Eli Robillard's World of Blog.

Ameet Phandis wrote a terrific article on writing custom site definitions that somehow slipped under the radar when it was published on ASPAlliance in January. In the article, Ameet copies an SPS definition (SPSTOC) as his starting point, most articles use STS to begin. Nice work!

Register at: http://www.tspug.com/

Tonight, CorasWorks will be showing off some great components for SharePoint. If you've used out-of-box SharePoint at all, you probably found some gaps in what it's capable of. CorasWorks fills in those gaps to help you construct some great, useful, navigable apps.

I'll also be describing some RSS tricks I've recently developed, and we'll have the usual fireside chat to begin, including a review of the recent SharePoint 2003 Advanced Concepts book by Nadrowsi and Draper. In brief, it rocks. And I'm glad it turned out that way because I helped with the technical reviewing. In fact, I've been drawing ideas from it since it was in draft, and even now it's sitting open on my desk. Anyway, all this and a free copy for one lucky attendee at tonight's meeting.

See you there!

CorasWorks Workplace Suite and Collaborative Business Applications
Venkat Muthukrishnan
CorasWorks Workplace Suite™ empowers IT to deliver end solutions to your users rapidly with little to no administration, freeing up your time to focus on the more custom needs of your users. Join us as Venkat Muthukrishnan of CorasWorks demonstrates CorasWorks Workplace Suite™ – Winter 2006. The seventh version of CorasWorks’ industry leading product suite delivers an “Active” integrated workplace that empowers IT and end users to easily automate common tasks and drive business activity. This capability works with CorasWorks Roll-Up and Navigation capabilities, and allows users to take action on information located throughout their “Active Workplace”.

I downloaded an alarm clock last night to wake me up this morning, and then my computer went to sleep. I guess I need to download something else to wake the computer.

 

In this fascinating series, a dozen people talk about how they organize their work. For Bill Gates, it's

• Three monitors to organize the desktop,
  
• Outlook and SharePoint,
  
• a Tablet PC with OneNote, and
  
• a whiteboard.
  

More in the series (click on a name to bring up the gallery, then use the navigation to see other responses).

Be sure to check out Marissa Meyer, Google VP, Search Products and User Experience. Marissa spends one day a week (Saturday or Sunday) doing "e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight." Honestly, I didn't realize Google VPs personally moderated Google Groups, because really, what else could be so time-consuming?

Marissa uses GMail for 10-20 personal messages a day, but finds it comes up short for serious e-mail management where she relies on, um, PINE. Yes, PINE. Of meetings at Google, she notes that "We are a very laptop-friendly culture. It's not uncommon to walk into a meeting at Google where everyone has a laptop open." Unbelievable stuff, but I feel she's holding out on some productivity magic.

And sure enough. "To keep track of tasks, I have a little document called a task list. . . . It's just a list in a text file. . . . Using this, I can plan my day out the night before: 'These are the five high-priority things to focus on.' But at Google things can change pretty fast. This morning I had my list of what I thought I was going to do today, but now I'm doing entirely different things." Slow down Marissa, I can't keep up. This amazing futuristic world you live in seems too fantastic for mere words. But seriously, anytime you decide life's too short for 12 hour e-mail binges, 11 hour workdays, and people physically lined up at your door from 4:00 to 5:30 waiting to have critical questions answered, I can help you set up this thing called SharePoint. . .

But there's a lesson in them thar hills. Marissa is a bright person who does a great job - the Google user experience is wonderful. I'll assume she uses what works for her. Are they the best tools? Honestly, I don't know her world. I can only say that I have used those tools - every one - and if I still did, I'd average 67 hours of work per week (11x5 + [(14+10)/2]) too. Could she boost productivity by spending some up-front time building better aggregators and filters for her world? Probably. How? That would make a really good series.

While the source of my Amazon Link Generator has been XHTML since the beginning, I somehow didn't do the same for the code it generated (specifically the unary tag closing and alt attribute for images). Should be fixed now, if anyone sees further nits just let me know!

I'm pretty happy to write that I'm on the roster of SharePoint Portal Server MVPs. This is my second time in the program, the last was as an ASP.Net MVP. Since then I've shifted my primary focus from web development to knowledge systems, though I still enjoy web dev and get my fix on that end with continued involvement in the ASPInsiders.

Thanks to everyone who made it possible! From Elizabeth, Damir, April, Fitz and the other great people on the Office Server teams in Redmond and Mississauga, to the people in the community who've inspired and helped me along the way like Bil, Michael Herman, Scott Howlett, Todd Bleeker, and the rest of the crowd from PDC last summer. It's going to be a great year ahead, and I can't wait to see it from the front seat hood of the car.

Here's a great feature idea for weblog articles - versioning. I went looking for a book link today on my resources page and SONNOVA, the article's been truncated at the Site Template list. Hmmm, I was just updating those the other day. . . ARGH! (These reactions have been heavily sanitized for family viewing.)

So maybe there's a way to recover rather than rebuild. In fact, maybe you can help. I wouldn't expect anyone to save a page of links but hey, maybe you have it cached (and have so far resisted temptation to click the link above). All versions include the phrase:
improved list of SharePoint Resources

A recent version would include the phrase:
New 2006-Mar!

This link explains how to find your MSIE cache folders, usually:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files

From there it's up to your favourite text search utility. I like Total Commander for all thing file management  you'll have your own. I located a version from January, can you do better?

As noted by good friend Blake (sans blog):

_well if yer workin the graveyard this week you'll be in for some sort of
historical triva. at 2 min, 3 sec after 1am wed the time n date will be:
01:02:03 04/05/06
that one won't happen again till the emperor decides to change the
calendar on us.

Update: Yes, depending on your preferred method of writing dates, this once-in-a-calendar occasion will either occur this week (mm/dd/yy) or in May (dd/mm/yy). Being Canadian, I've marked the date for May. And if you're a hard-core high-order to low-order kinda person, then you already celebrated on either 01/02/03 04:05:06 or 06/05/04 03:02:01 instead, or will instead mark 07/06/05 04:03:02.01 on your calendar. Your mileage may vary, offer not valid to expatriates of Saskatchewan or employees of the Directorate of Time.