markwilson.it

Category: Technology

  • SharePoint list migration between sites – a few lessons learned

    What a week! Believe it or not, my job isn’t one as a SharePoint administrator, although sometimes it feels like it is (and recent blog posts might suggest otherwise)!

    The thing about SharePoint is that even non-developers like me can string together a few webparts and lists to create something reasonably useful. Last week, one of the sites that I’m managing as part of my day job was migrated from its incubation location as a subsite of my team’s portal, to join some related content on another site. It should have been fairly straightforward, but sadly that wasn’t the case…

    Updating hyperlinks

    I knew that I needed to edit the hyperlinks on some of my pages but I forgot that the webparts showing views of my lists would also need to be changed, meaning that the data was actually being displayed from the old site (still left in place until I knew that the migration had been a success). I couldn’t find a way to just edit a link to the list, so I had to replace each webpart with a new version, picking up the appropriate list (and view).  That was issue number 1 sorted.

    Corrupted lists with orphaned columns

    Most of the lists in my site came across without issue but the largest one (30-odd columns and around 350 items) was generating an error, with the expected data replaced by “One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields”. I found various articles about this, but they all seemed to relate to migrations from SharePoint 2007 to 2010.

    Then, as I was digging around in the site, I found a “hidden” column that wasn’t visible in the list settings but could be seen when editing list views. The name of the column was familiar though – it matched a workflow that someone had created on the original (source) site but which wasn’t attached to the list. Apparently, when SharePoint starts a workflow on a list for the first time, it adds a workflow status column to the default view of the list  and it seems that “orphaned” workflow status columns are not unheard of. I tried creating another column with the same name (to then delete it again) but, predictably, that wasn’t possible (although creating a new workflow with the same name did create a duplicate column, which was deleted when the workflow was removed).

    A little more research turned up “official” advice from Microsoft that suggested these orphaned columns couldn’t be deleted but, as is often the case, there is a way to do it with third party software and a bit of coding, as described by Nik Patel at his SharePoint World. Unfortunately, the SharePoint Manager tool that Nik used needs to be run on the server – there’s no chance of me being able to do that – but our SharePoint admins were not convinced that the orphaned column was causing the issue anyway and found some columns using lookups that were not correctly linked following the list migration. These couldn’t be edited (at least not through the SharePoint web interface), so they were deleted and recreated, before I copied the data back into them. A page refresh later and the list was displayed as expected (so the orphaned column was not the cause), although there was still one final problem…

    Broken New and Edit forms

    I still had an issue in that attempting to add a new item to the list resulted in “an unexpected error has occurred” messages, which are far from helpful!

    A colleague had spotted that the NewForm.aspx and EditForm.aspx forms were incorrectly linked (the list had been renamed at some point and for some reason the original list name was still being used in the path to the forms) but that was easily corrected in SharePoint Designer. Even so, adding or editing an item in the list was generating errors and I was running out of ideas (as were my colleagues).

    I thought that I had spotted all of the differences between the two copies of the list (source and target sites) so, I conceded defeat and started to recreate the list from scratch (before copying in the data in data sheet view – I know I can import/export via Excel, but that sometimes results in incorrect column types that can’t be edited). That’s when I found some more corrupted lookup columns. I couldn’t edit them (at least not through the SharePoint web interface) so, again, I deleted and recreated them, before repopulating the data. All of a sudden, my site was working as it should have been – hooray!

    Wrap-up

    All of the problems I had were avoidable, with the benefit of hindsight, but I’m hoping not to have to migrate too many SharePoint sites in future. I expect I won’t be the last person to go through this process though and hopefully the experiences I’ve written about here will come up on a search when others are looking for help…

  • Getting started with Raspberry Pi (#RasPi): Take 2

    Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi FoundationA couple of months ago, I wrote about getting started with Raspberry Pi but I have to admit it wasn’t exactly successful. In true open source style the Raspberry Pi FAQ (since updated) contradicted the downloads page/quickstart guide and an official blog post suggested that Fedora was the recommended distro.  I had some issues with Fedora, not least that a graphical login seemed to fail (there’s a forum post that suggests why that might be a problem) but also with getting hold of Scratch (which is something I want to use the Pi for, with my sons).

    Last night I tried again, reflashing my Pi’s SD card using the Debian 6 “Squeeze” distro from the Raspberry Pi downloads page. There are various tools to do this (I used Win32DiskImager, also recommended on the downloads page, although the Softpedia download site is UX disaster, but Linux and Mac users already have dd and there is a Windows port of dd that Element 14 are distributing).

    With the SD card flashed, I booted the system, logged in (username pi, password raspberry) and set about resizing the 2GB image to fill my 8GB SD card.  There’s good advice for resizing flash partitions on the Embedded Linux Wiki and the steps I took were:

    1. Edit the partition table:
      sudo fdisk -cu /dev/mmcblk0
      p (to view the partition table)
      d (to delete a partition)
      3 (to select partition 3)
      d (to delete a partition)
      3 (to select partition 2)
      n (to create a new partition)
      p (to make it a primary partition)
      2 (to create partition 2)
      157696 (to set the starting position to match the old partition table – see the output from the p command earlier)
      Press the Enter key (to set the maximum available partition size)
      w (to write the partition table)
    2. Then, reboot:
      sudo shutdown -r now
    3. After logging in again, resize the partition:
      sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2
    4. Finally, check the new size:
      df -h

    With a working system, I launched the LXDE graphical user interface with startx. and found that there is a decent amount of software (including Scratch, Python, etc.) already installed. It’s also possible to access the Raspberry Pi remotely and run the GUI on another system with X Windows/SSH.

    Back in the command line, I wanted to install a twitter client (so that my Pi can tweet status updates) and Twidge is my favourite (CLI-based) client on a Linux system.  Romilly Cocking has written about installing Twidge on the Pi (Tweety Pi!) but I found I needed to run sudo apt-get update before I could successfully complete the sudo apt-get twidge command (without the update, there were lots of 404 errors for missing dependencies). As I was running Terminal inside the LXDE environment, I could use Midori to authorise Twidge via the Twitter API, completing the twidge setup process, before sending a couple of tweets.  If you don’t like Midori, I couldn’t find a suitable version of Firefox but I understand Google Chromium can be installed on the RasPi using the sudo apt-get install chromium-browser command).

    I’m much happier with the Pi now it’s running Debian – and tonight’s activity involves creating a case for it out of an old business card box (an Altoids tin won’t fit!) – watch this space for more details!

  • Why brands need social media monitoring and analytics

    Last week, I was asked to give a short (10 minute) talk about social media monitoring and analytics. I’m not exactly what you might call an expert in this field, but I have been around the loop with this as part of some work I did a couple of years ago, when the company I work for started to make better use of social media, although I’ve since moved on to other activities.

    In researching for my talk, I decided to reach out via my own social network(s) and have to say that I was pretty amazed by the response. Within a few minutes of tweeting, I had responses that gave me some fantastic angles to cover.

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/markwilsonit/status/217902930999787521″]

    Even though I can’t share the presentation (I used some slides that were “loaned” to me by others), I can write about what I presented, so here goes – with special thanks to David Gentle (@DaveGentle), Graeme Goulden and Jim Millen at Fujitsu; Brent Ozar (@BrentO), Consultant and Author at Brent Ozar PLF, LLC; Louise Parker (@LouParker), Sales Director at Sentiment Metrics; and Eileen Brown (@EileenB), Author and Social Media Consultant at Amastra – as well as to the many other people who offered assistance but whose work I haven’t “borrowed” here!

    “Social working”

    Many organisations are experimenting with (or even gaining real value from) social media and are rapidly trying to discover ways to exploit these new channels before their competitors do. The challenge here is that the steps required to gain value from social media go against conventional wisdom: In business, we want things to be routine and predictable. Social media, however, is organic in nature and is driven by people’s passions and interests.

    Integrating the virtual and physical worlds

    One way to consider social networks is that we need to look after customers in the virtual world, just as we would in a physical context.

    For example, in a restaurant, management touch tables and customer check-backs are an integral part of the service in the UK and elsewhere. They are used to see that customers are happy with their meal, ideally before any simmering concerns become full-on dissatisfaction. In the past, restaurant customers didn’t talk to each other. But with social media, they do, and bad experiences snowball fast.  In real life, you can hear your customers complaining and shuffling toward the door. The same happens in social media too.

    Smart organisations can use this to their advantage and build brand advocacy. For example, one upset Mum sent a tweet after she had taken her four-year-old child to McDonald’s to complete his Marvel Set figurines only to receive a Littlest Pet Shop character (another type of toy) instead.  Instead of sending a tweet to apologise, McDonald’s took the initiative to send a real mail and titled it “you tweeted, we listened”, including the missing Marvel figure with a handwritten note. Cool right?  Especially for McDonalds as that mum had a popular blog and she wrote about it leading to 50,000 page views a month and, even better, the story was included in the updated version of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (Forrester Research)’s book Groundswell.

    Some organisations are particularly smart and they integrate customer feedback into their loyalty programmes and CRM systems. In an example, which Eileen Brown wrote about on her ZDnet blog, a customer tweeted to say how much she loved cornbread when staying at Gaylord hotels (a US hotel chain).  The company offered her some, but by then she’d already left. A few weeks later and she stayed at another one of their hotels and, a short while after checkin, some cornbread was delivered to her room – without even requesting it.  She then blogged about the great customer service, closing the communication loop and making it clear that she was a satisfied customer.

    What’s the alternative to this? Well, sadly, things don’t always work out so well. These pictures have been around for a few years now but became Internet memes. Thankfully the names of the restaurant chains involved are not so easy to find…

     

    Losing sight of the individual

    The next part of my talk was borrowed from Chris Brown and Louise Parker’s SoConBuzz talk where Chris highlights a hotel on Trip Advisor which ranked really highly (9 out of 1068 hotels in London) but for which some very negative reviews really stand out – this is the social media challenge – we need to be able to identify these individual responses, this individual dissatisfaction and react at the tactical level to address specific concerns.

     

    Four phases to actionable insight

    Louise continues her SoConBuzz presentation by talking about four phases to actionable insight. Watch the video for the full details but, in short:

    1. Listen – monitor content and actively respond to it.
    2. Categorise – filter out the noise and focus on what’s important.
    3. Analyse – analyse conversation threads and identify leading topics.
    4. Act – drive actionable insight and add real value.

    The value of social media

    The real value of social media is not so much as another channel to market but as a method to understand what customers are saying about you – and to engage. But, more than that, by integrating with other data it’s possible to provide a holistic view of the organisation, enabling both tactical and strategic change to take place.

    My take on social media monitoring and analytics

    It’s all very well quoting chunks of other people’s work but I did mention at the head of this post I’ve had some experience in this area as, two years ago, I began an experiment with corporate blogging, backed up with other social media channels. Before launch, we wanted to measure a baseline so that we could measure the impact of our efforts but we found that enterprise tools (e.g. Radian 6) were expensive and free alternatives lack functionality, granularity, or just don’t really join up. Most importantly, any social media programme needs commitment of resources – agencies can only go so far.

    I’ve found that the majority of social media case studies are from business to consumer (B2C) organisations. In the business to business (B2B) space, customer conversations tend to be fewer, and are less likely to be online – and even for B2C organisations there will be differences between sectors.

    Critically, for marketing teams it’s important to understand that social media is different to other marketing communications channels – it shouldn’t be led by campaigns with time and budget limitations – social media endures after these have ended – and it’s a conversation, not a monologue.

    tl;dr

    Social networks are an important element of customer interaction and integrating virtual and physical worlds is crucial. In summary, organisations need to:

    1. Understand what it is they want to measure – and there will be a human element to this too as humour, irony and sarcasm are still challenges for many tool sets.
    2. Make sure that they can take action with what they find or else the exercise becomes just an expensive way to collect a lot of information, and possibly to leave customers feeling ignored (in my experience @VirginTrains is selective in the tweets that it responds to, in stark contrast to the other rail operator on my journey, which is @LondonMidland).

    In addition, beware that social media has a global reach – we found it practically impossible to monitor social media for a single geographic region – and make sure you know how you will cope in the event of a crisis (there are some well-known examples in the form of Eurostar and the Ford Motor Company).

    And finally…

    If you’re a manager who is struggling to “get” what social media is about (you’re probably not reading this blog), but consider this tweet:

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/Annemcx/status/218223658882187265″]

    Euan Semple (@Euan)’s post is short and to the point but it makes an important point: to understand social networks you have to experience them – “feel the fear”.

  • Useful Links: June 2012

    A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

    • UK train times – UK train times and detailed timetable information (platforms, non-advertised stops, etc.) – taken from the National Rail API used by many apps
    • TheBookYard – UK Apple spare parts and refurb specialist
    • Swivl – Personal cameraman for hands free video (spotted at Raspberry Jam thanks to Leon Cych)

  • Short takes: Raspberry Jam (#RaspberryJam) and Milton Keynes Geek Night (#MKGN)

    This week, aside from struggling with the culture shock of getting back to work after a fortnight of Internet abstinence, and getting very angry with Microsoft, I spent my evenings at two fantastic community events. Both of them deserve a lot more space on the blog but I’m short of time right now, so a teeny overview will have to suffice.

    Raspberry Jam

    Complete with scones (really!), Raspberry Jam was a fantastic evening of RaspberryPi fans talking about some of the things that they are up to and hosted by Alan O’Donohoe (@teknoteacher):

    • Genevieve Smith-Nunes (@pegleggen) talked about the HackDay she’s organising at her school with 250 Year 9 students who will be building “something” with RaspberryPi (and the website is a constantly moving feast as its the kids who are building it). She’s also teaching Scratch to kids in Year 1 and 2 (my children are Foundation and Year 2, so this is very interesting to me).

    (great quote by the way – “nobody’s the teacher; everyone’s the teacher; and we’re all students”).

    • Neil Ford (@NeilCFord) talked about Portable Pi – a project for taking Raspberry Pis on field trips to provide a portable website for kids to upload research data where there is no mobile phone reception. The shopping list for a Portable Pi is available on Amazon (although I can’t see the battery on there right now).
    • Neil also mentioned the Young Rewired State Festival of Code that’s happening in August – teaching kids to code, hoping to create the next Mark Zuckerbergs, and to keep them in the UK.
    • There was a demo of the Acorn RISC OS running on a Raspberry Pi. I’d forgotten just how advanced it was, back in the days before Windows… what’s more, it is tiny (6MB) and includes BASIC. Great for starting to code…
    • John Bevan (@bevangelist) showed us Mozilla Thimble – a really simple tool to teach people how to publish on the web and one of a wider suite of tools that Mozilla is creating.

    Plus there was loads of opportunity for networking, snacks, beer, soft drinks and more. Hosted at the Mozilla Space in London (a great venue for like-minded open source-oriented people), the organisers are looking for more RaspberryJam events to be created across London, the south-east (and presumably further)… jump on the #RaspberryJam hashtag for more.

    You can also watch the recording (filmed on an iPhone using a rather cool tracking tripod head called a Swivl) on YouTube:

    MK Geek Night

    Regular readers will know that, about once a month, I head down to Digital Surrey, which usually has some great speakers on topics of interest to “digital” (media/marketing/tech) types, like me. With the Digital Bristol and Digital Berkshire spin-offs, I considered starting a Digital MK or a Digital Buckinghamshire but I simply don’t have the time (or the contacts). That’s why I was so excited to see Richard Wiggins and David Hughes announce Milton Keynes Geek Night.

    Wow! 190 people in a community arts centre in a converted bus station; two big speakers; three 5-minute lightning talks and some one-minute pitches. What a great evening.

    • Jon Hicks (@HicksDesign) spoke about iconography, using the redesign of Skype’s emoticons as a case study. Who knew there was so much to designing icons? I had an inkling there would be, and it’s pretty fascinating stuff (for geeks).
    • Kate Kenyon (@Kate_Kenyon) told us, in just 5 minutes, how to slash content and create better websites that work for users, not just company politics.
    • James Parker (@MrJamesParker) gave us some tips on how Twitter helped him to become a better designer.  I won’t leave you hanging – and they are not just for designers either – they are:
      1. Follow people relevant to you (not just celebrities).
      2. Don’ be a passive user – get involved in the conversation.
      3. Make friends – contacts are everything.
      4. Follow me.
    • Code Club (@CodeClub) were there – there are 120 schools and 1436 volunteers signed up now (maybe more this morning) to teach our children to write code with curriculum changes and after-school clubs. It’s a pity I don’t cut code for a living as this is a great initiative to get involved in.
    • Brendan Dawes  (@BrendanDawes) gave a whacky but enlightening talk on low-tech hacks and making “things” from “stuff” (that description simply doesn’t do the talk credit – I’ll write more in another post, I hope)
    • And then there were the one minute pitches for employment opportunities, user groups, special interests, etc.

    Fantasmagorical!

    The next event is scheduled for 20 September. Full speaker line-up is yet to be announced, but includes Relly Annett-Baker (@RellyAB) talking on content strategy and, based on the inaugural event, I have high hopes that Richard and David will find more great speakers. Follow @MKGeekNight on Twitter for more details.

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/dvlngl/status/215884358911918080″]

  • Microsoft (finally) gets its mobility act together – but cuts loose early adopters of the Windows Phone OS

    Last night, Microsoft announced plans for the next version of its Windows Phone operating system – Windows Phone 8. In many ways it was a great announcement. Windows smartphones will have a “common core” with desktop Windows. The Windows ecosystem is converging, maybe a little late, but I said Windows 8 could be a turning point for Microsoft and Windows Phone seems to be a part of that.

    Tom Warren had a great post up almost immediately at the Verge on what what was announced for Windows Phone 8. But Tom also highlighted, as did Simon Bisson at ZDNet, that there was a sting in the tail. A very big sting. And its target is the very people who adopted Windows Phone 7 – arguably the community that Microsoft needs in order to make Windows Phone 8 a success.

    Current generation Windows Phone (Mango) devices will not be upgradable to Windows Phone 8 (Apollo).

    There will be an update for Windows Phone 7, taking it to 7.8 (extending Microsoft’s marketing abuse of version numbers) but it’s little more than a few cosmetic changes. Windows Phone 7 apps will run on Windows Phone 8 but not vice versa (exceptions being those that are not compiled to take advantage of new Windows Phone 8 functionality, or Siverlight apps for Windows Phone, themselves sidelined for XAML/C#). Given that we’re starting out from a fairly limited pool of apps, that pool is likely to get smaller as apps are updated; and it pretty much kills the current Windows Phone market stone dead.

    I switched to Windows Phone because I thought it was fresh, different, and because Microsoft positioned it as the future of their smartphone story. The big reset happened when Windows Mobile was killed off two years ago in favour of Windows Phone. I thought (still do think) that iOS has become stale, its UI is tired and has become clunky in places (in fairness, so is Windows Phone at times) but at least the aging iPhone 3GS that my employer provides runs the latest version of iOS. Meanwhile, Android is fragmented and has its own problems around security and an incoherent tablet story (don’t write it off just yet though). I didn’t buy an HTC HD2 because I knew that Windows Mobile 6.5 devices wouldn’t be upgradable to Windows Phone 7 (that much was already known long before Windows 7 appeared). Instead, I waited for Nokia to release some (semi-) decent hardware for Windows Phone and, just 7 months later, they made it obsolete – and I simply don’t buy that they were unaware of Microsoft’s roadmap for Windows Phone. I know that technology adoption is a risky business but I expect my device to at least last as long as a standard mobile phone contract (2 years) and my Lumia 800 has a limited future ahead of it.

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/jonhoneyball/status/215642016019783681″]

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/bazzacollins/statuses/215495484255633408″]

    Some say that users will always complain: either that there’s no legacy support; or that legacy support is bloating the OS – but a published roadmap that allows consumers to make informed choices (together with N-1 version support) should really be the minimum acceptable standard.

    Microsoft owned the roadmap. Microsoft controlled the reference architecture. Microsoft prevented OEMs from increasing the hardware capabilities of Windows Phone devices (screen resolution, adding multiple cores, etc.) and now Microsoft is preventing even recent hardware from running its latest phone OS. In short, Microsoft is screwing its early adopters.

    I really do hope that all those consumers that Microsoft and Nokia have been (knowingly) marketing dead-end Lumia devices too of late have an opportunity to force support for Windows Phone 7-class hardware to continue until Windows 9 comes along (giving users 2-3 years of current device support). Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen (unless there are some very smart lawyers involved).

    One thing’s for sure. This Windows Phone user will be thinking very, very carefully before committing to any future mobile device purchases running Windows. Once bitten, twice shy.

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/caro_milanesi/statuses/215492067311353857″]

  • Microsoft Surface: my attempt to cut through the hype

    Over the last 24 hours, I’ve watched the hype build about Microsoft’s mysterious mystery event (thank goodness I missed the build-up last week as I was still on holiday in France…), watched the news break, and watched everyone either go ooooh, ahhhh, or hrmmm…

    I couldn’t stand it any more and decided that I too should weigh in with my comments on some of the comments I’ve seen about Microsoft Surface. I may even come back and add to this list over the next few days:

    • Microsoft is too late to the tablet game: Maybe they are. There’s the iPad, and then there’s… well, no-one really. But there’s still plenty to play for. Maybe back in 2007 someone asked for a tablet and got a table instead? Seriously, the device we previously knew as Surface was rebranded PixelSense last year, but we don’t seem to get the PixelSense screen tech in the Surface tablets.
    • It looks good: it does – really good. But we don’t yet know enough about the Surface hardware – if this is underpowered, or battery life is poor, or the screen is unresponsive, then it will fail, just like all the other iPad wannabes.
    • The keyboard in the cover is a gimmick/great idea/an admission that soft keyboards don’t work: horses for courses, I’d say – there are times when I use my iPad keyboard and times when I elect for a physical version – this way we get both.
    • Microsoft is cutting OEM’s throats? Are they really? My view (personally, not as an employee) is that it’s saying “come on guys, this is what can be done when you put your mind to it – stop letting Apple run away with the tablet market and design something that’s just as good, now that we have (finally) got an operating system (nearly) ready for you”. But there is an issue when (presumably) Microsoft doesn’t charge itself $85 per device for a copy of Windows.
    • This will undermine Ultrabook sales: perhaps it will, but however big the marketing push, they would have been niche anyway. Do IT Managers really have money to spend on “sexy” laptops when functional ones cost half as much? It might have killed off the Windows tablet market though, except that Surface will only be available from Microsoft Stores and online, which limits its availability somewhat, and makes it a consumer-only purchase. OEMs don’t really need to worry too much (sure, PC sales are in decline… but there are many factors behind that and mobile devices have been expected to surpass PC for a while now). And for those of us outside the US… we might not even get a sniff.
    • Ah, so it’s for consumers, so it puts Microsoft back in the game when it comes to consumerisation? Hrm Not really. On BYOD, there seems to be a shift towards choose your own device (CYOD) – i.e. we’ll give you more choice, maybe even let you contribute to have a better device, but it needs to run Windows. CIOs do need to re-architect applications to embrace cloud, mobility, big data and consumerisation – but that’s a big ask and it’s not happening overnight. Until then there’s life in Windows 7 (and 8) for a while. And laptops/tablets are only one side of the story; Microsoft is still struggling for smartphone market share…
    • Two versions of Windows, both on Surface devices, one that runs Windows RT and one for Windows 8 Pro – what gives? On this I agree, it will confuse the market. Maybe the x86 hardware should have been a reference platform for OEMs to sell in the business market, with ARM to consumers?
    • Analysts say… Really. There is some really good insight there, seriously. But now what do CIOs say? How about: where will this help me to deliver business value; what’s the impact on the rest of the IT environment; how can I transition to become a competitive (internal) IT service provider who no longer cares about devices and operating systems? Having said that, I think Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps is correct to highlight issues with the way Windows is marketed and sold, and IDC’s Crawford Del Prete (@Craw) is right on the money:
    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/Craw/status/214873118030839809″]

    For some time now, we (geeks, tech journalists and IT types like me) have lambasted Microsoft for being unimaginative, lacking innovation, and for being late to market. This time they have something bold, exciting and that could really shake up the way that PCs look and feel. They’ve also kept it secret and created a buzz (albeit a little too early, some might say) perhaps a bit like another company that seems to get credit for everything it does…

    Let’s give the Surface a chance to get out of the door before we write it off, hey? It could actually be really good.

    Now, what are they doing about smartphones?

  • Creating a dashboard using a SharePoint list (part 4): bringing it all together

    This week has been a bit of a SharePoint-fest as I’ve walked through the stages of creating my SharePoint dashboard. For obvious reasons, I can’t share the version I use at work, so I’ve created a mockup using the SharePoint site that comes with my Office 365 subscription. Feel free to take a look…

    The three posts that explain how I built this dashboard can be found below:

    As the code examples I gave use quite a lot of SharePoint formulas for calculated values, I thought it might also help to link to Microsoft’s formulas and functions documentation as well as their examples of common SharePoint formulas.

    Right, that’s enough SharePoint for now… next week will be back to the usual mix of tech, marketing, photography and whatever else I stumble across…

  • Creating a dashboard using a SharePoint list (part 3): indicating several states of progress

    Yesterday’s post looked at using ticks/crosses on my SharePoint dashboard to track progress on activities. I was quite happy with this, but my manager wanted to show progress, rather than a simple binary done/not done – and I wanted it to be visual, not text-based.

    We settled on a system using a series of circles with various stages of “filling-in” (none, quarter, half, three-quarters, full) to show how far an activity had progressed, and I amended the code that I used for the ticks and crosses.

    Using the same principle as with the ticks and crosses, this time the font changed from Wingdings to Arial Unicode MS, which includes the appropriate shapes under the block elements and geometric shapes subrange:

    First of all, I changed my column to indicate progress from a Yes/No to a Choice with radio buttons for Not Started; Started; Additional Information Required; Almost Complete; Complete and Not Applicable.

    Next I needed to adapt the formula used to calculate the correct HTML code for the display column by nesting repeated iterations of

    IF([Task Progress]=”Started”,”

    ?
    “,”
    ?
    “)

    Eventually this ended up as:

    =IF([Task Progress]=”Complete”,”

    ?
    “,IF([Task Progress]=”Started”,”
    ?
    “,IF([Task Progress]=”Additional Information Required”,”
    ?
    “,IF([Task Progress]=”Almost Complete”,”
    ?
    “,IF([Task Progress]=”Not Applicable”,”
    “,”
    ?
    “)))))

    The code is not pretty, but it seems to work, and the result is something like this:

  • Creating a dashboard using a SharePoint list (part 2): tick/cross status indicators

    In my last post, I wrote about how I used a script I found on the Internet and a couple of calculated columns to show a Red/Amber/Green (RAG) status on a list in SharePoint. I also wanted to clearly indicate which items in my list were complete, and which were still ongoing.

    My inspiration for this came from Chris Bell’s posts on displaying tick marks in HTML, combined with the same code that converts my text RAG Status to HTML.

    This time, I converted a Yes/No Checkbox (actually, it’s TRUE/FALSE) to HTML code for a tick or a cross in another column, using the following formula:

    =IF([Task Completed]=TRUE,”

    ü
    “,”
    û
    “)

    The end result is something like this:

    It needs the Wingdings font to be installed, but everyone who needs to access this list is using a Windows PC – feels like a bit of a fudge but it works for now… and can always be replaced with a graphic (as I did for the KPI indicators on the RAG status).