Category: Blog

Blog

Mind Mapping as a GTD Tool

Posted on by jaywll

I’ve posted a lot recently about myĀ SharePointĀ development work.

Itā€™s a topic I know quite a bit about (if I do say so myself), but this is not a SharePoint blog and I have no intentions of making it one – itā€™s simply that I blog mostly about my work, of the nine projects and tasks I have on my plate currently five of them have at least some kind of custom SharePoint component to them, and two are full-blown web-apps built on top of SharePoint.

With so much going on how, I hear you ask, do I stay organized and keep on top of things?

(Full disclosure: nobody asked. Iā€™m going to tell you all anyway)

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Mind mapping!

I’ve been aware of mind mapping for quite some time, and about a year ago I readĀ a lifehacker articleĀ comparing mind mapping tools. I was interested but I didnā€™t have a good use-case for them at the time, andĀ I’m not a fan of technology just for technologyā€™s sake.

Whatā€™s changed in the past year is the nature of my work. A year ago a was adhering fairly closely to the title of Business Analyst that youā€™ll see on my business cards – I was involved in a relatively small number of projects at a time, but I was usually only responsible for delivering on a subset of the overall scope.

As my role has evolved, I find myself putting on my project manager shoes much more frequently. I have a larger number of projects, and while I’m ultimately accountable for delivery on all aspects of them, I canā€™t possibly make myself responsible for every detail or Iā€™d drown in minutiae.

So a few weeks ago I downloadedĀ XMind, asĀ recommended by lifehacker readers, and I fell in love with it almost immediately.

At the centre of my map is a node called ā€œTo Do,ā€ but thatā€™s probably a bit inaccurate and it speaks to how I thought Iā€™d be using the tool rather than how I actually ended up doing things. Off that I hang projects, initiatives, and tasks, and branching out from those are multiple things.

There are to-do items for myself, often broken down into sub-tasks inĀ a WBS kind of way, questions that need answers, and tasks where I’m waiting on other people. XMind has markers (different types of symbol you can attach to a branch) and I use these to differentiate the types of sub-item I use. I track completion of my own to-do items on an eight point scale, I assign priorities to things, I add notes, and I call drill-down into a view of a single branch in the tree if thatā€™s what I happen to be focussing my attention on at the time.

Thatā€™s all kind of irrelevant, though. The end result is representative of a map of my mind and how I work, and your mind and approach to your work are probably not the same. The point is that the tool is flexible enough to work for you, however you choose to use it.

Regardless, mind mapping helps me keep track of the many things I have going on in a very easy to understand (for me) way. I now have XMind open on my computer more or less all day long, and itā€™s quickly become my go-to productivity tool.

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Blog

SPServices addAttachment jQuery Example

Posted on by jaywll

Update: I’ve posted some example code that works in Internet Explorer 9!

If you’re having a few issues adding attachments via ajax and SPServices on SharePoint have a look over the code snippets below.

To upload a file to a list you need to make use of the fileReader javascript class, using the readAsDataURL method and stripping the first part off the dataurl to get the base64 component. Then submit this to SPServices.

I’ve been asked a few times to add the ability to upload attachments to SharePoint tools that I’ve created, and I’ve never been able to achieve it until I eventually came across this blog post last week.

If (like me) you’re developing in a front-end only way without any server-side programming then it seems like this is the way to upload files and attach them to SharePoint list items.

It relies on the javascript fileReader feature so your users will need a fairly modern browser… which is where I ran into trouble. The default browser deployed within my company is Internet Explorer 9, and that doesn’t have fileReader support.

With much work and even more googling I was able to get this technique to work in Internet Explorer 9. In the future I’ll write more about how I managed it, and how you can too!

SPServices addAttachment jQuery Example

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Blog

Your Message Will Be Answered in the Order in Which it was Received. Perhaps.

Posted on by jaywll

My friend and colleague Matt (@wastedgenius) retweeted this from one of his twitter contacts a couple of weeks ago.

There was once a time when I didn’t understand (what could you possibly be doing that’s more important than what I want you to do for me), but this is absolutely how I behave now too.

If I intend to respond to you I’ll flag your email for follow-up, but sometimes when the size of that list becomes overwhelming I just delete a bunch of stuff from it.

Sorry.

Update:

Matt has posted about this too: Email is my answering machine. Enjoy!

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Blog

Comments, Likes and Reblogs

Posted on by jaywll

I made a few minor improvements to my custom tumblr theme last night, and the end result is that you can now comment on the stuff that I post here. Yay!

If you’re also on tumblr and you choose to like or reblog one of my posts then that shows up too. If you’re on the main page of the blog then a count appears just underneath the tags to the left of this text (assuming that there’s anything to count), and if you’ve clicked in to a post or followed a link from my twitter or elsewhere then there’s a more detailed listing of the tumblr love received toward the bottom of the page. This applies to both this blog and shrapnel, although shrapnel has no comments.

That being said, I haven’t made it easy to like, reblog or follow me. The specialised and complex nature of my exact setup (of course) means that the standard links for these functions that tumblr puts on the page don’t work, so I’ve turned them off altogether. Next on the to-do list is for me to bring them back, so watch out for that and show me some tumblr love when you see them.

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Blog

Lessons Learned

Posted on by jaywll

Last week I facilitated a “lessons learned” session as part of wrapping a project that I’ve just completed. We gathered a lot of great feedback we can apply to future projects, and a lot of the positive comments around the management of this project were about flexibility.

For some reason, it brought to mind a scene from the movie Broken Arrow.

Vic Deakins:

“This is battle! And battle is a highly fluid situation. You plan on your contingencies, and I have. You keep your initiative, and I will.”

It’s maybe a bit too dramatic to draw too direct a parallel with what I do (my life is not, in fact, an action movie), but the point is certainly transferable between the worlds of nuclear terrorism and project management.

As a project manager you plan. You plan for everything you can think of, and these are often elaborate plans involving resource and people management, procurement, otherwise writing big cheques and spending somebody else’s money, and many other levels of detail. The most important thing you can plan for though is what you’re going to do when the plan falls apart.

You will deviate from your plan somehow. Hopefully it’s not in too big a way, and it may even be to everybody’s advantage to do so. For my project there was no show-stopping issue, just handful of small ones and a couple of details we didn’t foresee.

The positive feedback about the flexibility of the project and the project team was because we had a plan for our plans falling through.

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Blog

SharePoint Development: Lesson 2

Posted on by jaywll

Welcome back to my series of posts on SharePoint development!

At the end of lesson one we’d used some basic HTML, javascript and jQuery skills to create a tool for calculating shipping costs, and we’re hosting the tool on our team SharePoint site so that everybody who needs it has access.

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This is great and all, but as we noted – it doesn’t exactly feel like our tool is a part of SharePoint. That might be fine if we’d built something extremely complex where having it as a self-contained webapp of sorts made a lot of sense, but it seems wrong for our purposes.

What we need to do is somehow build the tool into the main page of our SharePoint site so our users don’t even have to think if they want to use it – it’s just right there waiting for them.

The Content Editor Web Part

Believe it or not, we laid the groundwork for this in lesson 1 even without knowing it. The final step last time was to add a content editor web part to our page with a link to the tool in it.

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The content editor webpart is much more powerful than that though, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.Ā First, let’s take a closer look at what we have there already.

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From the web part’s menu, choose the Edit Web Part option. An options pane will appear on the right of the screen.

If you’re using SharePoint 2007 there’s a button in the options pane called Source Editor, and this is where you’ll want to go. On SharePoint 2010 you’ll need to click into the web part first of all so that the ribbon appears at the top of the screen, then select HTML and Edit HTML Source from the Format Text ribbon.

Right now, my source looks like this:

ā€‹<a class="ms-rteFontSize-7" href="/web/shipping.aspx">Shipping Cost Calculator</a>

Simple enough, but hopefully you’re beginning to see where I’m going with this. The content of the web part is rendered inline as part of the HTML of the overall page, and we can put whatever we want in there. We can only edit this one snippet of the page where the web part lives, but that’s OK – it’s good enough.

Last time we included a reference to the jQuery library in the <head> section of the page, but does it actually need to be in the head? It may not be semantically great code, but we can put that reference anywhere. And once we have we’ll have all the power of jQuery at our disposal to manipulate the main page of the site however we see fit.

For now, let’s modify the code we used in lesson one to make it appropriate for inclusion in the middle of a page:

/web/js/jquery-1.11.0.min.js

   $(document).ready(function() {
      $('input#calculate').click(function() {
         var shippingcost = 19.99;
         
         if ($('input#itemweight').val() > 20) {
            shippingcost += (Math.ceil(($('input#itemweight').val() - 20) / 5) * 3);
         }
         
         $('span#shippingcost').html(shippingcost);
      });
   });



   
Item weight:

     lbs

     
   

   
   
Shipping cost: $0

Paste that in to the content editor web part’s source, and save. On my installation of SharePoint 2010 a warning pops up telling me my HTML may have been edited. I don’t know why SharePoint feels the need to do this, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

Our shipping cost calculator is now looks like it’s really a part of our site homepage, and we’re done another quick lesson!

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Taking it Further

What we’ve done here is great for our purposes, but we’ve actually opened up a world of extra possibility here.

As I noted, the HTML and javascript we’ve pasted into our content editor web part goes directly into the page, inline. In some respects that’s not the best – we have script tags in the middle of the page which isn’t really the correct approach, but in other ways it’s extremely powerful.

We can use our script to manipulate the page however we choose. If the approach we’ve chosen to take is to include our code in a web part then we probably don’t want to go nuts and change everything, but if you want to manipulate, say, the document’s title? Easy!

document.title = 'Site Home and Shipping Calculator'

If you want to include a custom CSS file? Done!

$("head").append("<link rel='stylesheet' href='/web/css/example.css' type='text/css' media='screen'>");

And if you have another web part that you want to use jQuery in, there’s no need to include a second reference to the library – one per page is all you need. You can easily have one content editor web part that influences another.

Conclusion

So, in lesson one we built a simple tool and now in lesson two we’ve integrated it right into our SharePoint page. There’s a lot you can do with this knowledge. In lesson three we’ll go deeper still though, and begin to use data from SharePoint lists in our tool with the help of the SPServices jQuery add-on.

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Blog

Be Your Own Boss (Without Quitting Your Job)

Posted on by jaywll

Many people dream of being their own boss. You’ve probably encountered a good number of them in your lifetime, and you may well work with several of them right now. They seem to be especially prevalent amongst the professional peers I work on projects with, and more so still on the IT side where a lot of the project managers and business analysts I work with are actually contractors who are their own boss.

People have this dream for many reasons. Some are extremely valid, like a desire to increase your project experience by working on projects for multiple organizations across different industries, but there seems to be a lot of people who want to be their own boss just so they can escape their existing tyrannical boss, long hours, and unmanageable workload.

These people are wrong.

The problems they’re trying to escape are brought about by their approach to work, and the unfortunate other side of that double-edged sword is that if they’ve been unable to change their approach, they won’t do well as their own boss either.

First of all, let’s consider this:

I don’t have a boss, I have a leader. I’m lucky in that I have a great one, but leadership as a discipline, a science, an art, and a skillset is hardly a new idea, so frankly if the person above you in the org-chart isn’t one then you probably should escape. You don’t need direct reports to be a leader and if that individual didn’t develop leadership attributes before they got some (you) then that’s a problem.

My boss, by most of the definitions of the word, is already me.

As usual, what I’m talking about here is ROWE – the results only work environment.

The third of the 13 ROWE guideposts is “every day feels like a Saturday,” and the ROWE book has this to say about it:

This is how entrepreneurs and freelancers live. Talk to successful self-employed people and they will describe days that are full but not hectic, that mix personal with professional in a way that is almost seamless.

Thinking like an entrepreneur (or acting like I’m my own boss, if you’d prefer to put it that way) has become very important to the way that I work, especially if I’m particularly busy like I was last week.

If you’re talking about the old-school working environment of old then you’re answerable to your boss for your actions – not just what you do, but how you do it. That’s why being your own boss is so attractive to people if they’re unfortunate enough to be in that situation.

If you’re self-employed then you’re answerable only for your output – what you do – although you are answerable in a big way because your livelihood depends upon it. You’re answerable to yourself, to your customers, and to your employees if you have any.

I, too, am answerable only for my output, and guess what? My livelihood depends upon it too. If my output isn’t up to scratch I get fired, and so I should. Sure, there’s somebody above me on the org-chart and that might be who I’m primarily answerable to (or at least that’s who would do any firing that proved necessary), but that really makes no difference. I have all of the freedom of being an entrepreneur coupled with all the benefits that come from being part of a large organization with great leaders to support and guide me.

Why would I want it any other way?

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Blog

SharePoint Development: Tools of the Trade

Posted on by jaywll

As I noted in my last post, lesson two of my SharePoint development series is still nothing more than an item in the “someday” section of my to-do list at the moment, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a few tools that I find invaluable when I’m doing SharePoint development work.

  • Notepad++
    Any good text editor with a focus on code will do, but Notepad++ is my tool of choice, not least because it’s available in a portable version that I can run on my work computer without having to ask our IT department to install anything for me (not that I would ever run unapproved software, obviously. I’m just saying you could).
  • SPServices jQuery Library
    I’ll be introducing this little gem in lesson 3, if/when I get around to writing it.
  • Find List and View GUIDs
    SharePoint lists and views all have unique IDs assigned to them by the system, and it’s useful (again, for reasons that will become clear later) to be able to find them. This simple tool does just that.
  • SharePoint List Item Editor
    Another simple but extremely useful tool. This one presents lists in a grid view which is great for mass-editing, copying and pasting from Excel, etc, etc.

Enjoy!

Update:

I’d previously also listed SharePoint CAML Query Helper in this list, with the caveat that I hadn’t actually tried it but screenshots I’d seen made me hopeful that it would make the process of building CAML queries (which are the method by which you can control what data from a list is returned to you when you’re using SPServices) easier.

It’s is a worthwhile tool to have in your toolbox and it’s great for testing CAML queries, but it didn’t make building them as easy as I’d hoped.

What I want is a tool that lets me select a list field, enter the criteria by which I want to filter on that field, and then spits out the CAML query that I need to use. If anybody knows of such a tool please let me know in the comments!

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