1. What do you do in your spare time?
I love the outdoors and enjoy shooting when I get the time. When the weather gets the best of me, I've enjoy music production and recently have been getting into video production, which is proving quite addictive. I also enjoy motorosports, anything with wheels going fast is kind of awesome.

2. Favourite TV show?
Good question! I'm a huge Seinfeld fan and would have to put it right up there as some of the most entertaining TV ever. I've become slightly addicted recently US TV shows about buying storage units and discovering the contents, there are a few of them and they're all bonkers.

3. Favourite Book?
I spend a ton of time on planes and so I like mindless adventure - I'm a big fan of the author Clive Cussler so anything by him is fine by me.

4. Favourite Movie?
I'm a huge Star Wars fan so any of the 5 will do for me because, of course, we all know that there are only FIVE Star Wars movies… 

5. Apart from a career in SharePoint what would be your dream job?
I would to have a go at being a stand-up comedian. It would give me a great opportunity to show Robbie what real comedy is… 

6. Who is the biggest party animal in SharePoint?
It's a toss-up between Stacy Draper, Fabian Williams and Freddo Brandon or possibly the stealthy Corey Roth.

7. Who is the biggest troublemaker in SharePoint?
Aside from me of course, I enjoy the faceted thinking of Bjorn Furuknap, he courts controversy to make interesting points.

8. Where would be your ideal holiday location?
I'd struggle to choose between New York or the Maldives - it would depend on what kind of vacation I wanted.


9. Have you any hidden talents?
I have a recording studio at home and have produced soundtracks for two movies plus I'm a pretty handy Dj when the mood takes me - I'm available for hire!


10. If you could go on a date with someone famous, who would it be?
It would have to be Natalie Portman.


11. You can invite 3 people, dead or alive to your dinner party. Who would they be and why?
Leonard Nimoy, Zachary Quinto and Gene Rodenberry - we could then work out who actually is the best Spock.

12. If you were stranded on a tropical island and could only bring 3 things with you what would they be?
A good knife, clean underpants and Natalie Portman


13. What's the best piece of advice you were ever given?
"always be the fastest guy in the room, but never be the fastest guy on the freeway"

14. What was the last thing you ate?
Haribo jelly babies

15. Who is your hero?
For grit, determination, single mindedness, drive, vision and desire, it has to be George Lucas, he has been such a massive influence on how we consume movies, tv and music he has touched all of us in some way or another.

16. What's your most embarrassing moment?
I once met Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia from Star Wars) in an airport lounge and was so dumbstruck I could not even talk to her beyond a few mumbled words, I must have seemed like a total nutter.

17. What's the craziest thing you have ever done?
Went on a date with a cocktail waitress I met in a bar, who is now my wife.

18. What part of your daily routine can you not live without?
The 3 S's, except I rarely shave. Figure it out what the other one is. :)

19. If you could do one thing to change the world what would it be?
I'd assassinate Christian Buckley. Give the rest of us a chance. He just so damn nice.

20. Biggest fear?
Christian Buckley buying a bulletproof vest, or standing on a stage at an event and discovering my zipper is open.

21. Favourite song?
"The Winner Takes It All" by ABBA - I'm a big ABBA fan (don't print that, ok?) and this song reaches out to me both lyrically and technically. It's awesome.

22. If you could choose anyone to be your mentor who would it be?
Lee Harvey Oswald, then I really could get Christian or perhaps one of the really great religious evangelists (perhaps Billy Graham) to really understand how they mesmerise thousands of people and get them to part with their hard earned money.

23. If you could share the stage with anyone in SharePoint who would it be?
I'd love to share a stage with Robbie Leggit, then I could throw the bugger off it - and he knows why!!!

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Regardless of the source of your media (i.e., local computer, Asset Library, etc.), to begin the process of inserting video and/or audio, you will need to go to your site page and clickEdit pageas shown below:

Insert media from local computer:

• Select theInserttab from the Ribbon and selectVideo and Audioto insert media.
• Next, selectFrom my computerfrom the drop-down menu:

• Choose the media file which you'll be adding to the page from your computer. Next, select an Asset Library in your current site to which you would like the media file to be uploaded:

• After you have uploaded your media file, you will see a new tab on the Ribbon titledMedia. If you click the new tab, you will see the media player as well as your uploaded file. From this tab, you also have the option of adjusting your media player's settings and properties:

• In the mediaProperties, you have two playing options:

-         Start media automaticallywill automatically start playing the media file when users navigate to your page

-         Loop until stoppedwill continuously play the media file when users navigate to your page until/unless it is manually stopped by the user

• After you have completed adjusting your media settings, go to thePagetab from the Ribbon and clickSaveto save your settings and changes. You will now be able to see the media file autoplay on your page:

Insert media from an Asset Library:

• Select theInserttab from the Ribbon and selectVideo and Audioto insert media.
• Next, selectFrom SharePointfrom the drop-down menu to select a file from your SharePoint Asset Library

• Choose the media file which you'll be adding to the page from your Asset Library:

• After you have completed adjusting your media settings, go to thePagetab from the Ribbon and clickSaveto save your settings and changes. You will now be able to see the media file autoplay on your page:

Insert media from an embedded link:

• To begin, you will need to find the embed code from YouTube (or whatever the source site for the video is) for the media file which you will be adding to your page.

• Select theInserttab from the Ribbon and selectVideo and Audioto insert media.
• Next, selectEmbedfrom the drop-down menu to add the embedded link to your page:

• Paste the embed code into the blank field and clickInserttoinsert the media stream to your page:

• After you have completed adjusting your media settings, go to thePagetab from the Ribbon and clickSaveto save your settings and changes. Note that for this media, you are NOT given the option to change the video's settings or apply autoplay.

Share inserted media:

• Once you have inserted video into your page, you have the ability to embed your videos on other sites. This can be done by going to the right of the video on the page and selecting the Get embed code icon:

• Once you click Get embed code, a field with the appropriate coding will appear. Review the information in the embed stream setting and copy the code:

• Next, go to the other site where you would like to embed the media. Insert the code that you copied in the previous step onto the new page and poof!, you are ready to stream your video on a different page!

Bamboo Solutions were Silver Exhibitors at ESPC 2013. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre.

We have heard this question asked more times than we can count. As a matter of fact, many of us have been the ones to ask this question in the past as well.

Prior to Microsoft

Being involved in our respective communities heavily prior to joining Microsoft lead us to understand some very important facts.  The fact that there were many more events that required speakers than there were speakers to go around.  This was very apparent to us as user group organizers and conference organizers.  The question would always come up "Where is Microsoft". This question still comes up to this day but its focus in the speaking community is centered around face time and attendance at events.

Enter Project Aware.  The goals of Project Aware are painfully simple and there are only two of them.

1)    Educate Microsoft Employees who WANT to speak and give them the tools both internally at Microsoft and externally in their respective communities in order TO speak.

Secondly and most importantly:

2)    Have a one stop location for all event hosts (user groups, conferences, etc) to go to actually FIND willing Microsoft Speakers (www.technicalcommunity.com)

That's it.  But wow is that powerful.

Bridging the Gap
The main reason organizers have a hard time getting ahold of Microsoft speakers is for the most part, most organizers don't understand our corporate model.  The assumption is that funding is provided at the technology vertical level when in fact it is provided at the very low team and regional level.  Product groups are inundated with requests to send speakers and their budget just doesn't afford this luxury.  

The other side of the shortage comes from organizers not knowing WHERE to find potential speakers. If speakers are not networked previously or they are widely unknown, the requests never come and it is up to the speaker themselves to reach out.  With the amount of travel a given Microsoft employee already does the range in where a speaker will speak as well as their impact can be easily achievable.

The Result

Quite simply the result of Project Aware is to bring the joy of speaking about technology to employees that would otherwise be too shy, timid or reluctant.  Provide organizers of user groups to major conferences a virtual rolodex to reach out and get Microsoft SME's to speak at their event. And ultimately give back to thousands of people worldwide what has been afforded to us

Summary

Short and simple if you're an event coordinator and you're looking for some potential Microsoft speakers try going to MSTC and do a quick search on the technology you are looking for and the area where your event is being held.  The only negative to this is HOPEFULLY, you'll no longer be able to ask "Where is Microsoft".

As a secondary, if you are a technology speaker (any technology) you can also register as a speaker!

View video now on how to register and search for speakers.

Eric was a speaker at the ESPC 2013. Check out Eric's blog for more insightfull content!

For more SharePoint content from Eric and other SharePoint specialists check out our resource centre!

In the AIIM, SharePoint Security - A Survey on Compliance with Recommendations for Improvement, author David Jones asked if respondents had any general comments to make about their compliance and information security issues. They had a lot to say. We've compiled and provided some commentary on eight responses that caught our attention:

 1.     "Even though governance is established, compliance is faulty and monitoring is sketchy at best."

 2.     "If you want compliance don't use SharePoint."

Content compliance and monitoring do not need to be faulty or sketchy. SharePoint can absolutely offer secure collaboration and compliance with the right tools in place. The points below offer a close look at some of the steps and solutions that can assist you.

 3.      "After migrating content it is difficult to retroactively apply rules."

Many will face the migration obstacle as they move to SharePoint 2010/2013 or hybrid environments. What's important here is that organizations can take proactive steps to clean and check content against compliance both before and after migration, and regardless of where it resides. Using third party solutions, compliance and security policies can easily be applied to scan of all the content within the platform. Some policies will be based on regulatory and industry standards, while others will be custom to the requirements of a specific organization. Rules can be set-up to determine what to do when confidential or regulated content is discovered to restrict access to it and control what actions can be taken with it. This helps to ensure that all content in SharePoint, regardless of whether it is new or old, is compliant with policies. Adding additional security around sensitive content helps reduce organizational risk and the threat of breaches. 

 4.     "Currently taking a cautious approach until third party tools are in place."

 5.      "As with many organizations that are using SharePoint, we know/understand the current and potential risks associated with it, but are still in the process of trying to "get our hands around it" from an organization/enterprise perspective."

SharePoint can be a mammoth task to secure; and trying to secure it without content compliance and security solutions is an impossible task. Third party solutions for automated, content-aware compliance and security for SharePoint will ensure you are reducing risk while also maximizing your collaboration investment.

 6.     "Our organization lacks understanding of what's actually in SharePoint, from a sensitive/regulated information perspective."

The best thing about SharePoint is you can put anything in it, and the worst thing about SharePoint is you can put anything in it. Organizations need to balance an increasingly social collaborative environment while still meeting regulatory requirements. Many SharePoint sites seem to be a Wild West of unstructured content. But, there are solutions out there that can audit your site content to help you identify and secure sensitive and regulated information, helping you rein in compliance.

 7.      "Committing resources to tighten and maintain proper security requires a major, visible commitment from upper management to initiate and maintain the effort and incorporate it into the corporate culture."

There are a lot of important take-aways from this comment. There is absolutely a need to have management buy-in and engagement on implementing proper SharePoint security features, but it's too much to cover in one blog post. The emphasis should be on making compliance and security a seamless part of corporate culture. Training takes time and relying on staff to remember all the rules opens you up to those dreaded "whoops" moments. Using solutions that monitor content for compliance issues, taking the onus off the individual is the best way to ensure policies are enforced. After all balancing the need to collaborate with the need to maintain SharePoint security is essential to reducing organizational risk. Read how policy management can impact corporate culture.

 8.     "Compliance, security and record retention are must haves for us."

This is the ultimate comment because compliance and security are must haves for all organizations using SharePoint. Effective compliance is the ability to not only have a governance strategy in place, but to also be able to manage risk by identifying issues and potential violations, and have a process in place for resolution and fine tuning. The most effective method for managing compliance and security risk in SharePoint is to protect sensitive information at the file level using automated solutions for classification, encryption and content restriction.  To better protect your organization, you should consider how automated compliance and security products can remove some of the vulnerabilities and human diligence required to maintain SharePoint content security over the longer term.

Read more findings from the report including recommendations on improving SharePoint security or find out how selecting the right content compliance and security solution will help your organization achieve the full benefits of SharePoint by reading Microsoft SharePoint Security: Evaluating a Content Security Solution.  

HiSoftware were Silver Exhibitors at ESPC 2013. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre.

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Coextant System were Silver Exhibitors at ESPC 2013. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre!

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What do you do in your spare time? - Play the Saxophone, Ride Horses.

Favourite TV show? - TV? Oh, that box? Don't watch TV

Favourite Book? - The Emperors New Mind

Favourite Movie? - Bladerunner

Apart from a career in SharePoint what would be your dream job? - Pilot

Who is the biggest party animal in SharePoint? - Wow, there's too many of them! Anyway after the last conference Adis Jugo gets my vote.

Who is the biggest troublemaker in SharePoint? - Wow, there's too many of them too! Again, based on the last conference Adis Jugo gets my vote again

Where would be your ideal holiday location? Jamaica or Madagascar

Have you any hidden talents? - Origami - a paper folding diva me.

If you could go on a date with someone famous, who would it be? Cate Blanchett

You can invite 3 people, dead or alive to your dinner party. Who would they be and why? - Martin Luther triggered a whole sequence of events that have led direclty to the society we know and enjoy today. Albert Einsten, who could not speak until he was 4 years old and his parent were told he would not amount to much. Such an inspirational man. Muhammed Ali, Champion in the ring, a champion to his religion, a champion to his race and a champion to man kind

If you were stranded on a tropical island and could only bring 3 things with you what would they be? - A four foot bong, a block of ganga, and a saxophone.

 What's the best piece of advice you were ever given? - Don't settle

What was the last thing you ate? - A creamed vanilla slice (bad move)

 Who is your hero? -My Dad

 What's your most embarrassing moment? - Wrongly wearing a kilt

What's the craziest thing you have ever done? - Was a film extra in Stings film Stormy Monday, miming was never my strong suit!

What part of your daily routine can you not live without? - Having a good laugh!

If you could do one thing to change the world what would it be? - Sort out the transportation system and introduce Teleportation!

Biggest fear? - Spiders and DaddyLongLegs - hate those things!

Favourite song? - What's happening brother - Marvin Gaye

If you could choose anyone to be your mentor who would it be? If he was still alive, Steve Jobs, otherwise Bill Gates

If you could share the stage with anyone in SharePoint who would it be? - Theres far too many to choose from! No fair! Ok, any program manager of the SharePoint product team.

Obviously in order to have access to FourSquare, it is necessary having an account to authenticate on the application. Authentication is the process of being recognized and validated and as first time users we can decide whether we want to create a new account, providing all the details (…as we did more and more time during registration in other portals), or magically reusing our Facebook Identity and credential without having to retype again our personal details.

I won't explain the technical details because it would be a long and detailed discussion, but it is interesting spending some time thinking about the simplicity and linearity of this process: in order to have access to FourSquare we are allowed to use FaceBook credentials. Today this is quite com and as further example, even Skype supports this approach and allow using a FaceBook indentity, a Microsoft one rather than creating a new one.

We can suppose that in some way the security architectures of both the applications are federated and they use the same security context and indeed they are!

Technically speaking we are talking of Single Sign On, where I can authenticate somewhere (for instance in FaceBook) and afterwards we can navigate in another sites who trust Facebook without having to provide again credentials.

Why this is important when we target business systems? Does logging on Windows and afterwards retyping different credentials for SAP sound's familiar? At the end organization will face upset business users which in private life can use their social identity to authenticate on FourSquare from their mobile device and consuming TripAdvisor and MeetUp services seamless integrated whereas connecting to company Intranet from their laptop outside the corporate vpn is so painful and sometimes it requires to provide three different credentials. Is it just a matter of security? Or maybe the IT infrastructures are not designed to support technology federations due to silosed approaches?

The idea is not new, and for sure it is partially consolidated in business systems where Kerberos works exactly in this way. The innovation in case of Social Network is that authentications and Single Sign On are based open protocols working over http and making the magic happens. The main ones are SAML to manage the security ticket and OAuth used to authorize access to data and web services.

If we have to do a comparison with Kerberos, such technologies are easier to be configured working on http protocols without requiring firewall configurations, there are a lot of resources in terms of
documentations, platform and even people available and nevertheless they are extensible. A Kerberos ticket is fixed, a SAML ticket is a container that can be augmented in order to carry our data.

Another interesting quality that should be considered is Multi-Channel capability. In order to reach the broadest audience FourSquare can be used by a classic web application running on a multitude of heterogeneous devices and of course from browsers, or you can download the FourSquare App from Apple, Windows, Google, etc. marketplaces. Obviously this can be taken for grant but let's think for a while to some details. In the scope of the same solution FourSquare there are plenty of different Apps not identical and with slightly differences in order to better fit the target environment (iOS rather than Android for istance) or just because the specific lifecycle pace and adoption rate is different from the others. Today another raising buzzword is Appization, meaning the creation of cloud-based stores that sell small widgets, pieces of content, or streams and that eschew physical media entirely, and in the case of FourSquare the overall solution is built over a continuum of 2 different Apps, one targeting the consumer and the other targeting the business followed by an ecosystem of external specialized application developed by independent using the API. What we can learn as IT is that a big problem can be decomposed and supported by a group of smaller and specialized Apps. The classical example (…headache) is Time-Sheet and Expense Claim application. Is it better to provide and maintain a wide App covering all the required capabilities or is it better to decompose the problem in smaller chunks having very specialized applications enabling to fill the time-sheets, allowing the manager to approve/reject the expense notes, executing the people to scan and submission the expense tickets?

Certainly supporting this constellation of application is challenging in term of managing a solution portfolio and the "classic" software factory approaches simply don't work. I never worked for FourSquare so I don't know their delivery lifecyle and strategy but I had the opportunity to work and providing consultancy to many eCommerce Company, I would say quite successful in their specific areas and what I learnt was that Continuous Deployment is a must!

Such companies are continuously working on the evolution of their systems adding integrated or independent features to a set of subsystems and as soon as there are new capabilities available and successfully tested, they are rolled-out at production stage. This also implies that not necessarily all the Apps and the underlying systems are all at the same development stage and neither with the same feature set. Earlier a feature is used by user, easier a feedback is retrieved in order to properly enrich the overall solution. In order to achieve this, it is key to guarantee the consistency of the Internet Services (REST, SOAP) exposed among time and assessing and assessing again the backward compatibility in order to ensure the proper functioning of all the application versions.

The fact of having so many specialized Apps reaching a wide users Audience means as well having a huge amount of data collected by the platform as return. Here we are moving toward Big Data the technology trend of this year which is and it would be another long albeit interesting discussion. I prefer to point out that Big Data is a wide concept but the real aim of it is about prediction such as predicting market trend, decrease the customer churns ratio, running Social Analytics to evaluate the outcome of Digital Marketing campaigns. My personal feeling is that Big Data in common sense is mainly about infrastructure and the enabling technologies hence I think that focus and attention of IT should be on areally promising sub-branch which is Machine Learning which is targeting the construction of systems that can learn from data. As we can imagine Big Data and Machine Learning are essential components of FourSquare and they are used to run the Social Recommendation Engine as well as the Real-Time Suggestion tool which is based on the Social Graph.

Machine Learning are improperly considered far systems from daily usage since today so many effective development frameworks from Hadoop to Hive and tools make quite straightforward the development of such solutions. Looking around from Bing Traffic to Windows 8 Word Suggestion algorithm, from LinkedIn Maybe You Know to the Amazon suggested books are all example of Machine Learning implementations without having to explore the world of financial applications and hedge funds where ML system are widely used since years.

The new challenge is bringing such technologies to a mainstream adoption by business systems. Tools are available, knowledgeable people are out there working for startup, business is shaping the need. It's up to us now as IT department answering to this call to action.

myTeamWorks were Silver Exhibitors at ESPC 2013. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre!

Stay tuned for more SharePoint content by joining our community or by following us on twitter or  facebook.

In the last years rivers of (digital) inks have been flown talking about social networks, the new Digital Generation and Digital Natives, BYOD (topic perfectly discussed in a previous ICT journal dossier) and about the increased pressure over IT department but how many of us have really looked into the founding Ideas and dug the technologies and innovation behind such services?

Maybe as a car manufacturer can leverage, industrialize and foster innovation leveraging technologies and experiences coming from Formula 1 racing teams, we can do the same analyzing a winning social player in order to have some insights that we can bring back into our business systems world.

Finding a right player is not so hard since there are so many around, from Facebook to Twitter, from Spotify to Flickr. For many reasons FourSquare is very interesting and complete and it can be taken as good candidate for the winning player profile.

Just to provide a quick recap, essentially FourSquare (www.foursquare.com) is a mobile application that allow users to check in to a place and share that information with friends with the aim of illuminates, informs and inspires and inviting to experiment, sharing and establishing conversations among the community of users. Basically during daily usage, we can check-in into a City and, hereafter the system will inform us of "friends" around, we can search for restaurants, interesting places and even looking to hints and suggestion provided by other users. As far as we check-in adding hints and suggestions to the system, we are remunerated with "Badges" like Newbie, Adventurer, Explorer, … proving our credibility among the community of users.

It is important pointing-out that for the aim of this analysis business model, profitability or sustainability is not relevant. FourSquare was chosen for the innovation paradigm it brought with and technical features and ideas that can be easily reused in daily and real life activities that made them getting the momentum of brining millions of (enthusiastic) users onboard.

Looking at such functionalities from a very high-level, the most compelling ones from a business stand-point are the capability of combining the social, mobile and location features (officially known as So.Lo.Mo.), the Badging (also known as gamification) and the auto generated content (also known as crowd sourcing). Let's take a deeper look to each one.

SoLoMo In addition to being in the Top #10 of the most irritating marketing buzzword, as said means Social, Location and Mobile. Despite the fact that social media, local targeting, or mobile communications are not brand new concept but when you put all three together it's a combination that's revolutionizing digital marketing. For the first time, a system can target and communicate with a target audience in new ways because technology has caught up with the way people behave when they're ready to make buying decisions that in the case of foursquare can be restaurant, pub, hotels, shops.

But what is the technical lesson learned here? A So.Lo.Mo. application is nothing else that a subset of a wider classification which is Context Aware Application where the idea is that application behavior depends from the user context at the time the application is used.

Let's imagine for instance a solution for managing the maintenance of fixed appliances (BTS, Distributor Machines, Pipes, Power Supply, etc.), with a Context Aware approach the application would take an active role automatically spotting the equipment that should be maintained on the road, proactively suggesting the interventions needed accordingly to past history and bringing similar cases fitting the local situation once described by the operator inferencing the past history. As it may look strange but indeed this is how FourSquare behave within its specific domain.

Context Aware Application is really a strong paradigm and it must be paid attention to not limit its meaning only to Mobile applications.

• Intranet Portal can adapt their behavior accordingly to the device used rather than organizational role at first chance. During time content can be further adapted accordingly to user behavior using the Intranet.
•  A front-end banking application can suggest or change functionality accordingly to the historical profile of the customer in front of the operator;
• How many Reports are available in a corporate Data-Warehouse? Which are the most useful reports fitting our role and department? Which filters and slices are the most relevant? Won't be nice having a proactive system suggesting us what we should do?

Regarding Gamification, the idea is to integrate game dynamics into business activities or non-game environments in order to promote and inspire action changing people attitude and driving motivation, participation and engagement. The theoretical principle on which Gamification is based-on can be found in Daniel Pink "Drive : The Surprising Truth That Motivate Us".

Daniel Pink's idea is that high skilled people are limitedly motivated by money and more by Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose of their duties. Gamification is an excellent tool to measure the Mastery and, at the same time, fostering the attitude of high-skilled workers of being recognizable and rewarded in the communities. Yes, there is even a bit of egocentrism in this but pragmatically it's better to face the reality otherwise how I would explain the reasons why I'm struggling in writing this article?

But how can we bring Gamification can in daily business? It's not too difficult and there are plenty of examples. Establishing collective intelligence processes inside the organization and rewarding the most active users it the most viable way. Think to the successful experience of www.stackoverflow.com and decline it inside an organization. Such ideas can be easily extended to cover "classic" IT assets such as CRM, Help-Desk or Knowledge Portals. We are rapidly moving in the era of Social CRM and badging could be used to recognize and maybe reward the top Sales Agent. An interesting example is represented by www.badgeville.com that can be used to add badging capabilities on top of SalesForce. Why not, if we run an IT Department we can gamify our Software Factory granting badges to the most reliable developers (e.g. less bug and less broken builds) and even on top our ITIL processes (who are the fastest in closing incident tickets?).

About Crowd-Sourcing the most known example is Wikipedia where the disruptive innovation has been engaging a huge community of people in working together and concurrently to generate the content of an initially empty system. The idea of Crowd Sourcing hence is about obtaining the needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. In the case of FourSquare the database of venues initially was rough and dry and the duty of populating and enriching was directly assigned to the user crowd. Obviously co-authoring processes such as those ones, in order to be succesfully must be self-regulated therefore internal procedures will ensure the quality and consistency of gathered content maybe leveraging additional quality oriented crowd-sourcing processes.

The Crowd-Sourcing and Collective Intelligence topic are wide topics and bringing them back to the business world there are plenty of successful stories such Best-Buy in B2B pricing process rather the very well known ideation processes crowd-sourced by Ben & Jerry, Starbuck, etc.

It is crucial realizing that Crowd-Sourcing processes can be inbound, therefore acting inside the company limits leveraging to Management 3.0 theories and using IT technologies to unleash what is known as company collective intelligence. Outbound Crown-Sourcing means establishing processes involving the customer bases in defining the company strategy, for instance gathering feedback about new product features, and transforming the Crowd-Sourcing itself into a huge marketing opportunity maybe prizing the most voted features.

How can we leverage such findings in a non-conventional way? Moving back to the previously discussed example regarding fixed appliance maintenance, imagine to open the application aim to customers or external users into a B2C way allowing them to report about issues or malfunctioning directly from the field maybe enforcing their commitment through gamification. Of course it cannot work for all the business domains but for the most retail oriented ones for sure yes!

myTeamWorks were Silver Exhibitors at ESPC 2013. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre!

Stay tuned for more SharePoint content by joining our community or by following us on twitter or  facebook.

In here we cover:

1. Basics of how to change the theme
2. Components of the theme
3. Adding new theme with UI
4. Adding new theme with Visual Studio
5. Gotchas and things that took me a day to figure out :)
6. Putting it all together in Visual Studio 2012 solution

Enjoy!

Check out Yaroslav Pentsarskyy blog ShareMuch for more insightfull content. Check out our resource centre for more SharePoint content from Yaroslav and other SharePoint specialists!

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AlphaMosaïk were Silver Exhibitors at ESPC 2013. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre.

Check out Yaroslav Pentsarskyy  blog ShareMuch for more insightfull content. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre.

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Webtrends  were Silver Exhibitors at ESPC 2013. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre!

Stay tuned for more SharePoint content by joining our community or by following us on twitter or facebook.

Questioning about the reasons behind this sparkling landscape, I've found a plausible explanation in the IT Consumerization paradigm which is the tendency for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market. At first glance I thought that everything was about a mountain of mobile devices used by a bunch of teenagers running their FaceBook everywhere but as you can imagine, real implications are wider and disruptive.

I consider the most interesting ones from an IT point-of-view:
1) Social Networks are not applications but new communication channels. Digital Natives uses the Wall as their primary communication tool rather than classic email. Smart-Phones aren't tools for speaking but to stay connected to the Net.
2) Internet Social Applications support integration: people authenticate on FaceBook and then jump to TripAdvisor and Skype reusing identities and living a fluid and vibratic experience shuffling Apps and Widgets together. Applications suggest us friends, books, group and other awesome Apps and ….they simply hit! Why can we do such amazing things on public social networks while it's prohibited from daily business systems?
3) Mobile momentum gave us the App metaphor with a multitude of public or private Stores made available. The wake is growing and amplified with the new Windows 8 bringing this paradigm to desktop and followed by SalesForce and SharePoint 2013 doing the same on SaaS and Portals. Application Lifecycle is dramatically reduced while choice is huge.

There are many insights we can derive as IT and common cliché such as business no longer needs of IT to handle that key technologies since they are commodity now, but I would say that since technologies are turning to be commodities available to every company, the way in which they are effectively and timely used to run a business is the competitive advantage and the challenge for 2020 IT.

myTeamWorks were Silver Exhibitors at ESPC 2013. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre.!

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During my session there has been a question on how versioning works with Document Sets and Documents that have been saved to a Document Set. OK - let's have look:

First I create a document library and activate versioning. I use major and minor versions in this example.

After that I add the Document Set content type to this library. To do this I need to allow the management of content types for this library first.

Now I add a new Document Set with two documents to the library:

This Document Set is labeled with Version 1.0:

Now I change Document1 and have a look on its version:

As expected: the document's version changed to 0.2 - but the version of the document set is still unchanged. The version of a document set is not increased automatically when a document that is saved inside is changed. A new version of a document set can be created manually by using the document set's ribbon:

To create a new version of a document set simply click on 'Capture Version':

The version history of the document set now looks like this:

Last weekend I have been attending this year's ShareCamp at Microsoft in Unterschliessheim. It has been an awesome event: two days 'nothing but sharepoint'. I had offered to talk about my favorite SharePoint subject 'Document Management' and I was really surprised that so many participants wanted to hear that. To me this shows that -although DMS with SharePoint might not be a Level 400 session- it is still considered interesting and is demanded by many sharepoint users.

During my session there has been a question on how versioning works with Document Sets and Documents that have been saved to a Document Set. OK - let's have look:

First I create a document library and activate versioning. I use major and minor versions in this example.

After that I add the Document Set content type to this library. To do this I need to allow the management of content types for this library first.

Now I add a new Document Set with two documents to the library:

This Document Set is labeled with Version 1.0:

Now I change Document1 and have a look on its version:

As expected: the document's version changed to 0.2 - but the version of the document set is still unchanged. The version of a document set is not increased automatically when a document that is saved inside is changed. A new version of a document set can be created manually by using the document set's ribbon:

To create a new version of a document set simply click on 'Capture Version':

The version history of the document set now looks like this:

Version 2.0 of the document sets now holds version 0.2 of Document1 and version 0.1 of Document2. Creating a new version of a document set is like creating a snapshot and can be a real life-saver!

Conclusion: if you use document sets and versioning you should be aware of this:

• if the version of a document inside a document set changes, the version of the document set remains unchanged.
• versioning of a document set can be done manually (by using the document set's ribbon)
• versioning of a document set is like creating a snapshot (similar to creating a snapshot in a VM) 

Version 2.0 of the document sets now holds version 0.2 of Document1 and version 0.1 of Document2. Creating a new version of a document set is like creating a snapshot and can be a real life-saver!

Conclusion: if you use document sets and versioning you should be aware of this:

• if the version of a document inside a document set changes, the version of the document set remains unchanged.
• versioning of a document set can be done manually (by using the document set's ribbon)
• versioning of a document set is like creating a snapshot (similar to creating a snapshot in a VM)

Oliver Wirkus was a speaker at ESPC 2013.  Check out Oliver's blog for more insightfull blogs!

For more SharePoint content from Oliver and other SharePoint specialists check out our resource centre!

Check out Yaroslav Pentsarskyy blog ShareMuch for more insightfull content. Check out our resource centre for more SharePoint content from Yaroslav and other SharePoint specialists!

These trends include the emergence of the "Simplified SharePoint Extranet" as a way to better collaborate with the outside world. This new concept consists in allowing internal users to share documents or send messages to external people from any SharePoint site, and to track replies and updates in real time in SharePoint.

In many cases, the deployment of a classic SharePoint Extranet is a very resource-consuming process. Because of that, organizations hesitate or sometimes just give up, drop the project and don't set up an Extranet, leaving to end users the responsibility of managing their communication with people outside of SharePoint by their own means.

As a result, one-to-one and many-to-many e-mail exchanges proliferate and have a strong negative impact on efficiency and productivity. First, end users must spend time to download documents from SharePoint and attach them to e-mails, to add recipients (taking care of not forgetting anyone), to manage situations where attachments are too large and must be sent again, to sort out the replies they receive and to replicate new versions of documents in SharePoint to keep it up-to-date. Second, the group bears the additional costs of managing several communication channels for each project: researching the latest version of a document that can be in SharePoint or in mailboxes, losing reactivity when the person handling the exchanges is out of the office or leaves the company, or misunderstandings due to a list of recipients that changes from message to message.

Therefore, it is most important to set a bridge between SharePoint and external users, while avoiding to fall back in a long and costly project. Users should be able to share and collaborate with external partners from the internal SharePoint platform, but without exposing the network, creating user accounts for the partners and training them. It should be made easy to click on a SharePoint document to send it to external users, and to track in SharePoint all interactions that follow, including all version updates of the document, while external participants only use their e-mail application or a simplified interface.

Requirement for such a solution may be:

-          Allow internal users to invite external participants from SharePoint with just an e-mail address, with no Active Directory operation and no need for additional licenses.

-          Let internal users send those documents from SharePoint to their external partners, who will receive them by email.

-          Automatically replace large files by links to a secured sharing area where they can download them.

-          Provide a full traceability of the exchange: view in real time from SharePoint if the external partner read the message, opened the attachment, replied to the e-mail, and sent a modified version or other documents.

-          Remove the need to reconfigure the network and the firewalls, while complying with the security policies in place.

-          Be installed in minutes on the SharePoint environment.

The emergence of this type of innovations will allow SharePoint users to benefit from practical collaboration platforms enabling work with external partners. Users will be able to exchange at no risk documents with external people, to improve the traceability of communications and to work in a user-friendly SharePoint interface. Overall, these initiatives will vastly contribute to making SharePoint more attractive and to give users the benefits of features that make sense for their daily business and that improve their productivity.

As an example, BusinessGuest is an Instant SharePoint Extranet solution that enables these scenarios quickly and for very reasonable costs: http://www.business-guest.com

What's new in 2.5.8.

Among usual fixes and improvements, the most interesting new feature is the implementation of basic support for Dynamic Reader Enabled forms. Now it is possible to use PDF/XFA forms with dynamic layouts together with digital signatures functionality in Adobe Reader.

Other fixes

• Fixed issue with default values in Designer
• Minor language fixes
• Fixed issue with variables in Nintex actions
• Fixed issue with disappearing controls in Static forms
• Fixed issues with deleting fields in Static forms
• Fixed issue with Item Values in designer
• Improved dialogs functionality in Designer
• Fixed issue with switching views in Dynamic forms
• Compression of System data inside Immutable forms
• Added option to disable response Emails
• Improved external data preloading process

About PDF Share Forms

PDF Share Forms for SharePoint (PDF SharePoint) enables businesses to create and manage PDF forms in Microsoft SharePoint without the constraints of HTML forms. It is the only solution of its kind, that enables integration of industry standard PDF/XFA form format with the Microsoft SharePoint platform and free Adobe Reader.

         Try              -                  Request Demo

PDF Share Forms were Silver Exhibitors at ESPC13. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre from SharePoint specialists!

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Benjamin Niaulin work's with Sharegate who were Silver Exhibitors at ESPC13. For more SharePoint content check out our resource centre!

Stay tuned for more SharePoint content by joining our community or by following us on twitter or facebook.