Matthew McDermott

Matthew is a principal consultant for Catapult Systems. A Microsoft MVP (SharePoint Server), Matthew blogs about SharePoint and Microsoft technologies related to collaboration, web content management and productivity.
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Jul6

Windows Live Writer and Twitter

I just found a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that posts updates to Twitter when you publish a new post to your blog. Twitter Notify lets you format the tweet and prompts you when you publish a post. ...
Posted by Matthew McDermott on Monday, 6 Jul 2009 04:30.
2 Comments | Categories: Social Networking, Tools, Web Publishing

 
May25

Linux Browser Testing Made Easy

Every once in a while I have a client that requires more extensive browser testing. For most Windows-based browsers I have them installed locally or run a VPC with them installed. I am not a Linux expert by any means so the thought of standing up a particular flavor of Linux to support testing was not appealing. Then I found UNetbootin the Universal Netboot Installer. (http://unetbootin.sourcefor...
Posted by Matthew McDermott on Monday, 25 May 2009 07:52.
0 Comments | Categories: CSS, Tools, Web Publishing

 
May20

New Look to SharePoint.Microsoft.com

Have you taken a look at SharePoint.Microsoft.com? Look at the Silverlight navigation and image rendering. Cool! Looking forward to a “How we did it post on the SharePoint blog.” ...
Posted by Matthew McDermott on Wednesday, 20 May 2009 03:29.
1 Comment | Categories: SharePoint 2007, Web Publishing, Silverlight

 
Apr16

Presenting at Tech•Ed 2009

I will be presenting at Tech•Ed 2009 in LA, May 11-15, 2009. SharePoint Search Challenges and Tricks Abstract Many organizations struggle with SharePoint search configuration when it falls outside simple document search. This session presents strategies for handling special search scenarios like large files and images. This session also presents techniques for metadata tagging of files that ...
Posted by Matthew McDermott on Thursday, 16 Apr 2009 12:01.
0 Comments | Categories: Speaking Engagements, SharePoint 2007, My Sites, Development, Administration, Web Publishing

 
Dec19

Color Picking in SPD

For all the bashing we give SharePoint Designer, there are some very cool, though poorly documented, features. For example, have you ever found yourself creating a style sheet from a graphic provided by a designer? Did the designer give you every hex color value? Would you like to be able to select the exact color and be self sufficient? Here is how I use SharePoint Designer to solve the problem....
Posted by Matthew McDermott on Friday, 19 Dec 2008 06:14.
0 Comments | Categories: Web Publishing

 
Oct26

SharePoint Menu Alternative

I was recently working with a colleague who posed the following question: "How can I wrap the top navigation rather than scroll it off screen?" My follow up question was: "Why on earth would you ever have a top navigation that was that wide?" To which he answered: "Don't ask" So, ours is not to ask why... I tried several different CSS approaches using the Sha...
Posted by Matthew McDermott on Sunday, 26 Oct 2008 10:48.
5 Comments | Categories: CSS, Development, Web Publishing

 
Sep1

SharePoint Image Search (Part 4)

Introduction This is Part 4 of a 4 part series on how to create an image search center on a MOSS site. My goal is to create a search results page similar to the Microsoft Live Search Images page. In Part 1 I explored the out of the box search experience for images and walked through the setup required to get the indexer to crawl image file types. In Part 2 I installed the XMP IFilter and demo...
Posted by Matthew McDermott on Monday, 1 Sep 2008 05:00.
69 Comments | Categories: Search, Web Publishing

 
Aug31

SharePoint Image Search (Part 3)

Introduction This is Part 3 of a 4 part series on how to create an image search center on a MOSS site. My goal is to create a search results page similar to the Microsoft Live Search Images page. In Part 1 I explored the out of the box search experience for images and walked through the setup required to get the indexer to crawl image file types. In Part 2 I installed the XMP IFilter and demo...
Posted by Matthew McDermott on Sunday, 31 Aug 2008 04:40.
8 Comments | Categories: Search, Web Publishing

 
Aug30

SharePoint Image Search (Part 2)

Introduction This is Part 2 of a 4 part series on how to create an image search center on a MOSS site. My goal is to create a search results page similar to the Microsoft Live Search Images page. In Part 1 I explored the out of the box search experience for images and walked through the setup required to get the indexer to crawl image file types. We concluded the post with an issue: images st...
Posted by Matthew McDermott on Saturday, 30 Aug 2008 12:00.
8 Comments | Categories: Search, Tools, Web Publishing

 
Aug28

SharePoint Image Search (Part 1)

Introduction After working on several search projects it is clear that the out of the box search experience for images is, well, less than optimal. I mean look at how cool the Microsoft Live Search Images interface is, then, hover over an image and look at how cool the property display is! How about the results in SharePoint… OK, I know, SharePoint is a document centric application ...
Posted by Matthew McDermott on Thursday, 28 Aug 2008 09:24.
25 Comments | Categories: Search, Web Publishing