&c.

SharePoint training and use

At work we are in the process of rolling out Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 across the college, and as a result I went on a three-day training course in Milton Keynes to get up to speed with the system.

SharePoint is best described as a Content Management System, or a Portal system.  It is designed to allow users to create web pages, and to expose information from external systems via web pages.  We are using it to allow departments to easily publish information that they may find useful to other departments, and also to give each user their own MySite (a personal space that they can use to upload anything they like).

SharePoint is a massive system however.  It takes a multitude of servers to get the content to the end users, and installing it is not a simple process.  There are additional systems that need to be linked in, and customisations such as themes and templates need to be installed.  It is, however, a massively customisable system as well.  There are dozens of page and site templates, from blog publishing to document storage to website homepages, and there are features such as workflows and approval tied in at every level if needed.

This makes it an incredibly useful and powerful system, but also incredibly complicated.  All through the training, and in my normal use at work, it is apparent how difficult it can be to enable the simplest features.  Many of the options are in unintuitive places, which can be very time consuming when you need to enable something on a multitude of sub-sites.

The training did show me a lot of useful things though, and I am looking forward to trying some of them out on our system at work.

Dunstable Downs Festival: Friday 28th August 2009

Apparently Central Bedfordshire Council, the National Trust and the BBC have organised a free festival to take place on Dunstable Downs on Friday 28th August 2009.  Details currently seem scarce but from what I can tell BBC Introducing will be there, along with a load of local unsigned bands.  It starts at 12:30 and finishes at 22:00.  I will try to find out a bit more information about it, as this is the first I have heard of the event.

As soon as I know any more information I will post it here.  This might involve a call to the local council.

On being a geek

The trouble with being a geek, as pointed out by my fiancée Emma, is that half the time I write stuff that no-one else understands.  Things that interest me, like blogging, computers, social networks and Free Software, have no relevance to the majority of the people that I interact with in my social life.  Work is slightly different, as being a systems administrator means I am working daily with people that understand what I'm talking about, and the people that don't understand are grateful for my help when they have a problem they don't understand either.

The trick is to balance the two out.  When I am at work I can be as technical as I like, and it means that communicating with the people I am working with is faster because they are on a level playing field.  They understand what I'm talking about.  When I am at home I tend to focus on my lifestyle, which means I can interact better with the people around me in my social life.  There is some cross-over with friends, where they have a mild interest in technology, but then generally the conversation with my friends revolves around cars (an interest shared mainly with them).

Knowing when to be a geek, when to be a car nut, and when to talk about Eastenders is what stops me from looking like the comic book guy when I am socialising.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Asus Eee PC 900A

On Friday I bought myself an Asus Eee PC 900A and thought I would share my first impressions of the machine. I had decided on this netbook in particular because of it's diminutive size and weight, being portable enough to easily drop into a bag and take with me. I also wanted a machine with a Solid State Disk, to increase the battery life and avoid having to keep the mains lead with me and ensure a power socket was nearby.

It has a nine inch screen running at 1024x800 pixels, meaning that despite it's size there is ample screen real-estate for all your windows, and the keyboard is tiny but perfectly usable for small to medium amounts of typing—though I wouldn't want to write a dissertation on it.

I played around with the supplied Xandros-based operating system, liking the speed at which it boots and the compatibility with the hardware, but the whole system felt slightly outdated.  This was mostly due to the use of a low-resource menu/button toolkit, and issue with the update manager failing repeatedly.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix is a variant of the Ubuntu operating system.  Most of the underlying software is identical, but there is a different theme and a new program launching interface that is much easier to use on the small screen than tiny menus.  Installation was simple from a 1GB USB flash drive, which avoided having to find a USB CD-ROM drive.

Boot time is around 10 seconds from powered off to desktop, which is slower than the Xandros-based OS but still faster than most other operating systems.  Currently just under 2.5GB of disk space has been occupied on my root drive, so you may wish to keep this in mind when partitioning the drive.

The operating system is fast to use and all of the software from the standard Ubuntu repositories will install, so you shouldn't have any compatibility issues with unusual or missing libraries.  This also means you can install the full compiler suite to build applications from source if needed—something I found quite difficult with the Xandros OS.

All of the hardware apart from the webcam and microphone are working.  Suspend and resume work as expected, and I had no issues with my wireless or 3G network connections.  Battery life from a full charge is around three hours; plenty of time for light work while you're out or for sitting in the garden for a couple of hours, but not long enough to manage a full working day.  This point is moot however, as the keyboard is a little too small to use for eight hours solid.  Some of the hardware keys such as the wireless radio switch and the sleep key do not work, but the volume and brightness keys all work fine.

The solid state disk is robust and seems fairly reliable, and due to there being no moving parts it really helps with the battery life and the operatng temperature of the machine.  Running it directly on your lap it can get a little warm due to the air vents in the side, but if you were to use it on a table or even on a book on your lap you should notice very little heat from the machine.

Overall I love the combination of the very portable hardware and the well-designed Ubuntu operating system, much more so than Windows or the Xandros-based OS on the same machine.  So if you have an Eee PC, or indeed any netbook, give Ubuntu Netbook Remix a try and see if it works for you.