When Software Attacks!

Fundaments of planning your beautiful SharePoint web site

This article is all about preparation. It’s about the thinking and planning you need to do if you’re going to successfully build your wonderful, unique and striking website on the SharePoint platform. I’ve been helping customers implement SharePoint solutions for quite a while. Life gets interesting when those customers want to use SharePoint to host their public website or an intranet of published content. SharePoint is a great platform with a host of powerful features that make it a solid choice for large or complex websites, sites that have to deal with large volumes of traffic or simply sites that need real business processes wrapped around the publishing model.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Living with the Acer Aspire 1420P

This blog has been a very quiet place for a long time now, reflecting somewhat how busy I have been elsewhere. During this period of heavy work I have found a new friend in my Aspire 1420P. In some ways it’s sad – my trusty and reliable Dell Mini 9 has been neglected in favour of a younger, sexier model. tablet mode The 1420P is the production model Acer convertible tablet, a variant of which was given to all Microsoft PDC conference attendees last year.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, October 22, 2010

Thoughts on the BCS EGM

Stepping along the path ploughed by Richard and Robert, I thought I’d try to order my thoughts on the BCS EGM through a blog post. Like Richard, I am (as I begin writing) uncertain as to my final leaning on this, although I have clear views on some of the issues. Democracy In Action One of the most important, in my view, is one which might be missed by many. Should the membership vote in favour of the Board of Trustees they are also strongly encouraged to change the bye-laws of the Royal Charter to stop this happening again.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Social Networking: The double-edged sword of maintaining an online presence

Exploring the new frontier I’m writing this post whilst watching my Windows Home Server slowly copy data onto an external drive. I mention that not because of its pertinence, but to indicate why I found myself having time to join Facebook. The other reason was the excellent session given by Eileen Brown at our most recent event. After Eileen had finished admonishing me for not taking my online presence (and therefore reputation) seriously enough I took the step of installing the Twitter Notify plugin for Live Writer so I could connect two of my online personas together.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, January 31, 2010

New and coming Microsoft technologies you need to look at

Yesterday was the annual Black Marble Tech Update event, where we try to cover every product in the Microsoft arsenal in half a day, telling local businesses what’s coming and what deserves attention. Writing up the content of the presentations would be almost as exhausting as the research required for create them, but following a few conversations during breaks yesterday I decided that a short blog post on some of the technologies that deserve a closer look was merited.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, January 28, 2010

Remote working solutions (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the snow)

We lost remarkably few days of productivity to the bad weather at Black Marble. That wasn’t because we were all intrepid, hardy types and all made it into the office. Far from it – some of us live in areas where they don’t grit very often and can’t make it to the main roads. As you guessed from the title, the reason we came through the bad weather so well was because of our ability to work remotely.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, January 24, 2010

Twitter clients: Twinbox and Tweetz

Anybody who follows me on twitter will know that @rikhepworth is by no means a prolific tweeter. However, I do follow a number of people around the planet, and in addition to the ubiquitous Tweetie2 on my iPhone, I have found two clients to be useful and reliable. The first is Tweetz, from Blue Onion Software. This is a great gadget for the Windows 7 desktop (or Vista Sidebar). The UI is simple and extremely usable (I love the way I can scroll the history for older tweets) and it makes posting a breeze.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, January 11, 2010

Places to eat in Berlin: Grenander

Lets get this straight right of the bat: Grenander is not a restaurant. Sure, it’s open in the evening and it does light meals (think: soup and a roll). However, it’s really a cafe (‘cafehaus and icecream’, says my receipt). Coffee and cake is a deep-seated German tradition. You really must indulge, but beware that this is no piffling, tiny piece of sponge cake we’re talking about – oh no. Coffee and cakes demands a huge, sumptuous piece of one of a range of marvellous gateaux.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, November 13, 2009

Places to eat in Berlin: La Sepia

Anybody who knows me well will tell you that I am prone to waxing lyrical about Portugal. Whilst I haven’t been there for a good few years now, it was a regular destination for my family when I was younger and I have strong, fond memories of the place and its food. Imagine my surprise then, when we found a Portuguese/Spanish restaurant just a few minutes away from our hotel. La Sepia is on Marburger Strasse, just off Ku’damme.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, November 13, 2009

Places to eat in Berlin: Mola

Mola is opposite the Wittenbergplatz U-bahn station, just along the Ku’damme from KaDeWe. It’s not the most sophisticated restaurant you’ll find, but it’s a wonderfully authentic Italian restaurant. IMAGE_039 The first thing you’ll notice is the marvellously jovial owner (at least I think he was the owner) who welcomes you in Italian. The next thing that you’ll notice is the large traditional pizza oven, with the pizza chef making fresh pizza by hand right in front of you.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, November 13, 2009