Aug 18 2012

Sharepoint–how do I hate thee?

Sharepoint is Microsoft’s document sharing and collaboration tool. It allows you to share and manage documents, and to build websites – so it’s a content management system too. For work I am strapped to the mast of Sharepoint: we need to share files across the world, previously we used shared network drives, as a byproduct individual teams can also create websites. There are close on 100,000 of us.

The file sharing/content management schizophrenia can lead to horrible websites, on a normal website you might expect that following a link in a page will take you seamlessly to another web page to be rendered in your browser. Not in Sharepoint: the siren voice of the file sharing side means that all to often website authors are going to link you to documents – so you hit a link and if you’re lucky you get asked whether you want to open a document in Microsoft Office, if you’re unlucky you get asked to enter your credentials first. Either way it breaks your expectation as to what a website should do: hit link – go to another webpage.

For every function you can imagine Sharepoint has a tick in the box:

  • Blogging – tick.
  • Social media – tick.
  • Wiki – tick.
  • Discussion forums – tick.
  • Version control – tick.

The problem is that whilst it nominally ticks these boxes it is uniformly awful at implementing them. I’ve used WordPress and Blogger for blogging, phpBB for discussion forums, moinmoin and Project Forum wiki software, source control software, twitter, delicious, bit.ly, Yammer for social media and in comparison Sharepoint’s equivalent is laughable.

This ineptitude has spawned a whole industry of companies plugging the gaps.

Sharepoint does feature some neat integration into Microsoft Office: viewing shared calendars in Outlook, saving directly to Sharepoint from office application but this facility is a bit flakey – Office will try to auto-populate a "My SharePoint sites" area but does it via a cryptic set of rules which can’t be relied on to give you access to all of your sites.

For the technically minded part of the problem is the underlying product but part of the problem is down to how your company decides to implement Sharepoint. My WordPress-based site looks pretty much how I want it, bar the odd area where my CSS-fu has proved inadequate. In a corporate Sharepoint environment other people’s design decisions are foisted upon me, although Sharepoint’s underlying design often seems to be the root of the problem

Take this piece of design (shown below), this is part of the new Sharepoint social media facilities but it’s ugly as sin, most of what you see for each Note is Sharepoint boilerplate (Posted a note on – View Related Activities – Delete) rather than your content, furthermore I have repeatedly set my dates to format dd/mm/yyyy in the UK style and this part of my site remains steadfastly on the US mm/dd/yyyy format.

NastySharepointDesign

Here’s another nasty piece of design.The core of the document sharing facility is the Document Library, below is a default view of one of my libraries (with some blurring). All of the Sharepointy magic for a document is run off a dropdown menu accessed via a small downward pointing triangle on the "Name" field, the little triangle is only visible when you float over that particular line, note also that if you click on the name in the name field then that takes you to the document – so you trigger two different behaviours in one field.

NastySharepointDocumentLibraryBlurred

Other items in this table are hyperlinks but take you to entirely uninteresting content.

It didn’t have to be this way, the Document Library could functionality could have been integrated into the Windows File Explorer. Applications like the source control software TortoiseSVN and TortoiseHG do this, putting little overlays onto file icons and providing functionality via the right click menu. Windows 7 even has a panel at the bottom of the screen which seems to offer quasi-Sharepoint functionality – you can set tags for documents which could map to the "properties" that Sharepoint uses.

Users are familiar with the file explorer, Sharepoint discards that familiarity for a new, clunky web-based alternative. Furthermore users sharing files are often moving from a directory-based shared hard-drive scheme, Sharepoint allows you to use directories in Document Libraries but it breaks the property-based view which is arguably a better scheme but forcing users over to it wholesale is unreasonable.

In summary: Sharepoint suffers from trying to be a system to share documents and a system for making websites. It features a poor web interface for functionality which could be integrated into the Windows file explorer.

Aug 14 2012

Why I’m a liberal, and Giles Fraser isn’t

This post is stimulated by a piece Giles Fraser wrote a few weeks ago about why he wasn’t a liberal. It got me thinking as to why I am a liberal and clarified some things about the Church of England and socialists. This is a small revelation because I’ve never paid much attention to political theory – I’m more instinctive than that. I use the term “socialist” because alongside “communitarian” this is how Fraser describes himself.

 

I should point out that Giles Fraser’s post arose because of attacks on him, which he perceived to come from liberals, following his defence of circumcision in response to a legal decision in Germany outlawing the practice on children for religious reasons. Personally I think he was mistaken in this: he was being attacked by vociferous atheists who I would argue are a distinct group from liberals.

 

His argument is that the state or the Church of England, who represent the community, must step in and give individuals moral direction – that community interests trump those of the individual; liberalism, he argues, leaves us with a moral “anything goes” attitude that puts individual desires first. It strikes me that this thinking is at the heart of problems the Church has over equal rights for women and gay people. The church believes that it is the interests of the community that woman and practising homosexuals do not become bishops, and that gay people cannot marry each other. The liberal, individual-focused view is: why shouldn’t they?

 

Extending this beyond the immediate case: my view of democracy is that it is to enable all individuals to make their views know, and powerful in government. The communitarian view appears to be that it is an all or nothing bid to be *the* representative of the community. So if you look around the union movement you will see them seeking to be *the* representative of their group, similarly the Labour party appears to have little interest in anything but one party rule by itself. Similarly the Church of England clearly feels itself to be *the* moral conscience for the nation.

 

Perhaps the problem for me with communitarianism is the size of the unit on which it is now enacted: in Britain a group of approximately 60 million people, this is meaningless to a human. Our real communities are usually at the level of neighbourhoods, parishes or boroughs – although I would argue these days that we can form communities ignorant of geographical location – but surely no one can believe in a community of 60 million people? It’s true we have a form of local democracy but this is relatively weak compared to the centre and is subject to one-party states in many parts of the country based on the first-past-the-post electoral system rather than any truly democratic mandate.

 

Liberalism does not deny the existence of community, in fact takes an active part in it both on the really local scale and nationally: the state pension in the UK was introduced by Lloyd George and the remainder of the welfare state followed from a report written by another liberal, William Beveridge. From a liberal point of view the welfare state is a mechanism to enable individuals to maximise their potential. Whilst atheist myself, I don’t see the liberal position as being intrinsically atheist, as Fraser suggests, liberalism says that individuals should be free to follow their own religious beliefs, only limited when they impinge on others.

 

Returning to the events that launched Fraser’s post: can you imagine the uproar if the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels announced that from today they were going to circumcise each of their male children shortly after birth?

 

My liberal view is that men should be free to decide for themselves if they wish to have their foreskin removed but not impose that view on their children. If opposition to this is a touchstone of communitarianism, then I’m proud to be a liberal!

Aug 13 2012

The Peevish Olympic Spectator

As a follow up to being a Peevish Physicist, I thought I’d be a Peevish Olympic Spectator too.

Since Team GB started scaling the heights of the medals table I have been gripped by patriotic fervour; I am an armchair critic able to pontificate on the rules of various sports: keirin is a cycling event involving chasing a moped, that turn in the womens backstroke looked a bit poor, Usain Bolt normally stops trying a few yards short of the line. Each morning I have checked our national progress in the medal table.

The medal table is interesting: the US and China are riding high, a function of their large populations and the importance they attach to the games, although early in the games the US position was driven by its performance in the pool. The Russians were doing poorly to start with but only on the basis of gold medals – the table is ranked by number of golds won. Australia have done less well than recently but again a shortage of gold medals has emphasised this. Looking back, Great Britain has bobbed around 10th position in the table since 1928 with a disastrous 36th position in Atlanta 1996 and a 4th position in the most recent games in Beijing – this year we have finished 3rd!


Before the games had started I was something of a cynic: it’s an expensive exercise ~£10bn with dubious financial return. Companies like mine have scaled back activities during the Games, in part to avoid partners getting dragged into the predicted but perhaps not real “travel chaos” in London. Prior to the games it was predicted that non-Olympic tourism to London would be reduced.  The law has been re-written to protect brands sponsoring the Olympics not just from other companies but from the public, in view of this the spectacle of people being criticised for selling their Olympic torches on ebay was rather ironic. The sailing is taking place near where I grew up, in Weymouth, and the locals find themselves mightily disrupted. It’s been distressing to see the British media anticipating gold medals for British athletes to the extent where a silver or gold is almost seen a failure: “why didn’t you get a gold?”, in China this function is carried out by the state.
As the games come to a close politicians have developed a sudden enthusiasm for competitive games to be taught at school. Personally, I think this is an awful idea, PE lessons were the bane of my school life as I invariably was picked pretty much last for any team game, and once playing a team game I was invariably treated like the person you least wanted on the team. What I needed from PE was a life long enthusiasm for at least some form of physical activity, which I gained rather later in life from solitary pursuits in the gym. Medal success in the Olympic Games is a matter of ability and application for athletes and will for a country, in the eighties relatively small and not particularly wealthy countries such as East Germany and Romania came high in the table because of political will – but is this really a model we want to replicate?

Britain has done a creditable job of running the Olympics, building work went to schedule, transport infrastructure has worked well, the opening ceremony was outstanding, Anish Kapoor’s Orbit sculpture has given the TV coverage a distinctive look and our athletes have even done very well in the medal table.
If I might inject my own political note: Mohamed Farah, a Somali immigrant, won two gold medals for Britain – maybe we should consider the value immigrants bring across our economy.

Aug 08 2012

Lords Reform – aftermath

Lords reform is looking quite dead, there is an outside chance that David Cameron is bluffing his 91 rebels – faced with the realisation that they may have just blow chances of a Tory win at the next election due to the loss of boundary changes, they may relent.

As for the boundary changes, I’m indifferent to them. In best case for Tories they address an imbalance in the electoral system for them which lost them the last election. To Liberal Democrats they mean nothing in a system which is grossly weighted against them. I believe the Tories may just get through the changes they want, the arithmetic is very tight and I wouldn’t put it past a group of Labour MPs to vote for on the grounds that they prefer kicking the Lib Dems to the Tories.

Labour’s behaviour has been laughable: this is a reform they say they believe in and yet they are happier to see it fall than vote with Liberal Democrats.  Talk of a “badly written bill” is simply the flimsiest of pretexts to vote it down, the Bill is built on the work that Labour did on Lords Reform and was extensively consulted upon. “Badly written” is code for “we’re voting against because we’re automatic opposition”.

As for freeing up time in parliament in order to legislate to boost growth – I don’t think even socialists believe that legislation will boost growth – Tories spouting it is outright surreal.

The Tories have violated the Coalition Agreement – the Liberal Democrats have not. There is no careful algebra of this being tied to that: it has been broken. Even over tuition fees the Lib Dems kept their side of the bargain – the Tories haven’t. Liberal Democrats now opposing boundary changes is straightforward retribution – you break an agreement, there is a punishment.

We often piously say at election time that people have died for us to be able to vote. I’ve said it myself. It is utter cobblers: no one died so an appointed house of cronies, party funders and has been MPs could Lord it over us. No one died so that 37% of a turnout of 61% could give one party absolute power.

When you see Lords Reform in Labour and Tory manifestos at the 2015 general election have a hearty laugh and ignore them.

 

Aug 05 2012

My letter to Sir David Attenborough…

It seems Sir David Attenborough doesn’t think he has influenced people to take up science, some people have organised a letter writing to show how wrong he is, see here on how to contribute: http://dearsirdavid.wordpress.com/submission/

This is my contribution:

Dear Sir David,

I’m a scientist. I did a degree in Chemical Physics at Bristol University, a PhD in Polymer Physical Chemistry at Durham University and I became a lecturer in Biological Physics at UMIST, I still work as a scientist.

 

I understand you may not realise how many people you have inspired to become scientists, so I’m writing to say: you inspired me! As a child I was interested in the natural world; “Life on Earth” came along when I was nine years old. It was a grand story, it did not just cover the cute and fluffy animals, it went to Australia to look at the stromatolites. I went on to study the physical sciences formally but  to me science is all one big story and you helped make that clear to me.

 

I eagerly awaited each new series you made, I still do, because they don’t insult my intelligence and I come away learning something new. Your recent First Life series is a fine example, I read about the Burgess Shale long ago but you visited those bleak places where the evidence of the first life on earth were found; were passionate about the un-imposing smears they left on the rock and told the story. I never knew trilobites had calcite eyes.

 

You can claim some matchmaking credit too: were it not for “Life on Earth”, my wife would not have attended Bristol University to do a degree and we would never have met!

 

You still inspire me because at an age where I might reasonably expect to be retired, you are being hoisted up trees, dropped on atolls by helicopter, and standing on mountains of bat dung.

 

Thank you, Sir David!

 

best regards

 

Dr Ian Hopkinson

 

I have to say I was welling up when I wrote this…