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Buried in Big Data

I have a new blog post up at KnowledgeLake - Buried in Big Data.

I’ve seen references to recent Gartner reports that paint a challenging landscape for the future of content management for companies of all sizes. In one report, Gartner states

…by 2016, 20% of CIOs in regulated industries will lose their jobs for failing to implement the discipline of information governance successfully.

and in another Gartner shows part of the problem

…employees within an organisation generate more than 3GB of data each year and this is set to increase by more than 600% over the next five years. The effect of this is that 30% of a typical working day will be spent looking for information or documents, meaning a company with 1000 employees could spend around R40 million in lost productivity.

(read more)

#ECM #SharePoint

A Scouts Approach to ECM

I wrote a new Blog Post at KnowledgeLake.com -

As a Product Manager and in a previous life as a Software Development Manager, part of my job is to balance development efforts between features, enhancements, and fixes. One concept that I preach on a regular basis is treat the code like a Scout treats their campsite – Leave it better than you found it.

Understand that it may not be possible to get everything exactly the way you want it in the time frame allotted, but keep the end goal in mind and if you leave things in better shape than you found them, it will move you down that road.

I hadn’t thought about how this translates into other areas of business, but I was reading a post on the Gartner website – The Real Problem with ECM (hint: it isn’t the platform) – that applied a similar concept to Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

(read more)

#ECM #SharePoint

New Blog Post - Oreo Cookie Conundrum

I have a new blog post at blog.knowledgelake.com - Importance of Context (Or the OREO Cookie Conundrum).

Most of the article talks about how important it is to provide the appropriate metadata for anything you choose to archive in SharePoint. It is imperative that enough time is spent deciding what metadata fields (SharePoint columns) are needed in the content types used in each document library.

I recently talked with a major plastic manufacturing company that is in the process of converting their existing ECM solution to a SharePoint solution leveraging KnowledgeLake Capture and Capture Server. This company spent three months defining their content types and appropriate metadata fields.

(read more)

#SharePoint

Nice PowerShell / SharePoint Script

I stumbled across a nice PowerShell script for SharePoint when I was doing my daily perusals of RSS feeds:

Download all files in a SharePoint document library to Network Share using PowerShell

I was recently working on a client requirement to download all the content of a list/document library to a file share. This script should ensure the folder structure of the document library to be replicated in the file share.

(read more and get script)

#PowerShell #SharePoint

PowerShell quick list of SQL Users with SysAdmin Role

Here's a link to a quick script from Max Trinidad to list SQL Users with the SysAdmin role.

Here’s a quick way to start getting a list of SQL Server users having “SysAdmin” Role. Basically, I’m using SQLPS module (now available with SQL Server 2012) which loads all the SMO needed to help you script against your SQL engine.

This script does the following:

Import the SQLPS Module.

Connect to a SQL Server Instance.

Get the SQL Logins information.

Search for SQL users with “SysAdmin” Role, and builds a customized information in a PSObject.

Export the information to a CSV file.

Open the CSV file, which by default could open an Excel application(if installed on machine).

(read more)

#PowerShell #SQL

5 Steps to SharePoint Architecture Planning

Michael Porter has a discussion of a Steve Pogrebivsky post on the 5 critical steps to SharePoint Architecture planning.

[Steve] focuses on the people and the needs first before diving into techno geek details. It’s about:

1. Understanding the current landscape of document, content, IA and culture

2. Know what players need to be involved

3. Understand how content flows across your organization

4. Have a plan to get started

5. Plan for change and it won’t happen overnight

(read more)

Both are worth a read.

#SharePoint

Cute use of PowerShell Prompt

Seems like every PowerShell blogger has to do a post on some fun/different way they change up their PowerShell prompt. Trevor Sullivan has an interesting one...

Have you ever wanted to monitor your memory utilization in a PowerShell instance, but may not want to continually issue commands to determine it? Introducing …… the PowerShell Prompt to monitor memory utilization

(read more and get script)

What might be more useful (to me at least), would be to calculate the directory size and list that in the prompt, so you would always know how big the directory you were in was. Maybe I'll add it to my, something-to-play-with-some-time list.

#PowerShell

Using PowerShell to Surf the Web

Alan Renouf, Mr. VMware/PowerCLI has broken out of his comfort zone and posted about surfing the web using PowerShell. This is something I could definitely see myself playing with. In a previous life, I worked on automated web surfing/web site monitoring for a product called the Foglight Transaction Recorder (FTR).

ound my blog tucked away near the bottom amongst the other blogs beginning with V… as this is a virtualization top list you can imagine there were a few beginning with V!

Anyway, I thought there must be an easier way to allow people to vote for me than to hope they find me amongst the V’s and don’t get bored along the way and choose others so here it is:

The below script is not a cheating script, it will not make you vote for me 1000 times it will simply start internet explorer, browse to the survey and select my site for you, one this has done you are free to deselect me if you wish and also select the other 9 participants you would like to vote for. After this just follow on through the survey and click Submit to finish.

Obviously with PowerShell I could have just added my favorite bloggers to this script and completed the survey for you but that would be cheating and I believe in the freedom to vote!

(read more and get the script)

Using Alan's script, a little previous knowledge, and some help from PowerWF, I'm sure I could write a script that would monitor a web site and push the results to SCOM.

#PowerShell #SCOM #Foglight #PowerWF

Get WMI namespaces using PowerShell

PowerShell MVP Don Jones has a new blog post that tells you how to find WMI namespaces and classes. If you read The Scripting Guy's blog, you know that WMI is his get-out-of-jail free card.

As you know, every computer in your environment can have slightly different WMI capabilities, depending upon what roles, software, and technologies are installed. Being able to quickly list the available namespaces is pretty useful - especially if you can do it remotely. In PowerShell, it's not too hard:

(read more and get scripts)

#PowerShell #WMI

PowerWF v2.7 Released

Here is a sample press release I authored:

Devfarm Software, a Windows 8 Launch Partner, today announced the release of version 2.7 of the award winning PowerWF. With this release, PowerWF begins the transition from a popular PowerShell workflow orchestration tool to a complete windows automation platform.

For the past 3 years PowerWF has seamlessly combined Windows PowerShell with Workflow technologies to provide users with PowerShell Orchestration. PowerWF provides a rich automation platform that lets IT Administrators harness the strengths and versatility of Windows PowerShell with a workflow Orchestration layer required to cross technical disciplines.

The latest version of PowerWF provides instant return on investment with one-click automation solutions for many common IT and VMware administrative tasks. The solutions can be run as-is, or easily modified using PowerWF’s visual authoring environment.

“The focus of this release has been jump starting the automation process,” said Ben Vierck, CTO of Devfarm Software. “We want our users to see the value of automation as soon as they launch the product.”

“PowerWF has always provided a powerful authoring environment,” added PowerWF Product Manager Kirk Munro. “This version ensures that users gain the benefits of automation even before exploring PowerWF’s authoring experience.”

(see release)

#documentation

PowerShell Azure Cmdlets Update

I noticed that Codeplex has an update for the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets.

#SQL #Azure

PowerShell - Creating email attachment

In the PowerWF world that introduced me to PowerShell, we had our own activity/cmdlet for sending emails. It is very easy to build a report in PowerShell and then send the results using PowerWF's email activity.

That said, I thought this post was a pretty nice primer in using the PowerShell cmdlet to send an email. Creating the email attachment was especially clever.

I was working on a project to send a html attachment in a powershell script. I have the HTML string so all I want to do is create an attachment from the string. Here's the code:

...

$att = [System.Net.Mail.Attachment]::CreateAttachmentFromString($attText,$attName) $msg.Attachments.Add($att)

...

(read more and get script)

#powershell

Combining the QA and Documentation Roles

I've spent the last several days writing software documentation for a client. In order to properly document the product, I'm having to touch almost every feature, and in the process verify that everything works as expected.

It got me to wondering, why don't more companies combine the role of technical writer and quality assurance. I realize that there are many "tech writers" who don't have the technical skills to run the product, but I wouldn't want them writing my documentation anyway because they don't really understand what they are writing about. Far too many tech writers are focused solely on grammer and spelling, but have no clue as to what they are writing about. Early in my career, I had cases where a tech writer changed the wording of a paragraph to correct minor grammatical issues, but changed the meaning of the paragraph in the process, making the documentation worthless.

I also realize that many QA people are unwilling or unable to create documentation. They may be really poor writers or may not natively speak the language. But if you CAN find people capable of learning your product and documenting it in a meaningful way, that person will be worth a lot more than a pure tech writer or a pure QA person.

Personally I would trade a slight drop in grammatical accuracy for a major increase in document depth and breadth. If you really want stellar documentation and QA coverage, you can have QA members trade the sections of the documents they have written for proofreading and to retest the software with a different set of eyes.

#Documentation #Quality Assurance

PowerCLI Reference for Android and iPhone

Whether you are an iPhone user like me, or if you have a 'Droid, and you want a complete PowerCLI reference at your fingertips, then Alan Renouf has you covered.

A while back I found an iPhone and iPad app which allowed you to reference the PowerCLI Cmdlets, this is quite useful when you are on the move and need a quick reference.

Today I came across a similar app for the android and wanted to share it.

vPowerCLI5 Reference is an app for Android which can be downloaded from here:

http://droidmill.com/vpowercli5-reference-405917.html#.Txgq7ZiE6-8

(read more)

#PowerShell #PowerCLI

Get VMware Session Information

Luc Dekens has a new post that includes a VMware auditing script that shows how to find out who is logged into the VMware/vSphere Virtual Center and how long they have been online.

There was an interesting thread in the PowerCLI Community today. It raised the question how one could report on the current vCenter sessions, including the IP address or hostname from where the session was started.

Unfortunately the SessionManager doesn’t hold any information from where the session was started.

But there are other ways of finding that information. The UserLoginSessionEvent object has a property, called ipAddress, that has the information we’re after.

Btw if you are only interested in looking for idle sessions, independent from which host they were started, there is a great post, called List and Disconnect vCenter Sessions on thePowerCLI blog.

(read more and get script)

#VMware #PowerCLI #PowerShell

PowerShell is key to the Future of Exchange Administration

Tony Redmond at WindowsITPro has a new post on the future on Exchange administration. Not surprisingly, PowerShell is at the heart of his discussion.

Microsoft is heading towards a world of automated management based on PowerShell in Windows Server 8

Exchange 2010 is close to where Microsoft wants to go because it already uses web-based consoles and Remote PowerShell

The trend will continue, but will administrators heed the clarion call?

(read more)

#Exchange #PowerShell

Don Jones Discusses PowerShell Parameters

Don Jones has a brief discussion on creating PowerShell Parameters. PowerShell Parameters are used to pass inputs to your PowerShell scripts and functions.

I've been helping more than a few folks unravel some grave misunderstandings. At first, I thought, "where in the world did they get this stuff," and then I thought, "the Internet," and it all made sense! When you're trying to get a job done by piecing together things on the Internet, you run into several problems. First, not everyone on the Internet has actually got a clue. Second, sometimes they're not clear why they did a certain thing, and you're not clear what it does, so you try it sorta and it kinda doesn't really work. PowerShell parameters are one of the things that have come up several times in that regard.

(read more and see samples)

#PowerShell

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