How to Protect Your Kids Online with Windows 8

If you’re father, like myself, sooner or later you will start to worry about the surfing habits of your kids. Internet is now something ubiquitous, for a whole new generation there is no distinction between life online and offline. They are always connected. In a way these kids are like an open door letting all kinds of information come into their domain. When all the information coming in is safe and constructive, that’s awesome…unfortunately, not everything is safe for them.

 

The Importance of Safe Internet Surfing for Kids

I am not going to advocate against block all the information access. Truth is if they are curious enough, they will find in a way or the other, such is the power of the social networking. And out there, lurking in the shadows are hackers, spammers, phishing scams, virus threats, spyware threats, paedophiles.. all kinds of threats that can inflict heavy damage to a normal family like. The problem is not the kids, the problem is that they can’t most the time clearly distinguish between a nice person and a bad person (which is for all matters until we discover a ‘nice person with bad intentions’). The 2 most common types of attacks involving kids online are: (but not limited to)

• Hacking, by using someone’s else computer to perform harm against someone of something, with or without financial gains or personal injury. Mostly the times they aim to hit the person and finances.
• Sexual Predators and Pornography, by the easy access to pornographic content or internet chat rooms where predators can apply their techniques to lure unaware kids to their reach. Several of paedophiles were arrested in these virtual locations. Internet pornography probably one of the bigger threats to the online kids

 

How Windows 8 Can Help to a Safer Online Experience

Microsoft has a long story of fighting the online crime and threats. They are also probably the company that spends more investments in online safety in the world, beating even specialized online security companies. Windows 8 has all the online security tools that you need to technically protect your devices against malicious behaviour: A top-class firewall, built-in anti-virus, access to encrypted connections and the most advanced data encryption you can find…however all this is not enough if you don't educate your kids about online safety. You can do this in many ways, I am going to enumerate 2:

• Teaching them, in an open conversation, about the real possibilities of a malicious element
• Monitoring what they do online while they learn their ways in the internet.

 

How Can Windows 8 Help You Monitor Your Kids Internet Surfing

Before we go ahead, the monitor word might sound too heavy for the new generation. Monitoring normally is associated with: big brother, cut in civil liberties, prison etc… so let’s make an agreement upfront: When we talk about monitoring, is the same kind of monitoring you do when your kids are crossing the street to go to school, or the same kind of monitoring you do when you are teaching your kids to ride a bicycle. Monitoring as mentoring and advising.

When you get your PC, tablet or device with Windows 8 installed go to the Charms and select “Search”. Type “Users” and when the options come up, select “Users”. This will lead you to the create new user option. The idea here is to create a new user to be used by your kid when he/she access the internet.

You are going to create a user for your kids. Windows 8 requires to associate a valid email to everybody. If your little ones don’t have an email, create one for them with a secure password.

That’s it. Next time your kids want to surf the web, let them use their own user, not yours. You are still the administrator of the computer and you will have all sorts of tools to monitor their online surfing.

 

Family Safety Online Reports

From time to time you will then receive an email with a report about their usage.

This will give you access to an incredibly powerful tool to monitor your kids activities online…and Free. With that tool you can do all sorts of configurations to adjust their behaviour to their usage profile without your kids knowing. It tells you:

• which websites they have accessed
• how many times,
• which searches they did on google, bing, yahoo etc

 

Family Summary

with the same tool, you can have access to a Family Summary, which gives you access to all the accounts in your family and access to their usage report. I do recommend that as soon as you can you make yourself and your partner the administrators of your kids accounts.

Also the report will tell you not only all the computers used by them at home, but also if they have accessed by mobile or other tablets. All the usage data will be centralized into a single location.

 

 

Activity Reporting

This is the higher level report which groups all the family members and their activities online. From here you can drill-down to get more details. At first this report will show you:

• all the websites accessed during the week, when they were accessed (with time and date) and if the website had any malicious content,
• which application was used to access the website (chrome, internet explorer, etc..)

If something looks suspicious, like for example an application with a dodgy name you never heard about it,  you can in choose to block that application immediately for only that person (your kids) or for everyone at home, if you think is the best decision.

 

Time Limits

This is probably my favourite feature. Here you can enforce time limits for your kids internet usage. If you have kids and tried to tell them to stop using the computer, or the videogame or the TV you have probably realised how difficult to manage this can be. Which can vary from little crying to powerful-royal-tantrum-throwing.

Here at home, I enforced that my kids can only use my tablet 3 hours per day. No more than that. So, it means that when I arrive at home from work I give them my tablet and then I go to make dinner, shower, watch some TV etc…and they might be entertained with the device….however when the time is up, it is up! They are automatically locked and they cannot use the device. It works as a charm because they don't see this as your fault, but as a computer’s rule. and while they can argue with you, they cannot with a computer. Kids stop surfing, you stop worrying. Win-Win!

additionally to that, you can establish not only how many hours they can use the computer everyday but also which days they can use and between which hours they can use. This is truly marvellous. A curfew for your kids online surfing, Anything outside these times, and they cannot use the computer at all.

All these computer systems usage controls are extremely valuable and found in very complex enterprise systems, and now Windows 8 is making them available for us at home.

 

Downloads and Parental Content Classification

One of the most important features for modern TVs and programs is the implementation of parental controls in the TV Show itself. It allows people to configure the TV to automatically block any content based on their classification. Today you can for example configure your TV to automatically do not display TV shows that have sex scenes, nudity, violence etc. You can control this because the TV show itself brings the classification and parental control in the signal.

Now, all Windows 8 applications have a signature for classification and parental control as well, and Windows 8 can filter content based in that signature. The screen below shows the current classification of the Australian Broadcasting Authority. It means that every thing that’s downloaded from the internet store only can be used by your kids if the parental control allows. That’s helps us to have piece of mind.

 

Ad-Hoc Restrictions

and to top it all, you can still select to block any installed application, regardless of the reason…simply because you can! If you think something should not be used by your kids, just block it.

 

In Conclusion…

Clearly Microsoft is continuously to invest in this area since the frontiers of work and play are more and more blurry in our connected world and more and more kids are living their lives connected via multiple devices, weather is via tablets, laptops or mobiles..

I completely understand that “to each head, its sentence” and that online safety means different things to different families. Some parents just want to have a chat with their kids and ask them what they do online and trust them; some parents wants to have full control of what they do or don’t do online…and I am not going to discuss such merit here, but what I have to add is that a safer online experience for kids comes down to awareness and education, and IMHO having access to such features in Windows 8 really makes our lives easier.

 

By Edge Pereira

Videos do Lancamento Mundial: Windows 8 e Surface

A Microsoft comecou uma blitz mundial. Campanha de marketing pesada anunciando o Windows 8 e Surface. Se vc tem acesso a internet, foi praticamente impossivel ficar indiferente ao marketing massivo da Microsoft. Tenho certeza que pelo menos alguem comentou ou voce viu alguem comentar sobre eles hoje.

Aqui os comerciais lancados da campanha! Parece que finalmente a MS aprendeu a fazer comerciais interessantes.

Esse ganhou premio de melhor comercial do ano (batendo Apple, Samsung etc.)

By Edge Pereira

Windows 8 Picture Password Demonstration

Here’s the windows 8 picture password being demonstrated by a 3 year old Aussie.

Come on!!! If she can use Windows 8, everyone can as well :-)

By Edge Pereira

Windows Server 2012 – Step by Step Installation

By Edge Pereira

How to: Managing My Twitter Usage

(This is the first version…might be enhanced with new ideas, questions)

First of all, let me say here that twitter is hardly a productivity tool. It is great fun, nice to communicate short, to the point messages, but honestly rarely add something new, important or indispensable to the lives of people who use it. Someone mentioned the other day he “could not understand what I want read from twitter” (?)

It is a perfect valid point and the short answer is: I do not take twitter seriously. I mainly use to read random news…and sometimes help contribute with some content which I produce in my blog. I don't aim content at anyone. I have no expectations of content from anyone…but I try to align my current interest around subjects.

If you want to know the whole point then the long answer is below.

Is All About My Quality Time

First of all, a bit of a background for you. My Wife, kids and I live in a foreign country. No relatives are around us. We have 2 small kids and we don't have a nanny. I do a lot of consulting travel and when I am at home it is paramount for me to spend quality time with my family. I want to have time to BBQ, to go out with kids to the beach, to relax with my wife…. I am telling you: it is hard!! Not always this time is available. We always have to sacrifice something..TV series, movies, something…and twitter does not help! as a matter of fact, if you leave it twitter will suck the life out of you (and Facebook as well probably)

Is this a reason for you to stop using twitter? I say 'no' you still can use it as long as you don't fall in the common challenges. I identified some of them and I explain my solutions for them: (again, this is just my format…they are not necessarily also good for you)

 

Mind What You Say

Twitter has a 140-characters limitation. The capacity to express an idea or opinion in the right manner is extremely reduced. Words can very easily hurt people and fewer words add a ‘cold’ tone to your message and how the other people will perceive it. Remember that behind a twitter avatar, there is a real person. If you meet someone at a supermarket, or at a party would you go immediately throwing inflammatory comments at them? so why you do it to people online?

Everything can be said differently to avoid confrontation. The other day I shared some article about tech. Immediately I received a reply saying “BULLSHIT! bla bla bla…”. This is officially a troll. Trolling is replying/engaging to someone in a conversation that starts already from a negative point of view, with inflammatory opinions which has no purpose other than drag you to a long, time-wasting bashing and potentially hurting scenario. Sorry mate, I don't have time for that.

I try to reply to every tweet I receive. Except from trolls. If you receive a tweet from someone, if the communication is with good intentions and a genuine conversation I suggest you to engage in the conversation. You never know, the next person might be just the networking link you were looking for…and besides, a new good friend is always a good thing.

It amazes me how people on twitter ignore genuine, rich conversations but are ready to reply immediately to abuse and provocation.

Think this way: If you are in a party where you know nobody. You see someone alone, you approach and talk right? Likewise, if you are in a party alone and someone comes to have a chat, you would not look at his/her face and go away, right? so why do this online? Use the capacity that twitter has to bring new people to your life and engage with them.

My View: I don't take twitter seriously. To me, nothing important happens on twitter. But I do take what I say/write seriously. Every time I write a tweet I think:”How would my son (or daughter, or wife, or mother) would read this?”

We all have an online reputation to care about, weather we like it or not. Be nice when communicating with people, try to make new friends, ignore those who engage with inflammatory conversations. Finding the right things to ignore is as important as finding the right things to associate.

 

I am Just Re-twitting you; Not Agreeing With You

Another great mistake is that people confuse re-tweet (RT) with their own words. Person X says “I don't like this…” then someone does a RT and all of sudden people immediately assume you are agreeing with that person. You can have many rules regarding this, my rules is if I do a RT, it does not mean I am agreeing with that idea; instead it means “hey, I saw this opinion and I would like to share it with you…what do you think?” This is similar of my behaviour outside the virtual world. When I go to barbecues, parties, social functions, I do not only talk about things I agree. If I see a stupid comment on TV, next time I meet my mates I’ll bring that up for discussion….why? well, because that’s how we bind ideas, by discussing it.

My Solution: I do RTs from everything I find it interesting or worth sharing for discussion. Do not necessarily agree with them.

 

Our Friendship Is Stronger Than “Me Following You”

I understand We are humans. We do marvellous things and achieve great feats. But we are also creatures of vain and desires. We love attention as much as we love saying sour things to each other.

Now, I do not necessarily follow all my friends. It does not mean I don't like them, it only means that if I have to follow all of them my twitter timeline would be so flooded that I would do nothing except read and reply tweets all day. That’s not their fault, that’s Twitter’s fault. It was designed like that. One does not have to follow their friends on twitter to see what they are up to, you still can check what they are saying without having to follow them.

We have an endorphin shot when someone follow us, try not to get addicted to that. think about it, what’s the point? Try to think this way, I follow the Gartner Group report, but I don’t follow my brother. t does not mean I think Gartner is more important than him.

I do not use any other advanced twitter features, I have a mortgage, kids, bills to pay, work etc…already way too many things to manage daily; twitter lists? IMHO, I don’t think I need yet another thing to manage without giving me any benefit at all except “list things”.

My Solution: I do not follow people, I follow subjects. Ideas that can potentially help my day to be better or bring and different perspective on things. We are still friends, weather twitter says we are following each other or not. If someone gets mad because a friend stop following them…well, man up! I am following something now, but I might not be tomorrow.

 

Your Time Is Your Time, Is Your Time

Some people literally spend hours on twitter. They feel the need to reply to everything and to comment on every bit of information. Whilst the occasional vent is ok sometimes is borders the twitter addiction. And worst, they do this during their working hours. IMHO, your time is your time and one can do what ever they feel like; I wouldn’t.

Having said that, every July for 1 week I tend to go crazy on twitter during the tour de France. I just love interacting with my cycling community. I am also lucky that this happens during the night when I am at home and kids are already sleeping. So I still feel guilty free here. Another moment when I tend to go bananas on twitter is on Monday nights during my favourite political TV show “Q And A”, extremely popular with the twittersphere in Australia. but again, this just happens once a week and from 8 to 9 PM.

My Solution: I try to limit my tweet times to some very specified moments:

• When I am commuting to/from work
• When I am at home trying to kill some time watching some TV (which I do not do much), after lunch etc
• When I am participating in some event where people are socializing

I never/rarely do twitter during working hours or when I am with my family. Twitter NEVER comes first in my daily routine. Twitter is NOT important to me. As a matter of fact, the importance I give twitter to my personal life is the lowest possible…which takes me to what I said before…

 

Nothing Important Happens on Twitter

If something is really important, if something will affect your life or those around you…You WILL know, regardless of twitter. I have a colleague who does not watch the news on TV and he says:”I don't watch the News, I let other people see the news and if something is really important, this something will find me”.

And also this has an interesting effect of re-tweeting. Follow people who aggregate what you are looking for. There are some people who JUST retweet. I must say that I used to think less of them because they do not express any opinion, but then with the time I realised they are just what we need to help us free time and be more productive.

In the beginning, I used to have more than 200 tweets to browse in my timeline. I’ve been slowly decreasing this number by following some and (mostly) following others. Now, I have about 30-40 tweets in my time line when I check it every morning. Unfortunately I discovered I don't have lots of free time to read a timeline of more than 60 tweets and since I found that I noticed my productivity increased a lot. I suggest you to do the same, unless social media participation is really your thing.

My Solution: Try not to check twitter more than 2-3 times per day. Nothing important happens on twitter that if you miss it will affect me/you. Stop following every one and every thing. There are people out there who do that task and filter the news for you. Find and follow them. Reduce the noise in your timeline.

 

Throwing Letters from a Building vs. Writing on a Book

From time to time, I want to express an opinion on twitter…and sometimes I have to do it more than once. I found that I was wasting my precious time doing that. So instead of having to reply to every one my opinion I discovered that if I wrote a blog post and reply to them with the URL I would hit several goals at one go:

• Set the right perception: without the limitation of the 140-characters people would understand where I come from and my reasoning better
• Help to build a more intelligent internet: Twitter is great for sending quick and short-lived updates, but is almost doing a disservice on content creation by offering a below par search capabilities. A few times I wanted to share again something I saw in twitter and I had incredible hard time to find that information again. With a blog, it is a no brainer; create your content, share the link on twitter and let Google, Bing etc do their job.
• Saves me a lot of talking. I write once and can be reused as many times as I can; if I change my opinion in the future, I just revisit my blog and refresh it.

 

I Can Only Show You The Door

To me Twitter, like Facebook, is just a tool. Being or not fun, productive or destructive is all up to the user; and Twitter is awesome to share the instant , something that just happened and you just can't hold it only for yourself. That capacity to share information snacks is what makes twitter attractive.

When I first joined, I was not sure what to make of the tool. Like everybody else, I guess. Then together we experienced several phases: from using twitter to say 'good morning, is there anyone here?' to 'hey, look at this awesome link I found'.

In many ways, I've grown to enjoy twitter, and this acknowledgment is important. It represents a shift in the way things are delivered to the crowds. The power of simplicity and focus. I must say I even learned how to deliver a message using fewer words, a constant exercise in productivity.

Twitter is in many scenarios the minimum common denominator of the communication. It allow sharing of content to hit millions. It has evolved to become a political issue. It covered the USA elections from the people's point of view, it was blocked by governments during times of crisis.

My take on this: If you are not on twitter already, jump in; if you are, try to make it sustainable, from my part I try not to use it as content creation but as a tool to make content reach people. I would say, share things that are meaningful to you and surrounding without any expectations. Sometimes like a turning a TV at 3AM on a Sunday: I don't expect to watch anything, I just expect to see what’s going on. Nothing more, nothing less. If there is content that’s going to better me, great! If not, I just turn it off.

One caveat here: I am opposed using twitter and Facebook integrated with professional tools like LinkedIn. Think about how your professional network will see when you post religious content, pictures of your meal or screams about your sporting team winning in their timeline. But of course, you do what you feel like doing :-)

If you have ideas on managing your twitter timeline and other point of views of its usage, feel free to reach me out.

By Edge Pereira

Cool Stuff: Evolution of the Toolbars Through the Years

Source: Ilistes

By Edge Pereira

How To Get the Managed Accounts Password in SharePoint 2010

This script I’ve got some time ago from a Microsoft Field Engineer. It is ok to share (you can find this same utility here and a more elaborated version here). Make sure to run this script in the SharePoint Management Shell, using an account with Farm Admin privileges.

function Bindings()
{
    return [System.Reflection.BindingFlags]::CreateInstance -bor
    [System.Reflection.BindingFlags]::GetField -bor
    [System.Reflection.BindingFlags]::Instance -bor
    [System.Reflection.BindingFlags]::NonPublic
}

function GetFieldValue([object]$o, [string]$fieldName)
{
    $bindings = Bindings
    return $o.GetType().GetField($fieldName, $bindings).GetValue($o);
}

function ConvertTo-UnsecureString([System.Security.SecureString]$string) 
{ 
    $intptr = [System.IntPtr]::Zero
    $unmanagedString = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToGlobalAllocUnicode($string)
    $unsecureString = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringUni($unmanagedString)
    [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::ZeroFreeGlobalAllocUnicode($unmanagedString)
    return $unsecureString
}

Get-SPManagedAccount | select UserName, @{Name="Password"; Expression={ConvertTo-UnsecureString (GetFieldValue $_ "m_Password").SecureStringValue}}

You should see a result like this:

Things to Watch Out

Some tricky things might happen when you execute this script. So, If you run this script and…

• All passwords displayed are BLANK: check your current logged  account permissions (remember, farm admin rights)



• Some of the passwords displayed are BLANK: the accounts are likely out-of-synch with Active Directory ..ouch!

Accounts Out-of-Synch With AD

if you have multiple farms or geographically distributed farms, do not be surprised if after you setup the Auto-Reset Managed Accounts Password you see them out-of-synch with AD. If you experience that, try to run the following command:

Repair-SPManagedAccountDeployment

This will redeploy all the credentials and checks if the current farm passphrase is consistent across all the servers. This command will also tell you if any accounts are broken. In that case you should see a screen similar to the below:

in that case you can try to…

Set the Managed Account Password Manually

Run the following command:

Set-SPManagedAccount -UseExistingPassword

This will allow to enter the password for the managed account. This command is the same used to set the password. You will see a screen similar to the below where you will manually enter the

 

If when trying to execute the command, you receive an error message like the one below,





then make sure the SharePoint Timer Jobs are running in all the servers. I hope all these experiences I’ve had help you and maybe save some of your precious time.

By Edge Pereira

How to Fix PassBook: Cannot Connect to iTunes Store iOS6

If you just upgraded your iPhone to the new iOS6 you will note one of the new apps called PassBook. Click here to learn more about the PassBook.

However, if you try to access it you will see this frustrating message:

here’s a little hack to overcome this. Go to your phone settings and change your device date to the future. Choose year 2013, for example.

then confirm and do not select the option to automatically update the time.

With the clock set to the future, go to the PassBook app. You should see once more the cannot connect to the Apple store message, but then after that is all good.

By Edge Pereira

How to Fix: Verify that the critical User Profile Application and User Profile Proxy Application timer jobs are available and have not been mistakenly deleted

When provisioning a Project 2010 Server or a SharePoint 2010 server, if you are using the Service Pack 1 you will have an unpleasant surprise which is the User Profile Service misbehaving and potentially breaking your system. To fix that, the recommendation is to apply the August 2011 Cumulative Update.

However soon you will notice that every hour or so, your SharePoint Health Analyzer will start bombarding your screen with this error:

 

 

That is in fact an issue introduced with the August CU. It is a known issue and MS is working on that. Chances are there is nothing wrong with your UPS. That's very likely a false positive. They are just timer jobs which are being deleted without any intervention, but because a bug was introduced by the cumulative update package.

So to avoid that message keeps showing up and drawing your attention, you have to set SharePoint to automatically try to fix the issue. Follow these steps.

In the Monitoring section, in the Central Admin, click the link Review Rule Definitions

A list of all the current job definitions will be listed by group. Browse the Configuration group and find the rule called "Verify that the critical User Profile Application and User Profile Proxy Application timer jobs are available and have not been mistakenly deleted"

 

Click the rule and edit the item selecting the checkbox Repair Automatically, then save.

Now, every time this message comes up SharePoint will try to fix the issue automatically creating the missing timer jobs

By Edge Pereira

The New Microsoft Logo Done Using ONLY CSS

That’s pretty hard-core UI , the new Microsoft logo done entirely with CSS. No images, no convoluted HTML…just plain CSS.

logo {
    font: 60px "Segoe UI";
    color: #747273;
    line-height: 1.5em;
    padding-left: 1.7em;
}

logo:before {
    content: '\2006';
    position: absolute;
    height: 0.095em;
    left: 0;
    box-shadow: 0.35em 0.35em 0 0.25em #f8510c, 1.05em 0.35em 0 0.25em #7eba00, 0.35em 0.97em 0 0.25em #00a3f4, 1.05em 0.97em 0 0.25em #ffba00;     
}

If you create an html page with:

<logo>Microsoft</logo>

you will see this.

You can play around here for more results: http://jsfiddle.net/ 

Note that the logo increases/shrinks according to the length of the text

( yeah, I know…doesn't look good on Apple )

Go ahead and have fun!

By Edge Pereira

Project Management: Duration, Scheduling, Resourcing

Before the project starts, a schedule is created. A schedule determines the macro view of the project, which is then broken down into smaller pieces of work. The person responsible to handle this dynamic is called Scheduler.
The scheduler with all these pieces then creates a work breakdown structure, aka. WBS, which is the wallet for the effort estimated for each task. Then we find the people, then allocate them and then we get moving.
This is not news, we've been doing this for centuries. Just look at the engineering projects. We've been building cathedrals, cities, bridges, castles for many years. We do have a huge experience and materials when the subject comes to manage engineering projects.
With so much experience and materials to build upon, we still find ourselves having an incredible hard time trying to answer one question : how many tasks should we have in a schedule and how long each task should be?

The Art of Estimation
Often we see project schedules that are just plain convoluted and project managers frustrated to isolate the issue with the tasks in the project schedule because they far too macro. Some projects lasts decades, like the construction of the LHCI; some projects are just a few days. But regardless of the length, how to handle a schedule with hundreds, thousands of items?
Different industries, require different project management strategies, that's one of the primary challenges of the project: Delivering on time, on budget. Let's have a look at an IT project. Here a few samples on how to approach the scheduling and task decision process:
IT projects: IT is a very new category of projects; unlike engineering projects the experience is being built fairly recently, which might explain why so many IT projects fail in comparison with older industries.

• Phases: IT projects normally follow a very successful model, which is a design phase, a development/build phase, a quality assurance/testing phase, a documentation phase, and a deployment/release
• Duration: The projects are measured in weeks or months; which makes the task to allocate work a bit easier: days or weeks.
• Resourcing: Resource allocation comes down to a person/unit. If you drink the Agile-koolaid you should try to think about the resources and tasks using  short sprints. Maximum 2 weeks sprints.

Engineering/Construction Projects: This is what the humankind knows how to do it best. Big scale projects.

• Phases: Just like regular planned projects but having an engineering phase at the beginning. This is a very peculiar group, because despite our vast historic experience, this moment always covers one or many aspects that has never been done/thought/designed before.
• Duration:  Engineering projects are visualized in months, years...lasting at minimum weeks and at maximum months.
• Resourcing: Expect to see thousands of tasks in this type of project. So the Scheduler here will have to manage the units person/skill level, rather than person/day. These allocations can become quite complex and often there is a needed to create smaller projects and group them into a program to ease the management and delivery aspect.

Which these concepts in mind we will discuss now how long should be a project.
Divide to Conquer
Let’s imagine an engineering plant location move project. The company bought new offices in another location and needs to phase-out the old offices while transitioning to the new one. First we need to identify the macro-objective, then after that experience show us that the breakdown in smaller pieces are a good approach. Not only because they are more visible to manage and to handle but also because their deliverables can potentially be closed down independent of each other.

you determine the star and finish of the project. then you breakdown in smaller tasks (A, B, C, D, for example), then you try to group these tasks in logical phases (1, 2 and 3, in our case) and for each phase you try to break them in smaller micro tasks. How many micro tasks is up to the manager or responsible for the delivery but in my experience I try to avoid creating less than 5 tasks and more than 15. This is not a rule of guide, it is just the number I personally feel confortable and that has brought me most successes.
Additionally, every time a decision needs to be applied to a task try to get into the habit of asking yourself: can this task be broken down into smaller tasks? Is this going to impact the scope? the main reason for that is because generally some tasks look very simple in the schedule but effectively can become quite complex during the execution…for many reasons. You can’t foresee which ones will be but you can forecast their likelihood of happen.
And yet…
bear in mind that despite all our previous successes and our amazing management skills… some projects will fail, and sometimes nothing can stop that happening. For these cases the same old adage still applies: visibility, visibility, visibility. Make a deliverable visible as much as you can, use whatever powers you have to propagate this visibility. You cannot stop a project from failing, but you can fail gracefully (to use a term from IT management). As long as everyone is aware of how the project is going and we are doing the best we can of the situation everyone is accountable.
The plan is not important, but planning is important.

By Edge Pereira

What is BYOD and Why Some Companies are Against It ?

BYOD (bring your own device) is one of the big topics being discussed now in the organizations. The main questions arise from:

• is our organization mature/prepared enough to allow external devices coming into our ecosystem?
• is our workforce trained and educated enough to understand their possibilities, actions and consequences?
• is our overall culture and strategy aligned with the new world of BYOD?

These are extremely thoughtful questions and if governance around this topic is not done with due diligence, these policies can swiftly backfire.
What's the point in blocking Facebook, twitter etc. when clearly your employees likely have a smartphone in their pocket and will use these services anyway?
Having said that, I believe we need to understand the motivations and the cost x benefits that BYOD would bring to an organization.
For example, it is common practice that content created on company's computers are intellectual property not of the employee but the company itself; however what are the implications if the employee creates his material in a personally own laptop? who has the IP of the production? you see...that's already raising big questions and yet this is not even the tip of the iceberg. The lines between IP and behaviour are getting blurred by the minute.
and here's the raw truth. 67% of the people are already using it and the majority of people is in favour of bringing their own devices to work anyway.

How did the BYOD thing started?

We live in a social world, and the technology reflected this in many ways, mimicking across the virtual world. Now we have Facebook, tweeter etc. So when people went to work, they felt the need to adjust their new virtual persona across the boundaries as well. People don't want to wait until 6PM to live their online personas, they want full experience, control. So, BYOD started from the employee/worker's perspective.
The next step was then to use the devices they felt more confortable with. Your company might have a preferred mobile device such as BlackBerry for business, HP for laptops, encrypted USB drives for data transfer. And more often than not, these are pushed via company policies. However, some workers did not like BlackBerry, they want to use iPhones, they prefer using a Samsung Series 9 instead of HP, and they prefer to keep their stuff in pocket hard disks. People were then using the company's recommended devices and side-by-side using their own preferred ones. Almost like a parallel reality.
And for a whole new generation which was born with a myriad of technological options, being able to choose their own hardware and software platforms makes them more satisfied. More satisfied workers likely makes more productive people. More productive people increases the chances of a project success. Project success makes companies happy. Win-Win for companies and workers.
Sounds like simple joining the dots. It isn't.
Research has shown more majority of organizations are against BYOD  , and in fact some organizations actually ban workers bringing their own devices to work. But don't blame the corporations for it, some of them have very good points to back their policies.
 
Look at this research and you can see that almost 60% of U.S. IT professionals view mobile devices owned by employees as posing the greatest risk their organization face . If you work in the healthcare or finance, this is even more real.
Mainly this happens because some industries are highly regulated by very strong code of practices when it comes to sensitive and privacy data such as company and customers. These industry regulators stand a very strong stance and it an organization is found breaching some of their obligations they can easily face fines and some cases even jail.
See now? the iceberg tip starts to show up and the conversation is not focused anymore just on gadgets but how a business is run and their obligations with the market, government and citizens.
Overall, all this is great. It opens up the canvas for discussion around the pros and cons of adopting BYOD.
Just accepting BYOD as the coolest thing ever at the workplace is not the smartest route. As in any project, all the risks and benefits need to be weighted.

By Edge Pereira

How to Get AD Forest in PowerShell

Here’s another small PowerShell script useful for your administration. It returns the AD object for a specified forest; the forest in the current context is returned  if nothing is passed as parameter. This is also compatible with Office 365.

function Get-Active-Directory-Forest-Object ([string]$ForestName, [System.Management.Automation.PsCredential]$Credential)
{    
    #if forest is not specified, get current context forest
    If (!$ForestName)     
    {        $ForestName = [System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.Forest]::GetCurrentForest().Name.ToString()    
    }        

    If ($Credential)     
    {        
        $credentialUser = $Credential.UserName.ToString()
        $credentialPassword = $Credential.GetNetworkCredential().Password.ToString()
        $adCtx = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.DirectoryContext("forest", $ForestName, $credentialUser, $credentialPassword )
    }    
    Else     
    {        
        $adCtx = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.DirectoryContext("forest", $ForestName)    
    }        

    $output = ([System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.Forest]::GetForest($adCtx))    

    Return $output
}

By Edge Pereira

How to Change Currency from Windows Store in Surface, Windows RT

if you just received your Microsoft Surface RT, when going to the Windows 8 app store you should see the prices in your local currency. In my case I saw the prices in British Pounds…living in Australia it does not make much sense…so if you come across this, here’s how to fix:

 

at the Start Menu, type ‘location’. and select the option ‘Settings’ and ’Change location’

 

in the next screen, choose your correct location. In my case, my Surface was configured to ‘United Kingdom’, so I just changed to ‘Australia’

click OK and voila! all set. If you go to the Windows Store again you should see the prices adjusted to your correct currency.

By Edge Pereira

How to Populate a ObjectDataSource from a Dataset

To use datasets for data manipulation and grid displaying is great in a SharePoint environment.  
The .NET framework offers many displaying controls for that task amongst them is the SPGridView. Grid views are excellent for presenting data because people like to see things organized in grids. it is almost natural to our eyes and project stakeholders love grids because they are like the heart and soul of a project management report.
If you are using SharePoint it is pretty straightforward to instantiate a SPGridView control and then use the datasource property to point to a dataset.
So let's say, you want to display all the team sites or site under a specific URL. you can populate a dataset with the rows and bind to the grid.

The only issue here is the network traffic. Every time you perform a postback you will force the dataset to be loaded and then the grid will just change the page displayed, but under the hood the whole dataset was there populated. If you have hundreds of sites and these are being accessed by multiple users it can potentially be using unnecessary bandwidth. ( note: There are strategies to place around this mechanism like using cache objects and persisting information in the viewstate, but we wont be discussing them here )

 

 
Would not be great if we could have a out-of-the-box structure good enough to allow fetching the necessary records for a specific page?
For that we can use the ObjectDataSource control.

You can read a lot about the usages of the ObjectDataSource all over the net, but if you are like me a big fan of datasets and you have been dealign with datasets objects in many legacy applications, you want to just want to have an easy way to migrate your datasets to ObjectDataSources.
Unfortunately, the ObjectDataSource control does not have a property like objectDataSource.DataSource neither it has a LoadFromXml or Load(Dataset)...
So how do you do?
Here's how I find it: using reflection.

ObjectDataSources do not have a property to perform something like MyObjectDataSource.DataSource=MyDataSet, but it does have a constructor that allows you to parse classes and extract data methods.
So let's say you have a scenario like this in a webpart

        /// <summary>

        /// Called by the ASP.NET page framework to notify server controls that use

        /// composition-based implementation to create any child controls

        /// they contain in preparation for posting back or rendering.

        /// </summary>

        protected override void CreateChildControls()

        {

            base.CreateChildControls();

            Grid = new SPGridView

                           {

                               AutoGenerateColumns = false,

                               AllowSorting = true,

                               AllowPaging = true,

                               AllowFiltering = true,

                               PageSize = 10

                           };

 

            Grid.DataSource = MyDataSet.MyTable;

            Grid.DataBind();

        }

To convert this to an ObjectDataSource you then do this...

        /// <summary>

        /// Gets the data table for object source.

        /// </summary>

        /// <returns></returns>

        public DataSet GetDataTableForObjectSource()

        {

            // do whatever you want to do here and

            // return the table with the data

            return MyDataSet.MyTable;

        }

 

 

        /// <summary>

        /// Called by the ASP.NET page framework to notify server controls that use

        /// composition-based implementation to create any child controls

        /// they contain in preparation for posting back or rendering.

        /// </summary>

        protected override void CreateChildControls()

        {

            base.CreateChildControls();

 

            // in this constructor specify the type name, the class name and

            // the public method inside this class where the object datasource will retrieve the data

            // make it a signed assembly for security reasons.

            var edgeDataSource =

                new ObjectDataSource(

                    "MyNamespace.MyClass, MyNamespace.MyClasss, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=ce8ab85a8f42a5e8",

                    "GetDataTableForObjectSource") {ID = "EdgeDataSource"};

 

            Grid = new SPGridView

                           {

                               AutoGenerateColumns = false,

                               AllowSorting = true,

                               AllowPaging = true,

                               AllowFiltering = true,

                               PageSize = 10

                           };

 

            // do not use DataSource property. MUST USE DataSourceID with the control name

            Grid.DataSourceID = "EdgeDataSource";

 

            // do this before the databind

            Controls.Add(edgeDataSource);

            Controls.Add(Grid);

 

            // bind the objects and execute the call

            //specified in the ObjectDataSource constructor

            Grid.DataBind();

        }

 

Cute trick!
So there you go. To migrate, load, or populate ObjectDataSources using DataSets, all you have to do is to wrap the data returned in a public class and pass the method information to the ObjectDataSource constructor. I hope this helps you guys out there using ObjectDataSources.
Now go coding. Happy paging, happy filtering, happy caching!

By Edge Pereira