Congratulations Microsoft MVP 2013!

This is the subject of the email I received on the Fool’s Day. Luckily it was not a joke, it was the confirmation of my nomination as SharePoint MVP. I still don’t believe it fully, but I slowly begin to adapt to it.

In the Catalonian SharePoint User Group event SharePoint 2013 Novedades y más allá we expressed our long-term view in which Barcelona should become the “SharePoint City”. Now we have 2 SharePoint MVPs here who are keen to keep the things in motion. We want to host the European SharePoint Conference 2014 in Barcelona, please!

What is MVP?

MVP, or Most Valuable Professional, is an award bestowed by Microsoft upon the professionals that excel in the contribution to the technical community, within the scope of a Microsoft product. Microsoft official MVP page explains it in depth.

And now, what?

Well, the idea is to keep sharing the little I know with the people who find it interesting and to keep helping the community from the humility and service. In a nutshell, what I have been doing the last years. In a couple of months I’ll find a way to merge this blog and my Spanish language blog and give a new visual identity to the new, unified blog. Ideas are welcome!

To all of you who have kept encouraging me to contribute to the comminity in all these years, a big thank you!

I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Evolutions Conference in London

A few months ago I was confirmed as a speaker on the SharePoint Evolutions Conference (aka SPEVO13) that will take place in London, from April 15th to 17th. This conference is organized by the fantastic folks at Combined Knowledge and it was formerly known as the International SharePoint Conference (ISC).

The conference will be crammed with SharePoint experts and community leaders. Still not registered? There are still seats left. Wondering about what will you find at the conference:

• Over 113 Sessions delivered by Global SharePoint Experts, Microsoft Speakers and MVP’s.
• 3 Days of Sessions covering Business, Technical, Developer, Information Worker, Community and Case Study Tracks and Ask the Experts sessions
• Over 40 hours of networking opportunities

I will speak in the Community track. My session is about a real-world case that the company I work for is involved. I expect to contribute the things that we learned during the successive improvements of the customer’s SharePoint intranet, both in technical and organizational sense. I hope that somebody will find some inspiration in the things that I will share and hopefully it will help others to avoid some of the pains that we experienced.

On the other hand, I’m eager to meet the old friends from the fantastic SharePoint community and to make some new ones! The community is the BEST part of SharePoint, by large.

See you all in London!

Review of “HTML5 and JavaScript Web Apps” Book

Thanks to the good people at O’Reilly User Group Program (Josette, you rock!), the SharePoint User Group I lead has access to review copies of the books in their catalog. In one of the meetings we decided to ask for a book on the modern web apps made with JavaScript.

I began reading Wesley Hales book "HTML5 and JavaScript Web Apps" with high hopes. I'm fairly up-to-date on web development but I have to admit that I’m not particularly versed in HTML5. I expected the book to provide an interesting journey.

The first I noticed about the book is how thin it is. There are barely 140+ pages, which is surprising for a technical book these days. It also clearly shows that the intent of the author is to cater for entry-level understanding.

Well, it was so. The book starts with an ultra-short introduction about the Client-Side architecture and then it starts narrating about the mobile web and its challenges. The next chapter plunges into the depths of the mobile web oddities and caveats, with CSS/HTML/JS code that somewhat clutters the chapter. It then covers the “Desktop Web”, with a well-picked but short introduction to several modern JS MVC frameworks, which is one of the best parts of the book.

At the end, the book covers the rest of the HTML5 goodies: WebSockets, Web Storage, Geolocation, Device orientation and Web Workers. These chapters are much more coherent than the first ones.

In short, it’s a quick introduction to the shiny new trends in web apps made in JavaScript and HTML5. Don’t expect working code and full-fledged demos (I did…) but a down-to-the-essentials recap instead. For a book that boasts that “you will quickly master building client-side applications” on its back cover, it is, at least, an overstatement. It will surely get you looking in the right direction, but you have to walk the path to the mastery of modern web apps.

Pros

• Short and summarized reading
• Variety of frameworks and concepts it covers

Cons

• Confusing sample code in several places
• Not deep enough to get the concepts explained

Would I recommend the book to a colleague? Yes, but clearly stating that it is an introductory book just to get the concepts in place.

Helpful SharePoint Tool for Solution Deployment Automation

I decided to give a try to a new tool that has been published at CodePlex, called SharePoint Solution Deployer (SPSD). It is built to automate solution deployment in different environments.

The tool is built with PowerShell by Mattias Einig (Swedish SharePoint guys) and it’s made of a close-knit scripts that do the deployment in the following fashion:

• The environment data is set as a XML config file, one per each environment
• The solution WSP is dropped in a specific folder
• Deploy script is run. It retracts the solution from all the servers, resets or recycles IIS and/or SharePoint services, uploads and deploys the solution, all with nice progress information.
• You can also run pre and post deployment PowerShell scripts, if you need to ensure some non-SharePoint settings.

It’s very simple to configure: it’s just the XML environment file and your WSP file(s) and it runs smoothly.

Give the tool a try and make your own opinion.

Windows 8 and Synaptics TouchPad Driver

I installed Windows 8 on my Dell Studio laptop two weeks ago, and I found out that the Synaptics TouchPad driver supplied by Dell does not show the touchpad settings screen in Windows 8. I only use that screen to set the touchpad to disable itself when an external USB mouse is plugged in. Well, I could not do it in Windows 8.

Not until now, I mean.

Looking in the forums (specially http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/149723-synaptics-touchpad-auto-disable-usb-mouse.html and http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/449196-np8662-auto-deactivate-touchpad.html) I saw that the solution is very easy indeed: change a single key in the registry.

Literally:

For those of you who want the "Disable internal pointing device when external USB pointing device is attached" option in the synaptics control panel, open regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPEnh, right click and select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value and name it "DisableIntPDFeature". Modify it's value to 33 in hexadecimal, or 51 in decimal to enable it to be default on.

Works like a charm

Activate Windows 8 Enterprise License without Volume Activation

I was trying to activate my company’s Windows 8 Enterprise license but I was met repeatedly with the “No DNS Servers Configured: Code 0x8007267C” error during activation. It is caused by the missing Volume Activation Management Tool deployed in the company Active Directory. However, we still haven’t deployed this setup but I wanted to activate my license.

In the previous version of Windows, you could change the key into a MAK (Multiple Activation Key) and then activate it without hassle. In Windows 8 this possibility is still available, but it is somewhat hidden.

You should run the following tool to change the key and activate Windows online:

• slui.exe 3 (for online activation)
• slui.exe 4 (for phone activation)

I hope that it helps.

PDF Files Missing in Tag Results

A quick mystery solved on a customer intranet today.

The Symptoms

You tag some PDF files, alongside other content in SharePoint 2010.

Then, you search for content for that tag, either by clicking a tag or searching for a specific tag.

The results do not include the PDF files.

The Cause

Luckily, it’s just that the SharePoint search does not index PDF files by default, skipping them completely.

The Solution

You have to install Adobe IFilter for PDF files on your SharePoint server(s) and configure some other things in SharePoint. After that, you have to run a full crawl again to rebuild the search index.

You can find detailed instructions on how to enable PDF files to be indexed in this Microsoft Support article.