Version problems? To the Cloud !

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I was on my way home from a business trip and wanted to print my boarding pass. Most hotels have a PC set up that is primarily for that purpose, and this one was no different.

The PC they provide is set up so that it wipes itself every time somebody logs in, which in theory protects you from somebody eavesdropping and/or stealing your information. The down side to this approach is that you’re stuck with whatever they decide is the right version of software to work with.

The problem (for me) came in because I was flying JetBlue. Now I love JetBlue, but they (for some unknown reason) use Flash in the page to print out your boarding pass.

You’d think this wouldn’t really be much of a problem, since I’m sure they probably have some sophisticated check that will catch if the browser doesn’t have Flash and redirect you.

… Except …

The PC did have Flash loaded, but the JetBlue page wanted a higher version installed than was on the machine. So the browser helpfully asked if I wanted to upgrade, which I said “yes” to, only to find that the generic login doesn’t have install permissions (surprise, surprise).

So I asked the desk to help, but they had even more locked down machines, so I figured I’d just have to punt.

Until I remembered that I had my Mac with me. I went to my room, ran through printing the boarding pass from the JetBlue site straight to PDF. Then I uploaded the PDF to my Google Docs.

Back down to the hotel computer, log into my Google Docs, open the PDF and presto – the boarding pass is printed !

Bottom line is that by relying on Google to connect me, I was able to get what I needed in spite of the software incompatibility. Once again I’m loving the cloud (and Google Apps).

How to Copy a SharePoint Site

I had a bit of a fire drill the other day when a SharePoint site that I had been using needed to be retired. I have moved content around before, but only lists and small numbers of documents, never an entire site.

After some research, and with help from my colleague James Robertson, I now know how to make a copy of a SharePoint site that includes the content on that site. This is useful if you are archiving a site, or need to create a working copy in order to do development and testing.

First of all, it appears that you must be a “Site Collection Admin” to do this task. If you don’t see the link to save the site to a template, you may need to request permissions from your SharePoint administrator.

Step 1 – Go to “Site Settings” from the “Site Actions” menu:

Step 2 – Click on the link that says “Save site as template”:

Step 3 – Name the template and check the “Include Content” check box:

Click the “OK” button

Step 4 – Use the new template by choosing “Create new Site”:

Step 5 – Name your new site and choose the template you created before from the “Select a Template” list (Click the “Custom” tab to see saved templates):

Step 6 – wait for the site to be created:

Step 7 – You should see the new site once it is created:

DONE – Now you have a complete clone of the site (including content, permissions, etc) as it was when the copy started.

Problems with connecting at a hotel …

When traveling and trying to use the hard wire at a hotel, you may find that the provided Ethernet cable won’t work. This is because hotels typically have a very outdated infrastructure and are still running at 10Mbps.

Most new computers are set with network speed set to auto detect, but this relies on the hardware being able to handle that detection, which older, cheaper network boxes aren’t able to do.

In the lower right corner of your screen, you should see your network icon that will look something like:

The network connection is the one that looks like a pair of computer screens ().

The ).

When you are connected to a hard-wire, the tray should look something like:

The icon for the network connection will flash as network activity occurs.

If you don’t see the icon for the Ethernet connection, right click on the one for the Wi-Fi to get the context menu and choose “Open Network Connections”:

This will bring you to the network connections, which will list all of the available network options that have been configured on your machine:

If the connection shows “Limited Connectivity” instead of “Connected”, you most likely don’t have an IP address.

Right clicking on the “Local Area Connection” (or whichever one is associated with your Ethernet card) will give you a similar context menu that should let you check your connection by choosing “Status”.

This will show you a more detailed status of the connection:

You can try clicking the “Repair” button to force the connection to restart, but this typically won’t work in the hotel scenario. So going back to our context menu for the Ethernet connection, choose “Properties”:

This will bring up the property sheet for the connection:

Click on the “Configure” button next to the adapter to get to the settings. This will bring up the properties:

Go to the “Advanced” tab to change the link speed to 10Mbps:

Click “OK” and the adapter should reset and you’ll be good to go.

Facebook Annoyances …

I’ve been busy, so I haven’t logged into Facebook for a while now. I ran into somebody who said to send them a friend request, so I pulled up my Facebook app on my iPhone and ran through the process of logging in there.

I hadn’t used that app for a really long time, and like most iPhone apps, you have to start over once it upgrades, so that didn’t surprise me.

What did catch me by surprise was what happened when I tried logging on from my Mac later that day. First thing that happened was I got an unfamiliar screen that said I had logged in from a location I hadn’t used before:

OK, fine – seems like they’re trying to protect me, so I guess I can deal with this – but why they think I’m logging in from a different location is a bit off. So I’m expecting some sort of confirmation of identity, which would be fine. So next comes the usual Captcha to make sure I’m not a machine:

I type in the phrase, and get to the next screen, where the first surprise happens, apparently to identify myself I’m going to have to recognize people tagged in photos:

I’m a little worried now, since I don’t spend a lot of time looking at photos from my friends, and I’ve seen a LOT of photos from the ones I do know that don’t really look like the person to begin with. But it looks like this is the only option.

So I start trying to identify the photos, and the very first one I see is a picture of a cow and calf … Hmm, this is going to be hard. Obviously none of my friends are cows, so it must be pulling from somebody’s picture album. Of course I only know about 20 people who might post a picture of their livestock, and probably the same number that might think a calf was cute enough to take a picture of.

So I skip that one, and try again – now I get a picture of somebody celebrating. It’s a picture of people in their 20′s, so I’m thinking either an old photo, or one of my younger friends, but I don’t recognize any of them. Two down and no luck. At this point I even try looking at photos on the iPhone (which for some reason still works), no luck, so this is skip number two ….

Next I get what is obviously some sort of a class picture from the 60′s or 70′s – I probably know this person, but how would I know who the picture belongs to ? So it goes, with all 7 pictures being people, places or things I don’t recognize.

Then the next annoyance: after failing, you have to wait an hour to retry, so I can’t even go back in to see if I might get more recognizable pictures.

The next time through I think I recognize one, but still no luck. OK, wait another hour.

Finally on the third try (the one where I started writing this post), I get lucky. Every picture that comes up is an actual person, and I recognize all but one. Luckily for me even the one that has more than one of my friends on it appears to have worked. And I’m back in …

And in this whole process, there is no link to get help, or alternative way to get past this process. What would you do if you had some sort of vision impairment.

FAIL – Facebook … you need to fix this.

Out of the box Sharepoint Workflows

As a project manager, I’m often faced with the problem of how to deal with configuration management, which is how we make sure that everybody is on the same page. I typically like to use a content management system to handle this issue. For my current project, I’m using Sharepoint, which also has some nice built in collaboration capabilities.

There are two out of the box workflows on the Document Library: “Approval” and “Collect Feedback”.

Both work pretty similarly, and for general document collaboration they work pretty well.

When you get a document to where you’d like to gather feedback, you can fire off a Review workflow by going to the workflows page for the document:

This will take you to a page that displays the available workflows (will also display any that are in progress):

Choose the “Collect feedback”  workflow and it will prompt you for who you’d like to review the document and a message that you’d like to send. You have complete control of who you pick, and you can also cc people if you just want to keep somebody in the loop:

Once you pick the people you want to review, assign a due date, and click the “Start” button, the workflow is running.  The people you assigned the task to will get a notification that asks them to review the document. It includes your message, and links to both the document and the workflow tasks (I assigned this one to myself):

As the creator of the workflow, you’ll also get a message for each reviewer you assigned that has the link to their task:

Note that the tasks are stored in a SP library called Tasks, and if you click on the “Edit this task” button, you’ll get the form that lets you provide feedback:

This is where you would give feedback that doesn’t need to go into the document. It also allows you to reassign the task if you aren’t the person who should review it (by default it will assign back to the person who assigned the task to you, but you can also use it to reassign to somebody else):

Once the workflow is running, you can see the status at a glance by going to the workflow page again:

If you click on a workflow, it will show you the current status, and you can update individual tasks:

This takes you to the Task in the Sharepoint “Tasks” library (you can get there by clicking the “Tasks” link above) and a web version of what you see when you click the “Edit This Task” from Outlook:

If you want to see all of the outstanding tasks you can go to that library by clicking on the “Tasks” link on the workflows status page (above):

Converting an Access DB to Sharepoint

I’m a big fan of making people more productive by sharing data entry. In my current project, the tool we have for collaboration is Sharepoint 2007.One of our team members is really comfortable with Access development, and built a nice database for tracking the status of our document deliverables. The problem with this is that since Access is a local sort of solution, it doesn’t allow for people to make updates as they work, so we end up spending a lot of time with the database owner updating status.

The solution (in this particular environment) is to utilize Sharepoint lists. Access 2007 has a nice wizard driven approach to building Sharepoint lists, as long as the database is built correctly.

So here are the iterations I had to go through to make this work …

First pass: Diving right in, I loaded up the database to see what it looked like (how many tables, what sort of structure was there, etc). The designer did a good job of making a lot of the fields lookups, and had named all of the reference tables with the prefix of “REF” – so far so good:

So, thinking it would all work fine, I simply start the “Move to Sharepoint” button in the “External Data” tab of the Access Ribbon:

This starts the wizard, which walks you through the process of building the lists on Sharepoint. Once the task is finished, you are left with a new Access database that is linked to the newly created Sharepoint lists.

Looking at these lists I noticed something off: it didn’t appear that any of the reference tables were being used. They were there as linked Sharepoint lists, but when you looked at the data in either SP, or Access, there was no drop-down or choice to be made, they were simply text fields.

So digging a bit, and having a discussion with the developer, I found a few issues: Most of the reference tables weren’t actually setup as relationships in Access, and some of the reference tables didn’t have an ID column (an Autonumber primary key).

The wizard requires the links between tables to be relationships on autonumber primary key fields, in order to build the field as a lookup.

Looking at the base relationships, it turns out that there was only one of the myriad of tables that actually had a relationship:

In order to get the Sharepoint lists to build fields that were lookups to the “REF” tables, I would have to create new fields that linked to the primary keys in those tables. To do that turns out to be relatively simple in this case.

First I open up the design of the main table, and look for the fields that are using lookups (in the case below, Contract_Task):

Then I simply create a lookup field that has the name of the table in question (in this case REF_Contract_Tasks). First step is to insert or append a new column :

Name the new column the same as the table in question:

Choose “Lookup Wizard …” for the Data Type:

Then complete the lookup wizard:

Choose the table you are interested in (in this case REF_Contract_Tasks):

Pick which fields you want to display (typically this will just be a name field, but you can choose whichever fields you think would be helpful):

Choose the order you want things displayed:

Format the columns for lookup display (it’s recommended not to display the ID column):

Choose a name for the field (if you already typed this in, you don’t need to change it):

The wizard now asks you if you’d like to save the changes, which you should do:

Now if I look at the relationships, and hit “show all relationships”, I see the newly created link:

Right click on the relationship line to edit the relationship:

And I typically just check the “Enforce Referential Integrity” box to make sure it is an identifying relationship:

Once that is done, I can either build an update query, or copy the contents of the original row to the new one in datasheet view. For the purposes of this database, there aren’t that many rows, so a simple cut and paste works fine:

Hit ctrl-C or choose “Copy” from the menu:

Select the new row, and paste the data there:

Repeat for all of the other rows in the table that have some query in the lookup tab …

Now in a couple of cases, I got prompted for which field to use to establish the relationship. These are the tables that didn’t have an autonumber primary key. The fix for this is relatively painless (once you discover which tables have the problem).

Just add a new field to the table that has a Data Type of Autonumber, and make it a primary key.

The trick with this is that the primary key won’t likely have the same numbers as the original ID column, and you can’t create an AutoNumber column with data in it. So in order to get the new field updated, the easiest thing to do is create an update query and edit it to use the old join values.

Do query wizard, and choose the columns in question, in this case Deliverables, and REF_Projects. Since you created a relationship with the new REF_Projects field on the Deliverables table, you should end up with something like this:

In theory you should be able to edit the relationship in the GUI by dragging it around and/or right clicking on it. I’ve actually had limited success with this, so I tend to simply add the column I want to update (REF_Projects) to the query, then hit the button on the Design tab of the ribbon that says “Update”:

Then switch to SQL view in order to modify the join properties more easily:

The query so far will be something like:

UPDATE REF_Projects
INNER JOIN Deliverables
ON REF_Projects.newID = Deliverables.REF_Projects

SET Deliverables.REF_Projects = [REF_Projects].[newID];

And you want to update it with the old columns from the lookup query that was in the original table, so in this case it becomes:

UPDATE REF_Projects
INNER JOIN Deliverables
ON REF_Projects.ID = Deliverables.Project_Level

SET Deliverables.REF_Projects = [REF_Projects].[newID];

Then run the query and the values in the two fields should look relatively the same in the datasheet view (since they are now both pointing at the same rows.

Then another one that threw me off was one field that had a different column heading than the field name. When I got to the “Doc_Type” field, I didn’t see it in the Datasheet view. Turns out it had a value in the Caption area of the field definition:

So in the datasheet view it showed as “NDCP Standard”:

This field also has another interesting challenge – the values didn’t all match up with the values in the lookup table (REF_Doc_Type), so when I did my cut-and-paste trick I got the following error:

So looking at the REF_Doc_Type table, I was able to figure out that there is no row that is named “Standard” (likely it had been changed to “Program standard” at some point, and since this column stores the actual value, there is a disconnect).

So in this case, I chose to simply update the current column values to match the one I thought it should be with an update:

After that my cut-and-paste from the “NDCP Standard” field to the “REF_Doc_Type” field went without a flaw.

This same trick needs to be applied to any of the tables that will be worked directly with (typically those that contribute to forms) in order to make sure all of the proper links are built.

Once you have the links built, you want to rename the original table and build a view (in Access this is called a Query) with the same name that has all the joins you need in place. So after you rename the table, just build a simple query with that table in place (I use the wizard and make sure I include all of the fields):