Recording Playback Woes with Windows Media Player

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Alt Title: Windows Media Player playback too Bright

Sometime last week I recorded an online session for the upcoming SPBiz Conference.
I did this using Camtasia, and was quite happy with the quality.

I then exported this to MP4 file, and there's where I started banging my head.

See how the colours are quite messed up.  Everything has gone extremely bright and you lost all the details on the PhantomJS logo.  My dev.office.com T-Shirt beams like a cyan-highlighter pen.

Thinking I screwed up with the export, I then proceed to spend the evening exporting and re-exporting with different options.  I also tweaked Camtasia to apply a slight blue filter to the whole slide, to try to give the presentation a more differentiating shade.

Near the end of the night, I decided I had a somewhat (not as crap) copy of the video, and upload it to OneDrive.

What was very interesting, is that the video played back from the browser fine - with no colour distortion.

I double checked by opening the MP4 in VLC player, and that looks fine too.

So it turns out my struggles were fairly self-inflicted.  It was Windows Media Player deciding to just be really bright! 

I did around later to get to the bottom of this.  Turns out there's some Driver level settings I needed to reset.

I flipped my Input Range from "Driver Settings" back to Application Settings and that seems to reset the whole thing.  The Preview on the right also looked a lot better.  After I applied this change in the Graphics Control Panel - my Windows Media Player also looks fine now.

 

Office 365 Saturday Perth #O365PER summary

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On 22nd of May I had the pleasure of presenting O365 Saturday Perth.  In the past years, we have called this SharePoint Saturday.  We re-branded the name and this year had a mix of content from SharePoint On-Premises, SharePoint Online as well as Azure and Office 365.

People from Perth are always early risers - the room was quite packed early in the day.

Here's James Milne presenting the keynote.

I presented Introducing PhantomJS: Headless browser for SharePoint/Online.

Had lots of feedback about what people found it interesting, many people said it has potential for scenarios that they didn't think were previously possible.  I'm very keen to hear more feedback especially for different business cases.

Some of the feedback and demos will be rolled into an updated content over the year, so stay tuned.

Here are the PowerPoint and ZIP files for the presentation.

 

Nintex Work Inspired Breakfast Seminar - Sydney

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I'm now a Nintex vTE (Virtual Technical Evangelist).  Continuing my company SharePoint Gurus' strong partnership with Nintex.

I had the pleasure of presenting Nintex Tips at the Work Inspired Breakfast Seminars - Sydney event on May 15.

http://www.nintex.com/company/events-webinars/2015/5-15-2015-work-inspired-breakfast-seminars-sydney

As I wasn't sure of the audience, I decided to cover the simple Nintex workflow scenarios and diving deeper into the complex - developer minded (heavy API stuff) at the end.

  • Site Workflows
  • Scheduled Workflow
  • Iterating through Query SQL
  • Recursive CAML Query
  • Regex Options in the Regular Expression Action
  • XSLT to clean up complex XML namespaces
  • And finally, pre-caching json queries in Javascript based applications (great for javascript charts that needs lots of data)

It was quite interesting that the Nintex Breakfast is targeted at existing Nintex customers and really just show casing what they can do with tools they have already got.  So there was no hard sell - just "you can already do this".  There was a bit of discussion from the tables regarding various techniques and tricks.

Timing wise, some were able to stay to end (developers) for the last few demos while many had to go after 9:30am.  Still a great experience and will look forward to more of these events in the future.

I've previously worked with Dan Stoll and he's always a great show.

Nintex Workflow - Lazy Checkin Everything Workflow

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Doing quite a bit of client-side JavaScript (AngularJS in fact) and checking in and out lots of files that sit within Style Library.  At the end of the day, I just want something that will go through everything and check them all in for me.

Nintex Workflow time

  • Query List of items still checked out to me
  • Loop through list
  • Check-in
  • Bonus: Run-As-John

Query List

Create a Site Workflow, add a Query List action then set the filter.  Collect "URL Path" and "Checked Out To" fields to separate collection variables.

Important: Make sure you tick Recursive

Hit Run Now.
I want to change this part of the Query to Current User.

<Eq>
<FieldRef Name="CheckoutUser" />
<Value Type="Integer"><UserID Type="Integer" /></Value>
</Eq>

Hit the Execute button - looking good. 

Return to Configure Action.  Make the same change to the CAML query.

Loop and Check-In

Wrap up the rest of the Workflow.  After the Query List, set up a For Each action and loop through each URL in the URL Collection.

For each URL, run the Check in item Action.  Set it to check in by URL.

Insert Witty Comment.  Log an entry to History list for testing.

Laziness Complete

And done.  Workflow runs, John's files are checked in.

Bonus: Run-As-John

Sometimes, you might want to let a colleague check in your files on your behalf.  Nintex let you set up workflow within an Action Set to run as the Workflow Owner.

Summary

  • Now Everyone can check in all John's Mess!
  • Put this on a weekly schedule.

 

A Hybrid Future for On-Premises

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Hybrid - In Theory

I think it is no suprise for us watching from the SharePoint world (sometimes with a slight envy) at all the investments in the cloud.

Microsoft makes no secret about this - cloud is a massive growth area and an area that Microsoft is and will aggressively pursue.

SharePoint itself is a product born On-Premise. But many of the Experiences are now born-in-the-Cloud.

What I was very relieved to see though, is that in this mad push for Cloud-First, Microsoft reaffirms that they will not leave their customers behind. This is where I feel the Hybrid story that has came out is so refreshing.

What's coming down?

  • OneDrive for Business coming to SharePoint 2010
  • Delve coming to SharePoint 2013 first
  • Continue to evolve Hybrid Search

Hybrid in the Real World

The landscape "I" see.  This part is where I get yelled at, or perhaps I'm seen as a Fanboy.  I'll just say what I saw.

In the year 2013 - I saw the future that Microsoft wanted was all Cloud.  I was very dismayed - Australia is not particularly fast at going to the cloud.  Many of our enterprises aren't even migrating their SharePoint installations from 2010.  What about data sovereignty?  In the light of NSA spying case in 2014 it looked even worse. 

In the following year June 2014, the Australian Government modified its policy to say it is up to each Department Head to decide whether it is OK to store data offshore.  No doubt pushed by both budget cuts, internal push, external Vendor Pricing and a public statement of cutting out unnecessary Red-Tape.

Now, I hear cloud being implemented left and right.  Prime examples?

  • Exchange Online - much bigger mailboxes than on-prem.  Mobile friendly.
  • To get Exchange Online, a company pretty much has their Active Directory synchronized to Azure AD.  ADFS is nicer for SSO, but more servers.  Small and medium enterprises are pretty happy with DirSync.  That's another tick.
  • OneDrive for Business - relatively large personal storage space that allows Enterprise IT control
  • Office Client Licenses.  As part of the Office 365 package, the cheaper client licenses (and up to 5 devices, as well as additional mobile/tablet licenses) are also a huge win.
  • Yammer - Corporate-friendly, sanctioned "social platform".  Seriously, your youngster employees wants to talk, at least give them the right place to make that conversation heard.
  • Lync/Skype for Business - Lync Online took care of a lot of remote VOIP scenarios.  Lync Server worked well with Polycom and other On-Prem solutions.
  • Extranet Sites (SharePoint) where the company wants to share "some" content with an external partner.

There will always be companies that can't move everything to the cloud, but I think more and more companies are considering what they *could* move.  Most companies don't really want to host their own Exchange Server, unless they really have to.  And even for those rare cases, my Bank client is implementing Yammer as their Enterprise Social solution.

 

Reading the Tea Leaves

Oh my favourite activity.  I love doing this and yet I'm so bad at it.

I'm terrible at reading the future.  So I only wanted to mostly comment on the past.  Perhaps as a consultant that works across many different sectors (building, education, transport, mining and banking), and as a community person that loves to talk to everybody I meet, I do see quite a bit.

And what I see aligns with what Microsoft is doing.  So I think it's safe to predict this one:

Bet on the Cloud.  And if you can't do that yet, Bet on Hybrid.