Category Archives: Collaboration

Derek Kerr of non-linear creations speaks at #TechDays_CA in Toronto

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of doing something I never get to do — getting out of the office to take in a conference (Tech*Days Canada 2011, Toronto leg). Only one session, but it was an awesome one:  my esteemed colleague, Derek Kerr, director of all things infrastructure for non-linear creations, spoke on Microsoft Lync 2010: Audio, Video, and Web Conferencing Architecture and Experience.

Derek is one of the hottest IT speakers on the conference tour these days, and during this session I figured out at least of his secrets:

  1. Know everything there is to know (key!).
  2. Before your talk begins, Instead of hiding behind the podium reviewing your notes, walk around and chat with the audience members to get an idea of their expectations for your session.

Brilliant!

Here are some snapshots:

Derek Kerr TechDays 2011 working the crowd before

Derek Kerr TechDays 2011 demonstrating Lync videoconferencing

Derek Kerr TechDays 2011 answering questions after

"There are no activities in your newsfeed”: a little-publicized change in SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1

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This is a common frustration out there in the SharePoint user community. I have seen lots of posts from people pulling their hair out trying to get Activities to show up.

You set up your My Sites host, and the newsfeed (“What’s New?”) web part on the home page shouts moronically at you, “STAY CONNECTED! There are no activities in your newsfeed.”

You search for the answer in the documentation and online, and one at a time you knock off each of the following:

  1. Ensure that your test user has Colleagues.
  2. Log in as at least one of the Colleagues and do some Newsfeed-worthy activities(change some Newsfeed-worthy Profile Properties; Tag stuff with “I Like It” and other Tags (remember that Notes are not Newsfeed-worthy)).
  3. Double-check that your first test account has permission to view whatever itemsyou Tagged or Liked (this is important: the Newsfeed is security trimmed).
  4. Enable the Activity Feed Timer Jobin Central Admin. This is disabled out of the box; and this step is the first and usually only advice most blogs offer to fix this problem.
  5. Ensure that the search indexer is crawling My Sites regularly, and even kick off a manual crawl.

After you discover each piece of advice pointing out a step you missed, you jump for joy, start from the beginning, and browse to your My Site and find:

STAY CONNECTED! (DERP DERP DERP)

And then you generally curse a lot. You are especially angry because you know you saw activities working before. You’re sure you saw Activities just before you applied Service Pack 1 and …

Here is the updated text from the TechNet article “Set up My Sites” (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee624362.aspx#configsettings):

12.  In Newsfeed, specify whether you want to enable the newsfeed on My Sites. If you enable the newsfeed, but the accompanying Activity Feed timer job for the User Profile service is disabled, you receive the following message with a link to enable and configure the job settings: “The Activity Feed Timer Job is currently disabled, this setting will have no effect until the Activity Feed Timer Job is enabled. Activity Feed Timer Job settings.”

This option is available only after you install SharePoint Server 2010 with SP1. Prior to SharePoint Server 2010 with SP1, the Activity Feed timer job both determines whether the newsfeed is enabled and how it is configured. Starting with SharePoint Server 2010 with SP1, the addition of the Newsfeed option provides an explicit way to enable or disable the newsfeed. This is important in hosted environments where tenants may share the same User Profile service but have different requirements on whether they can enable newsfeeds for their users.

Yeah … so now you ( and by “you” I mean “I, Jeff Kelly”), feeling pretty stupid, find the checkbox:

Enable_newsfeed_on_mysites

… run an incremental crawl, click “Run Now” on the Activity Feed Timer Job, and boom: no more $$%$#* “STAY CONNECTED!”

non-linear creations’s Amanda Holstrom at SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim #SPC2011

My esteemed non-linear creations colleague Amanda Holstrom is in Anaheim at the official SharePoint Conference.

She’s been blogging about the sessions she’s attended, including Microsoft’s Records Management approach, SharePoint Search, and how Telus uses social media to change their educational model.

See Ms. Holstrom’s blog at http://holstrom.blogspot.com.

 

spc2011 SharePoint Conference non-linear creations