Every time someone comes to me with a system that they have built in Excel and asks me for help making it better, I feel like Steve McGarrett in his perennial battle with Wo Fat. Inevitably, that “system” is a list of stuff loosely arranged in row-column order. Also inevitably, when I suggest moving the system into SharePoint, I get major push-back. I have written about this before, in fact,Excel vs. Custom Lists is one of the [...]

I spent much of this past week in Dallas. My first stop was the AIIM Board meeting that I was invited to attend as an ‘on-deck’ director. My term officially begins on January 1, 2013, and all I can say is that I’m going to have to work hard to participate effectively; this is one impressive group. Immediately following the Board meeting was the AIIM Executive Leadership Council meeting which focused on Big Data. I’m [...]

We have been spending quite a bit of time lately working with the various ways that SharePoint can interact with a SQL Server for displaying, adding and editing rows of structured data. Initially, we were hoping to extend SharePoint’s reach and save ourselves some time by quickly developing SharePoint-based solutions for tasks that would otherwise require a hand-crafted fat-client application. After we began studying these capabilities, two trends emerged: one familiar and one unexpected. The [...]

If you follow this blog, or even if you drop in from time to time, you know two things about our SharePoint implementation – we have had some success, and much work remains. Given that situation, this might not seem like the time to be more aggressive with our SharePoint goals, but I think it is. I want to build on the success we have had; I want to extend our reach into other areas [...]