Posts

New Authoring Process

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With my commitment to revive this blog with new content I have also switched to a new authoring and publishing process. Previously I wrote all my blog posts directly in Blogger’s HTMl editor . At the beginning of my blog it was the most sensible thing for me to do. Blogger provided me with an interface to directly write my articles into the publishing engine. And it was a good choice. But over time I began to regularly fiddle with the HTML which was generated while typing into Blogger’s editor . And I did not focus on the area which is most important: content . Besides my blog I have been looking for an editor solution which provides me a simple and universal user experience from my Windows laptop which I have for work and on my private iMac . Early on I found Markdown a very interesting solution. You are basically typing plain text into an editor with formatting commands. And the available commands are quite comprehensive for a blog post. This is then rendered into formatted o
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Green Gamification

Device with a Twist At my company’s new year kick-off everyone got a present which at first sight does not have much in common with our daily work: Creating rich intranets based on SharePoint. It might be even seen as a pure geek gadget : a DIN A4 sized solar panel and a rechargeable battery. The solar panel is used to charge the battery. And the battery then can be used to charge for example your mobile phone. But now comes the twist. Changers , the company behind it, has created an online community which allows you to upload your CO 2 savings by charging your devices with solar energy. And this community provides multiple incentives to regularly use your device. You can Track how much CO 2 you have saved by charging your mobile devices with solar energy. Track how many watt-hours of energy you have created. Earn badges by achieving certain energy saving levels Start a green energy competition with your peers, e.g. colleagues or friends. Earn credits and redeem those at
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Looking back and ahead

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At the end of a year I have the tendency to look back at the past year and set a vision of what lies in the twelve months to come. When I look at the post history from this year I must admit that this blog was pretty silent in 2013. I published only three posts in January - which is eleven months ago. Then nothing has happened until this post. Wow, time flew by . What has kept me from publishing new posts in this time? Frankly, I cannot attribute to a single cause. There were multiple reasons for this: I have started a new job in February which provided new challenges. In my prior job I was regularly involved in Nintex projects. In my new job my projects are most of the time around software architecture and quality assurance in SharePoint development projects . (SharePoint will never let you go ;-)) and many other reasons. So with the new tasks in my daily job, I am going to shift the core topics of this blog more in the direction of software architecture and quality
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Readlist 02/2013: Search in SharePoint 2013

With this month I start a post series with Readlists . Each posts contains some links to articles devoted to one topic. besides introducing a new tag "Readlist" there is also a page where all reading lists can be accessed. February 2013 is all about Search in SharePoint 2013 .
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Integrating Nintex Workflow with Twitter Pt. 2

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This is the second part in the series Integrating Nintex Workflow with Twitter . Please go to part 1 to see the full story. In the first part of this series we have created a content News Page,  a page layout and deployed the feature to a SharePoint Publishing site . The page has an extra field which is used to enter the message sent to Twitter. This part covers the workflow which is used to tweet the availability of a new News Page . In order to get the following to work you need Nintex Workflow 2010 with Nintex Live enabled. (If you want to know how enable Nintex Live take a look at the Installation Manual which can be found on Nintex's Support Pages .) Step 1: Creating the Workflow The workflow for this scenario should be executed everytime a new page with version 1.0 of our content type is approved. Consequently, for updates to the content no tweet is sent. Nintex offers the possibility to hook into the item changed event for list workflows . Therefore go to the l
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Integrating Nintex Workflow with Twitter Pt. 1

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Overview One common scenario for corporate Internet sites is to sent notifications when a new article is published via social networks to their followers. With the availability of Nintex Live it became possible to twitter a tweet. In one of the later versions a similar activity for Yammer  became available. In this post I will show how you can use the "Twitter a Tweet" activity to notify your Twitter followers about new articles. This is going to be a two part series. In the first part I will create a News Page content type and page layout. In the second part I will show you the workflow which ensures that every time a News Page was approved the notification is sent to Twitter. Step 1: Content Type News Page In order to get started open Visual Studio 2010 and create an empty SharePoint project. Then add a new content type to this project based on Page . Modify the added content type to look like the this: 1: <!-- Parent ContentType: Page (0x010100C
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How to use Workflow Constants as Environment Information

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After showing how workflow constants can help you with environment information in my last post  How to Handle Environment Variables with Nintex Workflow , I am going to explain how workflow constants can be used in your deployment scripts. Starting of we create a workflow constant at website level. Therefore go to the Site Settings  of the site where you want to use the workflow constant, then select Manage workflow constants under Nintex Workflow.  Select New from the ribbon and create a workflow constant with the following settings: click to enlarge Then open the command prompt and switch to the Nintex Workflow 2010 install folder. (Typically: C:\Program Files\Nintex\Nintex Workflow 2010) . In order to export the workflow constant you have just created enter the following command: 1: nwadmin -o ExportWorkflowConstants -siteUrl [url to your site] -outputFile wfconst_dev.xml -includeSite The output file  wfconst_dev.xml contains all workflow constants which do e
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