Archive for the ‘IT’ Category
Working in London
Posted by Rhys Aronson in Europe Trip, IT on February 6th, 2011
So I have been in London since Late October am currently on my second short term contract here, Let me say Christmas was not a good time to be looking for work but once January rolled around things seemed to pick up reasonably quickly and I got my current role within the first two weeks of the year.
I am working on the service desk for a company which provides IT to a number of charities here in the UK so it feels nice to be giving at least a little something back to the country that is hosting me for my European escapades (even if they are paying me rather well for that help). It has been an interesting change moving back in to the service desk and while I am dealing with a lot simpler tasks them some of the stuff I am used to mostly I have learned a few bits and pieces as well ( I hadn’t worked professionally with Citrix up till now for example) and it is always nice to deal directly with the users a bit more than I had been. I certainly plan to do my best to get my grubby paws on whatever tech they will let my touch and work with.
It was slightly disheartening when I first got here to find I was unlikely to get the more technical work due to my Tier 5 Working Holiday status although I can understand why companies would not want to hire a Senior 2nd/Junior 3rd Line Support tech, train them up on the more serious systems then have them forced to leave in 2012.
All in all I am enjoying myself in London even if I am being a tad frugal to save money for more travel.
Sharepoint Part 2
Posted by Rhys Aronson in Sharepoint Services on June 18th, 2010
So I am making the Sharepoint intranet Live this weekend and it has all gone rather swimmingly (which is why I haven’t had a lot to say here I am afraid.
The one thing I will not is I was not sufficiently skilled to design my own .aspx page for a template which could do what I needed for bookings.
Thus I used the fantastic MRBS to provide what I needed, it links to AD via LDAP, it lets me book using periods rather than time and it is simple to use. The initial implementation can be tricky as the config.inc.php file you download off their site seems to be missing some instructions on what commands do what. if you have any issues with it please let me know (Edugeek was a big help with this).
I will note I had problems using it with the latest version of PHP so you may have to go back to php 5.2.x
Sharepoint comes with 40 templates which really are fantastic, I am finding a lot of use for the helpdesk one which allows me to track everything very neatly (although admittedly is not as nice as the dedicated software I have used in the past)
I was planning on creating my own CSS for the intranet but overall I have found the default one very good for it’s use and it probably will not be a good use of my time.
Overall for places where spending money on dedicated services is not an option WSS will really does things nicely and does not require a hell of a lot of prior knowledge to get the basic services off the ground. I have learned quite a bit about ISS as I have gone along as it was what caused most of the issues I actually had.
Documenting my Sharepoint Services development process
Posted by Rhys Aronson in IT, Sharepoint Services on April 7th, 2010
So as some of you may know I work at a High School as the ICT Officer, my next major project is going to be developing a SharePoint Services 3.0 Intranet to replace our current woefully inadequate system.
Now as Sharepoint is not something I have worked with before and web design is not exactly my area of expertise I expect I will be learning a lot on the fly as I go.
The project will probably start off slowly as I just get a feel for the software rather than do any serious design but after that I will write up a design document and the project can hopefully get off the ground running.
Initially the project will be running off a virtual server of Windows Server 2008 on my Home PC and after the initial period I will move it across to our secondary server at school once the Pilot test is ready to go. After that is up and running the remainder of my work should be on the aesthetic side and any features the pilot group think could be useful.
If anyone has any suggestions for tutorials or guides for me to take a look at either post a comment or send me an email at rhys@rhysaronson.org
Some guides I have been looking at for the initial design/planning phase.
http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200503/ij_03_02_05a.html
http://www.alentus.com/hosting/sharepoint-guide.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/wss/2/all/adminguide/en-us/default.mspx?mfr=true
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Windows-SharePoint-Services.html