All posts by Richard

SharePoint

Office 365 vs Google Apps vs HyperOffice vs Zoho

Battle of the Online Collaboration Suites

[Excerpted from Nothing But SharePoint]

Last week, Alpesh Nakar published a review of Office 365 in which he asserted that “there is no competition for Office 365. Simply nothing.” Sweeping statements like that are catnip to this crochety blogger, so I decided to play devil’s advocate and say: there are a number cloud-based collaboration suites, and presumably most of them have some advantages and some disadvantages over Microsoft’s version.

For the sake of efficiency and my own sanity, I only looked at three of the most popular cloud collaboration suites: Google Apps, HyperOffice and Zoho Collaboration Apps, along with Office 365 Kiosk, SMB and Enterprise editions. I compared each in terms of desktop features, platform compatibility, browser compatibility, system requirements, administration and support offerings. My findings? Not to be all “it depends on your needs” but… it depends on your needs. And on your re$ources. If you want a one sentence recommendation: go with Office365 Enterprise if offline document editing, heavy-duty formatting (especially of PowerPoint presentations) and workflow are integral to your company’s mo, and if you’re all running on Windows.

Continue reading Office 365 vs Google Apps vs HyperOffice vs Zoho →

Excel, OfficeWriter

Creating a ‘% of Total’ Column in Excel

Intro

A customer came to me recently with the following request:

I have a fairly simple question, but cannot seem to make it work. I’m creating a simple table in OfficeWriter Excel. One column outputs general sales dollars. I’m trying to create a column next to it that will populate the % of the total sales for each row. So, it will look like this:

Store Sale $ % of Sales Total
Store 1 $2500 50%
Store 2 $2500 50%

Excel Pivot Tables can do this easily using the Field Value Settings, however, I’m creating a simple table and NOT a pivot table. Any help would be great.

We’re going to start by walking through how to create a % of Total column in Excel with static data. Read how to do this in a pivot table and with ExcelWriter data markers .

Solution

We start with a basic table that has the total sales for a number of stores. We want to add a column that shows each store’s sales total as a percentage of the sales total over all the stores. Continue reading Creating a ‘% of Total’ Column in Excel →

Events, SharePoint

Boston SharePoint Salon: A Shared Mobility

Technology-wise, ours is a nebulous world, but mobile’s increased prominence is one point of certainty. It’s not hard to imagine using our phones to unlock our apartments, start our cars, buy our groceries, record our sleep rhythms, yell at our significant other when he opens that container of Chubby Hubby… And on the business side of things, an increasingly accessible workforce translates into an increasingly accessible workspace. More and more workers have a need for a mobile replica of their brick-and-mortar office: they need to be able to do things like read and approve documents, fill out forms and assign tasks on the fly. In SharePoint, we have a potential vehicle for an empowered mobile workforce, but at this stage, both in-house and third-party offerings are underdeveloped. Continue reading Boston SharePoint Salon: A Shared Mobility →

SharePoint, Women In Tech

Stories from the WIT Trenches: Marcy Kellar

[This is the fifth in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame at the very least statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. If you’ve gone to any SharePoint conferences in the past few years, you may have met-and had your jumpshot taken by-Marcy Kellar. A bubbly usability-focused consultant, Marcy is a passionate and supportive member of the SharePoint community at large. Check out her SharePoint blog here, and her event photography portfolio here. And if reading her story inspires you to share yours, please feel free to email me.]

Hello.  I’m Marcy Kellar. I own my own boutique consultancy that focuses on solution strategy and user experience design.  I am a consultant who goes by whichever title is appropriate at the time.  I’m a solution strategist, solution architect, user experience architect, user interface designer, creative director, branding specialist, business analyst.  Basically, I solve problems using user-centered design methods.  My primary focus is on SharePoint but I also engage in early strategy envisioning and user experience design while its platform agnostic.

1)       Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment–a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology? Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Marcy Kellar →

SharePoint

NEUGS Part 6: SharePoint Libraries or Between the Stacks

When I was eight, I got blacklisted from my elementary school’s library because I’d lost too many books (I think my check-out : return ratio was 1:9.) In those days, I really could have used a library more like SharePoint’s, where nothing checked out is lost unless I delete it. Not that inadvertent deletion is an impossibility, but I’d like to think it’s an improbabality.

Annnnyways. “Library” is one of MSFT’s better terms, in that it accurately describes the component’s functionality, which is: store content. “But a list stores content too,” you say. Yep. I didn’t say: “distinguishing, boundary-laying term.” Basically, the way I think of it is that a library holds content created outside SharePoint, like Word docs and pictures, and a list holds content created inside SharePoint, like tasks and meeting attendees. Continue reading NEUGS Part 6: SharePoint Libraries or Between the Stacks →

SharePoint

NEUGS Part 5: A SharePoint Page Is Like the Box Holding the Chocolates

 

[Image via Steve Ottenad]

In SharePoint as in life, a page is a place that stores information in a visible format. In life, you might use ultra glossy paper for your photography opus and parchment for your diplomas. The same holds true for SharePoint, minus the parchment paper, which is hopefully coming in Office 2015. Anyways, there are two primary types of pages: site pages and application pages.

The Site Page:

There are three types of site pages: the publishing page, the wiki page and the web part page.

Events, SharePoint

23 Lessons from SharePoint Saturday the Conference

This past Thursday-Saturday, Alison, Nick, Ben and I repped SoftArtisans and OfficeWriter at the inaugural SharePoint Saturday The Conference. Between speaking engagements, vlogging, dance parties and running demos on OfficeWriter’s SharePoint integration, there wasn’t a whole lot of downtime, but as Sandy Ussia told me, “I’ll sleep next week.” (Plus, unless you have Freudian recall, sleeping makes for a boring blog post.) Many attendees and speakers have already published their recaps, but this one is coming to you fashionably late, in a fashionable list.

Claire:

1.       If you don’t have anything nice to say, look up. The cloud was definitely this conference’s hot topic, with everyone from Mary Jo Foley to Jeremy Thake to Joel Ward weighing in. One takeaway: Microsoft’s in-the-works Online Services Delivery Platform will bring all the hosted services into one infrastructure. Maybe it’ll be accessible through a browser-based tool bar, too. Continue reading 23 Lessons from SharePoint Saturday the Conference →

Events, OfficeWriter, SharePoint

SoftArtisans at SharePoint Saturday The Conference

Mr. Jones Goes to Washington

Plus three more of us, but Ben’s surname is most conducive to Capra-homage. Anyways, this Wednesday through Saturday, the SA Crew is storming das Kapital/Annendale, VA with the lofty intentions of a) getting to know the people behind the avatars, b) talking shop, which in our case translates to demonstrating some of the things you can do when you integrate OfficeWriter into SharePoint, c) learning about everything from Office365 to migration to branding to unicorns, d) blasting our speaker-sourced SPSTCDC playlist all day, urry day. If you have some downtime between sessions, please stop by booth 320 to hang out/bust some moves/ ogle some schmancy SharePoint-to-Office reports with us. Also, if you’re a developer, admin or BI analyst, you should definitely check out Ben’s two sessions on  custom workflow actions and advanced document processing with OfficeWriter in SharePoint: Continue reading SoftArtisans at SharePoint Saturday The Conference →

Women In Tech

Stories from the WIT Trenches: Erin Stellato

[This is the fourth in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame at the very least statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. Those of you engaged in the virtual and IRL SQL communities may already know Erin Stellato from her active and informative presences at conferences and user groups, on Twitter and on her blog. Here, she talks Commodore 64s, nature vs. nuture and her evolution from Kinesiology major to Senior DBA. If reading her story inspires you to share yours, please feel free to email me.]

My name is Erin Stellato and I’m a Senior Database Engineer for a software company outside Cleveland, Ohio.  I have been working in technology for almost 11 years, and with SQL Server for over 8.  I’ve been involved in the SQL Community since 2010, and spend my time on Twitter, blogging and presenting at SQLSaturdays.  I am active in our local user group and will be presenting at my first PASS Summit this fall.

1)      Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment—a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology?

I think it starts with my dad…he always had the latest electronics.  My dad loves watching TV, especially movies.  In our house this meant that we had a big TV, a satellite and a VCR.  We also had an Intellivision, which was a bummer for me because all my friends had Ataris, but I still played it.  A lot.  We also had a Commodore 64.  I remember my mom sitting down and typing out a “Hello World!” program.  I tried it as well, and figured out how to make it type different words.  I thought that was cool.  My mom worked in the radiology department of a hospital, and when I would tag along when she got called in.  I was able to see her use the Ultrasound or CT machines, which were pretty new at that time.  It was a lot of lights and buttons, but you could see inside a person on the fly.  It didn’t require the waiting of a normal x-ray…point, shoot, develop, wait, and then see.  Technology was pervasive in my life growing up, but it wasn’t something we discussed.  It was just there. Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Erin Stellato →

SharePoint

NEUGS Part 4: A Workspace by Any Other Name Would Be a Site

[The Team Site. Really feeling the beige blazer and mildly ethnically diverse group of mildly pleased office workers.]

I’ve already danced over the different sites available in SharePoint 2010; now I’m going to dive into them. Essentially, the gist is that there are a bunch of different site templates in SharePoint and mostly they are different in name and in focus, but not in format. Before we go further, I’d like to tell you a little bit about the site collection, top level sites and subsites.

The site collection is not a type of site–it is the collection of sites that fall under one top-level site. Your organization could have hundreds of them, if it so choosed. Certainly, you want more than one, as each comes with its own administration and security settings, libraries, recycle bins etc…

Continue reading NEUGS Part 4: A Workspace by Any Other Name Would Be a Site →