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29/11/2011

The 2011 Catch-up Post

Wow, it has been so long since I have posted a blog article!

Well what can I say; it has been an extraordinary year. My son Jeremiah is now crawling and is just the most awesome son that a father could ask for, my wife is doing some of the greatest cakes that she is just about turning work away and my company Sharing Minds is growing from strength to strength.

It is always a great thing to say that your busy (better than being bored) but it’s sad that I have not had the time to reflect and write up some on the really interesting things I’ve been up to. So to recap and summarise here’s a number of the fun business and technical items I have been up to:

- SharePoint Remote (New Product Launching December 2011)

- Assisting the Not for Profit sector with developing a collaboration framework

- Assisting in the lobbying of funding for Alzheimer’s research in Australia

- Assisting some of my clients with getting a handle on some of their run away projects

- Getting my head into the Microsoft CRM 2011 space (currently successfully deployed 3 on-premise deployments)

- Building better education sector collaboration portals

- Spent time playing drums

- Enjoyed time with my family

- Attended SharePoint Conference 2011

- Architecting Search solutions for sub second search results in SharePoint 2010 technology

- Doubled the size of the Sharing Minds team

- Presented to CEO and Board of Management Groups on the definition of business orientated technology and projects

It has been a crazy year and that’s just the items off the top of my head. Next year is looking like it’s going to be my biggest year yet and I can’t wait to get into it! Here is a few of the things planned and to look forward to:

- SharePoint Remote – it’s going to be huge (stay tuned for more VERY SOON!)

- Sharing Minds Business Breakfasts – Every three months with a variety of business orientated technology topics

- Sponsorship of the Australian SharePoint Conference 2012

- Jeremiah’s first birthday J

- SharePoint Conference 2012

Posted at 10:10 PM by Adam Clark | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/05/2011

SharePoint Saturday Brisbane - 21st May 2011

So it's coming up again, SharePoint Saturday Brisbane is happening on the 21st May.

This year I'm up to nothing more than hanging out and hearing what our session speakers have to say as well as having a few drinks in the evening, if you'd like to come and hang out, chill and listen as well make sure to register at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/brisbane/default.aspx

See you there!

Posted at 7:14 PM by Adam Clark | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Changes in Perspective

You know it's funny how life changes your perspective on things, it's been months since I've put out a blog post, quite some time since I have reached out to the community and even longer since I have written a technical white paper. And while a lot of this has to do with some fairly major changes occurring in my life, I also find that the things I thought that mattered really don't when it comes down to it.

But before you criticise let me backtrack and give you a little background. The last three years have been a massive journey for me as I am sure the next few years will be in building my own business, the last three months have been a massive change with the birth of my first son (Jeremiah John Clark) and the past 3 days have seen opportunities have mashed all that together in attempting to prepare for new changes in my business and the coming financial year.

Of course with Jeremiah being born, I am getting little sleep and what I do is broken, if I'm not looking after him and giving Olivia a break I am working on something and with the few minutes that I do have spare I'm trying to get a little 'Adam time' to chill and re-charge.

Life is busy :)

But the other morning I was up early as the little one wasn't sleeping and my beautiful wife needed rest, I was sooo tired and I really needed some good sleep so I could present to a new potential client, when my son smiled at me for the first time… That one short moment made all the struggle and trial worth wild, the stress that I had building around the client presentation melted away and everything was golden.

It has been moments like these over the past few months where I am coming to realise the things that matter and what priority to put on things (i.e. My Family, My work, then everything else). It sounds simple, but in practice it can be really difficult to do when you push and play hard. The other great benefit of this has been that with my change in perspective that I have taken the time to slow down, smile and even begin saying no to people (which has been great).

So if your reading this and you’re a colleague, a friend or family, then take the time to give me a call, arrange a time for a drink and let's just enjoy a little slow time and my change in perspective!

Posted at 7:07 PM by Adam Clark | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

22/09/2010

SharePoint Kerberos Authentication on IIS7

It's been a long journey, however on one of my longer term clients we're about to deploy MOSS into production on a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment. In most of our initial development we have built prototypes on single server scenarios and the functionality is quite nice. However in our full environment config we have a multi-server setup meaning that we require Kerberos authentication between servers.

Now a fun issue that I have come across is that Microsoft have done something great in IIS7 where IIS7l runs using 'Kernel Mode', where the application pool by default runs in Integrated Mode on the Network Service account. This is great cause it just works for all site. However when you're talking about setting up Kerberos authentication to help solve issues of cross box communications and the classic 'Double Hop' issue, you'll need to ensure that your IIS7 application pools can run under the identity of the delegated service account.

The great thing is, this is not hard to change, you can perform the action in the IIS7 GUI or modify the application host config at "C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config"

For our solution we're modifying the application host config file directly at the time that we provision the server, so this way it becomes part of our install and configuration script (using PowerShell ofcourse). So the file modification looks like:

<system.webServer>

<security>

<authentication>

<windowsAuthentication enabled="true" useKernelMode="true" useAppPoolCredentials="true" />

</authentication>

</security>

</system.webServer>

Of course this will only solve your Kerberos issues around service account delegation within your SharePoint Farm, if your still going through Kerberos issues, always check your SPN's, service account delegations and of course your server time vs. Domain Controller times (that they are in sync). And remember for each server you add into the farm you need to do the same thing.

So in a final word, when it comes to Kerberos, good luck!

Posted at 3:00 PM by Adam Clark | Category: SharePoint Technology | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

21/09/2010

Another great article

Here is another great article on Servant Leadership. What I really like about this article is that it would work well within a SharePoint project where you often have to mix many different types of people together.

http://sharepoint.learningtree.com/2010/08/25/the-project-leader-as-a-servant-leader/

Posted at 11:10 AM by Adam Clark | Category: Sharing Minds | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Getting into Trouble with Folders

I am currently waiting for Visual Studio 2010 to complete it's install on a machine, and while I wait I thought that I might catch-up on a couple of articles I tagged a while ago. Reading through these articles I quite liked some of the positioning, so here are a couple of my fav's:

Folders are Bad http://sharepoint.learningtree.com/2010/09/10/folder-are-evil-and-will-get-you-trouble-soon-if-not-already/
Googling Visual Studio 2010 http://www.sharepoint-tips.com/2010/08/what-do-you-get-when-you-google-visual.html (Thanks Ishai)
Social Media http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/social-media-program-planning-101-purpose-matters/
TechEd 2010 Videos and Decks http://blogs.msdn.com/b/acoat/archive/2010/09/16/teched-australia-url-lists-for-downloading-videos-and-powerpoint-decks.aspx

Posted at 10:57 AM by Adam Clark | Category: SharePoint Technology | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

TMG 2010 Service Pack 1 is out

Got a mail this morning from Alex Hassett letting me know that Threat Management Gateway 2010 Service Pack 1 is now out. Patching your security gateways is an important part of ensuring your networks are secure and protected from both external and internal threats.

You can find more on the TMG 2010 SP1 here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/isablog/archive/2010/09/20/software-update-1-for-microsoft-forefront-threat-management-gateway-tmg-2010-service-pack-1-now-available-for-download.aspx

Posted at 8:38 AM by Adam Clark | Category: Infrastructure | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

7/09/2010

Long Time No Post

whoa, it's been a little to long since I have posted, my post topics are growing so will put something together over the next couple of days, Updates coming your way!

Posted at 12:12 PM by Adam Clark | Category: Sharing Minds | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/08/2010

SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit v1.0 Released

As always, there is lots of SharePoint goodness around and one of those items is the newly released SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit. From what I can gather (still need to download and install the kit) there is a few good tools for shortcutting security administration and content management among other things.

You can find more information here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508851.aspx

You can find the download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=718447d8-0814-427a-81c3-c9c3d84c456e&displaylang=en

Happy SharePointing!

Posted at 3:21 PM by Adam Clark | Category: SharePoint 2010 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

How Social Networking hasn’t changed the world

It interesting that in this world some many things are popular that no impact on us at all, take social networking for example, on one hand SN tools like twitter and facebook have connected us all together, but on the other we're still the same people we we're before the introduction of these tools. It's a slightly older article but here is quite a good post on the topic http://katecarruthers.com/blog/2010/06/the-onion-is-right-about-social-networking/

Posted at 2:29 PM by Adam Clark | Category: Architecture | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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