But Does It Work?

FB May Decide That You 'Like' Something Without Asking You, Unless You Opt Out

Facebook tells my friends that I 'Like' Facebook pages that I have never even seen.  Facebook does this automatically.  This experience leaves me with a feeling of "what else is Facebook not telling me?" 

Last week, I was talking to my friend Dan.  He mentioned that in his News Feed he saw that I (Marcel) 'Like' the Proper Cloth.  He thought it was strange, since I don't usually promote brands in this way. 

I have never taken any actions to indicate that I 'Like' the Proper Cloth, and I felt that a hacker might have done this.  Dan navigated to the Proper Cloth Facebook page and there it indicated that Marcel Liked the page along with several thousand others. Then I navigated to the Proper Cloth myself and there was no indication that I actually 'Liked' it.

I decided to write to Facebook support asking a few questions about this.  As soon as I submitted my questions, Facebook provided a message indicating that I would not get any response, but thanked me for my feedback.

I decided to post a question on my Facebook page to my friends:  Did anyone have a similar experience as I did?  Almost immediately Gina responded saying that she has.  Furthermore, I had noticed in the past that on my News Feed I have seen that Gina 'Likes' Salesforce. (See the image below)  I always thought this was strange, since I didn't think that Gina was involved with Salesforce.

One other friend, Howard, responded indicating that you have to opt out of this behavior.  More on this below.  Finally, I did send an email to the "Anti Phishing" group that I belong to.  Foy, someone very knowledgeable explained how you can see what you 'Like' on Facebook.

 

How to Opt Out

On a regular browser (not the FB App) go to settings then ads. There's something that says 'can we  pair your name with ads we think you like.'  Just clicked no.

NOTE:  What this is really saying, yes (which it is by default) means: "Facebook will at times indicate that you 'Like' something automatically, without asking you or informing you."

If you ask me, this stinks.  It is probably just legal, but not ethical.  It is using me to advertise to my friends with the claim that I like something, which in fact I do not.

 

How to Tell What Facebook May Have 'Liked' on Your Behalf

The "Antiphishing Working Group" responded with the following instructions:  "look on your FB page on the menu bar under your profile picture, click "more" and there is an option for "likes". you can see what you like as well as what you follow.

 

End Note

This experience leaves me with a feeling of "what else is Facebook not telling me?"  It is not a good feeling.

 

Developing SP Lists that Reference SP Objects by ID, and Can be Moved

I have developed a document management system using SharePoint for a large organization.  The original intent was that the system be used by one department and started out as a grass roots effort.  As people started using it, others in the global organization saw the system and asked to also use it.

Since the original system was created as a site buried several levels down of a departmental site collection, it was decided that we should create a dedicated site collection for the this system and move the site and its contents to the new home.  The benefits of a dedicated site collection are:  1) would allow easier management of permissions and 2) make a disaster recovery plan more straightforward to develop, test, and implement.

We discovered a number of interesting issues during the move.  This brief post focuses on one single issue:  The issue of how to design a series of SharePoint Lists & Libraries that cross reference each other and allows one to move the site and its contents and maintain referential integrity..

The Problem
Originally when I created the site, I had a simple list called "Index."  The Index was the system of record and kept columns that pointed to documents in various libraries.  These "pointers" consisted of the native SharePoint ID given to the documents when they were created.  Thus if this was the 51st document to be created in a library, then SP would assign the ID of 51 to a document.  All of this worked really well, until the site had to be moved.

The problem is that when you moved the site to a new site collection (not using a Database Restore) the IDs of the documents were no longer the same as the IDs in the original libraries.  The new copy of the index was now all wrong.  The index was pointing at document with ID=51 in a certain library, but that library now had a different document assigned to ID 51.

The Solution
Instead of relying on the native SharePoint ID, I decided to create my own column “SiteID” and made sure that this column contained a unique ID generated by me.  (The easiest way to do this is to use a string representation of the record creation date and time.)  Once I established this as the ID, the site could easily be moved with its contents and the referential integrity was maintained.  

Review of a MS Surface...

I have used an iPad 2 and 3 (16 GByte) extensively, as well as a Kindle Fire HD (16 GByte), and now I am trying the MS Surface Pro (128 GB, 4GB RAM) with Windows 8.  Overall my initial gut reaction to the Surface is "Yuk."  Microsoft has a huge legacy with the Windows Franchise, and they are trying to bring users along from laptops and desktop machines to their new attempt at the tablet market.

As part of my consulting business, I am doing an evaluation for a large company that is considering bringing in Surfaces instead of continuing to purchase iPads.  I have therefore been handed a Surface and asked to evaluate it.  To sum up my feelings in one sentence:  "The problem is that Microsoft is trying to make the Surface appeal to everyone by doing everything, and instead I believe that they have succeeded in turning off many people."

I know that I am supposed to begin with positives, but my reaction was so negative to the Surface, that I just couldn't bring myself to do so.

Negatives:

1. It is too heavy

2. Battery life is too short (2 hours in continuous use, if I am lucky)
           (Note 1 & 2 make it impractical to read books on the Surface  )

3. The onscreen keyboard and the physically detachable keyboard don't agree on simple things (For example the onscreen keyboard does not have an "alt" key. and has a set of smiley faces instead)

4. You often need the stylus, when using the Surface as a tablet, because window adornments are too small to click on with my fingers.  The stylus is easy to lose.

5. The Power Cord takes a little fiddling to attach, and it attaches to the same magnetic strip that the stylus does.  Thus you have to take the stylus off when you are charging.

6. Apps are not abundant.

7. The camera is not integrated widely with apps

8. Internet Explorer 10 is no great shakes.  Furthermore, IE, Firefox, and Chrome for Windows do not support the camera for HTML5.

We have developed an application written in HTML5- jQuery and CSS.  The application leverages the HTML5 calls to the camera.  It works beautifully on the iPad.  It works well with Chrome and Firefox on a PC, except the camera cannot be used.

8. I happen to like to hold the Surface in the Portrait position, many apps do not support this orientation, thus I am forced to hold it in the landscape position.

 

Positives:

1. The hand writing recognition window, which is an extension of the keyboard is quite good.  I can actually use it to take notes in a meeting.  I do not like to type in a meeting, because I believe it is too intrusive and it draws my attention away.  The handwriting recognition is actually good enough so that I could use that during a meeting.

2. I could plug in the Surface into my monitors and keyboard and mouse and use it as my main computer.  Main drawback is that it has Windows 8.

Granting Access and Permissions to a SharePoint site hosted on Microsoft Office 365

Marcel and I are working on granting permissions for a SharePoint site created in Office 365. The process for granting an external user access to an authenticated SharePoint site is a convoluted process and I am documenting the procedure to see if this can help others and discover suggestions. The advantages for having external accounts is that you can give access to a SharePoint that is not part of a company site but an external site. You can control who sees and contributes to your private site that is hosted and created via Microsoft Office 365. This makes the SharePoint site an Extranet and would be good for sharing with clients.

We are using Microsoft Office 365 and that SharePoint environment which does not allow for a true Sharepoint site to be visible without authorized access. Office365 does give you the option to create an external site with very limited functionality.

Here are the steps I had to follow.

Firstly from the Admin SharePoint Office 365 screen, you select manage Site Collections > Settings > Manage External Users and choose Allow.

Then go into your SharePoint site under Site Actions > Site Settings > Site Collection Features and activate External User Invitations -Allow external users to be invited to the site

Now as the site admin if you got to site settings, and choose Site Permissions, and select Grant Permissions, I have found that this does not work. If you put in someone’s email address it refused to send it or says unknown user. I think this screen might work if you are linked to an Active Directory but not to a general email.

So how then did I get some to have access, you ask Under Site Actions, I choose ShareSite and put in an email address to someone email and that sent them an invitation to join the site as a Visitor. Then that person gets then email, selects t he link to the site, but they are then prompted to login and can only login with one of two types of email accounts either a HotMail account or a Microsoft Live account. This does seem very limiting. However a person can register for a Microsoft Live account which is linked to their other random email account for example a Gmail account. This linking to another account allows the invitation to work and the person can login to the SharePoint site through Microsoft Live or using the onmicrosoft account 

Then I wanted to grant this visitor a higher level of access, either contributor or member so that they could modify the site.

It seems to me that once the visitor has accessed the site, then Site Settings > Users and Permission  > User and Groups then you have all the choices in the left nav of the different types of users, example – Visitors, members, or Owners. Select the one you want an dyou can then add this new person to that group and their permissions have now changed. This is how I changed an external users permissions. It might be possible to change that persons permissions another way, as well as send someone an invitation from this page directly for the level of permissions you want to grant them. You can also turn off sending out the auto email and just grant the permissions.

I think you can add many external users, remove them easily if you want to have them collaborate temporarily and I think external partners will only know who else has access to the site only if the other users post or modify an item and that information is captured. They will not have access to a member list. As a member or visitor I don’t think they can access a list of users or modify those type of records, nor access other Office 365 features. Only access the SharePoint site that was granted to them.

A good post that we used to learn from can be found here (The video at the end of this post is worth watching.)

Len Goldberg

IE 9.0 Memory Grows by 6+ MB when Refreshing SharePoint Pages

Dear Microsoft,

Could you please fix IE 9.0!  When I use IE 9.0 (x32) on WIndows 7 to view SharePoint (Enterprise Edition) pages (any page), I see that the IE 9 memory process grows by about 6 MB everytime I refresh the page or navigate to a new page.  Since I work with clients that spend a lot of time on the SharePoint pages that I build for them, it means that local machine memory consumption goes up rapidly (100 clicks --> .6GB !) and they believe that SharePoint is slow and causes the browser to crash frequently.

I have done quite a bit of research on this issues and have concluded that the culprit is IE 9.0 (x32), most likely the add-in "NameCtrl Class."  Here is what I have found:

 

1. Important metnions of this probelm
       IE 9 and SharePoint memory usage is extreme Posted (May 23, 2011)
      ?IE 9 and SharePoint 2010 memory leak (Posted June 27, 2011)

      The thing to note is that the problem has been around for a while,
      and then the blog trail went silent.

2. The problem causes IE to crash after some time, in my case every twenty minutes.  The problem also causes my Windows machine to slow down.

3. The prolem only occurs with IE 9:

    Not with Firefox, not with Safari, not with IE 8.

4. I have observed the problem on several corporate enterprise servers (both 2007 & 2010), on a virgin installation of enterprtise server running on my own Virtual Machine, as well as on Office 365.

5. NOTE: The problem does not exist when navigating pages of WSS 3.0 or Founddation Server.

6. If you have a single IE 9.0 session and tab open, when you naviagte to a different domain, e.g. nytimes.com, IE 9.0 releases the memory and the process size goes down.

This is a trivial way to see the problem yourself.

Step 1:  Navigate to the any page that is being served up by SharePoint 2007 or 2010 enterprise server.

Step 2: Launch the Windows Task Manager and click on the Processes tab.

Step 4: Note the process size of iexplorer.exe *32.  (NOTE: There is usually more than one running)

Step 5: Refresh the page from step 1.

Step 6: Note the process size of one of the iexplorer.exe *32 instances should have increased. 

Step 7. Repeat steps 1->6 several times.  You will see that the there is no limit to the growth of the process size for IE 9.

 

The screenshots below show a Before (125,532K) and an After (131,492K) a single refresh, for an increase of 5.96 MB.  Note the screenshots were taken of a site that was built on Office 365.

 

BEFORE

AFTER

If I find a solution to this issue, I will post it here.

Impersonation in SharePoint Workflows - An interesting Pitfall

Impersonation is an important feature of workflow technologies.  It is the process of running an automated process with the credentials of another user.  It is frequently employed for short fragments of an automated process to accomplish a task that requires an elevated privilege.  Developers have had this tool at their disposal for many years.  The new SharePoint Designer (2010) now allows knowledgeable end users to leverage this important feature for their automated workflows (See figure 1.)  Impersonation is quite handy, but users should be aware of an important pitfall that may only be revealed months or years after the workflow has been running flawlessly.

 
Figure 1: Shows a simple Workflow with an Impersonation Step in SharePoint Designer 2010

 

A workflow may be running for a long period and it will not have any issues.  Then one day it stops running.  The cause?  The credentials of the elevated user are no longer valid.  There can be several reasons for the change.

1. A user password can be forced to change.  The credentials that are stored with the Workflow are now stale.
2. The User ID may have been revoked. The user may have left the organization.
3. The privileges for a given User ID may change.  The user has changed departments and is no longer allowed to have access to the department site.

Generally IS organizations are aware of this pitfall and thus when a developer uses an impersonation step she will use an ID that has been specially created for this purpose and is sanctioned by the organization to permanently maintain the same password and privileges.

Even sophisticated end users may not be aware of this issue.  They may build solid workflows that operate flawlessly.  In the worst case, a critical process is supported by a workflow that depends upon one or more impersonation steps, probably  leveraging the end user’s credentials.  One day the credentials change.  In the worst case, when the end user leaves the organization!  Suddenly the automated workflow stops working.

What is the Significance of Cloud Computing?

Last month I attended the single day condensed version of Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in Boston. (http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/start.aspx)  Microsoft decided to devote 1/3 of all sessions to Azure.  Azure is Microsoft’s new ground-up approach to “Cloud Computing”.  According to local Microsoft sources at the conference, this is Ray Ozzie’s big bet for the company.  Ray has been in charge of large company bets in the past: Lotus Symphony, Lotus Notes, and Groove Networks (acquired by Microsoft by in 2005.)  Cloud Computing is receiving a great deal of fanfare across many industry players, and it seems to be a high stakes game.  Skeptics are questioning whether Cloud Computing is real or just an elusive term to create excitement.  Before getting too carried away with the term, below is some sobering insight from Larry Ellison:

Excerpt from : http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/09/25/larry-ellisons-brilliant-anti-cloud-computing-rant  “The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop? “We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

 

Of course we have all seen buzz words come and go, some stick and some don’t. 

I worked at Lotus development for most of the 90’s.  Remember Lotus?  Lotus became well known when it made a splash with 1-2-3, and later Notes.   I was part of the Smart Suite team and we were losing market share rapidly to Microsoft Office.  In 1998 my colleague, Andrew Wyatt, suggested that we change the business model for Smart Suite.   Instead of selling Smart Suite, Andrew’s idea was to give away Smart Suite and to rely on embedded advertising for revenue.  Oh my god, what a visionary!   Of course at the time the idea was shunned by almost everyone at Lotus, “software just isn’t delivered that way.”  In fact it seemed like throughout the latter part of the nineties people kept talking about monetizing web advertizing, but no one seemed to be able to do it.  Fast forward 10 years, and we now know that Google, arguably one of the most successful software companies in the world, has been wildly successful at monetizing software advertizing.

How is this related to Cloud Computing?  This tale reminds us that ideas which seemed ludicrous at one time, can quickly evolve into a pervasive technology.  Today, no one doubts that there is money to be made in online advertizing.

So who is investing in this murky future of cloud computing?  What is the potential payoff?  What is the sea change we can expect?  What are the pitfalls?

Who is Investing in Cloud Computing?

Of course as Larry Ellison points out, he can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing.  That being said, a lot of companies are claiming to be putting big bets on it:

1.       Windows Live: Microsoft has already put a lot of money into moving the existing server applications to a centrally managed set of services embodied by Windows Live.

2.       Azure Platform Services: Microsoft’s next generation foray into cloud computing is building a cloud operating system from the ground up.

3.       Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): Amazon’s offering which brags of a “true virtual computing environment.”

4.       Google Apps: Google has as set of web applications.

5.       Joint R&D effort by Google and IBM: Google and IBM have formed a partnership in which they will invest a combined $30 million over the next two years in Cloud Computing.[1] 

6.       In 2008 Dell tried to trademark the term Cloud Computing: The US Patent Office turned them down.  Dell is working on creating large centralized computing farms so that companies can lease computing power without the hassles of maintaining their own hardware and software.

7.       Saleforce.com: A CRM on demand service.  One of the first successful Software as a Service (SAAS) models.

8.       Intuit’s TurboTax online: Not much to say, people understand this.

 

The list goes on for pages, but you get the idea.  The important thing to realize is that lots of companies are spending a great deal of money and marketing effort to get into the game.

What is the potential payoff?

Robert X. Cringely[2]  likens Microsoft’s Azure with the electric power industry.  Although Cringely uses the analogy with a different slant, whoever winds up being a utility provider in the computing industry has an annuity that pays dividends on a monthly basis.  We all pay the utility companies: electric, phone, and gas, and we rarely look at our bills.  There is a huge pot of money to win here.

What is the sea change we can expect?

Imagine a world where we don’t have to worry about our personal computing devices.  You don’t have to be too imaginative.  Think of the iPhone.  If something goes wrong, you walk into your local Apple Store and talk to someone at the genius bar.  The big nugget you pay for the iPhone is not the initial cost, but the monthly service charge.  In exchange for this annuity you provide to AT&T/Apple you get “worry free” service and the use of applications in the cloud.  Of course you don’t even realize that there is a cloud supporting you, instead you think of your computing environment as the device itself.  Here is a perfect example:  You are listening to a song, you launch Shazam.  The phone listens to the music and then acts like it is thinking.  What is it really doing?  It is sending a captured pattern to a computer in the cloud.  Then it waits for the cloud to respond with the name of the song, the artist, and a link to the song on iTunes , where you can buy the song.

What is the impact of cloud computing on businesses?  Fast forward ten years.  Imagine a world where businesses no longer need to worry about any hardware or software on premise.  This is akin to the centrally located telephone switches of the twentieth century (AT&T used to call theirs “Centrex”.)  The telephone companies took care of everything.  Of course we have seen many swings of this pendulum.

The future may bring monthly payment s for each employee, but no initial investment and no staff needed for upkeep and maintenance.  This will allow new businesses to have access to sophisticated software on the day they are established with risk free investments in technology.

What are the Pitfalls?

For anyone who is too young to recall Lily Tomlin’s skit about Ernestine, the telephone operator, on the 1969 Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, you should watch it before reading the rest of this article on You Tube: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o.)  The point of this skit was that people by-and-large felt that the phone company knew everything about us and used it against us. 

In a similar vein, today we can see a more subtle impact on our lives by Apple’s control of what can be installed on our iPhones[3].  Imagine if Microsoft wants to build a version of its media player for the iPhone.  Microsoft may want to provide a platform for the iPhone so that non-iTunes music can be played on the iPhone.  Will Apple allow Microsoft to distribute the media player on the App Store?

One last anecdote that illustrates the battles that are already occurring between the big players.  Microsoft Hotmail looks at the web browser’s signature, referred to as the user agent signature, to identify the type of browser.  In the case of the new Google browser “Chrome”, hotmail reports to the user that it cannot run in the browser.  In response to this effort by Hotmail to undermine Google’s browser , Chrome is now spoofing its own user agent by reporting that it is a Safari browser. [4]

What Will we be Saying in 10 Years?

I am not sure what people will be saying about Cloud Computing in 10 years.  The term will probably not even be known by young people and one may have to look it up on FuturePedia.  It will all be clear to us what the really relevant aspects of cloud computing were, what the important design points were, and who the winners were.  It is clear that there is a land grab going on to be at the center of it all.

---

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/technology/08cloud.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=cloud%20computing&st=cse

[2] “Azure Blues: Microsoft and the electric power industry have a lot in common” (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081030_005501.html)

 

[3] Not too dissimilar form Microsoft’s earlier grip on Windows.

[4] http://lifehacker.com/5142420/google-chrome-accesses-hotmail-by-pretending-its-safari

 

I took the Plunge! I bought an iPhone and I am sticking with it.

I am a very careful buyer and very rarely do I buy on impulse.  I have been a student of mobile data communications since the 1990's.  I used to work for AT&T (remember the princess phone?), Lotus Development (remember 1-2-3 & Notes?), and Fleet Bank (remember Bank Boston?)  I spent a great deal of time investigating the various mobile data devices over the years.  I have been a loyal BlackBerry user since 2000.

Full disclosure is important here.

1. I have never used my data device as a phone.  I have always carried around a small separate phone on the Verizon Network and another device for data.  I never liked talking on a bulky and awkward data device, and I am not bluetooth lover.
2. I work for a Microsoft Gold Partner.  I try not to show it in my opinions, but you should know it.

Since I work for a Microsoft Partner, BlackBerries are not supported.  In plain English, I can't get my email on my BlackBerry, because we do not have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) , which is needed to connect BlackBerries to an exchange server.  In addition to that, I must confess that I am very bored with my BlackBerry.  Of course bored is good, because I can be very productive even when I am on the road.

So I recently took the plunge, I bought an iPhone.  I am a difficult customer to please, and if I feel that I am giving up too much, I won't change.  Several months ago I tried a Windows Mobile 6.1 device.  It took me less than a day to realize that I just couldn't bare it, even though it gave me access to my work email.

So how was my experience with my new iPhone?

Well, if you like Macs, then you gotta love the iPhone.  Some things are not as good as a BlackBerry, but it gets an overall "very good" review from me.

  -- Battery life not good, but this is the 1st device that I am willing to swallow that negative to keep the device.  No question, the BlackBerry is the platinum standard, and the iPhone doesn't hold a candle to it.

  ++ Output to humans rules! There is nothing like it, both visually and audibly.

 ++ Input from humans is great for the new innovative iPhone gestures.

  -- Typing input is poor compared to the BlackBerry.   If you need to type lots of emails, then you still need a BlackBerry.  If you are okay with relatively little typing, then it is fine.  (Make sure to have the disclaimer at the end of your e-mails: "Sent from my mobile device :-)"

  -- NO CLIPBOARD!  I miss having a clipboard.  Still worth getting the device, though.

  --NO GLOBAL SEARCH! You can search the address book, and it is quick, but the user interface around searching is poor.

 - No spell checker yet.

 -  3G Network:  Not wonderful.  However, it seems that I am mostly in proximity of a Wireless network, and except for a drop in performance, the switch is seamless, unlike any other device I have tried.   Once you get to understand the iPhone User Interface, you can get around pretty well, and you optimize your use of the web in low bandwidth situations.  (By-the-way, I use testmyiphone.com/speedtest to test my bandwidth.  The AT&T 3G network in the Boston area seems to give me about 1 Mbps when it is working well, but my average experience is around 128 Kbps.)

 ++ E-mail: This was wonderful!  I was able to connect to my exchange server at work within 2 minutes and my Yahoo account another 2 minutes.

  ++ Contacts & Calendar Sync: Works just as well as the BlackBerry!  Apple did a good job on this.

 -  Phone: I am not using the phone, I am sticking with my small cell phone on Verizon.  I suspect I would be very upset if my battery was constantly running down and I couldn't talk on the phone. account another 2 minutes.  (I am paying $15 per month for the extra exchange connector.) The email client was just as good as the BlackBerry in terms of the "Push" to my device.  The e-mail reader was terrific!  I can read attachments, zoom in, and zoom out using the famous iPhone finger gestures.  Apple was very clever here.  They piggy backed off the already widely deployed Microsoft infrastructure for Microsoft mobile devices.

  ++ The App Store: An absolutely brilliant move by Apple.  I am willing to trust that applications on the AppStore are safe,  they don't break the bank, and they are trivial to install.

  ++ GPS: They did a really nice job integrating Google maps and the built in GPS.  Granted it does not provide turn-by-turn audible instructions, but it is a lot friendlier than many of the GPS devices out there.

  - Cost: I will admit it, it is expensive.  I have pooled with some other people who don't value the AT&T voice minutes, so we are on a family plan.    We took the minimal number of minutes, and we add each additonal iPhone for $10 plus the cost for the unlimited data plan.

Other devices?

I am curious to see how Google does with the new Google Phone.  I have heard good things about Nokia's E90.  Overall, I give Apple a lot of credit for innovation and execution.  Within a very short time frame, they have raised the bar.  It took Research in Motion years to accomplish this, and many of the other vendors haven't been successfully, even though they have been at it for many years.