Just Interesting

The Last Pint - Remembering a Friend

Darrin Bishop — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:53:07 GMT

I almost did not check my emails before I left the house today… One cannot explain the grief I felt when I checked the mail on the phone and realized the SharePoint community lost a dear friend. Wading though way too many eamils this morning to my disbelief I leaned that Patrick Tisseghem passed away.

Patrick was practically a SharePoint icon, not only in the European community but world-wide. Many of us have had the pleasure of meeting Patrick at one of his training sessions, SharePoint conference or by reading one of his many books, articles or posts.

For myself, I distinctly remember the first time I met Patrick. We were both speaking at an Advisor Summit in Phoenix, Az. As the speakers made their way across the hot pavement quiet and soft spoken Patrick and I introduced ourselves and made our way with the pack to dinner. It was during that time that Patrick made some SharePoint fame with his famous Beer database.

Over the years we connected primarily on the conference circuits, in and out of the speaker room and the after hour events. Patrick was always there, pint in hand, quiet and on the edge of the crowd. Always willing to talk and listen. Strange quality for an instructor, Patrick was more of a listener than a speaker after hours.

I can easily recount the events and parties that we happened to be together at, many now are all a blur over the years. I can say that my parting memory of Patrick will be TechEd 2008 in Orlando. Heading back to the speaker hotel from an event, my Matt and I happened upon Patrick taking a break on the bench outside the hotel. We sat an talked for a few minutes and as usual headed to the hotel bar. Over pints we discussed his current book, watched some sports and just kicked back. For me personally I will be left with a fond Patrick memory of TechEd, Pints, Books and Friends.

Free Vista SP1 Support From Microsoft

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:17:00 GMT

Microsoft has announced free, unlimited installation and compatibility support for Vista SP1 starting right now until March 18, 2009. Don't you love that word Free!

The deal is Telephone support available world wide, chat and email support US and Canada only.

Information and details are available at:
http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx?rdpath=1&prid=11274&gprid=500921

Announcing the International SharePoint Professionals Association

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:05:43 GMT

SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole – by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together.

ISPA’s first offering to the community is support to user groups around the world through free WSS v3 web sites for any group that becomes ISPA-affiliated. In addition, one of the goals of ISPA is to facilitate an exchange of ideas between user group leaders that helps increase the likelihood of their group’s success. Therefore, ISPA is providing leaders of user groups with access to collaborative spaces where they can interact with other user group leaders, sharing ideas, resources, best practices, guidance, and most importantly – support for one another.

ISPA has also established Regional Evangelists – existing community leaders who have previously exhibited a strong commitment to the promotion of the SharePoint community, and who have pledged to carry the ISPA message throughout their particular region. These evangelists are key local contacts who are available to work with local SharePoint professionals and user groups throughout their region to help promote the community and SharePoint. If you are interested in starting a user group, have an existing one, or need guidance – the ISPA Regional Evangelists are great resources who are available immediately to assist you.

Finally, as everyone knows, no community is complete without a web site, and ISPA is proud to announce the launch of its official site, www.sharepointpros.org. While the web site is still in the early stages of development, plans for multilingual support and exciting functionality that will assist anyone involved with SharePoint are on the horizon.

If you have ideas for ISPA, would like to start a user group, or are looking for assistance, visit the new ISPA web site or contact ISPA at contactus@sharepoint.net. Together, the community can achieve what was impossible as individuals – becomes a part of ISPA today!

Daniel Larson's new Service-Oriented AJAX Book - First Preorder Wins!

Darrin Bishop — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:57:44 GMT

Many of you probably have seen Daniel Larson speak at one or more SharePoint conferences and know that he is big into Ajax. Daniel's newest book from MSPress - "Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft® Platform" is now available from Amazon for preorder.

Check out Dan's blog post "Pre-order on Amazon: Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft® Platform". Dan is going to give away the first confirmed pre-order book.

Good Luck.

Collaboration and the Atom

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:46:33 GMT

The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes) is a book that has been sitting on my shelf for some years. I pulled it off the shelf the other day for a little light reading. I am not finished with it yet, hardly even started it but it is full of relatively useless facts about early physics and the discovery of the atom. Well useless for most SharePoint developers. Interesting none the less.

Early in the book the author writes about a chemist/philosopher Michael Polanyi. Polanyi was asking questions about the scientific community at the time. I wont go into the details - don’t want to give away the book :) In his view (Polanyi's) to discribe how the scientific community worked the author provides this :

From The Making of the Atomic Bomb….

"Polanyi proposed an analogy. Imagine, he said, a group of workers faced with the problem of assembling a very large, very complex jigsaw puzzle. How could they organize themselves to do the job most efficiently?

Each worker could take some of the pieces from the pile and try to fit them together. That would be efficient if assembling a puzzle was like shelling peas. But it wasn't. The pieces weren't isolated. They fitted together into a whole. And the chance of any one worker's collection of pieces fitting together was small. Even if the group made enough copies of the pieces to give every worker the entire puzzle to attack, no one would accomplish as much alone as the group might if it could contrive a way to work together.

The best way to do the job, Polanyi argued, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing. "Let them work on putting the puzzle together in the site of the others, so that every time a piece of it is fitted in by one [worker], all the others will immediately watch out for the next step that becomes possible in consequence." That way even though each worker acts on his own initiative, he acts to further the entire group's achievement. The group works independently together; the puzzle is assembled in the most efficient way."

I found Polanyi's analogy very interesting. Isn't this what we are striving for in the enterprise today with tools such as Office Suite, SharePoint and Communication Server? The author does not detail exactly when Polanyi spoke of this analogy but the context of the statements in the book suggest early 1900's.