Friday, March 30, 2012

Won the antlers trophy at Arctic SharePoint Challenge!

antlers2

Last week saw the 2nd incarnation of the Arctic SharePoint Challenge –ASPC2012. ASPC is a community event for SharePointers by SharePointers; in essence a three day team based code camp with competitions and lightning talks throughout the event. Around 50 people attended spread over 12 teams.

The goal of the competition is to create cool SharePoint solutions for the fictitious company Lynx Inc. where you can show off all your hard earned SharePoint skills. Along the way teams earn badges in numerous categories, where each badge earns you points as well. At the end of each day a “stage winner” is awarded, which gives lots and lots of points.

After the three days, the three teams with the most points enter the finals, and all the attendees of the event cast a vote to pick the winner. Sounds simple enough? Well, it is if you’re as productive as we were during the event :D

My team did not have time to prepare before the event, but we had one idea, we wanted to hook the Xbox Kinect up to SharePoint. And so we did. Check out our excellent solutions like Lynx InCare - Your workplace health tracker and Lynx Inc FacePalm Detection Agent.

We also delivered other solutions not using the Kinect, such as a “Sexual Harassment Early Warning System” and “Handbook provisioning from Word to SharePoint”. The latter was submitted by me to large protests from my team members as it actually has 100% business value and no silliness to it.

imageTo cut the story short. Among our seven submissions and two lightning talks we managed to rake in 16 badges and 2233 points in the end to bring home the trophy, now hanging proudly in our offices at Puzzlepart.

The event was great fun with lots of cool coding, lots of socializing and lots good food/drinks in the evenings. Ideas for next year are already churning in my head!

And a tip at the end: If you forget your belt when travelling, be sure to keep at TP cable handy in your computer bag.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

The book is out!

If you haven’t already seen my tweets or noticed yourself, “Working with Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint” is ready for sales in print edition at both Amazon and O’Reilly web sites. The e-book should arrive shortly as well.

It’s been fun and a lot of work creating the book, but together with my co-authors Marcus Johansson and Robert Piddocke we managed to complete it.
I hope and think that everyone should find something interesting and useful in it and I’d love to get your comments and thoughts on it.



I would also like to thank my employer Puzzlepart for supporting my writing and allowing me time during the day for parts of the writing. Very valuable indeed!

Friday, March 9, 2012

How to: Make folder hits appear at the end of your search results

imagePaul Olenick tweeted me a question on how to get folder hits to appear at the end of the search results using FAST Search for SharePoint.

If we are talking about folders from file shares this is not too hard. If we refer to my post about Taking promotions/demotions one step further we can accomplish this by adding negative promotion using XRANK.