Enterprise...

Ok, let's go to enterprise level. At a multinational company (or at least i know) Sharepoint is (and let's simplify it a bit) content management application.

Quite powerful when it comes to storing any content. It also provides some workflow management, what gives you some kind of automation tool.

Ohh,if i could forget the workflows of SP2007. 

I had only Sharepoint designer and without, for example, cycle or copy/paste the development is becoming quite pain in the *ss. (If you have solution for this, please drop a comment as my current company does not want to upgrade from SP2007 due to cost awareness.)

But... There is an interesting feature of Sharepoint lists (where you usually store your data),namely export to Excel. There was another feature named synchronize with excel, but it was not working in all Excel/Sharepoint i was working with.

And here we are. Excel has VBA. My most hated programming language of all time. 

But let's put the language aside. VBA sits on top of a brilliant application suite (Office).

So just some idea how you can use the power of VBA:

• combine multiple Sharepoint list in one joint table
• adding extra data processing on the data sits in Sharepoint
• auto generating PIVOT tables on fresh data from SP lists
• send email based on the data
• move mails based on their content
• editing clipboard to paste info based on your data
• downloading files from Sharepoint document libraries 

And so on....

One would ask many of these can be done with server side application. That is correct, but we are on Enterprise level. That also means that it is more difficult to deploy your application.

So be brave enough for VBA (especially when you are not a developer) and save some minute of your work to grab a latte machiatto with your workmates.

Bye!

ps:I can't wait for Typescript in the Office application Suite. :-)

Google docs

So let's start...

Just to recap, i am a project manager, please do not expect me to reveal secret recipes how to do certain things, actual coding. However i will link those items which needs to be considerable.

So if you works for an entity not having strict security rules, then the most obvious choice is Google Docs. I am not talking Google Apps for Work, just a pure Google document with extra script added.

There are two projects i would like to reveal as possible hint:

Simple resource management tool 

(i am really into Resource Mgmt as you will see.)

Different sheets represent demand entities (aka project manager). Columns are the resources and rows are the days to come. 

Each PM adds his/her wishes (resource requests) to a certain day for a certain resource. And a script comb it together to reveal the collisions for the resource coordination meeting. 

Thanks to Google. Very simple, easily accessible. 

Though it is not really sofisticated, it can do the grunt work if that is all you need.

Sport game calendar

In some way it is also a resource mamagement tool. Guys can check in for certain gamedays. Also the paid in money is tracked in a different sheets. 

And the spreadsheet automatically counts the personal balance based on the presence. 

No trick here. We still use it.

The script can add the spice here as well. 

Sportmates are usually too lazy to go online to check a spreadsheet, look for their name and the appropriate day and set their status to 'Participate'. 

So why not let the script to send a reminder mail. 

Still very simple and it runs once a week, but with this we have not solved the original problem of laziness.

So here comes the GMailApp, which lets you to read all emails in a specific gmail account. 

Having said that those lazy sportmate only need to press a reply without any typing to let the script update their presence for a certain gameday. :-)

Code snippet to iterate thru mails with a certain subject (here they are dates):

 var searchString = 'subject:(*' + Utilities.formatDate(utcDate, "GMT", "yyyy/MMM/dd") + ') OR (*' + Utilities.formatDate(tomorrow, "GMT", "yyyy/MMM/dd") + ')';


  var threads = GmailApp.search(searchString);



  for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++) {
 
    var messages = threads[i].getMessages();
 
    for (var j = messages.length - 1; j >= 0; j--) {

Stay tune, next time we jump into the possibilites how you can automate things at enterprise level....

BYOA

Ok, the article, mentioned in the previous POST, interprets the BYOA concept differently. It focuses on the existing external applications.

I would not go that far for the first steps. Of course that would be great, but it takes a lot to consider as he also describes in the article. Big, multinational companies are far more robust to achieve, consider this in a reasonable timeframe.

So what we can do to enhance our productivity?

The problem in these huge companies they try to centralize everything to save cost. But as they say "The common horse is worst shod.", what is planned to be good for everyone, will be good for noone.

I don't say that companies should not develop, procure applications, but what the CIO needs to focus is to get only such application on board which has a open API (preferably thru some kind of webservice).

These open API allows that local units to streamline the processes better to the local way of working.

This is far more achievable what the author is stating in the article. All you need a collague or a univerity student with software development skills and a boss who oversee the benefit for it.

I will list some real life examples, happened to be implemented by me.

I am back. After so long time

What happened?
I became a project manager (not forgetting my developer roots), so i see the world from a different angle.

Just to see this almost forgotten blog. After 7 years so much the technology changed.
Today javascript, node.js, angular, Scala are the key technologies. Yes, there are some others, but for now these are the ones i am interested.

And what i will write about?

Bring Your Own Application, this is what i think the most nowadays.

To start please read this: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236316

What do you think?

No Spring Desktop

So we found out there will not be any Spring Desktop. At least in the near future.
But the guys promised the they will continue developing RCP.

Lieven Doclo has just stated to make a document about it.

Spring Desktop

Ok! Now i realized why i don't have any documentation on Spring RCP.
Quote from Spring richclient homepage:

Spring Richclient's Future

The current codebase of Spring Richclient was started a few years ago. Although the code is quite stable, we realise that it's not state-of-the-art anymore. Several technologies and ideas have emerged that should be embraced in the Spring Richclient code (eg JSR Application Framework) and the need for refactoring and revising of the codebase has grown. We opted to start a new project called Spring Desktop that allows us to do this without having our hands tied to the current codebase. This does not mean that Spring Richclient will be abandoned. The current project will be maintained and fixes will be deployed as needed. We're aiming to release the first version of Spring Desktop in October as part of the Spring release train.

So i am eagerly wating for Spring Desktop scheduled in a month. But what should i do till?

I guess i continue with Spring RCP to gain some experience....

Spring RCP

Instead of the GWT based project i turned toward Spring. I've read many books on Spring:

• Manning book


• Apress book

However i like Manning books, for Spring i found Apress' book better.

I really would like to make some tool helps me to organize my work (i work as a project manager). I thought i make a webbased WebFlow/JSF based application. But now i realized that Spring RCP 1.0.0 is out.


Spring RCP project

It is quite ok, but the documentation is missing very much, even a JavaDoc is not available (tell me if you have). However i found some useful description:

• Introduction to Spring RCP by Geertjan Wielenga


• Spring Richclient: A Journey by Chris Parsons

In the coming days i will go through this. What i would like to make then is to add Calendar support for Spring RCP FormBuilder. I will use the Calendar widget from swingx:

JXCalendarPicker

I will share with you my progress. Hopefully much more frequent as i used to so far!