O Pointy Pointy
I think I'm done with the social slut phase.
I've met more people in the past several weeks it seems than I did the entire time I was in New York, and now, well - I'm kinda tired. I'm not the type of social butterfly that's comforable with a vast expanses of acquaintances. I much prefer a tighter knit circle of close friends (that I try not to place unreasonable demands on). Recently it's been the opposite. Actually, it's been more like a theme park, and I've long since passed the magic hour where the fun can't cloud the fact that I'm hot, sweaty, and ready for a long nap back at the hotel.
I've been oversocializing, no doubt, to try and compensate for the stresses of the past month that mostly surround my job . Professionalism dictates that I not say too much about the situation. I'll suffice to say that I'm finding it harder to deal with life as a contractor. Consulting is fine: when you're brought in at the level of a experienced professional, trust in expertise is a given. As a contractor, you're just hired help. In a dysfunctional organization, that's a bad position to be in.
So, it's no secret, I'm actively looking for a full-time job. I'll consider contracts, but only those that I find engaging at my level, and only after taking a serious look at the personalities running the show. Shared values are an indelible part of the mix.
I've done a lot of consulting and project work, as well as longer stints as a full-time employee, and over time I've distilled a process for job searching that I find workable. Being prepared and organized takes a lot of stress out of an inherently tedious and tense process. As anybody who's been out of work can tell you, job searching is a full-time job, complete with repeating tasks and annoyances. Up to now, I've always kept track of the fifty or so resumes I'll have in play at any given time on a mishmash of job board printouts, scribbled notes, and Excel spreadsheets thrown together on the fly.
Well, last week I spent much of my free time preparing my old Windows 2000 server for a full wipe-and-upgrade to Server 2003 (yeah, I know, only two years late). It took the entire week to back up the 600GB worth of project files, media, and crusty old stuff from the past ten years. I was doing it all to DVD, and as speedy as my drive is, that's still a lot of frickin' data. Once I'd configured MSWS2K3, I downloaded Windows SharePoint Services from Microsoft's website (which is a free download that works only with MSWS2K3), and it's streamline my job search and brought a level of efficiency I've not experienced before.
I administered SharePoint at Spansion and I swear it's one of the finer things Microsoft has produced in recent years. I nearly choke saying that; I come from a UNIX-heavy world and it seems something like blasphemy. But alas, some great things are going on in Redmond. It's not the speed of the interface (it's often pokey), nor is it the breadth of its features (it lacks more than a few nice-to-haves). But there's a logic to SharePoint that strips information down to elemental components, and shifts focus away from traditional drive-folder-file systems to one that's based on more fluid objects, lists of objects, and meta-information.
Lost you yet?
Alas, this is where the more esoteric elements at SharePoint's core have steepened the road to customer excitement. It's hard to explain in concrete terms, let alone quantify any benefits to those outside the information/content management universe. How do you convince people of the benefits that lie outside the box when they don't even know the box is there? I've found myself in more than a few of these situations. And once I learn I'm in a box, I want nothing more than to get out.
SharePoint marks the third time in a decade one of these technological revelations had come my way to serve as a skeleton key to a whole new mansion of ideas. Germans, with their endless facility for creating cool words that crystalize the abstract and esoteric, must have in their dictionary a word that describes the ineffible moment where a new technology goes beyond recasting what one knows to actually inspiring new ideas through access to new possibilities. The effect is not unlike the moment at the end of The Sixth Sense when Bruce Willis discovers crucial information that deconstructs and reconstructs everything we've just been through.
The first such moment, for me, came with the original Mosaic browser that brought graphics to the web and ideas to my head. Then came RSS which made rapid information flow manageable. Then Creative Commons, which opened up a universe of artistic possibilities simply by pointing out they were there. And now SharePoint, which is the logical next step to the ideas that saw infancy in Active Desktop, the NetPC, and the other embryonic "failures" that sparkle through the ashes of the .com boom.
I can describe the experience of learning SharePoint in much the same way I talk to web newbies about learning CSS style sheets. The structure is far simpler than you imagine. The work lies in learning the vocabulary and practice. Take Adobe Photoshop for example. When anybody asks me where to begin tackling the app, I'll always start with three concepts: layer, filter, feather. Until I understood those concepts, I didn't have the contextual tools to begin to imagine what Photoshp could do. Once these became clear, the rest took care of itself as I created image after image, some good, many bad, until the happy accidents and borrowing and reverse engineering coalesced into something like technique.
SharePoint boils down simply: data - digital information, real things, and collective knowledge, are individual, but linked objects richly described. From these names and descriptions, we can then make lists of the things we have and make the right things available to as many persons as might need it.
And that's about it. It's a deceptively simple, but adaptable and portable logic that holds true.
Beyond that we can discuss the things we have, and can look at our lists any number of ways. We can then pull all these little things together on one page, or in a list, or in several lists that are configured for different views of various data points. Add to that a healthy dose of an attitude that one doesn't immediately associate with Gates and Co: give people control over their environment. If one data set is insufficient for this guy over here, he can change his view without forcing others to adapt. Bells and whistles notwithstanding, SharePoint's core logic boils down to libraries of well-defined, linked objects, and lots and lots of lists.
It's a weird area that I'd imagine's a bitch to market, especially to the home consumer in Middle America. Still, there are myriad uses any family could get out of it. I've already started using SharePoint to track and manage news, my finances, my collected media, thousands of project files from throughout my career complete with version control and redundancy, my public and private photo albums also with version control and entitlement-based access. Oh, and lest I forget, the aforementioned job search dashboard.
SharePoint uses "Web Parts" to simplify modular web page design at the user level. A Web Part is a self-contained XML script that calls specific information or applications for display in the browser. These Web Parts are easily moved around a structured SharePoint page, can interreact with each other, are customizable, and can display anything from simple text to any web page on the Internet complete with Flash and PDFs. SharePoint automatically creates a Web Part for every document library and list created.
Click on the image below for a full-size screenshot of my job search page, with pointers to indicate what each Web Part is there for. This page took about two hours to create. 1:45 of that time was spent thinking about categories, with about 15 minutes left for actual page construction. Not entirely transparent, but well on its way toward being a more accessible, usable piece of the invisible infrastructure of the workplace and everyday life.
WARNING: The SharePoint screen capture is very large. Zoom in with your favorite picture viewer to fully read the text.
More later.
I've met more people in the past several weeks it seems than I did the entire time I was in New York, and now, well - I'm kinda tired. I'm not the type of social butterfly that's comforable with a vast expanses of acquaintances. I much prefer a tighter knit circle of close friends (that I try not to place unreasonable demands on). Recently it's been the opposite. Actually, it's been more like a theme park, and I've long since passed the magic hour where the fun can't cloud the fact that I'm hot, sweaty, and ready for a long nap back at the hotel.
I've been oversocializing, no doubt, to try and compensate for the stresses of the past month that mostly surround my job . Professionalism dictates that I not say too much about the situation. I'll suffice to say that I'm finding it harder to deal with life as a contractor. Consulting is fine: when you're brought in at the level of a experienced professional, trust in expertise is a given. As a contractor, you're just hired help. In a dysfunctional organization, that's a bad position to be in.
So, it's no secret, I'm actively looking for a full-time job. I'll consider contracts, but only those that I find engaging at my level, and only after taking a serious look at the personalities running the show. Shared values are an indelible part of the mix.
I've done a lot of consulting and project work, as well as longer stints as a full-time employee, and over time I've distilled a process for job searching that I find workable. Being prepared and organized takes a lot of stress out of an inherently tedious and tense process. As anybody who's been out of work can tell you, job searching is a full-time job, complete with repeating tasks and annoyances. Up to now, I've always kept track of the fifty or so resumes I'll have in play at any given time on a mishmash of job board printouts, scribbled notes, and Excel spreadsheets thrown together on the fly.
Well, last week I spent much of my free time preparing my old Windows 2000 server for a full wipe-and-upgrade to Server 2003 (yeah, I know, only two years late). It took the entire week to back up the 600GB worth of project files, media, and crusty old stuff from the past ten years. I was doing it all to DVD, and as speedy as my drive is, that's still a lot of frickin' data. Once I'd configured MSWS2K3, I downloaded Windows SharePoint Services from Microsoft's website (which is a free download that works only with MSWS2K3), and it's streamline my job search and brought a level of efficiency I've not experienced before.
I administered SharePoint at Spansion and I swear it's one of the finer things Microsoft has produced in recent years. I nearly choke saying that; I come from a UNIX-heavy world and it seems something like blasphemy. But alas, some great things are going on in Redmond. It's not the speed of the interface (it's often pokey), nor is it the breadth of its features (it lacks more than a few nice-to-haves). But there's a logic to SharePoint that strips information down to elemental components, and shifts focus away from traditional drive-folder-file systems to one that's based on more fluid objects, lists of objects, and meta-information.
Lost you yet?
Alas, this is where the more esoteric elements at SharePoint's core have steepened the road to customer excitement. It's hard to explain in concrete terms, let alone quantify any benefits to those outside the information/content management universe. How do you convince people of the benefits that lie outside the box when they don't even know the box is there? I've found myself in more than a few of these situations. And once I learn I'm in a box, I want nothing more than to get out.
SharePoint marks the third time in a decade one of these technological revelations had come my way to serve as a skeleton key to a whole new mansion of ideas. Germans, with their endless facility for creating cool words that crystalize the abstract and esoteric, must have in their dictionary a word that describes the ineffible moment where a new technology goes beyond recasting what one knows to actually inspiring new ideas through access to new possibilities. The effect is not unlike the moment at the end of The Sixth Sense when Bruce Willis discovers crucial information that deconstructs and reconstructs everything we've just been through.
The first such moment, for me, came with the original Mosaic browser that brought graphics to the web and ideas to my head. Then came RSS which made rapid information flow manageable. Then Creative Commons, which opened up a universe of artistic possibilities simply by pointing out they were there. And now SharePoint, which is the logical next step to the ideas that saw infancy in Active Desktop, the NetPC, and the other embryonic "failures" that sparkle through the ashes of the .com boom.
I can describe the experience of learning SharePoint in much the same way I talk to web newbies about learning CSS style sheets. The structure is far simpler than you imagine. The work lies in learning the vocabulary and practice. Take Adobe Photoshop for example. When anybody asks me where to begin tackling the app, I'll always start with three concepts: layer, filter, feather. Until I understood those concepts, I didn't have the contextual tools to begin to imagine what Photoshp could do. Once these became clear, the rest took care of itself as I created image after image, some good, many bad, until the happy accidents and borrowing and reverse engineering coalesced into something like technique.
SharePoint boils down simply: data - digital information, real things, and collective knowledge, are individual, but linked objects richly described. From these names and descriptions, we can then make lists of the things we have and make the right things available to as many persons as might need it.
And that's about it. It's a deceptively simple, but adaptable and portable logic that holds true.
Beyond that we can discuss the things we have, and can look at our lists any number of ways. We can then pull all these little things together on one page, or in a list, or in several lists that are configured for different views of various data points. Add to that a healthy dose of an attitude that one doesn't immediately associate with Gates and Co: give people control over their environment. If one data set is insufficient for this guy over here, he can change his view without forcing others to adapt. Bells and whistles notwithstanding, SharePoint's core logic boils down to libraries of well-defined, linked objects, and lots and lots of lists.
It's a weird area that I'd imagine's a bitch to market, especially to the home consumer in Middle America. Still, there are myriad uses any family could get out of it. I've already started using SharePoint to track and manage news, my finances, my collected media, thousands of project files from throughout my career complete with version control and redundancy, my public and private photo albums also with version control and entitlement-based access. Oh, and lest I forget, the aforementioned job search dashboard.
SharePoint uses "Web Parts" to simplify modular web page design at the user level. A Web Part is a self-contained XML script that calls specific information or applications for display in the browser. These Web Parts are easily moved around a structured SharePoint page, can interreact with each other, are customizable, and can display anything from simple text to any web page on the Internet complete with Flash and PDFs. SharePoint automatically creates a Web Part for every document library and list created.
Click on the image below for a full-size screenshot of my job search page, with pointers to indicate what each Web Part is there for. This page took about two hours to create. 1:45 of that time was spent thinking about categories, with about 15 minutes left for actual page construction. Not entirely transparent, but well on its way toward being a more accessible, usable piece of the invisible infrastructure of the workplace and everyday life.
WARNING: The SharePoint screen capture is very large. Zoom in with your favorite picture viewer to fully read the text.
More later.
leave a response