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Paul Culmsee Profile |
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An obscure “failed to create the configuration database” issue…
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
You would think that after years of installing SharePoint in various scenarios, that I would be able to get past step 3 in the configuration wizard (the step that creates the configuration database). But today I almost got nailed by an issue that – while in hindsight is dead-set obvious – was rather difficult to diagnose.
Basically it was a straightforward two server farm installation. The installer account had local admin rights on the web front end server and sysadmin rights on the [read].
Posted: Thu, Feb 2nd '12 |
On the decay (or remarkable recurrence) of knowledge
Paul Culmsee
“That’s only 10%…”
One of my mentors who is mentioned in the book I wrote with Kailash (Darryl) is a veteran project manager in the construction and engineering industry. He has been working as a project manager more than 30 years, is a fellow of the Institute of Engineers and marks exams at the local university for those studying a Masters Degree in Project Management. His depth of knowledge and experience is abundantly clear when you start working with him and I have learned more about [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 30th '12 |
An opportunity to learn about aligning SharePoint to business goals in Vancouver
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Just a quick note to mention that I’m off travelling again, this time swapping 39 degree Celsius summer weather of Perth for somewhere between –6 to 5 degrees of Canada. I’ll be spending a week in Canada running two classes – one public and one private. The first class is a public SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class running in Vancouver. MVP Michal Pisarek of SharePointAnalystHQ fame will be there and it should be a terrific two days of learning how to think a [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 23rd '12 |
The cloud isn’t the problem–Part 5: Server huggers and a crisis of identity
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Welcome to my fifth post that delves into the irrational world of cloud computing. After examining the not-so-obvious aspects of Microsoft, Amazon and the industry more broadly, its time to shift focus a little. Now the appeal of the cloud really depends on your perspective. To me, there are three basic motivations for getting in on the act…
I can make a buck
I can save a buck
I can save a buck (and while I am at it, escape my pain-in-the-ass IT department)
If you haven’t guessed [read].
Posted: Thu, Jan 19th '12 |
Why can’t people find stuff on the intranet?–Final summary
Paul Culmsee
Hi
Those of you who get an RSS feed of this blog might have noticed it was busy over last week. This is because I pushed out 4 blog posts that showed my analysis using IBIS of a detailed linear discussion on LinkedIn. To save people getting lost in the analysis, I thought I’d quickly post a bit of an executive summary from the exercise.
To set context, Issue Mapping is a technique of visually capturing rationale. It is graphically represented using a simple, but powerful, visual structure call [read].
Posted: Tue, Jan 17th '12 |
Why can’t users find stuff on the intranet? An IBIS synthesis–Part 4
Paul Culmsee
Hi and welcome to my final post on the linkedin discussion on why users cannot find what they are looking for on intranets. This time the emphasis is on synthesis… so let’s get the last few comments done shall we?
Michael Rosager • @ Simon. I agree. Findability and search can never be better than the content available on the intranet. Therefore, non-existing content should always be number 1 Some content may not be published with the terminology or language used by the users (especially [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 16th '12 |
Why can’t users find stuff on the intranet? An IBIS synthesis–Part 3
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
This is the third post in a quick series that attempts to use IBIS to analyse an online discussion. The map is getting big now, but luckily, we are halfway through the discussion and will have most of the rationale captured by the end of this post. We finished the part 2 with a summary map that has grouped the identified reasons why it is hard to find information on intranets into core themes. Right now there are 4 themes that have emerged. In this post we see if there are any more to eme [read].
Posted: Sun, Jan 15th '12 |
Why can’t users find stuff on the intranet? An IBIS synthesis–Part 2
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
This is the second post in a quick series that attempts to use IBIS to analyse an online discussion. Strange as it may sound, but I believe that issue mapping and IBIS is one of the most pure forms of information architecture you can do. This is because a mapper, you are creating a navigable mental model of speech as it is uttered live. This post is semi representative of this. I am creating an IBIS based issue map, but I’m not interacting live with participants. nevertheless, imagine i [read].
Posted: Sun, Jan 15th '12 |
Why can’t users find stuff on the intranet? An IBIS synthesis–Part 1
Paul Culmsee
Hi
There was an interesting discussion on the Intranet Professionals group on LinkedIn recently where Luc De Ruijter asked the question:
What are the main three reasons users cannot find the content they were looking for on intranet?
As you can imagine there were a lot of responses, and a lot more than three answers. As I read through them, I thought it might be a good exercise to use IBIS (the language behind issue mapping) to map the discussion and see what the collective wisdom of the group [read].
Posted: Sat, Jan 14th '12 |
Why can’t people find stuff on the intranet? An IBIS synthesis–Part 1
Paul Culmsee
Hi
There was an interesting discussion on the Intranet Professionals group on LinkedIn recently where Luc De Ruijter asked the question:
What are the main three reasons users cannot find the content they were looking for on intranet?
As you can imagine there were a lot of responses, and a lot more than three answers. As I read through them, I thought it might be a good exercise to use IBIS (the language behind issue mapping) to map the discussion and see what the collective wisdom of the group [read].
Posted: Sat, Jan 14th '12 |
The cloud is not the problem-Part 4: Industry shakeout and playing with the big kids…
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Welcome to the fourth post about the adaptive change that cloud computing is going to have on practitioners, paradigms and organisations. The previous two posts took a look at some of the dodgier side of two of the industries biggest players, Microsoft and Amazon. While I have highlighted some dumb issues with both, I nevertheless have to acknowledge their resourcing, scalability, and ability to execute. On that point of ability to execute, in this post we are going to expand a little tow [read].
Posted: Fri, Jan 13th '12 |
The cloud is not the problem–Part 3: When silos strike back…
Paul Culmsee
What can Ikea fails tell us about cloud computing?
My next door neighbour is a builder. When he moved next door, the house was an old piece of crap. Within 6 months, he completely renovated it himself, adding in two bedrooms, an underground garage and all sorts of cool stuff. On the other hand, I bought my house because it was a good location, someone had already renovated it and all we had to do was move in. The reason for this was simple: I had a new baby and more importantly, me and power t [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 2nd '12 |
The cloud isn’t the problem–Part 2: When complex technology meets process…
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Welcome to my second post that delves into the irrational world of cloud computing. In the first post, I described my first foray into the world of web hosting, which started way back in 2000. Back then I was more naive than I am now (although when it comes to predicting the future I am as naive as anybody else.) I concluded Part 1 by asserting that cloud computing is an adaptive change. We are going to explore the effects of this and the challenges it poses in the next few posts.
Adapti [read].
Posted: Mon, Dec 19th '11 |
The cloud is not the problem–Part 1: Has it been here all along?
Paul Culmsee
Hiya
I have been meaning to write a post or three on cloud computing, and its benefits, challenges and eventual legacy. I’ve finally had some time to do so. This series will span over a few posts (not sure how many at this stage) and will focus mainly on SharePoint. In short, I think the cloud is a shining example of innovation, combined with human irrationality, poorly thought out process with a dash of organisational dysfunction. In this first post, I will give you a little cloud history les [read].
Posted: Tue, Dec 13th '11 |
The end of a journey… my book is now out!
Paul Culmsee
About bloody time eh?
]
“In Paul and Kailash I have found kindred spirits who understand how messed up most organizations are, and how urgent it is that organizations discover what Buddhists call ‘expedient means’—not more ‘best practices’ or better change management for the enterprise, but transparent methods and theories that are simple to learn and apply, and that foster organizational intelligence as a natural expression of individual intelligence. This book is a bold step [read].
Posted: Mon, Dec 5th '11 |
Why most SharePoint training doesn’t deliver (and what to do about it)
Paul Culmsee
I was surprised to see the recent SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome post got some traction in the interweb. As it happened, that particular post was kicking around in an unfinished state for months. The thing is, its not the only “home truth” type of post that I have sitting in my “drafts” folder. I also have one on the state of the SharePoint training market. Given that I have a training announcement to make, I thought that I would combine them.
A day in the life…
We recently worked on a Sh [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 25th '11 |
SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome
Paul Culmsee
Hiya
I have been wrong about many things – I am happy to admit that. In SharePoint land, one of my bigger naive assumptions was that in early 2007, I figured I’d have maybe a 6 month head start before the rest of the industry began to learn from its initial SharePoint deployment mistakes and start delivering SharePoint “properly.” I thought that I’d better make hay while the sun shines, so to speak, as the market would tighten up as more players entered it.
Yet here we are, heading to [read].
Posted: Wed, Oct 12th '11 |
Troubleshooting SharePoint (People) Search 101
Paul Culmsee
I’ve been nerding it up lately SharePointwise, doing the geeky things that geeks like to do like ADFS and Claims Authentication. So in between trying to get my book fully edited ready for publishing, I might squeeze out the odd technical SharePoint post. Today I had to troubleshoot a broken SharePoint people search for the first time in a while. I thought it was worth explaining the crawl process a little and talking about the most likely ways in which is will break for you, in order of likeli [read].
Posted: Thu, Jul 21st '11 |
More classes planned and clearing the air…
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
I have a couple of important community service type announcements to make.
How do I know I’m attending a legitimate Seven Sigma Class?
Sometimes the training marketplace can be confusing with various organisations offering various courses. Ask any attendee of the SPGov+IA class and they will attest to the uniqueness of our course. Both myself, and some of my trusted local partners have been contacted by people about other SharePoint courses in the Information Architecture space, wonder [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 6th '11 |
Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection (cb7fb7f2-f82a-4034-a150-b870f5ba486b – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)
Paul Culmsee
This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (82e0c944-669f-49a3-ab57-513aecc6b837 – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)
No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 2nd '11 |
Whatever you do, do not ignore legacy
Paul Culmsee
On the twitterverse recently, someone stated that because of a problem of excessive SharePoint site sprawl, they were going to institute a new site approval process. On the surface this remedy seems to be perfectly reasonable. After all, there is a clear problem that has emerged and in the name of governance, we have taken steps to address it via this new process.
There is only one small problem with this. It’s probably the wrong thing to do or at best, a minor facet of what to do.
Before I [read].
Posted: Sat, May 21st '11 |
Seattle (and Bend) here we come!
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Just a quick post to let you all know that in around 11 hours I’m off on a long flight back to US shores – my first trip for quite some time. We will be in Seattle, Portland, Bend, San Francisco and Napa. I am really, really looking forward to this trip for a number of reasons.
Its my first ever SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Class in the US and I intend to deliver a knockout class. The class has essentially sold out (at the time of writing one remaining place loo [read].
Posted: Fri, Apr 29th '11 |
Seattle is go! SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class
Paul Culmsee
For one night only USA…
Ah, Erica Toelle – what a legend! Thanks to Erica and Fpweb, I’m thrilled to confirm that the Seattle SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture is all systems go. Save the date as its very likely indeed to be the only SPIA class in the USA in 2011. If it wasn;t enough that Erica will be joining me, but Ruven Gotz will be there too.
Thursday and Friday, May 05-06, 2011. (http://spiaseattle.eventbrite.com/)
The location is the Silvercloud Inn, 14632 SE [read].
Posted: Tue, Apr 12th '11 |
Praise for SharePoint Governance and IA Masterclass
Paul Culmsee
I received this today and I had to post it. In New Zealand recently, Paul McTaggart of Gen-i stopped me and complimented the governance and information architecture course that some of his staff have attended. I am truly humbled by the feedback that he just sent through…
Practical, relevant and seriously funny these attributes are seldom seen together in a training session.
However, Paul Culmsee has practical, real world experience having worked on complex (wicked) projects which provides hi [read].
Posted: Mon, Apr 4th '11 |
A call for help Canada – SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Class in Toronto
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
For those of you that enjoy reading this blog, I really need your help. I am running my SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture master classes in North America and Canada in May 2011. This is a bit of a “one night only” thing, because it is a damn long way for me to travel, so I rarely visit the USA and I have never been to Canada. It’s unlikely that I will be back here for some time.
My SharePoint governance class has been run in London, Dublin, Sydney, Perth and Welling [read].
Posted: Fri, Apr 1st '11 |
Consequences of complexity–the evilness of the SharePoint 2010 User Profile Service
Paul Culmsee
Hiya
A few months back I posted a relatively well behaved rant over the ridiculously complex User Profile Service Application of SharePoint 2010. I think this component in particular epitomises SharePoint 2010’s awful combination of “design by committee” clunkiness, along with real-world sheltered Microsoft product manager groupthink which seems to rate success on the number of half baked features packed in, as opposed to how well those features install logically, integrate with other prod [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 31st '11 |
The facets of collaboration part 5: It’s all Gen-Y’s fault – or is it?
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Welcome to another exploration of the collaborative world through a lens called the facets of collaboration. If you are joining us for the first time, I am writing a series of posts that looks at how our perception of collaboration influences our penchant for certain collaborative tools and approaches. SharePoint, given that it is touted as a collaboration platform, inevitably results in consultants never being able to give a straight answer. This is because SharePoint is so feature-rich [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 29th '11 |
Australian SharePoint Conference Community Challenge–How we did it.
Paul Culmsee
Hiya
I recently participated in the Australian and New Zealand community SharePoint conferences and had a blast. First up, I was given the opportunity to keynote the Australian conference on day 2, where I spoke about SharePoint Governance home truths. It received very positive feedback and I was told by a lot of people that it really made them rethink their governance approach. In fact, in the New Zealand session, as I was going through some of the common mistakes people make, I could see peop [read].
Posted: Sat, Mar 26th '11 |
MOSS World
Paul Culmsee
Wow, Christian Buckley doesn’t waste any time. First up, watch this video then I will explain:
Now I am writing this at 8am and around 10pm last night I recorded this vid with him and now it has photos, montage and credits. I don’t think he slept.
The story behind this goes back a bit. When Dux first told me he was going to do a rap – I think 2 years ago or more at a Best Practices Conference – and showed me the lyrics to “SharePoint is Nice Nice Baby”, I thought “no that w [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 17th '11 |
How to use Charlie Sheen to improve your estimating…
Paul Culmsee
Monte Carlo simulations are cool – very cool. in this post I am going to try and out-do Kailash Awati in trying to explain what they are. You see, I am one of these people who’s eyes glaze over the minute you show me any form of algebra. Kailash recent wrote a post to explain Monte Carlo to the masses, but he went and used a mathematical formula (he couldn’t help himself), and thereby lost me totally. Mind you, he used the example of a drunk person playing darts. This I did like a lot and [read].
Posted: Mon, Mar 14th '11 |
A brief sojourn into the world of Exchange 2010
Paul Culmsee
Okay so this post is going to seem way out of place because it has utterly nothing to do with SharePoint and instead focuses on Microsoft Exchange Server. To explain why I have to give you a quick history lesson.
Before I was a SharePoint guy, I was a networking, infrastructure and security guy. In fact I met and worked with Jeremy Thake before either of us were full-time SharePoint guys. If you were to ask him I’m sure he would tell you I was a bit of an infrastructure and security nazi back [read].
Posted: Wed, Feb 16th '11 |
Exciting news for Governance and Information Architecture classes
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
I just thought I would check-in with some updates on happenings and some upcoming travels. In less then 2 weeks now, I will be in London with Andrew Woodward and Ant Clay of 21apps for the second SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class. There are still places available on this class so if you have been thinking about attending, now is the time to act.
Also in Europe, a class is being run in Utrecht, Netherlands in May by Ant Clay.
I am proud to be chosen to be a ke [read].
Posted: Wed, Feb 9th '11 |
The facets of collaboration part 4–BPM vs. HPM
Paul Culmsee
Hi all and welcome to part four of my series on unpacking this buzzword phenomenon that is “collaboration”. Like it or not, Collaboration is a word that is very in-vogue right now. I see it being used all over the place, particularly as a by-product of the success of x2.0 tools and technologies. Yet if you do your research, most of the values being espoused actually hark back to the 1950’s and even earlier. (More on that topic in my forthcoming Beyond Best Practices book).
As it happens, D [read].
Posted: Tue, Feb 1st '11 |
The facets of collaboration Part 3–The feature jigsaw
Paul Culmsee
Hi all and welcome to part three of my series on unpacking this mysterious phenomenon known as collaboration. In case you missed the first two articles (and I highly suggest that you read part 1 and part 2), I spent some 500 odd hours last year developing a SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture course. Amongst the sweat and tears of that particular endeavour, I researched many papers and online articles that attempt to look at the multitude of factors and variables that impact on co [read].
Posted: Tue, Jan 25th '11 |
The facets of collaboration Part 2–Enter the matrix!
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
In my first post in this series, I introduced you “Jane” and a true story about her missteps when implementing popular social networking technologies within her organisation. We then asked some deep and ponderous questions, before meeting Robot Barbie and the crazy world of SharePoint Robot Barbie solutions. Finally I outlined a simple mental model that I developed that I have found to be quite a useful method to look at collaboration more holistically and help with the user engagemen [read].
Posted: Wed, Jan 19th '11 |
The facets of collaboration Part 1–Meet robot barbie
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
I have a friend, lets call her Jane (not her real name), who was a huge web2.0 fan. Seriously, if it was a wiki, blog, tweet or anything remotely sounding like RSS, Jane would wax lyrical about how it was the answer to all that was wrong with the silos of the old world and if only people would get with this new paradigm and embrace the social revolution, collaboration within her organisation would markedly improve. After all, look at the popularity of sites like facebook, wikipedia and tw [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 10th '11 |
SP2010 – Migrating managed metadata term sets to another farm on another domain
Paul Culmsee
Hiya
My colleague Chris Tomich, recently saved the day with a nice PowerShell script that makes the management and migration of managed metadata between farms easier. If you are an elite developer type, you can scroll down to the end of this post. if you are a normal human, read on for background and context.
The Issue
Recently, I had a client who was decommissioning an old active directory domain and starting afresh. Unfortunately for me, there was a SharePoint 2010 farm on the old domain and t [read].
Posted: Sat, Jan 8th '11 |
More SharePoint Governance, Information Architecture and *Sensemaking* Classes Planned
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
A big chunk of last year had me off under a metaphorical mushroom, putting together several days of courseware on the topic of SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture. My take on these topics are influenced from some odd places, and the course drew on a lot of the non IT work that I do, that involves collaboration on some very complex problems indeed.
In November and December of 2010, we took this “on the road”, so to speak, firstly in Dublin, then London and Sydney. The co [read].
Posted: Fri, Jan 7th '11 |
It’s email integration captain, but not as we know it (problems with incoming email handling on SharePoint 2010)
Paul Culmsee
Hi everyone. This is my last post for 2010, and I am going out on a troubleshooting note. See you all next year with lots of new content and cool stuff!
I had some interesting experiences recently with SharePoint 2010, specifically the Content Organiser feature and leveraging it with incoming email. I thought they might be worth sharing, but first I need to set some context via the use-case where this started.
Where would we be without the photocopier?
Most organisations large or small, have on [read].
Posted: Tue, Dec 21st '10 |
SharePoint Analysts–Stop analysing!
Paul Culmsee
Michal Pisarek wrote a nice write-up of what makes a good SharePoint Analyst. I feel I have something to offer here, given that I…
am a cynical old bastard
am an opinionated old bastard
have had some opportunities that not too many SharePoint people have had
wrote this post on a plane while suffering jetlag
I am going to argue that as a SharePoint ”analyst”, the worst thing you can do is act like an analyst.
I previously wrote about the identity crisis that Business Analysts have whic [read].
Posted: Thu, Dec 2nd '10 |
Dialogue Mapping: The Ying to SharePoint Yang
Paul Culmsee
I don’t know about you, but as a SharePoint practitioner, I love the fact that I do not do SharePoint full-time anymore. I’d like to take some time to explain why this is the case, and how my non IT work helps me be a better SharePoint practitioner. To do so, I will talk about a recent non IT project I worked on. Who knows? This may give you some insights into how you view and approach collaborative work.
Western Australia is BIG
In case you don’t know already, I live in Perth, Western Aus [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 8th '10 |
Un-Managed Metadata: A couple of gotchas
Paul Culmsee
As the SharePoint 2010 dust settles, gushing praise and inflated expectations are slowly replaced by the cold hard reality, as people come to grips with the limitations of the product. One such area is with the managed metadata service. Don’t get me wrong, I like managed metadata a lot and I can see a little ecosystem building around that functionality specifically. But it does have a couple of big gotchas that you should be aware of before making a big investment with it.
The sad irony is th [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 28th '10 |
Improve your stakeholders “Crapness Calibration ™” for SharePoint Information Architecture success
Paul Culmsee
Hi All
Here is my simple, patent pending method to use to help users design good SharePoint sites. It combines two very effective IA methods into one and its amazing how it turns people from wanting 1990’s era sites complete with horizontal scrolling banners with animated GIF’s into usability and IA gurus within minutes.
The tools of the trade you need for this method is:
Balsamiq, a terrific wireframing tool that I previously reviewed.
http://www.websitesthatsuck.com/ – a hilarious site [read].
Posted: Wed, Oct 27th '10 |
A different kind of SharePoint Governance Master Class in London and Dublin
Paul Culmsee
The background
Over the last three years, my career trajectory had altered somewhat where I spent half my time as a SharePoint practitioner, doing all of the things that us SharePoint practitioners do, and the other half was spent in a role that I would call sensemaking. Essentially group facilitation work, on some highly complex, non IT problems. These ranged from areas such as city planning, (envisioning and community engagement) to infrastructure delivery (think freeways, schools and hospital [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 18th '10 |
Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection (c51254d5-6db5-47cd-bd7c-8fac1f52ac32 – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)
Paul Culmsee
This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (c6b00ec3-3777-4180-96b7-ff42535eb327 – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)
No Tags [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 18th '10 |
Sack Justin Bieber with SPD2010 and Forms Services – Part 2
Paul Culmsee
Hi
This is part 2 of a quick (but huge) post on my experiences working with SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows and Forms Services. In part 1, we used the scenario of an employee termination form, and sacked Justin Bieber. Now we want to ensure that the SharePoint user experience for sacking Justin Bieber is seamless and intuitive.
Truth be told, I have never actually heard a Justin Bieber song because we have not had a television in the house for over a year. Ignorance is bliss, but I have seen [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 21st '10 |
Sack Justin Bieber with SPD2010 and Forms Services – Part 1
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
A very long time ago now, I had the ambition to write an end-to-end blog post series called “A Humble Tribute to the Leave Form”. The intent was to show InfoPath Forms Services 2007 in all its glory – from its initially seductive, demo friendly first impressions, through to all of the dodgy workarounds and .net code required to get it to adequately handle a relatively simple business process like employee leave applications.
As it happened, I got through seven and a half blog posts [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 21st '10 |
Announcing the SamePage Alliance
Paul Culmsee
This is really great, and something that’s been a long time coming. On behalf of my partners at Seven Sigma, I’m announcing the formation of the SamePage Alliance. A strategic partnership with Seven Sigma and 21Apps, founded by Andrew Woodward, as founding members. SamePage is a commercial relationship where we will be pooling the respective talents of our organisations together and expanding our service offerings to clients.
I first met Andrew in San Diego in 2008, the SharePoint Best Pract [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 20th '10 |
Share2010 – A new kind of SharePoint conference
Paul Culmsee
Having spoken at the odd SharePoint event over the last three years or so, I’ve always lamented on the lack of a purely business focused SharePoint conference. Whilst the conferences I attend do cater for non technology oriented topics – particularly the best practice conferences, there is usually an equal or greater proportion of content aimed at the nerdier aspects of SharePoint.
Sadly though, nerds don’t often sign the cheques. Those who do sign them, are rarely interested in deploying [read].
Posted: Thu, Sep 16th '10 |
Why me? Web part errors on new web applications
Paul Culmsee
Oh man, it’s just not my week. After nailing a certificate issue yesterday that killed user profile provisioning, I get an even better one today! I’ve posted it here as a lesson on how not to troubleshoot this issue!
The symptoms:
I created a brand new web application on a SP2010 farm, and irrespective of the site collection I subsequently create, I get the dreaded error "Web Part Error: This page has encountered a critical error. Contact your system administrator if this problem persists"
B [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 16th '10 |
More User Profile Sync in SP2010: Certificate Provisioning Issues
Paul Culmsee
Wow, isn’t the SharePoint 2010 User Profile Service just a barrel of laughs. Without a bit of context, when you compare it to SP2007, you can do little but shake your head in bewilderment at how complex it now appears.
I have a theory about all of this. I think that this saga started over a beer in 2008 or so.
I think that Microsoft decided that SharePoint 2010 should be able to write back to Active Directory (something that AD purists dislike but sold Bamboo many copies of their sync tool). [read].
Posted: Sat, Aug 14th '10 |
Index index everywhere but not a result in sight.
Paul Culmsee
I have been doing a bit more tech work than normal lately – SP2010 popularity I guess, and was asked to remediate a few issues on a problematic server that I hadn’t set up. The server in question had a number of issues (over and above the usual “lets all run it as one account” type stuff) that had a single root cause, so I thought I’d quickly document the symptoms and the cause here.
Symptom 1: SQL Server Event ID 28005:
“An exception occurred while enqueueing a message in the targe [read].
Posted: Thu, Aug 12th '10 |
Also why I’ve been quiet…
Paul Culmsee
I’m in an airport (again), typing this on my way back from my latest trip to New Zealand – a country I am loving more and more each time I go there. (Anywhere that I can go that uses the same power plugs as back home is a great place in my book).
A while back I posted about the book I am writing with Kailash Awati (Beyond Best Practices). If that project wasn’t taking enough time, dedication and brain cells, I have just finished an undertaking that has essentially consumed me for four mo [read].
Posted: Fri, Aug 6th '10 |
SQL Server oddities
Paul Culmsee
So its Saturday night and where I should be out having fun, I am instead sitting in a training room in Wellington New Zealand, configuring a lab for a course I am running on Monday.
Each student lab setup is two virtual machines. The first being a fairly stock standard AD domain controller and the second being a SQL/SharePoint 2010 box. Someone else set up the machines, and I came in to make some changes for the labs next week. But as soon as I fired up the first student VM’s I hit a snag [read].
Posted: Sat, Jul 31st '10 |
Why I’ve been quiet…
Paul Culmsee
As you may have noticed, this blog has been a bit of a dead zone lately. There are several very good reasons for this – one being that a lot of my creative energy has been going into co-writing a book – and I thought it was time to come clean on it.
So first up, just because I get asked this all the time, the book is definitely *not* “A humble tribute to the leave form – The Book”! In fact, it’s not about SharePoint per se, but rather the deeper dark arts of team collaboration in th [read].
Posted: Mon, Jun 7th '10 |
SharePoint Webcasts: Reporting Services for the Really Really Good Looking
Paul Culmsee
Last year, Peter Serzo and I presented at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in DC. We did an extremely serious talk called “SharePoint and SQL Reporting Services 2008 for the really really good looking” which rated rather well. As part of this, we recorded a bunch of screencasts that have never seen the light of day, so I thought that some would benefit from this being released to a wider audience.
Note: This post and content is really going make utterly no sense unless you have watch [read].
Posted: Sun, Feb 21st '10 |
A roving we will go…
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
I am finding it increasingly difficult to find the time to post at the moment. Too many projects, too many initiatives and too many evil plans coming to fruition. It’s like every seed I planted last year suddenly sprouted this year and I can barely keep up. Whilst this is a good thing for a growing business, it is not a good thing when it comes to writing blog posts.
In April I’ll be jumping on a very long flight to London, to attend and speak at the SharePoint Evolutions conference, [read].
Posted: Fri, Feb 12th '10 |
SharePoint Saturday Perth Wrap and SP2010 BOOTCAMPS!
Paul Culmsee
Well, the event that I never thought would ever happen in Perth happened, and not only did it happen, it had more interest than expected and some people unfortunately missed out. Jeremy, as a result, had to take many upset phone calls. It seems that for Perth, once a few people got wind of SharePoint Saturday, everyone wanted in.
There were great sessions, great giveaways and I think overall, tremendous value for this free event. Seven Sigma sponsored the showbags, which we managed to fill with [read].
Posted: Sat, Feb 6th '10 |
SharePoint Saturday Perth is upon us
Paul Culmsee
Well I have to confess that I never thought it would happen in sleepy Perth, but thanks to the monumental efforts of Jeremy Thake, we are about to have our own little slice of SharePoint Saturday on Feb 6th! Jeremy has managed to secure a great selection of national speakers and even secured an international speaker making the 35 hour trip to our sunny shores! Ha Ha Michael Noel, welcome to Jeremy and my world!
For those of you in Perth or surrounds who are not aware, SharePoint Saturday is a bi [read].
Posted: Tue, Jan 12th '10 |
The problem with sales guys… (a peek into complex adaptive systems)
Paul Culmsee
Vulgarity warning. Its the silly season, I am winding down and being more low-brow than usual with this post
There is this wonderful way to look at the world, through a lens of something called “Complex adaptive systems”. Unfortunately with a name like that, it is automatically doomed to be only spoken of and understood by, a small subset of those sort of dishevelled looking nerdy guys who others take the piss out of when they are not around.
The notion of complex adaptive systems explains m [read].
Posted: Thu, Dec 17th '09 |
The rationale of a 5 year old
Paul Culmsee
Hahaha ahem – I found this funny. I am teaching my 11 year old daughter how to perform issue and dialogue mapping. Each night, we pick a relevant family topic, discuss all of the issues around the topic and my daughter maps the discourse.
Recently and the root question of the day was whether her little brother (Liam) should get a cat for Christmas. We already have a cat named Jessica and a detailed conversation unfolded, where my 5 year old outlined his reasons to the family. We all had a goo [read].
Posted: Tue, Dec 15th '09 |
SharePoint, Debategraph and Copenhagen 2009 – Collaboration on a global scale
Paul Culmsee
Note: For those of you who do not wish to read my usual verbose writing, then skip to the last section where there is a free web part to download and try out.
Unless you are a complete SharePoint nerd and world events don’t interest you while you spend your hours in a darkened room playing with the SP2010 beta, you would no doubt be aware that one of the most significant collaborative events in the world is currently taking place.
The United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen thi [read].
Posted: Mon, Dec 14th '09 |
SBS 2008, Hewlett Packard, WSS3, Search Server 2008 Express and a UPS – Oh the pain!
Paul Culmsee
In the words of Doctor Smith from lost in space, while everyone else was in Vegas having a grand old time, I was at a client site, having to come to grips with the beast known as Windows Small Business Server 2008. I rarely work with SBS2003 and had never used SBS2008 until now.
This was one of those engagements that is somewhat similar to those awful dreams that you have when you are trying to get to some place, but you never quite get there and your subconscious puts all sorts of strange and [read].
Posted: Sun, Nov 29th '09 |
A simple way to improve your estimating (and a cool pub trick) – Conclusion
Paul Culmsee
…and we’re back!
Well… that was a long commercial break wasn’t it
In case you missed part 1 of our version of the show “deal or no deal”, you missed the big cliff-hanger and you really should read part 1 first. For the rest of you, to quickly recap, I came out of the closet and admitted by secret teenybopper shame, told the world that my wife had a teenage thing for Jean Claude Van Damme, showed the effect of beer goggles and introduced the notion of cognitive bias and how it can a [read].
Posted: Tue, Nov 10th '09 |
A simple way to improve your estimating (and a cool pub trick) – Part 1
Paul Culmsee
Okay I’ll admit it, I used to really suck as a time and effort estimator. I happen to have a business partner who is much better at it than me (hey Peter), and every time I sought a second opinion from him on my estimates, he would almost always make a much less optimistic assessment then me. Of course, Peter was almost always right too, dammit.
So, why was Peter much more accurate with his estimates?
The answer to this question, all one has to do is think back to their teenage years, where [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 9th '09 |
Academic writing styles…
Paul Culmsee
I have been reading a bunch of material about sense-making. Most of online at various websites (that shall remain nameless), written by people who are way smarter than me. Essentially I always am looking for stuff that might augment Dialogue Mapping and improve my facilitation and analytical skills. I am in the middle of an online article that has been a bit of a struggle, so I stopped to write this quick post.
Some of the stuff that I have been reading is really good – brilliant in fact, but [read].
Posted: Sat, Oct 3rd '09 |
“Folders are bad” and other urban legends…
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
This post is somewhat related to the whole “Zen and the art of SharePoint governance” idea where the notion of a “best practice” is so culture and context dependent that the worst practice is to insist that your best practice applies universally .
Let me explain with this example. Consider two problem/solution scenarios, A and B.
Scenario A: We have a technically inferior solution with a really deep commitment to that solution by the stakeholders and participants
Scenario B: We [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 30th '09 |
The practice of Dialogue Mapping – Part 4
Paul Culmsee
Three weeks ago my plasma TV broke, freeing the family from the magic spell of hi-def television. My family took the loss in different ways. My four year old was devastated at the lack of Nintendo Wii, and constantly whined about being bored. My ten year old is a bookworm anyway, and continued to be one. I suddenly found mountains of time to write, churning out three Dialogue Mapping articles that I had been meaning to write for ages.
Today the repair man came and fixed the TV. I expect that th [read].
Posted: Sat, Sep 26th '09 |
The practice of Dialogue Mapping – Part 3
Paul Culmsee
Hi there and welcome to part 3 of my series on the practice of Dialogue Mapping in the real-world. To recap, in part 1, I provided a brief overview of Dialogue Mapping and in part 2, I described a common real world usage scenario that we perform fairly often as SharePoint consultants.
The rest of this series will change tack a little. In this article I am going to describe a very different Dialogue Mapping scenario to you. This was a huge challenge and a large leap from what I described in part [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 21st '09 |
Am I a Business Analyst? What about those calling themselves BAs?
Paul Culmsee
Hi
I attended and spoke at the Perth Business Analyst World Conference this week and really enjoyed it. This was a bit of a departure from the SharePoint events that I normally frequent, and I really didn’t know what to expect. Certainly, not having to fly 30+ hours just to speak is a big plus The recommendation to the organisers to consider me, came about via Craig Brown, who has a very popular project management blog that I follow. Thanks so much Craig, I owe you a beer when I am in Melbour [read].
Posted: Fri, Sep 18th '09 |
The practice of Dialogue Mapping – Part 2
Paul Culmsee
Hi there.
Welcome to part 2 of a series of articles on the craft of Dialogue Mapping – something that forms a significant chunk of my SharePoint and non SharePoint work. In the “One best practice” series of articles, I explained IBIS. In part 1 of this series, I introduced the facilitation part that goes along with IBIS. In this article, I’ll spend more time on how Dialogue Mapping works in real world scenarios.
In the previous article, I wrote about how important it was for tools and me [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 16th '09 |
Speaking at BA World conference in Perth
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Just a quick note to let you know that I will be speaking at the Perth leg of the BusinessAnalystWorld conference this week. My topic is called “IBIS: The one best practice for managing wicked problems" and I will be talking about the characteristics of wicked problems and how IBIS and Issue Mapping can help to manage them. I will also cover off some other sense-making tools in this talk like debategraph.
The BA World conference is the only one of its kind in Australia and will cover al [read].
Posted: Sat, Sep 12th '09 |
The practice of Dialogue Mapping – Part 1
Paul Culmsee
Hiya
For those who do not regularly read CleverworkArounds, I have a bit of a split career-personality where half my working life is spent as a SharePoint practitioner and the other half as a sort of facilitator, based around the craft of dialogue mapping. This series of articles will delve a little deeper into dialogue mapping and how I have used it.
I previously introduced the topic of IBIS and Issue Mapping to a SharePoint audience in the “One best practice” series of posts. That series o [read].
Posted: Thu, Sep 10th '09 |
Missing metadata with Office 2003 – yet another “duh” moment…
Paul Culmsee
I had a problem this week that got resolved with something quite obvious, but I learned a lot in the process, so I am detailing it here.
Symptoms: Using MOSS 2007 SP2 and Office 2003 SP3, users complained that metadata on documents went missing. Consider the scenario below where we have a sample document library.
Our user opens the “Memo to Council re Convenor” document into Word 2003, makes a change and saves it. Note the difference. Where’s my metadata?
I asked about this on the ozmo [read].
Posted: Fri, Sep 4th '09 |
My amazing psychic abilities :-)
Paul Culmsee
I just posted a small article to endusersharepoint.com that you can check out, demonstrating my John Edwards like mastery of the SharePoint spirit realm. Do you also have supernatural powers? If so, check out that article and then send me your own “Crossing over” transcripts
Paul
No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 2nd '09 |
BPC 09 August Wrap-up
Paul Culmsee
It’s been quite some time since I have blogged, and the months of July/August were really pretty full-on professionally. High work demands and preparation for the Best Practices Conference meant that blogging and any sort of public work really took a back-seat.
So now that it is over and I am sitting here in an airport lounge reflecting, I have one word to say about the BPC 09 in DC that I just attended.
Segways rock!
You have not lived until you have ridden a segway – and I mean the new [read].
Posted: Fri, Aug 28th '09 |
Troubleshooting SPSearch and good practices for moving large files
Paul Culmsee
Every so often I get back into geek mode and roll up the sleeves and get my SharePoint hands dirty. Not so long ago I was assisting a small WSS3 based organisation with a major disk subsystem upgrade (iSCSI SAN) and locally attached storage upgrade, driven by content database growth and a need to convert some sites to site collections. By the end of it all, we had a much better set-up with a much better performing disk subsystem, but I was hit by two problems. One was WSS Search being broken and [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 3rd '09 |
It’s going to be quiet around here (again)
Paul Culmsee
Just a quick note to say that it’s Best Practices Conference season again and this means I am a very busy boy. No doubt many other presenters are too because this is a conference that takes a disproportionally large amount of time to prepare and deliver compared to most conferences. As a result, blogging takes a back seat when preparing for such an event.
Why is this?
Well, for a start, we all don’t just get up there and rattle off a bunch of “oh, isn’t this cool” product features (th [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 22nd '09 |
Notes from the New Zealand SharePoint Community Conference
Paul Culmsee
Ah, lots of beers, staying out till 3am, taking an aspirin at 7am, breaking my 3 week coffee embargo..
Oh yeah – and there is this SharePoint conference on as well!
In case you have been living under a rock, a bunch of us have been at the New Zealand SharePoint Community Conference for the last two days. This has been a fantastic experience for me for several reasons
I come from Perth, an isolated city of around 1.8 million people. New Zealand cities are a bit smaller than this, but never [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 3rd '09 |
The secret to understanding governance
Paul Culmsee
I’m very tempted to start this post like a dodgy wealth-guru infomercial. You know the ones – with lots of imagery of people living the dream of financial freedom. I am thinking a montage of a resort, a large boat anchored in a topical bay, carving up the water with a jet-ski and then a shot of me standing next to my Ferrari, champagne in hand, with Megan Fox on my arm. My message would be that for a “small” fee of $10000, you too could learn the secrets to your financial freedom in an i [read].
Posted: Thu, Jul 2nd '09 |
SPD workflows: “ERROR: request not found in the TrackedRequests”
Paul Culmsee
I’ve written this post to document a dumbass thing that I did and the error that it caused. Hopefully it might help someone googling in desperation sometime…
The popularity of the “Tribute to the humble leave form” series over at SharePoint Magazine, has meant that we actually get a few gigs implementing, surprise surprise, InfoPath leave forms with SharePoint Designer workflows! This was actually quite unexpected, as I wrote that series as a joke and for end-user training purposes.
Now [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 28th '09 |
Who wants to spend 3 days with me and the gang?
Paul Culmsee
A quick bit of background. My last 2 trips to the USA were particularly fruitful in meeting many like-minded SharePoint pros, all of which are well known and highly regarded. Some close friendships were made and what was really cool was that some people I met, despite having very different skills and experience (and physical locations!), seemed to connect on a level that gave us the desire and impetus to to work together very closely idealistically and commercially. More on that soon enough… [read].
Posted: Mon, Jun 22nd '09 |
Core Principles for User Engagement – a must read …er… explore!
Paul Culmsee
I listened to Steve Smith talk about user engagement on the SharePoint Pod Show today and found myself nodding in strong agreement with many points that he made. So while in that mood of stakeholder engagement and how to achieve it, twitter made me aware of a really terrific Debategraph map on the topic of “Core Principles of Public Engagements” and think it is mandatory learning material for any SharePoint architect/collaboration consultant/business analyst/business improvement specialists/ [read].
Posted: Sat, Jun 20th '09 |
SharePoint book review – Seamless Teamwork by Michael Sampson
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Some time back a publisher sent me a self-help SharePoint book pitched at end users. I figured that I don’t really represent an end user and the best way to review it would be to make Mrs Cleverworkarounds review the book. I mean, after all, getting the spouse to bring home the bacon is part of my quest to eventually be a kept man! However, my grand plan ran aground after a while - she got around halfway through the book and came back and said “It’s easy to follow and all, but I don [read].
Posted: Wed, Jun 17th '09 |
SharePoint Governance – Debategraph style
Paul Culmsee
Quick note: This is another of the sort of posts where I cannot help but feel that some readers will wonder what I have been smoking. It is not essential, but reading the “one best practice” series will provide a lot of background to this post.
On the grand scale of world problems, your average messed up SharePoint project would not be considered particularly “wicked”. If you compare a haywire SharePoint project to the truly *global* wicked problems, such as global warming, the Israeli/P [read].
Posted: Mon, Jun 15th '09 |
New book preview – SharePoint 2007 Developers Guide to the Business Data Catalog
Paul Culmsee
I’ve been busy on a number of fronts and some of the fruits of that work will appear soon enough, but I thought that I would pop up to let you know about a forthcoming book written by Brett Lonsdale and Nick Swan on a SharePoint component that has until now, been seriously under-represented in the plethora of SharePoint books out there in the marketplace.
The Business Data Catalog is one of those SharePoint components that is easy enough to understand conceptually, but then will scare the utt [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 4th '09 |
Listen to me blab on about crap ;-)
Paul Culmsee
Hi
I have been very busy on a number of fronts – which is why the blog hasn’t had much attention lately. I’ll be back soon enough though – once I get a few big jobs done.
For those of you that are not aware, there is a podcast interview that I did with Brett Lonsdale at Sharepoint Pod Show where he allowed me to blab on and on and on and on Poor Brett - he didn’t know what he was getting himself into at all!
So if you think my posts are boring and wordy, wait till you hear me talk! [read].
Posted: Thu, May 21st '09 |
Developers who do a “Russell Crowe”
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
If you were going to slot me into a little stereotype box, then you would slot me into the “IT pro” side of the fence. My coding is okay, but my real vein of expertise lay in infrastructure and over my career, I developed what I think is a reasonable troubleshooting instinct.
I’ve also worked with developers for the whole of my career and have the scars to prove it. The thing about developers is that they have this in-built reflex that until yesterday I did not have a word for. Then [read].
Posted: Thu, May 21st '09 |
Perth SharePoint Users Group wrap
Paul Culmsee
Today I presented a session at the Perth SharePoint Users Group. I was a little unsure whether my non-technically focussed content would be of interest to the geeks but the turnout was terrific and the feedback has been brilliant. (The 3 copies I gave away of Dux’s excellent “SharePoint for Project Management” book may have sweetened the deal – hehe )
My sincere thanks to new user group president Sezai Komur for giving me the opportunity to present this material as it was the first time [read].
Posted: Tue, Apr 21st '09 |
Cannot restore from recycle bin – nested folders
Paul Culmsee
Oh my god – I have written a short, useful post instead of a bloated theory fest! What is the world coming to?
I was all set to go and catch up with SharePoint Sezai today, when the phone rang and the IT guy from one of my clients had a wee problem. Someone had been doing some serious file rearrangement surgery on a large document library with folders (yeah, yeah, I know - “folders are evil” blah, blah). In one of those typical right mouse click spasms that we sometimes have, a large [read].
Posted: Tue, Apr 14th '09 |
Meet Agile Boy :-)
Paul Culmsee
Not so long ago I wrote about the adventures of Governance Man and Dr Wicked. I also mentioned that there was another partner in crime. Agile Boy. Here he is in-between fighting SharePoint chaos and participating in SharePint’s!
Name: Agile Boy
Secret Identify: Andrew Woodward
Special Powers: Extreme agility, TDD guruness, MVP
Weakness: Beer and Waterfalls
No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Apr 9th '09 |
Review – Balsamiq Mockup Tool (for SharePoint)
Paul Culmsee
Hi
It’s review week here at CleverworkArounds, and the next one on my list that I have been meaning to speak about is an application called Balsamiq Mockups. Mr Mindmapper himself, Ruven Gotz first turned me onto this application some time back, and I have found it very useful in taming RBO (rampant branding obsession).
Although I have written various posts on SharePoint branding, most of the time I find it a tiresome task that for many sites, is pushed way too far up the priority list to the [read].
Posted: Tue, Apr 7th '09 |
See you in New Zealand in July!
Paul Culmsee
It looks like they know how to throw a conference in Australia’s ‘other’ state (just kidding, Kiwis).
I will be speaking at the New Zealand Community SharePoint Conference in July 2009 and I’m really looking forward to it. This will be the New Zealand conference to learn about SharePoint 2007 with a whole bunch of expert local and international speakers. Some big international names are joining in the fun, including Joel “Governance Man” Oleson himself so we can continue our buzzword [read].
Posted: Fri, Apr 3rd '09 |
Issue Mapping Webinar Series in April 09
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
There are a few people in my life who have had a big influence on me as a person, consultant and trainer. Jeff Conklin from CogNexus Institute is one of them. If I was to rank Conklin, I’d say he comes in somewhere between Jackie Chan and Freddie Mercury – illustrious company indeed.
Jeff armed me with the right set of skills and way of thinking that allowed me to defeat the likes of “SharePoint vs Skype guy”, a highly skilled foe that I previously wrote about in the “One Best [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 31st '09 |
Review - Understanding SharePoint Journal
Paul Culmsee
I have been a huge fan of Bjørn Furuknap ever since I first read his amazing series of posts on on customising the user experience at SharePointMagazine.
What struck me about Bjørn is the quality of his content and his fluid, entertaining and accessible style of writing. Although I can code okay enough, I am not a serious developer by any stretch. But Bjørn’s ability to weave his way through some large, fairly prickly programming topics and at the same time keep a part-timer like me, not o [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 31st '09 |
“Governance Man” has fallen into my trap! :-)
Paul Culmsee
This post was supposed to be called “SharePoint Governance is not a deliverable” – hence the pizza above, but my secret evil plan has worked faster than expected! Read on…
When I met with Dux Sy for breakfast the other day in a diner that looked remarkably like the set from Happy Days, our conversation covered various areas of topics around US vs Australian culture, SharePoint governance, project management, food, wicked problems, sense-making and my two kilograms of Vietnamese coffee be [read].
Posted: Sun, Mar 29th '09 |
“Governance Man” has fallen into my trap! :-)
Paul Culmsee
This post was supposed to be called “SharePoint Governance is not a deliverable” – hence the pizza above, but my secret evil plan has worked faster than expected! Read on…
When I met with Dux Sy for breakfast the other day in a diner that looked remarkably like the set from Happy Days, our conversation covered various areas of topics around US vs Australian culture, SharePoint governance, project management, food, wicked problems, sense-making and my two kilograms of Vietnamese coffee be [read].
Posted: Sun, Mar 29th '09 |
A warning on “tame” metaphors
Paul Culmsee
Often people use metaphors to describe various aspects of SharePoint. I am guilty as charged here. One of the many that I use for SharePoint, is the metaphor of an Ikea modular storage solution to describe the new paradigm of moving from folders to document libraries, columns, views, workflow, sites, content types and the like. [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 24th '09 |
Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection (fee3eb91-55fd-41e9-b113-368847cab767 - 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)
Paul Culmsee
This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (df0c82bb-fadb-4b18-80a0-241a605104ae - 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)
No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 19th '09 |
The one best practice to rule them all – Part 6
Paul Culmsee
Hi again and welcome to the sixth and final post in this series aimed at enlightening readers to the oft-overlooked importance of shared understanding of a problem. For those of you that have come across this article for the first time, I suggest very strongly that you stop and read through it’s predecessors. There is [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 19th '09 |
The one best practice to rule them all – Part 5
Paul Culmsee
Hi again and welcome to the fifth article on this series of posts on the topic of group sense-making and the pursuit of shared understanding among a group of participants trying to solve a problem. If you haven’t read the previous articles of this series, then I strongly recommend you go back and read the [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Mon, Mar 16th '09 |
That’s my boy…
Paul Culmsee
I am kind of in a “not in the mood to write” mode, but I thought that this video of my little boy rocking out to the metal band Amorphis needed a wider audience. His musical taste is very good actually, likes System of a Down, Faith No More, Opeth, Metallica and the Wiggles [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Mar 13th '09 |
Why InfoPath rocks
Paul Culmsee
At the San Diego Best Practices SharePoint conference, I sat quietly and listened to the governance godfather himself, Robert Bogue, discussing with the other SharePoint "big kids" various reasons why InfoPath sucks in many situations and some of its current design faults. I mean, anybody who has used forms services knows what a pain redeployment [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 5th '09 |
Seven Sigma is officially a CogNexus Institute Designated Partner
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
This is the culmination of a significant amount of effort and a long time in the making, but I am extremely proud that Seven Sigma, the company that I am a co-founder and partner of, is now officially recognised as the first CogNexus Institute "Designated Partner" in the world. I first came across [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 5th '09 |
The one best-practice to rule them all - Part 4
Paul Culmsee
Hi there
Welcome to the fourth post in my series on how to deal with the true root cause of project failure. The first three posts were really to set the scene for this post where I will explain the basics of my craft for resolving some of this. First up, I described my journey [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Mar 4th '09 |
Heading to Annapolis in March 09
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Just a quick note to say that one of my Seven Sigma colleagues and I will be back in the USA again in the week of March 16. If anybody wants to catch up, discuss business, client meet’s, etc or anything like that, let me know as soon as possible, as I need to [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Feb 28th '09 |
Mike’s code-monkey "SharePoint suitability" quiz
Paul Culmsee
Ah - this is exactly my sense of humour. My colleague Mike Stringfellow wrote a post called "Code Monkey Hates SharePoint" where he presents a quick multi-choice questionnaire of seemingly innocent questions that allows you to determine how predisposed your code-monkey is to completely butchering your SharePoint environment. Apparently there is not much difference between [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Feb 27th '09 |
jQuery: SharePoint Blu-Tack
Paul Culmsee
A quick observation: Jeremy wrote a good post on the ins and outs of jQuery as a SharePoint band-aid. Having done a little messing with JavaScript (under duress) I had a peek at his well thought out post. After reading it however, I came away thinking that jQuery was more like blu-tack than a band-aid. [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Feb 26th '09 |
Boy bands - how to understand the site definition/template debate
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
I’ve read a few blogs on site definitions vs site templates and reading some development centric articles, particularly the alternative presented by Raymond, and expanded by Mike and summarised neatly by Chris. Being a part time developer, I found that the explanation were a little…shall we say… geeky and I had to expend far [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Feb 25th '09 |
The one best-practice to rule them all - Part 3
Paul Culmsee
This is the third post in a series that focuses on what I think is the Holy Grail of project success - particularly SharePoint projects. Like everybody else, I am a product of my experiences, and one of these experiences was a project that included one of my greatest career teachers - "SharePoint-vs-Skype guy". [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Mon, Feb 23rd '09 |
Functional consultants vs *great* functional consultants
Paul Culmsee
Kristian Kalsing was written a really terrific post, not just because he quoted yet another bloody international standard that I will have to now read (ISO15489). But because, drawing on his experiences of the world of SAP, he has observed that there are some important lessons that can be learned for SharePoint engagements. SAP (okay, [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Feb 20th '09 |
The one best practice to rule them all - Part 2
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
This is part of a somewhat self-indulgent story of how I came to practice a craft that has made a profound difference on how I approach and manage SharePoint projects. If you never read part 1, then I suggest to stop now and read it. This post will really not make a lot [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sun, Feb 15th '09 |
Tribute to the "humble leave form" part 7 is out
Paul Culmsee
Hi!
I’ve just noticed that Arno Nel over at SharePoint Magazine has published part 7 of my "Tribute to the Humble Leave Form" series on InfoPath and forms services.
Bye!
No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Feb 11th '09 |
The one best practice to rule them all - Part 1
Paul Culmsee
This is a post or three that I have really been looking forward to writing, and it is a long time in the making for various reasons. Some of you, after reading it, will no doubt wonder if I have been taking magic mushrooms or something similar, but if the feedback from the SharePoint [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Feb 11th '09 |
SharePoint ROI Slide Deck and Sample Scenario worksheet published
Paul Culmsee
Hot off the press (okay - well SlideShare magic), I’ve just posted by Best Practices Conference slide deck for the "speak to your CFO" session, along with the ROI spreadsheet for the PMIS scenario that I used during the demonstration. Like the "wicked problems" slide deck, slideshare conversion isn’t quite there, so just contact me [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Feb 11th '09 |
"Wicked Problem" Best Practice Slides and Demo Materials posted
Paul Culmsee
Hi all. I’ve just posted by Best Practices Conference slide deck for the Wicked Problems session, along with the maps that I used during the demonstration. Expect a typically long post really soon now, to delve into much more detail about all of this
How to avoid SharePoint becoming a wicked problem
View more presentations [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sun, Feb 8th '09 |
Double wow - memoirs of the SharePoint Best Practices Conference
Paul Culmsee
To quote the brilliant singer Kate Bush, "wow wow wow unbelievable!"
Well, it is all over, and boy what an experience! For those of you who were not aware, I had the honour of attending as well as presenting at the San Diego SharePoint Best Practices conference. I had two topics, but I’ll post a [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Feb 6th '09 |
It’s gonna be quiet around here
Paul Culmsee
Hi
I’m off on a one month holiday to Vietnam for most of Jan 09, so it will be very quiet around here for a while and my email access will be somewhat limited. My colleagues at Seven Sigma will man the cleverworkarounds inbox for this period, so if you do need to make contact, then [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Mon, Dec 29th '08 |
More on the Best Practice SharePoint Conference - Feb 2-4 2009 in San Diego!
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
I have been extremely quiet on the blogging front lately, because I have been extremely busy, splitting my time between working on my two presentations for the up-coming Best Practices SharePoint Conference, as well as wearing my undies on the outside (ala superman), deep in the bowels of some unhealthy SharePoint farms, nailing various [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Dec 20th '08 |
I finally succumbed to the mugshot…
Paul Culmsee
I’ve always avoided too many pictures of myself online - I think its the little security person that sits on my left shoulder and says "privacy privacy", usually louder than the little marketing person on my right saying "go on you handsome devil!"
I was only just coming to grips with the guys at the Best [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, Dec 16th '08 |
Calling in all beer debts :-)
Paul Culmsee
Just a quick note to say that I’ll be seeing many of you (I hope) in San Diego from Feb 2-4 at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference http://www.sharepointbestpractices.com/. I’ll be talking on a couple of key interest topics for me in the CIO stream - one topic in particular I have worked really hard on [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Dec 3rd '08 |
Leave form article 6 up at SharePointMagazine.net
Paul Culmsee
Due to a sudden burst of motivation (that has since evaporated :-), I finished off part 6 and part 7 of the InfoPath "leave form tribute" series. Arno has just posted part 6 which you can read here:
http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/a-tribute-to-the-humble-leave-form-part-6
Looking for part 7? Ask Arno nicely as I’m not sure when he plans to publish that one [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Nov 29th '08 |
Book Review - "SharePoint for Project Management"
Paul Culmsee
To review this book I need to tell you a true story first…
The very first MOSS 2007 project that I was involved in did not go well. I was the architect who had to design the SharePoint farm, perform some IA work, sort out governance and work with the stressed out project manager who was [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sun, Nov 23rd '08 |
Report on which web2.0 technologies work for the enterprise
Paul Culmsee
I thought that this article was topical given that I am writing on how organisational culture and behavioural style impacts the sorts of collaborative tools that individuals and organisations gravitate to and find useful.
The reports cover 11 common Web 2.0 technologies that can potentially find value in the enterprise:
microblogs,
prediction markets,
social networking, [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, Nov 18th '08 |
Root Causes of Communication Fragmentation: Organisational Culture
Paul Culmsee
This is the second article in a series of articles which examine factors causing the sort of organisational inefficiencies that lead people to use products like SharePoint. My first article in the series examined individual learning and behavioural styles and their impact on communication and how those same learning and behavioural styles still manifest themselves [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 17th '08 |
Root Causes of Communication Fragmentation: Learning styles and behavioural styles
Paul Culmsee
This is the first article in a short series that will be looking at factors causing the sort of communication problems that underpin the motivation to implement a product like SharePoint. When you think about why you want to implement SharePoint, it tends to boil down to an improvement in efficiency brought about by improved [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 17th '08 |
New article posted to EndUserSharepoint
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
I recently wrote an article on how learning and behavioural styles affect the way SharePoint collaboration features are used in deployments. It is called Learning styles, behavioural styles and “collaboration” and can be found over at EnduserSharePoint.com
regards
Paul
No Tags [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 3rd '08 |
I’m a twit too
Paul Culmsee
I’m always a little slow on the uptake with anything new (Nintendo Wii being my first games console in 10 years being a case in point). But what the hell - let’s have even more information flowing into my PC for my poor old grey matter to process
Therefore, for those of you into [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sun, Nov 2nd '08 |
One million and counting…
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
I know statistically it’s meaningless and is hugely subjective, but it looks like I have ended this week (and this month), having finally cracked the million hits mark. Of course, the significance is about the same as when you think its cool when your car speedo clocks over from 99,999 miles to 100,000.
But [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Oct 31st '08 |
Free open source WCM for WSS
Paul Culmsee
I have to say, Perth is home to some great SharePoint Talent. MVP Sezai is one prime example and Jeremy Thake is another.
But there is also another colleague of mine who you may or may not know - Tommy Segoro, who is one of those mild-mannered guys who simply gets down to it and [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Oct 31st '08 |
Is Azure Death Magnetic?
Paul Culmsee
Microsoft and Metallica have more in common than people realise. Don’t believe me? Then here is my CleverWorkarounds "check the facts"(tm) campaign to prove it!
Fact
Microsoft
Metallica
They were both cool in the 80’s
They released some groundbreaking stuff in the 80’s
DOS 3
Ride The Lightning album Master of Puppets
In [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 28th '08 |
I bet it seemed logical at the time
Paul Culmsee
Oh how times change! I am reading a good book at the moment called "Competing on Analytics - The New Science of Winning" and I hit one particular quote that I have to share with you. It’s one of those statements that makes perfect sense at the time, but is kind of funny when you [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Oct 25th '08 |
(ab)using ISO9001 for fun and profit
Paul Culmsee
I don’t know if you have ever read ISO9001, but it is about as exciting as getting a root canal or trying to listen to a Ricky Martin album with a straight face. But hey, if they were actually interesting, ISO compliance wouldn’t be such a billion dollar industry. Does anybody else use SharePoint for [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Oct 24th '08 |
Don’t feel bad if you struggle with SharePoint
Paul Culmsee
This project was not SharePoint, but I have seen some people try and do this with SharePoint. But you can imagine how much stress this project would have caused to participants.
The South Australian government has pulled the plug on its $5 million records management system project, ending a five-year saga plagued by repeated cost blowouts, [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sun, Oct 19th '08 |
Toddler insights into understanding
Paul Culmsee
My little boy will be turning four this weekend. We are hosting one of those parties with a zillion toddlers, copious amounts of candy and a bouncy castle.
He seems to have gotten through the toddler/tantrum stage without causing us too much heartache and is now into the philosopher stage where he asks some surprisingly [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Oct 18th '08 |
It’s all Joel’s fault…
Paul Culmsee
Here we go - another cleverworkarounds waffle!
Now we all know that Joel Oleson is the Russell Crowe of the SharePoint world! I mean, he’s multi-skilled, loads of talent, has the respect of his peers and has built a well deserved reputation of being one of the best at what he does. (Although unlike Russell I [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 14th '08 |
A tribute to the humble leave form part 5
Paul Culmsee
Arno over at Sharepoint Magazine has published part 5 of my "Leave Form Tribute" series of articles. This latest article is a bit of a graduation from the first four, that were pitched squarely at new users. In part 5 we are now getting into the more advanced stuff - like attempting to explain web [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Oct 4th '08 |
It’s all in the way you ask the question…
Paul Culmsee
(Nerds are going to find this post dead boring).
Before I start, let me state that I am a believer in the Honey and Mumford theory of learning styles, as well as the Marston DISC assessment. I think both are closely related, and go some way to explaining many mysteries of the world like - [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Oct 3rd '08 |
Sarcastic, yet surprisingly insightful
Paul Culmsee
Had a good laugh over at the register today with this anti google article written by Ted Dziuba. I am his newest fan.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/dziuba_anti_revolution/
The laughter came from the fact that its very well written with a ton of sarcasm. The google bash is actually secondary to the underlying message about panacea and bandwagonning that all vendors [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Sep 26th '08 |
Complexity bites: When SharePoint = Risk
Paul Culmsee
think as you age, you become more and more like your parents. Not so long ago I went out paintballing with some friends and we all agreed that the 16-18 year olds who also happened to be there were all obnoxious little twerps who needed a good kick in the rear. At the same time, we also agreed that we were just as obnoxious back when we were that age. Your perspective changes as you learn and your experience grows, but you don't forget where you came from...
SharePoint, for a number of reasons, [read].
Posted: Thu, Sep 25th '08 |
Sometimes "Microsoft bashing" is justified
Paul Culmsee
Microsoft bashing is a favourite pastime of many a nerd. Whether it is justified or not in many cases is debatable since M$ will never please everyone. But the point is, it is cathartic and in actual fact, good therapy because venting your frustrations at Bill Gates is much healthier than at your colleagues or [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 16th '08 |
Part 4 in the "Leave Form Tribute…" series posted
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Arno over at SharePoint Magazine has published part 4 of my "Tribute to the humble leave form" series. This series is aimed at beginners and those starting out in SharePoint. This particular post covers publishing to forms services for the first time.
cheers
Paul
p.s Want a new certification? Try the CCLFD
No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Sep 13th '08 |
SharePoint sub-disciplines
Paul Culmsee
WCM guys shouldn’t do intranet or collab doc mgmt stuff
No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Sep 13th '08 |
You know you have done a good job when…
Paul Culmsee
When I wrote the series on SharePoint project failure, I had (and still have) a strong belief that I had gotten fairly close to the root causes of many a failed SharePoint project. As a result of this, I approach SharePoint engagements somewhat differently I think, to many other consultants in the space. I’ll write [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Sep 11th '08 |
It’s a cruel world…
Paul Culmsee
I’ve been sick as a dog since last Saturday and been off work all of this week. The worst flu I’ve had in years. Thus I’ve been feeling like complete crap, irritable to everyone I go near, running a temperature, skullsplitting headaches and coughing up stuff that could easily be in an X-Files episode.
As [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 3rd '08 |
Not Good Enough Stories…
Paul Culmsee
Bill, a former colleague of mine who is very technically savvy, has a little corner of the blogspace called www.notgoodenough.net.
Here he posts about the everyday dumb issues that he comes across that make his working life that little bit harder. By day, he manages some very complex infrastructure for a company of over 1000 staff, [...]Technorati Tags: Risk, Security, Troubleshooting [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 1st '08 |
SQL God? No… I just know how to do a maintenance plan
Paul Culmsee
I am working on an essay about IT complexity at the moment, and one thing that sprung into my mind while thinking about this, is the fact that many of my clients seem to think I am some sort of SQL Server guru.
There are two sad realities inferred by this.
Firstly, I am [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Aug 29th '08 |
All in the name of "security"…
Paul Culmsee
Here is a recent little story about when, in the name of "security", a really dumb thing was done, and the response that said a lot about the security posture of those behind the response.
A client of mine has 4 servers (2 for an Active Directory domain, and two for SharePoint/SQL server) hosted with an [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sun, Aug 24th '08 |
Book Review - Essential SharePoint 2007
Paul Culmsee
One SharePoint book on my bookshelf is "Essential SharePoint 2007 - Delivering High Impact Collaboration", by Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli and Susan Hanley.
Time moves fast in the SharePoint world. Having been involved with MOSS2007 since around August 2006, it is amazing just how far things have come. Here we are in August 2008 and I [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 13th '08 |
"Ain’t it cool?" - Integrating SharePoint and real-time performance data - Part 2
Paul Culmsee
Hi again
This article is the second half of a pair of articles explaining how I integrated real-time performance data with an SharePoint based IT operational portal, designed around the principle of passive compliance with legislative or organisational controls.
In the first post, I introduced the PI product by OSIsoft, and explained how SQL Reporting services is [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Aug 9th '08 |
"Ain’t it cool?" - Integrating SharePoint and real-time performance data - Part 1
Paul Culmsee
Hi
This is one of those nerdy posts in the category of "look at me! look at me! look at what I did, isn’t it cool?". Normally application developers write posts like this, demonstrating some cool bit of code they are really proud of. Being only a part-time developer and more of a security/governance/compliance kind of [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Aug 8th '08 |
Latest article on SharePoint Magazine posted…
Paul Culmsee
The second article in the tribute to the humble leave form series has just been posted here.
I eagerly await the cease and desist letter Matt Groenings legal team
Enjoy!
No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Jul 31st '08 |
Got my MCT (blatant plug alert)
Paul Culmsee
A really quick note:
As of last month I am now a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and combined with being a certified MOSS07 technology specialist, hopefully means that my SharePoint bedside manner should be enough to charm and dazzle even your most difficult users, whether senior management or the most scary technical geek.
<blatant plug>
My training style reflects [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 30th '08 |
Darth Sidious reads the same books as me
Paul Culmsee
Now, readers would know that I really lay on the pop culture references pretty thick. I find it works well and makes ordinary/sometimes mundane topics much more interesting and easy to explain. I’ve used Brittany Spears, Ikea, Kung Fu, Death metal, Dr Phil and countless others.
But I have never used Star Wars references in [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 30th '08 |
Thinking SharePoint Part 4 - Lessons from Kung Fu Panda
Paul Culmsee
Article originally published for EndUserSharePoint.com reproduced here.
Greetings, my cleverworkarounds kung-fu students. Paul here again to talk once more about Zen and the art of SharePoint. Now I don’t want to appear all arrogant and pretentious, but for this post you can all call me "sifu" :-). I don’t deserve the title in the slightest but [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Mon, Jul 28th '08 |
IT and the Corporate Immune Mechanism - the "Mother Hen" reflex
Paul Culmsee
Recently, I came across the blog of Dux Raymond, a Project Manager, forthcoming author and trainer who looks at SharePoint from a project management perspective. Being rather interested in that area myself, I read his "Empowered by SharePoint" post.
He wrote about the theme of user empowerment that SharePoint provides and made this quote.
Typically, if a [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 25th '08 |
Thinking SharePoint Part 3 - A tale of two clients
Paul Culmsee
My third post on "Thinking SharePoint" for www.endusersharepoint.com reproduced here
Hi all
[Quick reference: Part 1 and Part 2]
If you have followed the first two articles in this series, I have been attempting to talk about SharePoint "head-space". In other words, SharePoint success is so much more a people issue than a technical or architectural one. As [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 23rd '08 |
Using google to find potentially misconfigured SharePoint sites
Paul Culmsee
Those in the security community who have ever performed vulnerability assessment/penetration testing will know of the Google Hacking database. Google is actually a very handy tool to look for potentially vulnerable sites, due to the fact that it will crawl anything it finds. Therefore, if you have misconfigured an externally facing web based application, at [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Mon, Jul 21st '08 |
A neat trick with the publishing feature
Paul Culmsee
As I mentioned in my last post, I always security trim SharePoint. A very common issue with a security trimmed SharePoint is the "access denied" message that you receive when trying to activate the "Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" site collection feature.
There are lots of blog topics about this. Most refer to this one [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Jul 19th '08 |
Good advice hidden in the Infrastructure Update
Paul Culmsee
I guess the entire SharePoint world now is aware of the post SP1 "Infrastructure updates" put out by Microsoft recently. Probably the best thing about them are that the flaky "content deployment" feature has had some serious work done on it (I have always advised to use extreme caution and avoid it, but now I [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, Jul 19th '08 |
Lots of writing (just not here)
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
My poor-old cleverworkarounds blog has been sadly neglected lately (and my numbers are reflecting that too dammit). But I have actually been doing a while lot of writing for other SharePoint online publications, namely EndUserSharePoint and SharePoint Magazine.
The feedback from both has been great and much appreciated. If you haven’t read these articles, then [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 18th '08 |
Office Server Search memory leak and stuck on "crawling"
Paul Culmsee
It is the typical scenario isn’t it. Site works fine for a week and then is officially launched on a Monday morning and the site breaks after an hour complaining that it cannot connect to the configuration database. Whoa?
The SQL Server was checked and confirmed to be running fine, and in checking the SharePoint [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 9th '08 |
How to Sabotage Your (SharePoint) Projects
Paul Culmsee
This post from the eLumenotion blog is clever and really tickled my sense of humour.
He describes a declassified wartime era document called the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" and the content is pure gold
"It gives advice on how to deliberately screw things up but can also be read as an anti-pattern of behaviors [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 26th '08 |
Thinking SharePoint Part 2 - The "Unconsciously Incompetent" Ikea Mecca
Paul Culmsee
My next post on "Thinking SharePoint" for www.endusersharepoint.com reproduced here.
Hi again. Sorry about the delay in continuing with this "how to think SharePoint" series, but in Australia, the month of June is the end of the financial year. I assume it works the same way in the rest of the world too. What happens here [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 26th '08 |
Opeth - Watershed review
Paul Culmsee
Mentally tired this weekend and a headache too, so no work stuff. I promise to get back to SharePoint topics soon though…
I just read something amazing that really surprised me. Opeth (the progressive metal band that is target of a few of my SharePoint metaphors) has managed to debut at #7 on the Australian music [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 15th '08 |
Thinking SharePoint (and listen to your mother!)
Paul Culmsee
Note: Special thanks to Andrew Jolly for his excellent ideas and feedback
I have to say, SharePoint is one of the most misunderstood products that Microsoft have ever released. The misunderstanding extends from executive management who signed the budget approval to put it in, to the geeks who actually put it in for us, and all [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 13th '08 |
My First EndUserSharePoint.com article just published
Paul Culmsee
I just posted a new article to the EndUserSharePoint.com as a guest author. There will be a few of us doing this over the next few weeks, and it will be interesting to see how it pans out. The article is a more end-user focused version of the topic areas that I am interested in [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 10th '08 |
Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? - Part 8
Paul Culmsee
Hi
Well, here we are at part 8 in a series of posts dedicated to the topic of SharePoint project failure. Surely after 7 posts, you would think that we are exhausting the various factors that can have a negative influence on time, budget and SharePoint deliverables? Alas no! My urge to peel back this onion [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 3rd '08 |
Mrs CleverWorkarounds - Skills and Competencies of Global Managers
Paul Culmsee
Hi everyone. Some light reading for the weekend
This post is not authored by me (Paul). Instead, my one-and-only darling wife. Apart from being an all-round hottie, she has been studying a post-graduate business course at University. The content of this post is one of her papers that when I read it, found it [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, May 31st '08 |
Opeth vs Tech.Ed - impossible dilemma!
Paul Culmsee
I think with some confidence that I am the only person in the world who has ever attempted to educate about SharePoint while using heavy metal (and my favourite band of the genre, Opeth) as a metaphor. Specifically, I used metal genres to explain the difference between collaborative document management and records management in relation [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, May 28th '08 |
SharePoint development/deployment governance…
Paul Culmsee
My home-town compatriot Jeremy Thake has hit onto a governance topic that I think will turn into a very popular series once he is done with it (in committing to writing it, he will be a busy boy indeed for a while I suspect ).
He has written a post on current methods and [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, May 27th '08 |
Community service request - thesis guy…
Paul Culmsee
(cough)
Can the person who left a message on my plugoo chat window in relation to their thesis on SharePoint project failure please contact me again? You were gone by the time I saw the message and I’d very much like to learn more of your take on it all.
For the other two thousand or so [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, May 27th '08 |
Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? - Part 7
Paul Culmsee
Hi all
Welcome to the 7th post on this series delving into the murky depths of SharePoint project failure. I’m sure that even if you haven’t used SharePoint, or been involved in a SharePoint project, most will have experiences of being sore and sorry from a project gone bad and the content presented in this series [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, May 27th '08 |
"Train the Trainer"
Paul Culmsee
Sorry about the lack of posts, but I’m am right into the middle of a 5 day course called “Train the Trainer” which is run by the Australian Institute of Management. This course, among other things, will qualify me as a Microsoft Certified Trainer, so if you feel like flying me somewhere nice in the [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Tue, May 20th '08 |
A critique of the CMS Watch SharePoint Report
Paul Culmsee
June 30 is the end of the financial year here in Australia, and it has become very busy for me, which is rather annoying as it distracts me from advancing my evil plans for world domination (oh and blogging too).
It seems IT departments are realising they still have some budget left, and of course well [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Fri, May 16th '08 |
Why do SharePoint Projects Fail - Part 6
Paul Culmsee
Hi again and welcome to part 6 of my series on the factors of why SharePoint projects fail. Joel Oleson’s write-up a while back gave me 5 minutes of fame, but like any contestant on Big Brother, I’ve had my time in the limelight, been voted out of the house (as in Joel’s front page) [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sun, May 11th '08 |
Name dropping :-)
Paul Culmsee
In 1998 I met Dr Brian May and got my Queen memorabilia autographed. At the time I thought that was pretty cool and I was the envy of all my Queen fan friends. But today I met an even bigger celebrity :-P, the one and only Joel Oleson who popped up on my plugoo window [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Wed, May 7th '08 |
Globalisation, Strategy, Technology and Organisational Maturity
Paul Culmsee
This post is going a little off-track from the previous 5 posts around SharePoint project failure and I promise I will get back on track again soon. I felt that I had to talk about this topic while we are looking at the nature of project failure, wicked problems and SharePoint. Not sure if it [...]No Tags [read].
Posted: Sat, May 3rd '08 |
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