Living the Dream

Laura and I just started going through some of her old photo albums intending to transfer the pictures to a digital format to prolong their life.   It’s a good thing they did, because looking at some of her old pictures, two things became clear pretty quickly.   #1 – Any photo taken in the early-to-mid 70’s that wasn’t a Polaroid badly yellows over time, and #2 – Any photo taken in the early-to-mid 70’s that was a Polaroid badly cracks over time. Photoshop has stepped in to save the day.   The results aren’t always perfect, but they’re usually much better than what we started with, and I thought my experience might be useful to others who are trying to save photos of their own.

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Example #1 – Slight Yellowing

In this first example, you can see in the original on the left some slight age yellowing, and a few scratches and nicks that the picture picked up over time.    The photo on the right has had the color restored, and the imperfections removed.

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Example #2 – Medium Age Yellowing, Minor damage, and Unnecessary Extraneous Imagery

In this second example, you can see the original photo starting to show age damage, as well as demonstrating some imperfections from improper storage.   There is also an unnecessary border around the photo that can be removed.   Unless you’re nostalgic, the information typically kept in these borders (people writing dates/names in pen, etc.) can be transferred to EXIF data and stored with the digital file.

 

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Example #3 – Age Yellowing, and Major Photo Damage

In this final example, you see the same minor age yellowing, but there’s also some major damage to the photo itself.

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The “How-To” Portion

Doing a restoration is a no-lose proposition.   You wouldn’t be doing it in the first place unless there was a problem with the original photo, so chances are, regardless of your skill, what you get will be an improvement.   This particular “How-To” assumes that you have access to Adobe Photoshop.

If you don’t, you’ll want to get it.   It is an expensive, but powerful, piece of software, and it’s absolutely worth the money.    For the purposes of this discussion, I’m talking about Photoshop CS4, but version changes specific to what were doing here were minor, and shouldn’t affect the tutorial all that much.

General Tips

#1 – Use Layers.   The very first thing you should do in any photo manipulation (restore or retouch) is to open up the Windows>Layers pane and duplicate the base layer so that you’re always working with a copy. 

  If you do this, your source remains in tact and untouched, and at any time you can simply delete your working layer to get back to where you started.

#2 – Don’t overdo it.   When you start “fixing” a photo, the temptation will be to move on to whitening teeth, smoothing skin, etc. 

  You can certainly feel free to play with that if you want to get in to retouching – but in these examples, we’re trying to restore the pictures to a state close to the one they were in when originally taken.

Dealing With Yellowing

In order to deal with the yellowing problem of old photos, you’re going to be using a curves adjustment layer.   Getting color back to something approaching the original is dead simple using this technique.

Step One:  Open the photo you want to work on, and make sure that the Layers pane is open by looking for a check mark beside the word “Layers” in the “Window” menu item.   If it’s unchecked, click on the word “Layers” to open the panel.

Step Two:  Right mouse click on the “Background” layer, and click “Duplicate Layer” to create a new working layer.

 

Step Three:  Highlight your new copied layer, and then click the half white/half black circle icon at the bottom of the Layers window to insert a new Adjustment Layer.   In the pop-up menu, choose “Curves”

 

Step Four:  Once you’ve created your adjustment layer, you’re going to see a window like the one below.

   The three eye dropper icons in this window are the key to restoring the original color to your photos.   The basic idea is simple – you’re going to use the eye droppers to tell Photoshop which parts of the original image should have been black, white, and neutral, and Photoshop will use this information to reconstruct the color for you.

 

 

Click on the eye dropper on top (with the black tip) and select the place in the image that you think will be the absolute darkest portion of the original shot.

   Next, select the dropper on bottom (white tip) and select the portion of the source image that should be the whitest.

   Finally, select the middle dropper (grey tip) and select a portion of the image that contains a neutral tone.  Grey tones (brushed metal) and earthy browns (dirt patches in grass) work well for the neutral range.

    The middle choice will make the most difference in your output, so you may have to move it around to a few different areas until you are comfortable with the output. 

   You can fine tune the adjustments by grabbing the center line you see above with your mouse and shifting the color range. Below is what I got when I applied this technique to the photo I am using for this tutorial:

 

 

That’s it – you’re done with the color restore, and you can move on to correcting photo imperfections and repairing damage.   In the next post, I’ll cover how to deal with both minor and major photo damage in a way that does not involve any use of the magic wand or smudge tool.  

John Cummings email, personal

I have been really wanting to upgrade my primary work virtual machine, a Windows Vista Enterprise VM, to the new Windows 7 RC.    I’ve put it off for a while, largely because I expected there would be problems with the actual “upgrade” portion of the upgrade – meaning that I really wanted to upgrade my existing VM in place, without having to take the time to install a fresh 7 VM and then go through the program installations.

Today, I decided to bite the bullet and give it a shot.   Unsurprisingly, the first attempt failed, when I was met with an error message telling me that

“Windows Vista™ Enterprise cannot be upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate. You can choose to install a new copy of Windows 7 Ultimate instead, but this is different from an upgrade, and does not keep your files, settings, and programs. You’ll need to reinstall any programs using the original installation discs or files. To save your files before installing Windows, back them up to an external location such as a CD, DVD, or external hard drive. To install a new copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, click the Back button in the upper left-hand corner, and select “Custom (advanced)”.

Installing a fresh copy is what I was hoping to avoid.     After a little playing around, I found this blog posting detailing how to tweak the Windows Vista registry to allow for a Vista Enterprise to Vista Ultimate upgrade.   Hoping to be able to apply the same trick to the 7 RC installation, I gave it a shot.

I’m pleased to say it works just fine.   By firing up regedit, and navigating to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion simply chaning the ProductName from “Windows Vista ™ Enterprise” to “Windows Vista ™ Ultimate”, and changing the EditionID from “Enterprise” to “Ultimate” will be enough to get the Windows 7 RC installer to give you a pass.

There were two additional steps required in my case (which may or may not be true for you).   For me, I had to uninstall Powershell from Windows Vista, and reboot the system before the installer would recognize the registry changes and allow the installation to continue – but once that was done, all was well and the upgrade went ahead without problem.

John Cummings personal

When Microsoft released Exchange 2007, connecting to it from the Mac got a whole lot simpler.    The release of 2007 brought with it Exchange Web Services, and a lot of the core functionality that used to be poorly supported or simply broken in Entourage was now accessible.   Another nice side effect of the architecture was the ability to connect to corporate Exchange servers from outside the network, without the need for a VPN connection.

With all these nice additions, one annoying subtraction was the inability to query the Global Address List when Entourage was configured using OWA.   Even when Exchange is being accessed via OWA, Entourage still expects an LDAP connection to the directory server.     If you’re at home, more than likely this connection isn’t going to work, and neither will queries to the GAL.

Fortunately there are two quick and easy solutions.  Both solutions work by convincing Entourage to query the GAL using the exposed Exchange Web Services, rather than relying on LDAP for the lookup.   As long as your installation of Entourage is configured correctly and properly connecting to your Exchange server, you shouldn’t have to do any additional configuration.

The first is the Entourage Exchange Lookup Applescript.   Download this script, unzip the contents, and move the Exchange Lookup\cF.scpt file to your ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items directory.    Once you’ve done that, you can access the handy “Exchange Lookup” menu item from the scripts drop down to perform your user query:

The second option is the OWAGALSearch application, which includes both a stand along GAL Lookup Application, as well as a similar script that is added to the Entourage Script Menu Items folder.    If you choose this option, first drag the OWA Gal Search application to your Applications folder, and then move the .scpt file to the same Entorage Script Menu Items folder detailed above.

You may like the added functionality of a stand alone app.  In my case, I have both installed together, and they function fine side by side.

John Cummings email, technology, tips

A great article in Relevant Magazine this month that goes hand in had with the “Be present and engaged” mantra.

Sloth: A Stealthy Enemy

John Cummings personal

When Hulu.com launched, I was one of the most vocal advocates of the site with friends and family.   The content offering was terrific, and the companies involved (at that time solely NBC and Fox) really seemed to finally “get” content delivery over the web.    The advertising was there, but it was unobtrusive, well targeted, and usually fairly to the point.

The site supported a broad user base with Flash video, and the delivery was speedy and efficient.   All in all, it was a pretty good video on the web experience.    Of course, I would have still preferred to watch the content outside of the browser, but for an initial launch it worked surprisingly well.

As time went by, and Hulu’s viewership increased, they were sitting on a modestly profitable content business in a very short amount of time.    Flash forward to early last year, when Boxee, a media center application, started to leverage Hulu content heavily, taking it outside of the browser, and delivering it to users in full, wide screen glory on their televisions.   Boxee was trying to do the right thing, leaving all of the embedded Hulu ads in tact, and arguably making it more difficult not to watch them if you were taking advantage of Hulu within Boxee.    This was no big deal though, because with Hulu’s smart ad embedding and targeting, users were generally very happy to watch the advertisements in exchange for the convenient content.    In the age of the DVR and the 30-second skip, it seemed like Hulu was on to the future advertising model.

Then, out of nowhere, the content guardians who made Hulu worth watching lost their damn minds.    Strike one, they withdrew their content from the Boxee app itself, attempting to force users back to the browser to get the video content they wanted.

The folks at Boxee tried to respect the decision, and in a future revision simply modified their program so that Boxee could consume the public RSS feeds that Hulu was making available from their site.    The end user experience wasn’t as fluid, but at least you could still pull the content (via RSS) in to the Boxee app.    Users were modestly placated, and it looked for a moment like the cries of protest would die down.

Hulu responded by encrypting their HTML to block non-browser agents from consuming their content.   This was a horrible idea for a couple of reasons.   First, remember, Boxee wasn’t blocking any ad content – so by blocking these users, their own revenue was being cannibalized.   Secondly, the encryption process made Hulu subsequently unusable for a large number of users by slowing down the delivery process to the point of un-watchability.

This impacted my family and I, as we used Hulu (ads and all) to keep up with some of our favorite NBC shows.    We were Boxee users, but when it became clear that Hulu and Boxee weren’t going to kiss and make up, we gave up and moved back to the browser, only to find that the new, encrypted Hulu was nearly unusable.

I gave up on watching video on NBC.com a long time ago.   Their delivery is everything Hulu wasn’t – spammy, intrusive, poorly executed, I could go on, but……

No worries, because I’d been hearing great things about NBC Direct, a service run by NBC itself to deliver full episode content from NBC.com.   I happily cruised over to NBC.com, to be greeted with this cute message:

NBC Direct is built for the Microsoft Windows operating system. The service does not currently run on other systems such as Apple Macintosh or Linux. However, if your Apple computer runs on an Intel Core Duo processor, you can set up Apple’s “Boot Camp” software to install and run one of the supported Microsoft Windows operating systems on your computer along with MacOS X.

I made it through the second line of that message, before promptly pointing my browser to thepiratebay.com, and in 10 minutes, I had the two latest episodes of “The Office“, in full HD in nice files on my hard drive that I can keep and rewatch – and helpfully all of the advertising content has been stripped out.

Guys, stealing your content isn’t difficult.   The only reason I wouldn’t do it is because I’d rather not.   I’m willing to watch the ads in a fair exchange for the content.   I’m even willing to accept that you don’t (for whatever reason) want me to watch that content outside of the browser.   Fair enough.   But once you put enough hoops in front of someone, they’re going to give up on you and just take what’s out there for the taking.    Get with it, or become the RIAA and start whining about how no one loves you and you’re getting screwed out of what’s yours.

John Cummings technology

Over the last several years, I’ve been collecting snippets of inspiration I find either on the web, in the books I read, or from conversations I have with others. When I see or hear something that strikes me as inspirational, I’m often surprised at how that wisdom often comes in simple words that are easily remembered when you need them.

I thought I’d dust off a few of my favorites, giving credit to the source (where I can remember it) and providing a little note about what I found inspiring in the words. If you see one that resonates with you, write it down and keep it somewhere that you’re likely to see it several times a day.

Doing this will keep the words in the forefront of your mind, and should help remind you to do/think/feel whatever behavior you were trying to program in yourself.

With that somewhat laborious introduction, here are some that I keep handy:

• Always put in more than you take out - this has been said many different ways when talking about many different things, but it’s applicable, sound advice in many situations.    Whether it’s your job, or your wallet, following this advice will help keep you on the right track.
• Be present - Summarized from this post.  To often we allow ourselves to get bogged down in the monotony of our daily routines.  If we allow this, it’s easy to miss out on the life happening around us.    It’s hard to live every moment fully aware of what’s happening, without allowing yourself to daydream/worry about the next move, but unless you remain on guard you can find yourself letting weeks, months, or even years run on autopilot.    You only get one trip around – make it count.
• Enjoy life, it’s short – this one goes hand in hand with being present – but keep yourself aware of the finite nature of our existence, and try to spend at least some of your time focusing on what really matters to you.   For some people, that’s work/school/hobby/whatever, and that’s ok.   For others it will be time with their kids/spouse/friends.  Figure out what matters to you, and make sure you’re allotting an appropriate amount of your finite time to that thing.
• It’s not about you – this piece of advice is used heavily by both Rick Warren and Don Miguel Ruiz.    We’re all narcissistic – chalk it up to human nature.    Stop and take a look around at how much drama is caused by people assuming that something that was said/happened was about them.   How often have you found yourself mulling over a situation, imaging what someone else was thinking about you when they said or did something?    Guess what, they weren’t thinking about you.   More likely than not, they were thinking about them – just like you are.   Let it go.
• Set a higher standard for yourself – this is stolen from Walt Disney.   Whether you love or hate the Disney theme park experience, you can’t argue that as the theme park experience goes, they have it down to a science.    They’ve become the best at what they do by holding themselves to a higher standard than anyone else who is doing what they do.    From repainting nightly, to demanding an unprecedented level of customer service from all employees, they’ve set the bar higher for themselves than their customers initially would have.    Start there with whatever you do – expect more from yourself than anyone you interact with would expect from you.   Go the extra mile, do the extra work – success will follow.
• Don’t fear the world – It’s easy to tell someone not to be afraid – but human nature is to jump to worst case scenario in any situation and then start worrying about how that scenario will play out.    It probably won’t – but that’s not the point.   No matter what we do or say, regardless of how successful we are, we’re all going to end up in exactly the same place.   You already know how the game is going to end – now relax and enjoy playing it.
• Live by the Golden Rule – Respect people, respect their diversity, and respect their opinions.   Make people feel like they matter to you.   Even when you disagree, listen to what they have to say.   You can have your worldview flipped by listening to someone passionate about what they were saying, even when going in to the conversation with bias.

I love each of these, and they’re special to me – but I’d love to hear if you have some that have been special and helpful to you that you’d like to share in the comments.

John Cummings personal

Many people that know me know that I love technology.  I love learning it, playing with it, trying out new things, and just generally getting my hands dirty with what’s out there, and getting a feel for how tools can be used to both do what they were designed to do, as well as to do creative things that they perhaps weren’t intended to do.

Part of what makes my position at Marshall University such a great gig is the freedom that I have from IT Management to explore technology, and figure out how it can be applied in unique ways to solve problems.

This same position is what pushed me in to the world of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 over a year ago.    I’ve made no secret that after spending a year working with this product, I’d gauge it’s readiness at the alpha/early beta level at best.   Everything about it, from the developer APIs to the end user interface feels half-baked, unintuitive, and just generally “off”.

This doesn’t shock me, because as with all things Microsoft, it’s usually the third or fourth iteration of any product before they get it “right”.    That’s fine when it’s a consumer level OS, end user product or something similar – but not so ok when it’s the core engine running portions of your public facing web infrastructure.

Doing due diligence, I try to stay attuned to what’s being said in the broader development community about the product – and on one of these periods of evening research, I came across this post that talks about some common reasons why Sharepoint implementations fail.

Some of the points the author makes are thoughtful and insightful – but what I found more interesting were the comments.    I’ve reproduced some of the choice ones below – each from someone who has been in much the situation I have been in, trying to make a product that refuses to do what it was sold to do work to the point where end users will accept it.

I have been in IT a long time, and I realize that many live and die by the “no one gets fired for recommending Microsoft, Oracle or IBM” adage – but let me urge CTOs, CIOs, or any other IT decision maker to carefully consider what your end-goal is before deploying Sharepoint in your organization.   If you’re looking for a document storage and collaboration solution that you intend to use out of the box, with little customization, then yes, it will work, though I have to believe that there are cheaper options that would be as effective.

If, however, you have visions of using Sharepoint to drive your web architecture – please do yourself a favor and examine the experiences that others have had going down this same road.    It’s a long one, and you end up coming to the realization that, yes, it can be done in Sharepoint, but ultimately it ends up costing you a lot of time, and there’s very little return.

I know – you’re tempted to turn away and say “what does he know?”    Well, I’ve made it work – and believe me, it ain’t easy.   Yes, it’s easier the larger the team – but ultimately the reward you get for the effort is extra overhead and a wacky architecture that really doesn’t make any sense when you start to unpack it.

But – don’t take my word for it – here are some choice gems from the comment thread referenced above:

Anonymous said…

There are a lot of reasons why SharePoint sites don’t make it off the ground, but this list is awful and barely scratches the surface on exactly what makes MOSS so bad. If you’re not doing custom development in MOSS, for example, consider yourself lucky. It’s a disgusting pile of crap. The API looks to have been written by a bunch of narcissistic, junior level developers, posing as principal developers, that were thrown into powerful positions by brain dead management. Anybody involved with the MOSS architectural direction should be fired. They’re worthless. I’ve never come across a more hideous platform. Worse yet, idiot CTO’s and other technology leaders believe it’s the “be all end all development platform”. At its best, it should be considered nothing more than an extension of the Microsoft Office suite.

Would you suggest developing all custom applications in Word? Then why is it that technology leaders feel differently about doing the exact same moronic thing in MOSS? Seriously, MOSS needs to die and anybody that supports it is worthless in the software development world.

May 1, 2009 1:36 PM

Anonymous said…

Sadly, I have to agree with the other anonymous, except he/she/it goes a bit over the top in true anonymous fashion.

I can only describe the development side of MOSS as “icky”. I think part of this is that MOSS is from the Office team at Microsoft, not the development team. Another part of this may be that the development side of MOSS was originally more of an afterthought. From what I hear MOSS is a huge step up from the previous Sharepoint in terms of the development side of things, so perhaps the next version will be more palatable to developers.

I also find the admin functionality in MOSS to be counter intuitive. And as an end user of MOSS, I feel the same way. MOSS sites just feels “weird” to me. This may be because the product does not target ‘web savvy’ folks, but rather the non-web savvy folks.

I know that the company I work for during the day has had problems scaling MOSS – even after following Microsoft’s guidelines regarding MOSS setup, consulting with Microsoft folks on the architecture as well as other MOSS experts.

This isn’t to say that the problems we’ve seen are specifically the fault of the product, because our environment may be a bit different than a “typical” installation. However, it is disheartening when the “experts” have trouble recommending a MOSS architecture that works for us.

I think MOSS adoption will be helped (compared to other solutions) by the economic downturn, at least at larger companies that already license all Microsoft products and are looking to cut costs by moving from more expensive solutions to MOSS.

It will be interesting to see what the new version of MOSS brings.

May 2, 2009 10:11 AM

Anonymous said…

We have both MOSS and Confluence (a wiki that comes with the ticketing system JIRA). Thankfully MOSS died on the vine.

It looked to me like a thin wrapper around a file system. People would post Word (!) documents to it and expect others to check them out, make local edits, and upload. Oh and don’t forget to lock / unlock it. A lot of these people were ex-MSFT.

They eventually came around to the wiki as their documents quickly became out of date. It was like the electronic equivalent of a dead tree copy.

And the search was awful. Like unusable awful. Contrast that to the wiki that did its own pages and searched inside of the occasional word doc.

I’m not sure what MOSS gives anyone. Maybe it has an easy to install interface or that it comes preinstalled? There’s plenty of free and inexpensive wikis out there to ever go with MOSS.

May 2, 2009 11:57 AM

Marcelo Lopez said…

@Anonymous 1 & 2: I don’t think Mr/Ms. Anonymous goes over the top, as a matter of factor, I think Anonymous 1 was rather reserved in some respect.

Speaking from the standpoint of a developer, and an architect that’s evaluated extension systems ( like K2 Blackpearl/Blackpoint )and find it still woefully lacking for many things.

First let’s look at business processes in general. When is ANY business process ( especially one’s involving BPM and Workflow together ) EVER static in any sense. The answer is never. Sure any particular snapshot might have a lifespan, but usually that lifespan can be measured by an egg timer, not the atomic decay rate of carbon-14. MOSS has no innate way of rolling out versionable business processes that can overlap, or even cohabitate. When you roll out a document, that’s the document, you edit, approve, request mods, etc. But on THAT version of a document, there’s no literal temporal way of managing the lifespan of anything that’s requires versioning of any sort.

Secondly, like jc said, MOSS tries INCREDIBLY hard to be every possible CMS to every possible CMS situation. Again, woefully inadequate because as Anonymous 2 said, the development side is “icky”. Actually, no, I’ll see his/her “icky” and raise it with “inane”. Sharepoint Designer is practically Expression Web ( nee MS Frontpage ) with a few different templates installed, and some various menu differences. The fact that tools like K2’s toolset are almost a no-brainer for anyone trying to do anything MOSS of significant merit, is a testament itself that trying to do so without tools ( like K2 ) and using only what comes “out of the box” on MOSS is devoid of any practical sense. Not that I’ve found using the extensions gets you much further along that what many other CMS/DMS’s do out of the box already without all the hub-bub and extra expenditures.

May 3, 2009 12:57 PM

John Cummings sharepoint

So some guy comes in to 4th floor of the library today literally screaming about how he can’t log in, and basically goes off on a rant at a way unacceptable level. Entitled much? Just fyi – I don’t care who you are or what your title is, I’m not your dog, so check your tone.

John Cummings personal

When Amazon released the Kindle app for the iPhone (App Store link), they delivered a solid eBook reader with a direct tie-in to the Amazon Kindle Store – making it easy to purchase a book from Amazon and have it wirelessly delivered to your iPhone via the WhisperSync service.

While the Kindle Store is a great source of new books, many other sites have a much broader selection of free, classic books in various eBook formats.

Some of the best of these are sites like Project Gutenberg and FeedBooks, both of which offer deep libraries of free eBooks, with many titles that have yet to show up as free (if at all) in the Kindle store.   It’s this selection of free titles that has led many users to stay with apps like (the also excellent) Stanza as their eReader of choice on the iPhone.

If you’re a Kindle app fan who likes the convenience of the tie-in to the Kindle store, but you’d also like access to the freebies, there’s good news – assuming you jailbreak your phone.

Once jailbroken, if you’ll connect to your phone via Bonjour (which you can do easily using a client like Transmit – you can also use the IP address of your iPhone to connect, but Bonjour is usually simpler) by logging in with the default username/password combo of root/alpine, you can navigate to the Kindle App’s eBook folder, and drop in .prc and .mobi files that you’ve downloaded directly from any of these sites.   The next time you start up the Kindle for iPhone app, the books will be right there in your library, ready for your enjoyment.

To get to the right folder, once you log in you’ll need to go to the root of the file system, then navigate to \User\Applications\UUIDofApp\Documents\eBooks.   The only tricky part, if you’ve installed a lot of apps, is figuring out which UUID is being used for the Kindle app.   Opening up a UUID folder, you’ll note the Application name is listed as a folder (Appname.app).   You may need to find the right folder by trial and error.   Once you find it, make sure to make note of the UUID so you can find it again easily in the future.

Good luck – and happy reading.

John Cummings technology

WikiSym, the wiki site for the 2008 International Symposium on Wikis released some nice summary data on a number of Wiki systems that they reviewed for use by both private groups, and the enterprise.   By and large, they concluded Sharepoint was a failure for use as a general purpose Wiki.   You can read about their conclusions in context here.

The most interesting conclusion that I read in the article was a conclusion that I happen to agree with myself.   Sharepoint is the place to be for document of record, authoritative final draft content.    For real-time, or near real-time collaboration, the feature set is lacking.   It’s as if someone came in to a MOSS pitch meeting with a “How to Do Web 2.0 in 12 Easy Steps” portfolio, and started bolting on features that didn’t necessarily make sense.   “Gee Bob, Globocorp said they’re really in to this blogging thing – maybe we should add a blog feature?”.   “Sounds good to me Chip.  How do we do that?”   “Well, you’re going to need a rich text editor – get the ActiveX component developers on the phone stat….”

For the love of God would someone introduce these guys to the 22% and climbing segment of users who browse with Firefox.   Seriously, if a vendor other than Microsoft came through your door and told you “We have a great Wiki/Blog/CMS product – but the thing is, only 8 out of every 10 employees will be able to do anything with it” would you keep listening?

Thankfully, you can get creative and add your own RAD rich text controls, even going so far as to gut the bloated, horribly implemented MS content editors and replacing them entirely so it’s at least theoretically possible to work with another browser.   Be careful doing this though, as Microsoft pretty much tells you outright that they will stomp on these customizations when the time comes to install that SP.

One bit of humor I did find in the review of Sharepoint’s Wiki capabilities was the reference to the one company who did implement it for their Wiki system, and was happy with the outcome.   They go on to mention the team of consultants they hired, the six months of development time they spent in customization, and the tens of thousands of Euros it costs them on top of the price of Sharepoint itself.

One thing that has traditionally been true about MS products – with each revision, they get progressively closer to the product they should have come out with at release.   I’m hopeful with the next release of Sharepoint that some of these shortcomings will be addressed.    Right now, it has great momentum in the corporate intranet, where it’s not uncommon for IT to dictate that users who want to use the system use it in a specific way – but personally I’m a little burnt out on spending two weeks custmozing the look and feel of five web pages.

- Signing off

John Cummings sharepoint