Today could have been one of those days that started off on the wrong foot and continued to go down hill. You know, where you come home at the end of the day and think I should have stayed in bed. My day started off with a great breakfast at Starbucks, great conversation with my girlfriend, and a great work day ahead. I arrived at my client site, tummy full, hot tea in hand, and my purse. Wait, where’s my purse?! Where is my purse? Hmmm, in that instant I realized I had left my purse at Starbucks. No big deal, dropped off my girlfriend and headed back to Starbucks. I was enjoying the beautiful weather, realizing how far the Starbucks was, noticing all the buildings, homes, stores, and how far is this Starbucks. I wasn’t really worried about my purse being there, I knew it would be. I parked, left the car running, walked into Starbucks, looked at my chair – no purse. Went to the front counter and asked if they had a purse turned in, and Pam (the Starbucks Barista) said yes. Took my purse and went back to the client site. It was then I realized that in my purse was my MiFi card and my iPad, both of which were still in my purse. I would say that my faith in humanity was restored, but I already had faith someone would turn it in. So I guess my faith in people was simply solidified. It is a good day. For all of you who would have turned in my purse, I thank you.

Over the last few months I have had the desire, maybe even the NEED, to detach from people, technology, email, everything. And while it is possible to take my ATV’s out to the Tahoe mountains and spend a day connecting with nature, by the time I get back home I have dozens of emails and voice mails that are taunting me, clamoring for my attention. So I wondered . . . is it possible in this society to actually be unplugged for an extended period of time. I can tell you from my brief experience, while the overall answer may be yes, there is some planning that needs to take place.

The first thing is to determine your timeframe. For example, the week between Christmas and New Years seems to be a world wide time to check out. It seems to be more socially acceptable to not responding to email for a few days as people just assume you are out of the office. So far, I seem to be successful with this technology break only if I leave the country. My goal iin 2012 is to see how well I can find this balance, staying in the US, riding AVT’s and connecting to technology when necessary. Owning an iPad makes this last goal even that much more challenging.

In my quest for being unplugged I have come across a few articles that I thought I would share as some ideas on how to find the balance.

The Case for a 4 day work week – Inc Magazine
How to Implement a 4 day work week – Inc Magazine
Successful people who wake up early – Business Insider Magazine
Limiting Email after hours – CNET
Pulling the Plug – Inc Magazine

Personally I am going to start by making a portion of each day technology free. For a techie, this is not an easy task so I will update you on my progress. Today is day 1. I will not check my phone, email, or surf the web during my lunch hour. I will not play on my iPad and will not visit the Apple store. Wish me luck!

The finalists for each of the European SharePoint Community Award categories have been announced! The program team had a very hard task to narrow it down to the top three in each category. But after long deliberations and discussions the program team have made their selections for the award finals. Check out the finalists or vote for your favorite.

As many of you know, when a Windows Update takes place we all hold our breath, cross our fingers, and hope for the best. We then can spent the next several hours (or even days) fixing all of the issues related to that update. Whew, when we are done we have a mini celebration and then wait for the email with the next update.

So last week, MVP Zubair Alexander wrote an article for MCP Magazine called Windows Update Troubles, Or What to Do When the Mother of All Patches Fails. I hope this provides some assistance in those late night hours.

Many templates (WSS or SharePoint Foundation) come with the Search box on the main page. One of the challenges with these templates is that they only perform a site wide search. The search box will not search sub-sites, people, or across site collections. You can use different templates that enable enterprise wide searching, but what if you already have an existing site collection that is already using one of these templates.

So here is an alternative. You can enable the Publishing Infrastructure on the site collection, add a search center, and disable the search box on the main site. To disable the search box you can either edit the master page (not recommended) or add the following script to the page

#s4-search area { display:none; }

A few cool things happening in the world of IT:

Oracle Buys Cloud-based Customer Service Company RightNow For $1.5 Billion

Groupon is a Disaster (well if $10Billion is considered a disaster, sign me up)

How Recruiters Use Social Networks to Screen Candidates

Enjoy!

Energy drinks hit the mainstream consumer market in 1997 with Red Bull being the first. As a techie, it is a natural assumption that I would drink mass amounts of caffeine. To the contrary, I don’t drink coffee, or soda. An occassional iced tea here or there, but that’s all. Then late in my thirties – the NEED for caffeine started to increase on an almost daily basis. So, I was introduced to Red Bull. It was a shock to my system, for sure. I started drinking just a half a can. It tasted like cough syrup, and not the cherry flavored stuff you get as a kid, more like it had gone rancid. So from my perspective, not exactly the way I wanted to get my energy, but could not resort to coffee (just can’t stand the taste). Enter Monster Energy – yay! Now that flavor I liked. I migrated to the sugar free, low carb, and started by drinking about 1/3 of a can. I have now worked my way up to 1/2 can and occasionally will drink the whole thing (I know). But, what is all that stuff in the can? What am I really consuming? So I thought I would do a little research and see what I could come up with.

The first thing I wanted to find out was the amount of caffeine, as energy drinks are not regulated like soda. They do not have to disclose the amount of caffeine (neither does coffee). This is what I found: 

• Red Bull: 80 milligrams per 8.3-ounce serving
• Tab Energy: 95 mg per 10.5-oz serving
• Monster and Rockstar: 160 mg per 16-oz serving
• No Fear: 174 mg per 16-oz serving
• Fixx: 500 per 20-oz serving
• Wired X505: 505 mg per 24-oz serving (There should be a warning label on this drink!)

In comparison:

• Brewed coffee: 200 milligrams per 12-oz serving
• Instant coffee: 140 mg per 12-oz serving
• Brewed tea: 80 mg per 12-oz serving
• Mountain Dew: 54 mg per 12 oz. serving
• Dr. Pepper: 41 mg per 12-oz serving
• Pepsi Cola: 38 mg per 12-oz serving
• Coca-Cola Classic: 34.5 mg per 12-oz serving
• Canned or bottled tea: 20 mg per 12-oz serving
• Bomba Energy has 75 mg per 8.4-oz serving
• Whoop Ass has 50 mg per 8.5-oz serving

What brought about all this research was the fact that last week, while in a market in Houston, I stumbled on a “new” alternative energy drink. Ocean Spray Diet Cran-Energy (Sparkling). It was sold in the 8 oz cans in a pack of 4. I thought, why not? If it works, I would much rather drink something more natural. And, to my surprise, it worked. Monday I tried my first can, and the taste caught me off guard. I was expecting bubbly cranberry, which I got. I was expecting a diet taste, which I got. What I was not expecting was the Green Tea flavor (hence where the caffeine comes from) as this was not listed on the front of the can, but rather in the very small ingredients list on the back. Within 15 minutes I was wide awake and it lasted for hours. The caffeine content is listed on the can at 55 mg, significantly lower than many energy drinks. I will say, on day four now, the flavor of cranberry and green tea I am still getting used to, but it is definitely growing on me, and I feel like I am making a healthier choice. In the end, that’s what I was looking for.

Additional information about energy drinks (you may want to stop reading here if you are an energy drink addict):

A recent study conducted by Sogeti’s Vision, Insiration, Navigation, and Trends (VINT) found a new addiction driven by “The App Effect”. The study indicates that people can and will no longer do without what we now call “apps” and personalized information. Nielsen indicates that 57% of iPad users take their device to bed with them. When visiting family or friends, 44% consult their iPad and 58% their smartphone. A recent study called “The World Unplugged”, which asked 1,000 students on four continents to turn off their mobile devices for a period of 24 hours, showed that participants exhibited craving behavior and many were unable to go through with the challenge. At the same time, participants underlined how this technology is essential to the construction and management of their daily lives, with a refined awareness of which apps to leverage in which context: “Mobile phones function both as this generation’s Swiss Army Knife AND its security blanket.”

Being a recent iPad owner myself I can say that I am addicted. Sogeit’s VINT drafted a forecast that offers insight into society’s behavioral patterns in the year 2020. This addition, called New Media Addiction, is one of the ten behavioral changes that will deeply impact the way organizations need to operate. In 2020, there will be no difference between old and new media; there will only be media. Companies will no longer focus on clients’ preferences, but on their behavior. Organizations that fail to come to terms with this will suffer: customers, employees, and stakeholders will simply move on.

Read full article here

Webinar 1: Overview – What is SharePoint

This webinar will cover the basic topic of What is SharePoint. Users will explore various SharePoint sites, understand the differences between Internet sites, Intranets, Team Sites, Workspaces, Extranets, as well as SharePoint Web Applications. For people who have limited experience with the SharePoint environment this webinar will provide a great overview of the technology.

Webinar 2: Sites and Site Templates

This webinar will cover the fundamental concept of SharePoint sites. The primary topics covered include Site Layouts, Navigation,

Creating Sites and the various Site Templates.

Webinar 3: Search

SharePoint has tremendous search capabilities; however there are some configuration settings as well as end user education that need to take place in order to take full advantage of the technology. This webinar will cover the criteria SharePoint uses to perform search and how to enhance the Search results.

Webinar 4: Working with Lists

Lists are another fundamental component of SharePoint and are the bases of storing data. In this webinar users will discover how to add, edit, delete, filter and sort items. We will also cover the Recycle Bin feature.

Webinar 5: Customizing Lists

Once users have a basic understanding of how lists work in SharePoint, this webinar will discuss customizing lists to meet the users’ needs. Topics include list settings, adding custom columns, and creating a custom view of the list. This webinar is one of the areas where users will learn how to reduce the number of folders they use to organize data and rely on SharePoint Search.

Webinar 6: Working with Libraries

Libraries are a type of list template that have additional features such as check-in and check-out. Libraries have many of the same capabilities as other lists. Many of the document management concepts are covered in this webinar including versioning, content approval, publishing,

Webinar 7: Site Features

Every site is based on a site template, and each template has certain features automatically enabled or disabled. This webinar will discuss some of the most popular features of SharePoint such as Publishing and Workflows.

Webinar 8: Using Managed Metadata

Metadata is the defined information that SharePoint uses to search documents and items. While some of the metadata that comes with SharePoint is sufficient for our use, each company has it’s own set of naming conventions and information that also need to be incorporated into the search capability. In this webinar you will see how to create metadata specific to your organization, department, or project and how SharePoint will help you find that information.

Webinar 9: Form Libraries

Form Libraries are fantastic part of SharePoint that allows us to fill in form data in our browser and save the data, along with the form itself to a library. SharePoint utilizes InfoPath is the form template. This webinar will show you how to create a form in InfoPath, publish it to SharePoint and use the form in your site.

Webinar 10: Wiki Page Libraries

Wiki pages are one of the most robust and one of the most underutilized parts of SharePoint. In this webinar you will see how to create wiki pages, common uses of wiki pages, and easy ways to add content to the wiki pages. This technology could possible replace information you currently have stored in other application such as Word or Acrobat.

Webinar 11: Report Libraries

Reports have always been a popular topic of SharePoint. In this webinar you will see how to create a report library and how to connect data from excel to the web parts on a page. The most important part of reports is to make sure you have access to the information. Utilizing web parts on a reports page will allow you to display the information in either a static fashion or real time.

Webinar 12: Workflows

There are five workflows that are available in SharePoint, however depending on the site template chosen for the site collection not all five workflows will be enabled. In this webinar you will learn how enable the specific workflows you want to work with in your site. You will see how to configure the workflows in your list or library and how to execute the workflow either manually or automatically based on a condition.

Webinar 13: Content Types

Content Types are one of the most advanced features of SharePoint. Content Types allow the user to define the fields, workflows, auditing requirements and more for a particular item type in a list or document type in a library. For example, if you have a contacts list you might want to have different information that you keep for internal contacts and external contacts. Content Types allow you to create separate types of contacts, such as Internal Contact and External Contact so when you create a specific type of contact you fill in the information specific to that type of contact.

Webinar 14: Information Management Policies

Information Management Policies allow users to add tracking, auditing, or expiration rules to items in SharePoint. This Webinar will cover Labels, Barcodes, Auditing, and Expiration options for lists, libraries, and content types.

One of the favorite templates of SharePoint 2007 was the Site Directory. It allows users to tag their sites and make them searchable by their tags. A great template for your intranet. However, in SharePoint 2010 the Site Directory was not upgraded and is therefore not available when you try to create a site in the GUI.

Microsoft Consulting Services UK released a CodePlex version of the Site Directory which can be downloaded at http://spsitedirectory2010.codeplex.com/