Presenting "PhantomJS" at SPBizConf free online conference on June 18.

/

I will be presenting "Introducing PhantomJS: Headless Browser for your SharePoint/Online" in the SPBizConf on 18 June.

http://www.spbizconf.com/events/headless-in-sharepoint-phantomjs-will-blow-your-mind/

Despite the -JS in the name of the title, PhantomJS is not another Javascript library.  Instead, it is a headless browser that lets you automate many tasks involving a browser, and there are some very nifty tricks you can use this to build site directories or create PDF snapshot of documents and forms.

Timing

Technically, because of Timezone Differences, it will actually be the 19th of June at 7AM in the morning.  The session is pre-recorded and I will basically be watching it along with the attendees and replying to questions in the chat room.

More Online.  More content.

Online Conferences such as SPBizConf and Unity Online are a new thing for me, and has prompted me to start looking into setting up recording room at home for more, higher quality, recorded content to be made available from my local presentations.  I'm very excited to be able to participate in global conferences like this without the expense of having to do crazy travel - travelling from Australia to "anywhere" tend to get expensive very quickly.

Will it blow my mind?

The curious will see the old name of the session.  I've since calm down and renamed the title, but the old URL has to stick for link reasons.  You need to let me know if this session gave you great ideas about what sort of shenanigans you get up to afterwards.

Recording Playback Woes with Windows Media Player

/

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

/

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

/

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

/

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.