Real World Computing

So, you've got yourself a few Surface Hubs and now you're having a big meeting. Big enough to need to use both hubs together. So... how do you do it? The Problem In our case, we have two meeting rooms, each with a Microsoft Surface hub on the wall.  The rooms have a removable partition which enables it to be opened up into a large board room. Unfortunately, when this happens, the meeting participants can't always see the "master screen".  The ideal solution to this would be to have the display of the master screen duplicated on a "slave screen".  The diagram below illustrates this need. Two Methods There are two ways in which the screen can be duplicated.  Method 1 involves skype. It's fairly easy to set up and requires no cabling. Unfortunately, because of generally slow internet speeds, it doesn't cope with high motion slideshows -- and it certainly doesn't cope with video. The other method involves cables. In this pos...

SharePoint lists are a great way to build quick "applications" and registers.  If, like me, you've migrated from IBM Domino, and you were wondering where the Office 365 development functionality is, this is where it starts.  For everyone else, who has never heard of domino, don't worry, I'll explain what SharePoint lists are and why they're a great tool for you.  What Are SharePoint Lists? SharePoint lists are essentially a "cloud way" to store data that you want to share and search. You can put documents into lists but the best use of lists is to store and update "data". Essentially, SharePoint lists are a kind of database. They're not incredibly powerful, like SQL server but they're usually going to be powerful enough to replace a lot of the things you might have in Microsoft Access. One of the easiest ways to determine what applications are a good fit for SharePoint lists is to look at your spreadsheets.  Spreadsheet...

Once you're used to the new way of working, OneDrive and SharePoint are great file storage systems. The biggest problem is getting your files into them. Sure, it's usually just a case of drag and drop but the real problems are related to some tighter controls on the file names. The worst offenders are the ampersand and the hashtag. In fact, it seems to be really common for people to name their files with a hashtag in financial circles. For example: "Invoice No #675853.pdf" OneDrive and SharePoint will "spit the dummy" if you try to upload a file that breaks these rules. Interface Problems What's worse is that while the upload tools will happily report all of the errors, it doesn't give you a chance to correct them and it doesn't tell you exactly where in the path the offending file is. What's more, you can't copy the log of errors to the clipboard and I haven't seen any signs of any other forms of logging - not that I...

It's been a long road from drive letters to SharePoint but I feel quite comfortable in this space now. It's all a matter of perspective -- and of course, resisting the urge to rebuild the old world in the new space.  SharePoint works extremely well with files but there's a disturbing trend that I've seen amongst my users.  They use Sync to create a local replica of the entire of their SharePoint file libraries on their computers. Apart from being extremely dangerous, this also introduces a lot of complications. One of the biggest complications is that many of the limitations that don't exist or are reduced in SharePoint, particularly folder structure (long path and file names) are still present in Windows 10. This means that if you sync a large SharePoint library you may find it difficult to save files in the lower levels on your PC. When you think about it, syncing everything is just a way of trying to bring the old world into the new. A way to continue u...