egg is past it's due date.

Most of the farms in Japan have come up with a simple solution: they print the expiration date right on the bottom of the egg. I am not really sure how they do this and the font looks like a dot matix style ink jet of some sort. Clever, isn't it?

Project management in IT companies

2008-07-23T21:12:00.000+09:00

I've moved from a consulting company targeting smaller companies to a fairly large global company and it's interesting to watch the differences in IT management. There are a lot of similarities, too.

On the differences:

Budget: Most of my clients in Seattle had to be convinced, cajoled, or outright pushed to by high quality hardware. In my current company, they are so paranoid about downtime that they through money at redudant hardware that they really, really don't need.
Schedule: Right now, I was working on an "accelerated" project - I only had three months to plan and deploy it. I don't think I had three months to plan anything with my Seattle clients.
Turf: There arent't enough people in a small company to really generate big turf wars whereas larger companies can't seem to function without them. There were definately some "I built it, you can't touch it" moments with my Seattle clients but the amount of time spent manging that was quite small compared to now.

Similarities:

Dithering: When it comes to tech related issues, there are always "what if" dicussions - "what if we build a custom app instead of buying it?", "what if we outsource it", "what if they have a new version?", "what if we using an open source product?", and so on. The amount of time that it takes to explore options, discuss things with leadership, and get approvals for things seem to take the same amount time. Even though my current company is 700 times bigger than my largest Seattle client, they don't actually move noticably slower. I'm actually kind of suprised by that.
Managing change: It seems that both small and large companies don't do a good job of actually preparing thier employees for major changes. Very few of my clients would send employees to training before pushing a new software (Office, timesheet tracking, or whatever was being deployed). I tried very hard to push for end-user training in my Groove project but it was delegated to local offices instead of being pushed from HQ. And that has devolved to "go read this website" rather than any structured training. And now, I am not surprised that most of the questions I get are "what is this thing and what can I do with it".
ROI: Both my Seattle clients and current company seems to suffer from an odd approach to new technologies. They seem to start with some big plan that will have some big benefit (new communciation tool, smoother operations, time savings). Then, about half way through the planning process, the technical details take center stage. Whenever there is a hiccup, the project shifts towards ease-of-implementation rather than maxium-user-benefit. It seems that the big picture goal gets forgotten slightly - it's subtle but very noticable.

It's only been a short time, though, so I'll keep an eye on other interesting things as it develops.

Yup, it's hot

2008-07-23T20:42:00.000+09:00

89-degree F and 79% humidity today and likely to stay that way all week: http://www.intellicast.com/local/weather.aspx?location=JAXX0085

Ouch...

It's pretty dang hot

2008-07-22T14:57:00.000+09:00

We've had four or five days of over 30-degrees (Celisius) weather here in Tokyo. That means at or above 90-degrees Fahrenheit. Humidity is up in the tropical levels (~80%), too. Chiho and I haven't quite gotten used to that.

It's likely to get hotter over the next week or two. Kyoto and other cities south of Tokyo have been at 36 or 37 C (96-99 F) and the warmth is moving north. Oh well...... at least we have air conditioning.

Adding sites to Trusted or Internet zones

2008-07-22T14:31:00.000+09:00

You can add sites to the Internet zones in Internet explorer by manipulating the registry directly. I normally do this via VBScript but that is starting to become an unsupported technology so I suppose I will have to learn to use PowerShell or something. The documentation for this is a bit scattered in the MS documentation, so here's a quick explanation:

The path in the registry related to the URL. The pattern is 2ndlevel.TLD\4thLevel.3rdLevel.

http://share.domain.com/ = HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains\domain.com\share
http://audit.workspace.domain.com/ = HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains\domain.com\audit.workspace

You can also switch it to LOCAL_MACHINE instead of CURRENT_USER if you want to make this setting apply to Local Service and machine controlled access systems.

At each location, you then create DWORD values. The name of the DWORD is the protocol and then the value of the DWORD is set to match the zone you want to use. I find that I use these protocols the most:

http
https
ftp
file

The values are:

1 = Intranet Zone
2 = Trusted Zone
4 = Prohibited

If you enter 3, I don't think is does anything.

Minor note on Junction

2008-07-22T14:21:00.000+09:00

I recently deployed a big VBScript that used the Junction software from Microsoft that I wrote about earlier. When you use Junction the first time, you get a EULA pop up. Since that would be very, very annoying as a logon script, I found a way around it.

The only thing that the EULA pop up does is set a particular registry key. If you set that key in advance, you won't get the pop up at all. The registry key is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Sysinternals\Junction
DWORD: EulaAccepted
Value: 1

Once that is set, via VBScript, a REG file, or whatever, the user won't get a pop up.

List recovery model of all databases

2008-07-09T20:57:00.000+09:00

I put together a quick SQL query this morning that can be run against an SQL database to retrieve the list of database names and thier recovery models. I only tested against an Microsoft SQL 2005 server but it should work against any SQL server.

The blog will wrap the text incorrectly, of course. when you copy and paste, the commands should work correctly.

USE master
GO

-- Declare a variable to store the value [database name] returned by FETCH.
DECLARE @dbname sysname, @mode varchar(1000)

-- Declare a cursor to iterate through the list of databases
DECLARE db_recovery_cursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT name from sysdatabases

-- Open the cursor
OPEN db_recovery_cursor

-- Perform the first fetch and store the value in a variable.
FETCH NEXT FROM db_recovery_cursor INTO @dbname

-- loop through cursor until no more records fetched
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0

BEGIN
Set @mode = CONVERT (varchar, DATABASEPROPERTYEX(@dbname,'RECOVERY') )
PRINT 'Database Name: ' + @dbname + ' Recovery Model: ' + @mode

FETCH NEXT FROM db_recovery_cursor INTO @dbname
END

-- close the cursor and deallocate memory used by cursor
CLOSE db_recovery_cursor
DEALLOCATE db_recovery_cursor

Mimi

2008-07-06T07:19:00.000+09:00

A little bit of bad news from Japan today, Mimi, our lop-eared rabbit, passed away last night. Mimi had started to not eat and drink much in the last couple of days ad we had brought him to the vet to make sure it wasn’t an infection, abscessed tooth, or something that could be fixed. He seemed to have good energy and was cheerful all the time. According to the vet, it looks like it was just age. While she was packing, Chiho found the receipt from Jones & Co. pets and it showed that we bought Mimi in the summer of 1997 so that made him about 11 years old. That was really, really old for a typical rabbit so we just have to console ourselves that he lived a long life. We’re still going to miss him, though.

Groove Project going well

2008-07-01T19:07:00.000+09:00

The Groove project that I've been working on is going well but it is really sucking up a lot of time and energy. The software itself it only medium complicated and the infrastructure was all rolled out weeks ago. I've been writing up documentation, an absolute ton of documentation, really. I've been writing deployment plans, backup and recovery plans, data retention plans, security policies, installation instructions, help manuals, FAQs, and more. I feel like I'm writing a damn novel or something. I've gotten some assistance in writing up this stuff but only one person seems to be actually completing things on a schedule. I try to coordinate and delegate but I'm not really thier boss so I don't have much control over thier work.

Honestly, the only really silly part of the whole software is how it forces the local workstation to put everything on the C:\ drive. I wrote about this before and I found a manual fix for it, but now I'm trying to come up with an automated solution for a 7,000+ desktop roll out. Really, what other software published in 2007/2008 requires you you create a VBScript hack to change where the data is stored? At a minimum, couldn't they have made it a sub-folder under My Documents so that if you already pointed My Documents somewhere with more room, Groove would just go with that?

Microsoft support is kind of clueless on Groove

2008-06-26T17:57:00.000+09:00

During the run up to this big Groove project, I've had to open two different Microsoft support cases. Since we are a big Microsoft shop with a global contract, we have fairly easy access to high-level technical support.

Even though I'm dealing with developers right out of Microsoft HQ on these issues, people who really should know the software, the actually fix came from a Paris-based consultant that my boss found. These guys were able to get better answers and get back to us faster than Microsoft critical product support. It was kind of annoying that the peole who make the software couldn't troubleshoot the software correctly.

Of course, they did buy the software rather than build it in house but they bought it almost three years ago. Shouldn't they have learned it by now?

E-mail is really up, this time

2008-06-26T17:51:00.000+09:00

I finally got my e-mail situation finalized and I have e-mail to my @SBWorks.com accounts up and running again. I have the @thedamps.com e-mails available, too, for those interested. I'm using e-mail hosting through Fat Cow and they are pretty cheap and simple. I haven't set up a website just yet. I have configured the website to redirect to this blog for a while. Maybe I'll use it for something else, soon.

Not entirely in love with Groove 2007

2008-06-18T15:51:00.000+09:00

I've been working on this Groove Server 2007 project and work and there are alot of things I like but I'm not sure it is worth the hassle. The server side for large companies seems a little complicated but it isn't that bad, it's just that the client side software isn't that really that good.

Groove lets you keep things in sync no matter where you are or how you're connected to the internet. The synchronization works transparently across firewalls exactly as advertised. Considering how technically complicated that can be, that is a pretty slick software. But there are some usability things that are odd:

If you want to use the most secure method to share files, you need to drag and drop them into the workspace. There's no right-click >> send to workspace option and your workspaces don't show up in any file save dialog box.
Files that are in the workspace are not accessible from any "open file" dialog box. You have to access the file by double clicking it from the workspace.
You can link to a document in a workspace (hyperlink or OLE embeddd object)
You get a lot of pop ups when saving documents asking for confirmation and overwrite that you don't get from just storing it on the disk.

There were a lot of cool features in Groove 3.5 that offered all kinds of customization opportunities that are missing from the new version. Since this is the first Microsoft version after purchasing the company so I guess they had to cut things out to get things integrated.

Overall, the software is a relatively small niche product. It works well for highly mobile people with high security requirements. They can accept the oddities of the user interface.

SBworks e-mail delayed a bit

2008-06-17T08:23:00.000+09:00

Since my credit card info and contact info are not identical, it looks like my order for hosting services was flagged for additional information. My SBWorks e-mail is still down for the moment. I thought it would be up by now.

Convenience

2008-06-13T17:54:00.000+09:00

There are a lot of different ways to describe Japan but one thing that I have seen lately is the convenience of things. There is a well-engineered, user-oriented outlook to everyday things. Let's take something really boring: ATMs. Here's a picture of one I pulled off of the Internet:

The phone to call the bank and the calculator on the right is kind of useful but I'm pointing out to the place were you put the ATM card into. It's hard to see but there is a small slot underneath the card. That is were the receipt prints out. Why is that useful? The card and the receipt are ejected right next each other and you can pick up both with a single motion.

That level of engineering is hardly of life-shattering importance but that is fairly common throughout Japan. Prepaid train pass cards that you don't even have to take out of your wallet, vending machines that lift the drinks to waist height you don't have to bend down, advanced barcodes that can be scanned by a cell phone camera - all of these things are really nice to use.

I'm not sure why these types of devices are so common in Japan and so rare in the states. Maybe it's an engineering attitude...

SBWorks e-mail should be back up soon

2008-06-13T11:06:00.001+09:00

I signed up with an external hosting service so e-mail should be back up and running in about 12 hours.

Sloppy...

2008-06-12T22:27:00.000+09:00

I screwed up and managed to loose the small wallet that contains my two train passes. I have two different passes, one for the JR line and one for the Yurikamome line and I had them in a separate mini-wallet since you have to pull them out at each train gate. Somehow, I had it when I left the last train station and headed to the office and I didn't have it at the end of the day when I started to head back home. I have no idea how, or where, I managed to loose it. Since I had only bought the three month passes on June 2nd, it was pretty irritating to loose something that costs 81,000 yen (~$800 US).

Chiho called the train station offices and filed the paperwork I needed to cancel and reissue the pass. The JR pass was on the new Suica system and I could get that reissued for 1,000 yen (~$10 US). I had purchased the classic style commuter pass (ていきけん) instead of the new PASMO cards so I couldn't get that reissued. That pass cost 31,800 yen so I'm out over $300 US thanks to me being sloppy.

Painful - I better not do that again.

Been a bit busy

2008-06-12T17:00:00.001+09:00

As you've noticed, I've been a bit behind in updating this blog. I've been buried in this roll out of Groove at work and haven't had much time. My SBWorks server in Seattle died, too, and I haven't even had a chance to move my mail to alternate web host.

I'll try to fix that in the next couple of days...

Lucky 13...

2008-06-04T21:50:00.000+09:00

It is our 13th anniversary today - measuring from the ceremony we had in Tokyo, anyway. Our Seattle anniversary is in July. I'm celebrating by working late on a phone call to the rest of the team in Paris and America. Oh what fun...

By the way, my mail server in Seattle went on the fritz and I hope to have an alternate set up shortly.

Actually, the security check was worse than I thought

2008-05-31T08:48:00.000+09:00

Leaving the Bangalore airport actually had more silliness then I expected. Security checked my ticket, passport, and the stamps that were put on my luggage tags at the top of the jet way. And then, for some weird reason, there was a security guy at the bottom of the ramp that checked my ticket stub.

What possible security risk could occur between the top of the jet way and the bottom? Or is this just a jobs program for security companies?

Microsoft Junction v1.05

2008-05-31T08:43:00.000+09:00

While I was getting Groove training, they mentioned that the Groove client puts all of the files on the C:\ drive by default. What the Hommes et Process guess recommended was an old SysInternals application that Microsoft maintains called Junction. The software allows you create a virtual folder or mount point that points the C:\...\Groove directory to another drive. Since Groove can’t let you change it, you can have the OS point all requests for the default directory into a different location. Windows Vista has this as a native option but you need the additional software for XP.

To use this on Groove, you need to:

Logon to Groove and configure it for the current user
Exit from all Groove applications, including the systems tray icon
Move the %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Groove folder to a different location
Download Junction
Create a virtual folder called Groove at the Office level that points to the new locations
The command will look like this: junction "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Groove" "D:\Groove"
Junction does not currently support UNC paths
Restart Groove

I think this trick would work for other programs that have hard-coded file paths. It is a pity that Groove doesn’t let you move all the data. The Groove workspaces could get pretty big over time.

Flying out of Bangalore

2008-05-31T08:39:00.000+09:00

The trip to Bangalore is wrapped up and I’m sitting at the new airport here. It looks pretty nice but the airport is a long way out from downtown (and that is just the start of the problems). I left at 6pm (pretty much rush hour) and it took just over two hours to get here. Even when I arrived at midnight, it took over an hour to get here. One of the business people who talked at the regional meeting summed it up as “organized enough to build a new airport but not organized to build a good road to the airport”. It seems to be pretty accurate to me. There is a nice, broad highway that goes from the airport to the main highway out of Bangalore but they didn’t make any improvements to the highway for the airport traffic. For a Seattle comparison, it would be the same as if you put a new airport near Carnation and built a nice freeway to Monroe to hook up with Highway 2, don’t bother to do anything to any of the highways that feed Monroe, and assume that the Seattle-bound traffic will be fine.

As hard as it might be to believe, but the security check at the airport is worse than the TSA.

Here’s the flow:

They check your ticket and passport to let you into the building.
At check in, they check your passport.
After you check in, you go through an outgoing immigration where they check your passport and collect an outgoing passenger form. They stamp the passport and the boarding pass
After you leave the immigration, they check it again to make sure both were stamped
At security, they check your boarding pass and passport again
They let people through one at a time and perform an individual search for every person going though the hand pat-down and wand treatment
The security people stamp your boarding pass

So, from door to the gate, you get your passport checked six times. I am sure that they will check my passport at the gate again, too. For extra irony, the security and immigration people are all within easy viewing distance of each other and the flow of traffic is controlled and guided. Even with almost no line, the process took almost 20 minutes. I can’t imagine how it works with a typical rush. Good thing I got here early…

Bangalore is an odd place - reminds me of parts of the Philippines and Malaysia in the dust, unruly traffic, and the odd combination of old and new buildings. Bangalore is high-tech boom town that rivals Silicon Valley for creativity and energy but the living conditions are no different than any other part of India or Southeast Asia. The regional office is in a really nice building that is only a couple of years old but it is immediately adjacent to building that could have been there since ‘50s and haven’t had and repairs since the ‘70s.

I didn’t have much of chance to look around but I did get to sample some good food. For the meals that we had earlier in the week with the large groups, they toned down the spiciness a little but later in the week I talked them into turning up the spice when it was just a couple of us. There was some good stuff to be had. Only one person out of the group of 12 visitors managed to get sick so it looks like the food was fairly trustworthy. They did take us out to some of the fancier restaurants, though, so I can’t say for sure that the food is completely safe. It tasted great, though.

On the ground in Bangalore

2008-05-28T22:11:00.000+09:00

I did finally get to Bangalore (at midnight, local). I've been in the meeting all day so didn't get out and look around but it seems pretty chaotic around the city. Bangalore is definately a boom town - roads always underconstruction, every other building seems to be underconstruction, and everyone seems to be in a hurry.

In Bangkok for a couple hours

2008-05-27T18:12:00.000+09:00

I've landed in Bangkok for a couple hours and I think I've found the real advantage of traveling business class. Sure, the seats are wider and the food is better but I think the real advantage is the business class lounges. Here I am, stuck on the ground with nothing to do for 5 hours and instead of hanging out at a coffee shop or those little uncomfortable chairs at the gate, I can sit on a sofa with a near by juice and snack bar and get free internet.

The Bangkok airport is seriously confusing. It's a sprawling building that really needs an outside archictect or interior desginer to overhaul the signage. I started down a long consourse base on one sign that said "international transfers" and didn't see another sign for 10 minutes or so of walking. I was starting to wonder if I'd gone the wrong way. At least I have plenty of time to get lost.

I'll have even more time in Bangkok on my way back from India. The flight with the best connection (2 hours in Bangkok) is full so I'm on standby. I have a confirmed seat on the next flight but that is 10 hours later. If I get the standby seat, I will land in Tokyo at 4pm Saturday but the other flight gets me there at 6am sunday so the difference is acceptable. I don't get much sightseeing time but that's okay. I'm traveling for a specific business meeting, not for pleasure, after all.

95% Unpacked and Moved-in

2008-05-27T09:53:00.000+09:00

Chiho's been busy unpacking things while I've been out of town and it looks like most of our stuff in unpacked and usable. My office stuff and computer stuff is only partially set up and I think that is all that is left. Chiho found out that the basic internet access service is free (included in the rent, I assume) so we don't actually have to pay a seperate bill for 100Mbs internet access. Sure, the internet is shared amongst the whole building but that is still 60-70 times faster than Comcast's real throughput back in Seattle and they charge about $50 a month for that.

I am going to India after all

2008-05-27T09:51:00.000+09:00

After some last minute heroics by our travel agency, I finally got my visa to India at 5:00pm last night. I'm sitting at the airport now, waiting for my flight to board. I guess it's good news from a business perspective but now I have to go give 8+ hours of training lectures over the next three days. Somehow, I think I'm going to be drinking a lot of coffee...

Visa silliness continues

2008-05-26T12:43:00.000+09:00

Well, my trip to Bangalore is hanging the breeze again. The Indian embassy has outsourced their visa process and it's pretty obvious that they really don't want people to visit the country.

Two weeks ago, I dropped off my application.
The paperwork says to return in a week
One part of the paperwork says to come by in the morning, another says to stop by in the afternoon.
I went to the visa processing office for India this morning
They sent me to the main embassy to drop off my passport
I got to the office to find it closed. (It was about 11:50 so I am hoping it is just closed for lunch)
I called the visa processing center to find out the hours but they only accept phone calls between 3pm and 4pm

So, I am sitting at a Tullys having a coffee and I'll go check on the embassy office at 1pm and see if it is open again. If it isn't open, then I guess I'm not going. I love this kind of back and forth - doesn't everyone? I'm supposed to fly out tomorrow at 11am and we haven't been able to buy my tickets yet. I bet all of this screwing around is going to cost the company a couple thousand in extra airfare at this rate.

Also, I'm supposed to be giving about 8 hours of technical training over the next three days. I guess everyone is going to just sit around and waste time. And DS flew people from all over the world to Bangalore to get this training, too...

I was In Paris this week

2008-05-25T08:07:00.000+09:00

The business trip for Paris finally went through and got scheduled and I am just wrapping up a 5-day training seminar for Groove. Things were pretty busy while I was here so I wasn’t able to update this blog or even really sightsee. The trip was tied tightly to my work week – arriving late on Sunday and leaving Friday afternoon. After this Paris trip, I have to fly to Bangalore for an IT regional summit. I was originally planning of flying straight from Paris to India but there was a delay in getting my visa for India. I have to fly back to Tokyo instead of flying straight to India so I couldn’t stay in Paris like I originally planned. I couldn’t come early, either, because our household goods shipment arrived on the Friday before and I needed to be there for the unpacking. So, I got out to a couple of Paris restaurants but absolutely no other side trips at all.

The Dassault Systemes HQ is located in Suresnes near La Defense and it seems to be a pretty nice area. My jet lag woke me up a little early the first day so I decided to walk around the area a bit before I went to work. The area is full of classic, two story row houses and single homes that are in excellent shape. A lot of them have very nice yards, nice cars parked out front, and other hints that you’re in a very well to do area.

The hotel I’m staying, however, is not so nice. It’s not that bad but it really isn’t that good, either. I’m staying in the Best Western Atrium Hotel Suresnes and it is a reasonably priced business hotel but it seems to have some issues. The biggest drawback as a business hotel is that the wireless internet access doesn’t cover the entire building. You need to go to the atrium area to get a reliable connection. At least they have plenty of couches and tables to work at.
The smaller annoyances are the fact that that it doesn’t have air conditioning, the elevator is amazingly slow, and the rooms are pretty noisy. Since May isn’t that warm, I guess I don’t care about the a/c but Paris can get pretty uncomfortable in summer. And, the hotel fronts a busy street so you can’t leave the windows open.

I’m writing this on my way back but I won’t be able to post it until I get back. I’m at Charles de Gaul airport right now and the price for wireless access is a little high for just a blog post. I’m at Terminal 2E at CDG airport and it looks like they are 2/3rds of the way through a very nice looking remodel. However, that also meant that the security lines were incredibly long because they only had a couple of scanning machines running and all of the stores are closed up. There is one little coffee stand open but that is it.

For this trip, I flew business class on Korean Air from CDG to the new(ish) Inchon airport near Seoul to Narita. They are flying a fairly old 747 type but they have done some recent upgrades so it fairly comfortable. The business class seats are definitely a better way to travel then coach but they aren’t that comfortable. I still had trouble sleeping and it is still a 16 hour flight. However, the short check in lines, nicer food, first off the plane, first through immigration, and first at baggage pick up is definitely worth it. My trip to India will be by coach, thanks to the last minute change of schedule, so I guess I should enjoy my trip now as much as possible.

Default behavior of Outlook Auto Archive might be different than users expect

2008-05-14T21:03:00.000+09:00

If you are relying on Auto Archive to help our users stay below the a mailbox limit, there is something important that all end users need to be aware of:

If you create new folders in your mailbox, those new folders are not automatically archived. This may cause problems for people who think that all folders in their mailbox are covered. Any new folder will need to have the archiving option set manually during creation by selecting the properties of the subfolder. You can also reset the folders for the entire current mailbox from the Tools >> Options >> Other >> Auto Archive >> Apply these settings to all folders now.

There appears to be no way for us to change this default behavior without creating a custom Outlook plug in from scratch. Programming for Outlook is incredibly difficult so it is highly unlikely to be worth the effort. If you know of any existing plug in, please let me know.

Getting settled

2008-05-04T07:50:00.001+09:00

We’ve got keys for the new condo and have started to get appliances and stuff. We had refrigerator a combo washer/dryer delivered on Thursday. Almost no one uses a real dryer in Japan because the cost of electricity is so high. The vast majority of people line-dry their clothes so as you travel around Japan you will see a lot of clotheslines – even in the fancy parts of town.

Japanese retail stores have a different spin on the “90-days same as cash” financing scheme that American retailers do. The majority of salaried positions in Japan have a twice-a-year bonus, one in summer and one at new-years, so the retailers offer delayed billing. They will not charge your bank account or credit card until your bonus is scheduled to arrive. It’s a lot simpler than the “open an account” process that you get at American retailers.

The major appliance stores are willing to negotiate a little, too. The one that we finally bought from was willing to go lower in price after Chiho found some advertised prices online for the same products. It’s not quite a match-or-beat-the-price guarantee but it functions in a similar fashion. Chiho shaved about $150 (USD) off the price of everything with a half-hour worth of online searching.

Paris and Bangalore

2008-05-04T07:49:00.001+09:00

It looks like I’ve got a business trip coming up at the end of May that could get kind of long. There is a training session for the Groove software in Paris the week of May 19th and it will be followed by an IT Regional Meeting in Bangalore from the 25th to the 29th. I might actually end up flying direct from Paris to Bangalore. Not all of the details have been worked out, yet. I sure hope all of our household goods arrive before I have to leave. I think Chiho would kill me if I wasn’t in town when it came time to unpack.

I’ll try to take pictures and send gifts if I do go on these trips. I’ve been to Paris but I’ve never been to India at all so this should be interesting.