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Ask Me Anything

Time

The continual movement of time is like a pendulum, swinging gently back and forth, marking time at equal intervals. From some angles, the pendulum seems to stop as it hangs and then speeds up nearly, but it continues to move constantly. The passage of time is effervescent as the perspective changes as we move forward in life.

We only have a particular amount of time during the day to live, work, and rest. During the hours within which we work, a lot can occur, requiring re-prioritization of our time to meet the needs of who we are working on a task. Keeping track of that time can be difficult; planning that time and aligning to objectives even more.

At least for me, I’ve worked to adopt a few different solutions. For time tracking, I use a little app on my laptop that tracks time against whichever category I start the clock running. It’s primitive, but I’ve yet to find a solution that tracks time and understands the work’s intent. This inability to determine intent is especially true when it requires me to use skills or talents that are me drawing on a piece of paper or tablet to convey an idea, process, or basis for an architecture.

When it comes to my work calendar, I’m still working to determine best ways to manage this. I look through Viva Insights for, well, insights. I try to make use of Findtime and Calendar Availability for scheduling meetings. I strive to have blocks of working time. And yet, work still continues to progress forward in a positive motion. It can be tricky at times, especially in the ability to protect my time.

Many different companies provide tools to help in managing your time – I’m looking for one that will act as an assistant to literally protect time. Maybe that’s more a methodology or a practice, and I’m interested to learn from others; care to share yours?

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Off Topic

The year that made us blind…

In the year 2020, a lot of individuals stayed home a bit more. For remote workers, we all stared at screens a lot more. For many, going to a doctor’s office instilled fear and concern. I’m willing to doubt that everyone had seen an optometrist or opthamalgist immediately before or during what many have termed lockdown or quarantine.

In as much, I’m willing to bet that many didn’t always wear their glasses while staring at screens.

I think similar to general physical fitness, optical health likely was impacted by many workers that were working remotely these past 18 months.

How have you protected your vision? What have been the “game changers” when it comes to how you’ve get your eyes healthy?

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Off Topic

SharePoint, where for art though?

Captain’s log… the vapor and mist of the cloud have formed and we see that things are starting to take shape in the realm of Office 365. Dan Holme and his cadre of excellence have continued to chart forward with making experiences usable by end users, providing capabilities that to build on-premises, while feasible in large chunks of time, come to life.

In the day of past with SharePoint before “v12” came out, developers seemed to hack away at the core of SharePoint, injecting and reflecting methods to bring to life the Frankenstein solutions that clients were seeking. Not that these solutions weren’t valuable, nor was it that they weren’t well put together, but the typical SharePoint developer had to know how develop using Object Oriented Languages… namely C# or VB.net. Both languages were not for the commoner, or the SharePoint Citizen as some may call it.

Then came SharePoint 2013 and the app model was brought forward. The Internet had solved identity for the Internet (no one really likes leaving port 88 open on the Internet for Kerberos tickets to be passed between realms mind you). Developers were now free to roam about and develop where they wanted, how they wanted. And it was good.

Then Microsoft took a page from it’s competitors and started offering experiences and building out a Framework that would allow developers to interact with the underlying components of SharePoint and Office 365 using REST API calls. Gone were the days of requiring developers to know C#… the day of the JavaScript developer (and really any other developer that knows how to make REST calls) was here.

Experiences like PowerApps and Flow though have also largely taken away the needs and desires to learn a “hard” language (actually, thinking about it, if you don’t know how to construct the logic of a program, JavaScript becomes all out hacking in some cases… not that people didn’t copy others C# code and wonder why it didn’t work).

So where do we find ourselves? Well, as a SharePoint admin, I must say that there’s less and less I find myself worrying about. Sure I still have my concerns about opening up Access Services on my 2013 farms that are still operating and having developers create app after app watching the SQL server backend topple over. And sure, in the 2016 environments I’ve embraced MinRoles with open arms.

But why should I continue to build on-premises when Microsoft has Office 365 / SharePoint Online available with SLAs that I can’t match on-premises? What’s a trusty admin to do? It’s time to take some time and REST… just kidding, it’s time to help organizations migrate to SharePoint Online where it makes sense and make use of Hybrid to help them make use of some of the tools (ala PowerApps and Flow) that make their end users lives a little bit easier.

And maybe also learn some REST… because you never know when some prototyping will come in handy.

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Community Podcast

Favorite Podcasts… 2017 List

It’s interesting to look back at the past year and realize that I haven’t really been listening to all that many podcasts – whether professionally or personally. There are a few that are epic that should be on everyone’s queues to include:

There are several others out there but the above are the ones you’ll probably find me listening to. Maybe.

And maybe at some point when life slows down we’ll have Brewery.fm come back to life… http://www.brewery.fm

Happy casting!