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 →

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Excel, OfficeWriter

Adding a % of Total Column to a PivotTable

Intro

A customer recently asked for some help with adding a % of Total column for sales data without a pivot table (read about it with Excel and with ExcelWriter). But I wanted to see how the same table and column would be done with a pivot table. Enter Pitan, the Pivot Mage and here we go!

Solution

We start with a basic pivot table that already has the store names as row labels and the sales data as the data values. We want to add a column that shows each stores’s sales totals as a percentage of the sales total over all the stores.

1. Add a duplicate column of the values that you want to show the percentages for. In this case, it’s “Store Sales”, so there will be two columns of “Stores Sales”: one for displaying the raw values and one for calculating the percentages.

2. Display the field values as % of Column Total. This can be done two ways:

  • Right click on the field > Show Values As > % of Column Total
  • Use Value Field Settings to format the field
    1. Go to the field in the field view
    2. Select ‘Value Field Settings’ from the drop down
    3. Go to the Show Values As tab
    4. Select % of Column Total

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. (Optional) Rename the field as desired (from Value Field Settings)

4. Congratulations!

For more information about different field calculations, see Microsoft’s article on how to Calculate values in a PivotTable Report.

 

 

 

 

 

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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 →

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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 →

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Drupal

Drupal on Windows: Using SQL Server Merge Replication

In my first “Drupal on Windows” blog post, I wrote about using Windows authentication with SQL Server. That’s a recommended best practice for SQL Server in any production environment. So with the knowledge that Drupal can run on Windows technologies in a production environment, how can we scale Drupal to achieve high availability? How do we move beyond a single web farm?

One solution is:

  • Geographically dispersed web farms using Global Load Balancing
    • Each web farm resides in it’s own data center
    • Each web farm utilizes it’s own SQL Server instance
  • SQL Server Merge Replication
    • Keep the database in each web farm in sync, so the served content is identical

SQL Server Merge Replication

Setting up merge replication (and global load balancing) is beyond the scope of this blog post, but there are lots of great instructions out there. I would recommend the following reading for those not familiar with merge replication: Continue reading Drupal on Windows: Using SQL Server Merge Replication →

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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 →

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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 →

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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.

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Programming

Joining DataTables in LINQ

[Image via Patou Fine Art]

The Problem

Recently, I encountered a situation where I had to join two Data Tables from databases on two different servers. Had they been on the same server, I would do this in SQL with a simple JOIN statement, but since the databases were on different servers, my options were limited. I could:

  1. Use a linked server (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188279.aspx)
    But: This wasn’t really an option because I wouldn’t be able to modify production servers
  2. Use System.Data and create a DataRelation
    But: DataRelations are clunky and don’t perform LEFT OUTER JOIN’s very well
  3. Create a new DataTable and copy rows over manually (with, for example, a foreach loop)
    But: This would be painfully slow
    And: I’d have to duplicate a lot of null-row handling logic that LINQ and SQL do themselves
  4. Join the tables in the codebehind using C#’s own SQL-like syntax, LINQ.
    But: I had no idea how to use LINQ.

The Solution

After some research, I decided on option #4. To get a basic overview of LINQ, I started by going through 101 LINQ Samples and trying to learn the LINQ syntax. This was my first attempt at getting a method to join two DataTables: Continue reading Joining DataTables in LINQ →

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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 →

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