All posts by Richard

Excel, Women In Tech

Stories from the WIT Trenches: Debra Dalgleish

[This is the sixth in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame at the very last statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. If you’ve ever sought Excel-related help online or in print, chances are you’re familiar with Debra Dalgleish, one of the foremost authorities on Excel and Access development and the author of three books on pivot tables. Here, she talks staring your own home business, getting young girls aware of and excited about careers in tech and kissing correction fluid goodbye. If reading her story inspires you to share yours, please feel to email me.]

Self-employment is the dream job – most of the time. As a computer consultant, working from home, you can set your own hours, schedule meetings at convenient times, or meet with clients online. You’re the boss, so you can pass on projects that don’t appeal to you, if your workload gets too high.

If you have a young family, running your own computer-based business can give you more time with the children, while still earning an income. That’s why I got started, and now, even though the children have moved out, I wouldn’t want any other job.

My work, as an Excel and Access developer, is challenging and rewarding. My clients bring interesting projects, and push me to continue to improve my skills. In this business, there’s always something new to learn. Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Debra Dalgleish →

SharePoint

Boston SharePoint Salon Recap: Powerview and Fall in a Glass

Cross-posted from bostonsharepointsalon.com:

Last night’s Salon was, by I want to say all accounts, a rather smashing success. (Perhaps a smashed success for a few philosophes.) About twenty locals, newbies and visitors braved the seriously odious weather to talk about, among a few many other things, Power View and the revamped BI Stack. Many many thanks to Sean Boon (b | t), from Microsoft’s Power View team, for coming all the way from Providence on a tweet’s notice—your inside expertise was much appreciated!

If you’d like to come to the next Salon, consider this your invitation! It’ll happen sometime in mid-December–stay tuned for specifics!

Business Intelligence, SharePoint

Everything You Wanted To Know About Power View—But Were Afraid to Ask

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Before you decide whether Power View is the best damn thing to happen to self-service BI since graph paper or is just a smoke and mirrors, CamelCaseless extension to PowerPivot, you need to know its gist. The following blog posts and videos will give you just that, from a (mostly) business user perspective. Read ’em, and then get cracking with the CTP3 version, available for download here.

  • Dan English’s (b | t) “Intro to BI Semantic Model & Delivering Self-Service Reporting with Power View (Crescent)” video and slide deck

A comprehensive MSBI presentation that covers the BI Semantic Model concept, Power View and SQL Server Analysis Services with Power Pivot in SQL Server 2012.

Continue reading Everything You Wanted To Know About Power View—But Were Afraid to Ask →

SharePoint

NEUGS Part 10: Metadata, the Sign and Signified

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Recently, I read Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, The Marriage Plot. It doesn’t have the scope or political bent of Freedom, but it’s in the same vein of contempory Great American Novels. And it is great; you should read it. Anyways, two of the narrators in the book take semoitics classes at Brown (MP takes place in the early 80s, when all the cool kids forwent real books for books about how books weren’t real). In a nutshell, semiotics is the study of a word’s two facets: its physical appearance and what that appearance conveys to people who view it. Saussure called these two parts the “signifier” and the “signified,” which is a concise way of looking at it.
Here, I’m going to apply Saussure’s signifier and signified to metadata in SharePoint. (This is a bastardized appropriation, so to the throngs of strucural linguists who read this blog, apologies in advance.) Metadata is data about your data, obviously. It manifests itself as tags in fields in lists and document libraries, where it identifies documents and files as being such, and as having been created x days ago, and as containing information pertaining to graham crackers or uranium deposits or fingerling potatoes.

The signifying part of metadata is the tagness of the tag. When you look at a document library and see that there is an additional column next to the document column, you know that the contents of this second column exists to inform you about the contents of the first column. The second column’s existence might be something your administrator stipulated as being a necessary for all docs uploaded to all site collection libraries,  or it might have been created when you created the document library, or, it may have been added automatically when you assigned a content type to that list or library.

The signified part of metadata is what you learn from a specific tag- say, “fingerling potatoes.” When you read this tag, you know that the tag’s document contains information about fingerling potatoes. While the signifier is universal- all users of SharePoint who come to a document library or list or search results page recognize the purpose of the field(s) beside the item/document itself, the signified’s meaning is unique to its creator’s network.

All organizations need metadata to help them find and identify documents and files, but what the metadata is made up of, and how it is generated can vary from industry to industry, company to company and even employee to employee.  Metadata terms and term sets stipulated by the administrator prior to the creation of a document or document library fall into the taxonomy bracket; metadata keywords entered by the document owner on the fly fall into the folksonomy bracket. From a Saussurian standpoint, whether a piece of metadata was created taxonomically or folksonomically is the signifier, and what is in that piece of metadata is the signified.

Not sure if any of this is significant (heh) to you all, or just a load of blather, but it helped me get my head around the concept and purpose of metadata. Hope it helps you as well!

Further resources:

Events

BoSS and Beyond: Upcoming Boston-Area Tech Events

In case you missed my or Geoff’s or Sadie’s or Jason’s tweets, know this: the members of the Boston SharePoint Salon, or BoSS, will convene this Thursday, 10/27, at Eastern Standard in Kenmore, between the hours of 7-9pm. We’ll be talking about Power View and self-service BI, among other things. All are welcome, and you can RSVP here and get more info , here or here.

Can’t make it? Hate SharePoint? Don’t even know what Power View is? No worries—there are plenty of other upcoming events on the Boston tech horizon. Below, a subjective listing of the best, in chronological order.

1.       Boston Code Camp 16

a.       What:  A veritable multi-platform, polylingual workshop bonanza. If you have interest in HTML5, cloud architecture, ASP.NET MVC3, jQuery, LINQ, Netduino, Metro Style Apps, SharePoint, iOS5, XNA 4.0… you should go.

b.      Who: Patrick Hynds, Bob Goodearl, Chris Bowen and Chris Pels

c.       When: 10/29, 8:30am-6:40pm

d.      Where: Microsoft, 201 Jones Road, Waltham

e.      How: by registering on eventbrite

f.        Cost: Free

2.       WhereCamp Boston

a.       What: A two-day conference devoted to the intersection of technology and geography, with sessions on GIS, web mapping, start-ups, mobile computing, social software and more. Cartosoft’s Andres Ferrate, Development Seed’s Tom MacWright and Unterbahn’s Jeff Warren are keynoting.

b.      Who: Ignite Spatial Boston

c.       When: 10/29-10/30

d.      Where: Microsoft NERD Center, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge

e.      How: by registering on eventbrite

f.        Cost: 10$/day

3.       Network Visualization: Everything You Wanted to Know (But Were Afraid to Ask)

a.       What: IBM’s Frank van Ham will give a practical overview of the common algorithms used in drawing network visualizations, and the common pitfalls associated with implementing these algorithms.

b.      Who: Boston Data Visualization

c.       When: 11/1, 7pm

d.      Where: Bocoup Loft, 355 Congress Street, Boston

e.      How: by registering on BDV’s meetup page

f.        Cost: Free

4.       Nicholas Zakas on High Performance JavaScript

a.       What: Ex-Yahoo! front-end engineer and  High Performance Javascript author Nicholas Zakas will take you through some of Javascript’s speedblocks, and how to dismantle them.

b.      Who: Web Performance Boston

c.       When: 11/3, 6:30pm

d.      Where: Wayfair Offices, 177 Huntington Ave, 24th Floor, Boston

e.      How: By registering on WPB’s meetup page

5.       Google Analytics for Developers

a.       What: An evening spent investigating what lies under Google Analytics’ hood, and which parts contain information that the business users on your team will want to know.

b.      Who: Google Analytics author Justin Cutroni and Boston PHP

c.       When: 11/9, 6pm

d.      Where: Microsoft NERD Center, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge

e.      How: by registering on Boston PHP’s meetup page

f.        Cost: Free

6.       MIT Enterprise Forum: Changing the World: How  Innovators Are Using the Web for Social Action

a.       What: An roundtable on how innovative web strategies are being implemented in the non-profit sphere, moderated by Covestor’s Asheesh Advani. Water.org’s Mike McCamon, Boston Rising’s Tiziana Dearing, SoChange’s Mike Norman and Charity Partner’s David Wagner are speaking.

b.      Who: Doug Banks and the MIT Enterprise Forum

c.       When: 11/9, 5:30pm-9pm

d.      Where: MIT Stata Center, Kirsch Auditorium, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

e.      How: by registering at mitforumcambridge.org

f.        Cost: Students and members, free, non-members, $25

7.       Babson Entrepreneurship Forum

a.       What: Three days of panels, lectures and networking events aimed at entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. Among the keynotes are HBS’ Michael Porter, General Catalyst Partner’s Charlie Baker, Kairos Society’s Ankur Jain and CNN Analyst David Gergen; speakers include Hubspot’s Andrew Quinn,  Flagship Venture’s Noubar Afeyan, Idea Paint’s John Goscha and 410Lab’s David Troy.

b.      Who: Babson College Graduate Student Association

c.       When: 11/11-11/13

d.      Where: Babson College Main Campus, 231 Forest Street, Wellesley MA

e.      How: by registering at babsonforum.com

f.        Cost: Students, $60-140; Professionals, $125-205

8.       HTML5 Game Camp

a.       What: A day devoted to HTML5 games and the tools, skills and standards you need to know to make them. The camp ends with a judging showcase, so come with a laptop and your listening cap.

b.      Who:  Microsoft

c.       When: 11/17, 8:30am-5:00pm

d.      Where: Microsoft NERD Center, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge

e.      How: by registering on eventbrite

f.        Cost: free

SharePoint

Boston SharePoint Salon: Power View and Visualization

PowerPivot, Windows 8 Metro tiles, Office 365, Power View… if there’s one category of user Microsoft seems to building its future upon, it’s the business user. And by business user, I mean a given employee who needs to analyze and interpret data without writing a single query. Without even needing to know that “query” has a technical definition. For years, Excel was the only answer MSFT provided, but many of today’s business users want to be able to not only analyze but interact with data; and the data needs to be dynamic, and thus is optimally accessed from the browser. Enter: visualization, which is an interactive, abstracted visual representation of a given data set.Power View, née Project Cresent, is Microsoft’s new visualization application, and it sits inside SharePoint Server 2010. With Crescent, users can turn tables of data from PowerPivot workbooks or SQL Server 2012 instances into interactive charts, tiles and other vizualizations.
At the October Boston SharePoint Salon (BoSS), we’ll be talking Power View and the dataviz trend in general, its impact on database devs and admins, how it may play out in Office 15 and the next version of SharePoint and how many Euros, approximately, it takes to smuggle 20 kilos of guanciale past customs. Cool? Cool.
BoSS is happening at Eastern Standard, home of the Frobisher. If you want in, invite yourself on Facebook or @ me on Twitter.  See you there!

OfficeWriter

Creating and Hooking Up a Custom Action in WiX

As mentioned previously, we started using WiX for our own installers. Out of the box, WiX can do pretty much anything you’d like, but sometimes you need to do a little something extra. One avenue we can use is a Custom Action (CA). There are quite a few types, but among the most useful is the Type 1 Custom Action. This style of action is a function call to an external Custom Action Dynamic Link Library.

These types of custom actions can call code from basically anywhere, so they can utilize existing code for things like validating a license key, or determining other requirements. In this tutorial I’ll show you everything you need to create a Type 1 Immediate Custom Action and link it into the installer.

Part 1: Creating and Hooking Up a Custom Action DLL

With Votive, setting up a DLL to be a Custom Action DLL is as easy as setting up a new project. Continue reading Creating and Hooking Up a Custom Action in WiX →

Business Intelligence, SharePoint

Masterpiece Theatre SharePoint: Power View and Hadoop

In this episode of Masterpiece Theatre: SharePoint, we’re talking Cresent erPower View. Press play to learn why Power View is good for PowerPivot and bad for Tableau, how it transforms big Hadoop data into technophobe-friendly animated reports and what your edition of SharePoint needs to get it up and running.

Related Posts

Events, SharePoint

SPC11: Porchetta, Pirouettes and a Whole Lot of Demos

[Jumpshot via the lovely and talented Marcy Kellar]

Unless you’re a vegetarian, teetotaler or Luddite, you’ll find nothing (too)incendiary here, folks! If I had to encapsulate our team’s SPC11experience in three words, they’d be: demos, sessions and networking. Since that is boring and vague, I’m going to break it down by numbers, instead.

24: Terabytes in Yahoo’s cube (from Kamal Hathi’s session “Vision and Strategy of BI”)

50,000: Organizations that signed up for Office365 within two weeks of its launch. So, 2.5% of what Call of Duty Elite got.

324: OfficeWriter Export to Word and Export to Excel demos shown. We were surprised to see that the demand for Word template generation was much higher than that for Excel, as outside the SharePoint world, that proportion is inversed.

Continue reading SPC11: Porchetta, Pirouettes and a Whole Lot of Demos →

SharePoint, Women In Tech

Angels at the Gate: Tech Conferences and the Booth Babe Strategy

[Disclaimer: This is not my SPC11 recap. That is forthcoming, but in the meantime, please check out our video recaps]

There are three types of people you’ll meet at a software conference: attendees, vendors and booth babes.  The attendees are there to pick up new skills, network and score swag. The vendors are there to convince decision-makers to make the right decision. The booth babes are there to reel in the decision makers. You could make the argument that the booth babes are also vendors, but as temporary hires with little-to-no knowledge of the product, the only things they are vending are themselves.

I have two main cases against the booth babe strategy. The first, understandably, is from a feminist standpoint. The use of women as bait is objectifying and creates, to many attendees, a gender-based binary: you are a man or you are a booth babe. (It also, by the way, paints the attendees as slobbering cretins who can be manipulated through their basest instincts.) However, the feminist case against booth babes is, unfortunately, too general to be compelling. Sorry lady, you say, sex sells. Which brings me to my second, fiduciary case:  does it? And, more to the point: does it sell software? Continue reading Angels at the Gate: Tech Conferences and the Booth Babe Strategy →