blogs.catapultsystems.com

It’s no secret that I am thrilled with the new social features of SharePoint 2010. I am most excited about the new Profile Picture handling. I strongly believe that the more we can show the faces of our colleagues to one another the more connected we will feel. Clearly Microsoft feels that way as witnessed by the many features that make use of the Profile Image like the Activity Feed and Colleagues list.   Exchange and Outlook What about other applications like Outlook and Exchange? Outlook 2010 includes the Outlook Social Connector to present the social connections that the user has to the other actors in the conversation. The images in the OSC come from the users contacts and Active Directory. In this example Kobe’s picture is in Willa’s contacts but Ruby and Willa’s pictures a...

This post is a continuation of my series on adopting healthy practices that enable an organization to make the agile transformation. You can read the first three parts of this series here: Part I: Introduction Part II: Vision and Risk Part III: Backlog Management Although I’m trying to emphasize in these posts that companies well staffed for agile software projects don’t require any exact rules to follow about how people are organized, in practice there are some key skills that make it easier and some of these work best when they are not the same person. First of all, you absolutely must have at least one resource I’ll refer to as the Customer Champion. This person does not have to know how to build software, can have a horrible eye for usability and aesthetics, and have no con...

This particular issue has been one of the banes of my existence since I started deploying large-scale Operations Manager 2007 environments. I follow the best instructions available to the letter and create my certificates, use the MOMCertImport tool, verifying connectivity between systems, approve and install the gateway and… no-go. My gateway server shows up in the administrator pane, management servers and is stuck forever in ‘Not Monitored’. Several years back a co-worker of mine coined a term which keeps coming back to mind when this happens – the term is ClusterTruck. He coined this term because the original word kept getting blocked by the email spam filters (I’ll refrain from adding it to this blog but I bet you can guess the original). I reached out to my favorite PKI geek (JC)...

Haven’t been quite so active on the blog as of late as I’ve been working on a couple of presentations and enjoying this beautiful south Texas weather with the kids.  Stay tuned as we have some good content getting queued up and due to be released in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, please note that I’ll be delivering three presentations at the upcoming June PMI Houston blowout (more details here). Interestingly enough, they all ended up getting organized in descending order on the schedule: 1) Projects as Innovation Systems – the 80,000 ft overview of projects, innovation, and generally my GUT on problem identification.  Attend if you want to see the PMBOK processes painted in a whole new light, or learn what your project has in common with a puppy dog.  (I thought it might...

Cross posted from: http://blogs.msdn.com/mvpawardprogram/ Do you have tough technical questions regarding SharePoint for which you're seeking answers? Do you want to tap into the deep knowledge of the talented Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals? The SharePoint MVPs are the same people you see in the technical community as authors, speakers, user group leaders and answerers in the MSDN forums. This is the first time we have brought these experts together as a collective group to answer your questions live. So please join us and bring on the questions! This chat will cover WSS, MOSS and the SharePoint 2010 beta. Topics include setup and administration, design, development and general questions. The following MVPs will be sharing their time and expertise with the SharePoint community fo...

  After migrating from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010, we began noticing that address book downloads failed during a manual send/receive operation with: ‘error (0x8004010F) operation failed. An object cannot be found.’ Basically, this error is happening because Outlook 2007 and higher clients rely on web based distribution of the offline address book, and that address book is not found on the CAS Server. The fix is to enable the Default Offline Address book on the mailbox server for Web-based distribution: This setting does not go into effect immediately. If you want to force it to start working immediately, you need to perform these steps: 1) Update the address book 2) Restart the File Distribution Service on the CAS Server Performing this step will cause the CAS to ...

This post is a continuation of my series on adopting healthy practices that enable an organization to make the agile transformation. You can read the first two parts of this series here: Part I: Introduction Part II: Vision and Risk Depending on which statistic you believe, many researchers in the field of software development agree that the majority of projects that fail to make it to market are those with insufficiently detailed requirements. Though I agree completely with this, many companies also fail to avoid an even more troublesome, but often overlooked issue – that of building either too many or the wrong features. Traditional waterfall based development processes spend a large amount of time creating requirement specifications and detailed design documents before a...

The default speakerphone setting for a SNOM phone is ‘quiet room.’ This can cause the recipients on the other end of the phone to complain about call quality. After playing around with some of the settings we found that the most optimal setting is ‘normal room.’ This is found in the Setup > Advanced > Audio > Handsfree Mode. After making a change, be sure to click on the Save button. The setting takes effect immediately. Echoic room means, since the room is echoic, be aggressive on the echo cancellor. If the room is not so echoic, this setting could cause the chopping since the echo cancellor is aggressive but the room is not so echoic.This SNOM wiki page describes these settings....

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 allows for delegates to schedule Live Meetings or Conference calls on behalf of other users. There are three steps required to set this up. Step 1 - On the manager’s system, share the calendar with the delegate as follows: 1. In Outlook, click Calendar. 2. On the File menu, point to Folder, and then click Properties for Calendar. 3. In the Calendar Properties dialog box, click the Permission tab. 4. Select the delegate user, and then select ONLY Editor or Author in the Permission Level list. Note: If you configure the delegated Outlook 2007 calendar to work with any permissions other than Author or Editor, the delegate cannot schedule a conference for the Outlook 2007 calendar delegator. (Per KB 977282) Step 2- On the manager’s s...

It has been a while (OK, a long while) since I have published a series of posts on a topic. My last series, SharePoint Image Search, has been very well received. This series will walk through the Building Blocks that I have created to demonstrate and improve the SharePoint end user experience. I have been using many of these techniques in my developer focused demos for SharePoint 2010 (and in some cases SharePoint 2007). My plan is to use this post series to distribute my code and provide more detail on the why and the how of many of my code samples. My challenge in presenting a 75 minute session (or less) is to convey both the concept and the key code sections in such a tight time frame. This post series will allow me that freedom. Let’s go! CodePlex: How do I love thee? I confess that...